Saturday, October 01, 2022

Tears in the Wind -- Afghan Conversation 43

 (This is the latest of 43 conversations I have had with a young Hazara man in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. His identity is confidential for obvious reasons.)

Dear David:

Friday was a very sad day for me and for the Hazara people. Dozens of innocent teenage students were slaughtered in an educational center in Kabul and dozens more were injured. Most of the victims were girls. They all were Hazara. 

It also was personal. Two of my brothers and one sister studied mathematics and physics courses at that very center last year. 

Hazaras in general are treated badly in Afghanistan, as we are looked down upon by other ethnic groups, especially the Pashtuns who dominate the Taliban. Hazara parents place a very high value on the education of their children – both boys and girls. They see no reason for girls to be excluded from going to school.

Therefore, during the 20 years prior to the Taliban takeover, Hazara children (including me) flocked to the schools. We studied hard and went as far as we could in our education. Some, like me, have college degrees and are interested in further academic careers. But there are no opportunities for us here in this forgotten country.

Among the Pashtuns, those who support the Taliban consider public schools and universities a danger to their beliefs. They send their children to Madrasas (religious schools) instead.

Since they feel threatened by secular education, and also by the relatively trivial religious differences between the fundamental Sunni sect of Islam they follow and the Shia sect of the Hazara, they ignore the many ongoing attacks on the schools where Hazara children study.

Most of the worst of these attacks, including Friday’s, have taken place in Dasht-e Barchi—a majority Hazara district in the western part of Kabul. On April 19, 2022, two blasts occurred at the Abdul Rahim Shahid high school, killing six civilians and injuring dozens. 

On May 8, 2021, as teenage schoolgirls and young women were leaving the Sayed Ul-Shuhada high school in Kabul, multiple improvised explosive devices were detonated, including a car bomb parked in front of the school. The attack killed at least 85 people and injured at least 216 others—mostly girls and women.   

On October 24, 2020, a suicide bomber detonated explosives near the exit of the pre-university education center Kawsar-e Danish. The attack killed 40 civilians and injured 79 others. 

On August 15, 2018, a suicide bomber detonated explosives inside a classroom of the college prep center Mowud, killed at least 48 civilians, and wounded 76 others. 

All of these victims were documented by the UN.  All of the victims were Hazaras between 15 and 20 years old – students at the educational centers. 

It seems there will be no end to the massacres of our people. There is no authority for us to complain to. The Taliban authorities do nothing. No one is ever tried, convicted or punished for these attacks.

This is genocide. But it also reminds us that we Hazaras are a people without a country. And that the international community doesn’t care and won’t come to our aid.

Our tears will simply blow away on the wind.

LINKS:

at No comments:

Friday, September 30, 2022

Future Storm Shock

 In my twenties, during extended visits on Sanibel Island just off of the west coast of Florida, I got to know many of the young people who’d grown up there.

There weren’t very many of them so they all knew each other. They were mainly working class kids. At gatherings, over beers and marijuana, a common fantasy was how to blow up the causeway that connected the barrier island with the mainland.

None of them were ever going to do such a thing, of course, but the collective sense they voiced was that the constant flow of traffic over that bridge was going to ruin the idyllic life they had known up until then.

They were right about that. The influx of outsiders soon drove up property values to the point that few if any of those kids could afford to stay there. Property taxes went through the roof, forcing their parents to sell the family house, if they owned one, and move away.

Decades later, when I again visited the island, almost all of them were gone.

Well, I thought about those people this week when the causeway finally did get blown up. Hurricane Ian finally took out that bridge in three places and it will no doubt be a long time before it is back in action.

I’m no expert in real estate values but I’m sure the damage wrought by the storm will have a huge impact on property values on Sanibel and other low-lying coastal areas vulnerable to super storms.

The cost of flood insurance alone is now higher than the value of some of the modest cottages and beach properties those kids grew up in. It not only takes great wealth to afford homes on the island; it will require owners willing to incur the risks that the next big storm could be the one that sweeps their home away for good.

Climate change is a fact of life. Hurricanes like Ian are no longer “once in a century” events. 

LATEST LINKS:

at No comments:

Thursday, September 29, 2022

Storm Watching


All day Wednesday I watched with deep concern as Hurricane Ian smashed into Florida’s west coast. The massive storm made landfall at Cayo Costa, a barrier island just north of Sanibel, which in the island I wrote about in my recent posts, “The Island” and “The Fish House.”

From visiting those places many times over a half-century, I know a bit about hurricanes and why a storm like Ian could prove to be so dangerous and destructive there.

As of this printing, I do not know the extent of the damage to the properties I stayed at over the decades or the friends I still have in the region. But there is a report with a photo that the causeway bridge connecting the island to the mainland has been ripped apart:

  • Section of Sanibel Causeway wiped out by Hurricane Ian (TBT)

  • Time-Lapse Footage Shows Storm Surge in Sanibel, Fla. (WSJ)

Because most people focus on the high winds in hurricanes (Ian’s gusts reached 150 mph), they often don’t realize that a relatively small amount of the damages or deaths are caused by the wind. It’s the surge of water that in this case came in from a riled-up Gulf of Mexico that presents the real threat to life and limb.

Much of coastal Florida, including Sanibel, is barely above sea level. When the sea surges even a couple feet it will flood many of the buildings standing in these parts, which is why most of them are built on pilings.

But the storm surge from Ian was much higher in some places, including in the nearest city, Ft. Myers.. The result was catastrophic. Many homes were flooded and suffered serious water damage. Some were swept away. The inhabitants who didn’t evacuate were in danger of drowning in the flood.

Many residents I knew when I lived there expressed a mixture of fatalism and machismo that led them to ignore evacuation orders from hurricanes and shelter in place. They thought being in such a big storm was exciting. Young men on the island used to brag they would just tie themselves to a palm tree and ride a hurricane out. Some claimed to have done so in the past, though I kinda doubted that they did.

Again, the high wind isn’t what matters so much as the force of the flood that follows. And Ian was a super-storm, the result of climate change. It was much bigger than any storm that has hit there in the past.

One factor that makes these types of storms deceptively dangerous is they tend to slow down as they approach landfall. Ian slowed to a virtual crawl, which made some residents feel like the situation really wasn’t so bad after all. Also, there is the eye. Even the birds come back out for a while during the eye, leading people to think things are okay.

But during this period, the legendary calm before the storm, you’d best be boarding up windows, stocking up on drinking water, food and medicines, and moving to the highest ground you can reach in the area.

OTHER LINKS:

 

at No comments:

Wednesday, September 28, 2022

The Fish House

 (I first published this essay in 2006, but I wrote much of it decades earlier.)

We'd stick close to him, as we wended our way along the path through the woods at the edge of camp, following the circle illuminated ahead by the Coleman lantern. I tried to keep my arm stiff enough to not spill too much water out of the sloshing pail filled with our catch, while swatting mosquitoes with my free hand. Our shadows danced over the birch trees, their white dark lightening the night every bit as the stars above.

My sisters and I usually went along with him on these nightly excursions to "help" him prepare our dinner. When the door of the smelly little building slammed behind us, and he hung up the lantern from an overhead hook, we probably weren't much help, but we did provide him company.

And I, as usual, provided him an excuse to try and teach me how to clean fish. In our family, those summers, this was actually a pretty essential skill, much like how to get the car started when it broke down, or the outboard engine on our small rented boat going again when it flooded.

He poured the fish out on the metal and wood table top, with a large hole in the center, underneath which was a garbage can filled with the remains of others' catch. We had the usual array of perch, sunfish, croppies, bass, and an occasional pike.

The fish were usually still alive when we laid them out on the table, and some still flopped. These he stilled with a quick blow to the head from his pliers. "That's what you do about that," he said. Then he scaled each fish, before cutting it's head off and proceeding to produce fillets that my mother would be cooking up soon afterward.

One of my sisters shivered at the fish heads in the garbage can, their eyes still wide and glassy. "Can they still see?" she asked.

Dad was too engrossed in teaching me how to clean each type of fish to answer. Over the years, however, I almost never cleaned any of them, because he did too good a job. I just watched, my mind drifting out toward the sounds of the forest around us. There were raccoons, skunks, possums, rabbits, deer, bear and lots of other animals in those years.

Like most kids I knew, I was scared that a bear would corner us sometime way out on the trail. We liked to gather blueberries, which led us straight into their habitat, so it wasn't an entirely baseless fear.

***
Twenty years later, I was carrying a pail filled with fish out on our long dock one summer's night, as my oldest child tagged along with me. In a phone call earlier that night I had learned of Dad's heart attack. He was a day's drive north of me, and I was waiting now for the follow-up, to find out how serious his condition was from the doctors, and to set my plan to drive there and visit him the following day.

I turned on our battery-powered lantern, and laid out our catch -- sheepshead, mackerel, sea trout. Several flopped so I bashed them over the head with a stick.” Those eyes, Daddy, can they still see?" asked my daughter.

Not nearly as efficiently or successfully as my father would have done it, I proceeded to fillet our dinner. Some mosquitoes came after us. Off the dock something big jumped and splashed. My little girl shivered and edged closer to me and our little circle of light there in the wide blackness of the bay, under an enormous sky filled with the Milky Way.

Inside the house, the phone was ringing.

***

Photo: My father and i fishing together in Florida a few years before the night described above.

LATEST LINKS:

at No comments:

Tuesday, September 27, 2022

Before Closing Time

Our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.” 
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

***

Hat’s off to the Journal of the Plague Year for featuring this quote recently.

When we tell our families and our friends, or even complete strangers our life stories, we may be seeking a connection — to them, to the past, to the future...But what about when we tell ourselves our own life stories?

Nurses and hospice workers attending to those who are dying often report that patients in one of their final acts, sometimes break into an unforced narrative about themselves and the parts of the lives they’ve lived.

Sometimes it’s as if they aren’t talking to the nurse or anyone in particular; rather it’s almost like they are talking to themselves before passing.

They might discuss the people they love most, or their regrets, their mistakes, their loves, or even their crimes — which is how some cold cases get solved.

Reporters thrive at moments like those and often hope for them in difficult murder cases that have long resisted solution.

But people also die suddenly or silently, taking what they’ve known with them to their graves untold. And even if they do talk, usually no one would record their final pronouncements.

Obituaries are our public memoirs. A life summed up with a list of relatives, accomplishments and a notice of when a service if any, will be held. Traditionally, local newspapers publish these mini-memoirs, but it is rare that any true narrative of the person’s life actually emerges.

Journalist K. Patrick Connor wrote an insightful book, “Dying Words,” about an obituary writer and obituaries that sheds light on this topic. With the decline of local news comes a decline in professional obituaries. For most people, it’s up to the closest survivors to do the deed.

That concept of dying people needing to tell a final narrative is so vivid in my mind that it is  probably why I urge people to keep journals, and notes and letters and for telling their stories well before the end comes.

That story, fictional or non-fiction, at the end, is the unique recording of your time on earth. Others can and will tell it but it seems to me you should at least have a voice in the matter.

LATEST LINKS:

 

at No comments:

Monday, September 26, 2022

The Island

I did most of my best writing in the books I published in the ‘80s on a tropical island off the coast of Florida.

We had a small beachfront house on pilings on the island’s Bay side, facing the mainland, with an endless supply of fish and blue crabs to catch from the long dock that reached out into the Bay.

The other side of the island was where the tourists went — to the long, white sand beaches covered with shells that washed in from the Gulf. The women wore bikinis and sun hats and couples crowded into the island’s few restaurants at night.

Their smiled a lot and their faces were sunburnt.

Our side of the island was quiet, mostly empty, lined with coconut palm trees, and free of distractions, save for the porpoises, pelicans, egrets, herons, cormorants, sharks, rays, osprey and manatees that occasionally flew or swam by.

When I’d get stuck at the end of a sentence with no idea how to proceed, I’d walk out front and pace along the small beach in front of the cottage. The water lapped softly in a way that was always comforting.

If I couldn’t find my next sentence out there, at least there were shells.

The prized types that washed in on that little beach were king’s conchs with their distinctive spikes and black, brown and white coloring.

It was summertime so the island was extremely hot and extremely calm. 

Occasionally, a boat would stop by, with fishermen who’d heard the fishing was good off of our dock. I’d wave to them in a friendly fashion but wished they would stay away. You couldn’t swim when they were there, it would scare the fish.

The fishermen would scurry away at the first sign of the big dark cumulus buildup in the afternoon, when summer storms blew over to us from the mainland. You knew it was time to head inside when your hair started standing straight up from heh static electricity.

Lightning and thunder were on the way. 

The Bay churned up violently in those storms, with huge purple waves that came crashing to shore. The little house wasn’t anchored to its pilings and it rocked in storms. I liked writing during the rain. You couldn’t go outside anyway so it was all the easier to concentrate on work. The palm trees would bend and drop some coconuts and shed a few of their fronds. It call came crashing into the sand like errant missiles.

Later I’d grab a hatchet and crack open a nut to drink its milk and spoon out its sweet flesh.

After the thunderheads had vanished to the west, taking their mayhem with them, our whole world settled back into a sweet calm and the birds came back out. I could almost hear Jo-El Sonnier singing one of his sad country songs in the distance.

The only downside of writing in that place was that my mind would often wander. Rather than focusing on the task at hand, I’d sometimes dream of pushing the sailboat into the water and shoving off from shore, drifting far away alone, across the sea. 

Into the distance, with only a fishing pole, a cold beer, a jug of drinking water, a good book, my journal and a pen, my sunglasses and a baseball cap, a nautical map and a camera. All in search of my next sentence.

NOTE: We sold the beach cottage in 1999. As a condition of its sale, I insisted that it be preserved intact and moved to higher ground. It sits today in the island’s historical village.

LATEST LINKS:

LYRICS:

“Cmon Joe”

Jo-El Sonnier

It's a long hot night and the stars are shinin' kinda extra bright 
Sittin' on the back porch glider, whettin' my appetite 
Well, I'm a six pack high, I start missin' the light of my baby's eyes 
Wasn't it beautiful, the kind of soul they said would never die 
It's a-muggy in the shack and the backwoods are black 
Cause the clouds hid the moon away 
The light from my cigarette flickerin' in  the dark 
Is the only way she knows I'm here 
And suddenly the sounds of a fiddle and accordion 
Sweetly begin to play and I can almost hear her sweet voice say 

Come on Joe, let's count to ten 
Pull yourself together again 
Come on Joe, you gotta get over this mood you're in 
Come on Joe, you gotta be strong 
You're still young and life goes on 
So carry on till we're together again 

Hey, I know she's right but it's hard to fight when you're hurtin' so 
I tried to walk out that door but I just can't go 
With the tears and the laughter in every rafter of every room 
Wasn't it beautiful, wasn't it the kind of happiness in bloom 
It's a-muggy in the shack and the backwoods are black 
Cause the clouds hid the moon away 
The light from my cigarette flckerin' in  the dark 
Is the only way she knows I'm here 
And suddenly the sounds of a fiddle and accordian 
Sweetly begin to play and I can almost hear her sweet voice say 
 
Come on Joe, let's count to ten 
Pull yourself together again 
Come on Joe, you gotta get over this mood you're in 
Come on Joe, you gotta be strong 
You're still young and life goes on 

So carry on till we're together again  

at No comments:

Sunday, September 25, 2022

Connections

(I first published a version of this this column on my blog in May 2006.)

I'm not sure what the definition of friendship should be in this era of constant change and confusion in America. There seems to be a certain churn of people in our lives; they come and go, people break up and move away, change jobs, disappear, stop calling. 

You leave a job or you move. In the process you may lose your friends. It takes time to make new ones. The relentless economic pressures most people face keep us feeling like we are running on a treadmill, from which there may be no escape. The faster we run, we see that we are only further behind where we think we need to be.

Loneliness and alienation are the chronic diseases of modern urban American life. Most of us have enough resources to stay within the walls of our private spaces, listen to our own music, imbibe our chosen poisons, and isolate from our neighbors and the most of the strangers living nearby. Our families are often widely dispersed, barely available to us much of the time.

Into this odd lifestyle, and it is odd, given human history, comes the modern concept of friendship. 

If friendship means anything, it has to be based on trust. That probably has always been true, reaching way back to our origins. You have to feel safe to be friends. Most of us work hard to earn the trust of those we want to be friends with. We try not to hurt them or do anything to betray their trust. When we make mistakes, we try to repair the damage.

But what is friendship now? It used to mean that at your very lowest moments in this life, when you really need someone to turn to, you could call that one special friend. Now I am not sure.

I miss the old days.

***

Sad news. The Double Play burned down yesterday. The Mission District bar was a fixture for baseball fans from decades ago when the Giants first moved to San Francisco. Its walls contained a replica of the old Seals Stadium from across the street.

LATEST LINKS:

 

at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)