Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (to be published in March 2010). Cover design by Jason Kopec: http://www.jkgd.biz/

Interim update: The Haiti earthquake is compelling me to kick into higher gear on all my work. For a bit of updated information (which I’ll supplement with fuller info here soon), kindly see the Books page of this site.

When history happens in a place you know personally, it messes with your head. I visited Haiti for the first of many times in 1982, as a teenager; when the crisis over Aristide and the Haitian boat people hijacked the world’s front pages during the excruciating early months of the Clinton administration, I endured an agony of helplessness far away, in Bangkok. The place name Guantanamo Bay took on personal meaning for me then, as the place the U.S. Coast Guard took Haitians they intercepted fleeing to Florida. When the semi-revolution came to Kathmandu in 1990, it hit home because I had lived there as a student in the mid-1980s.

Those early experiences reinforced a predilection for taking history personally. Much water had yet to flow beneath the bridge in Haiti and Nepal, and in other places I traveled inflicting experience on myself: Burma, Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Detroit. During the later Bush years, I returned full circle and saw truths I had learned elsewhere at play in my own country. You keep going back to places where you’ve experienced history because you feel that, somehow, there’s sense to be made of it. But when a place has been your home and something terrible happens there in your absence—well, it hits home.

So the feeling was familiar when Kurien walked into his flat in Mumbai and told Pete and me about the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore.

My best-laid plan to blog reliably once a week on Tuesdays in 2010 is on hold until further notice, since the earthquake in Haiti. I’m in the middle of a very encouraging, and deeply moving, four-day visit to Michigan as I write this, which I’ll write about in more detail in another post, hopefully this coming week.

In the meantime I want to recommend two articles for you to read. One is by Orange County Register columnist Yvette Cabrera. It’s headlined “Pakistani Americans in OC helping Haiti,” and here’s an excerpt:

When the Haitian quake struck last week, Naqvi said he and fellow board members of the quirkily named Sustainable Healthcare Initiatives Now Empowering, a.k.a. SHINE Pakistan, (they’re the locals who help finance Shea’s work in Pakistan), rallied behind Shea’s decision to fly to Haiti, though none of them is Haitian. They also backed his plan to set up 10 urgent care facilities around the periphery of the capital, to help those fleeing Port-au-Prince.

The tragic images out of Haiti remind Naqvi of Pakistan – and that, in turn, reminds Naqvi that suffering knows no nationality.

“We can feel it… We’ve gone through it over there (in Pakistan),” says Naqvi, who wanted to get on a plane to Haiti last week, but has been delayed because he recently became an American citizen and has not yet received his passport from the government.

Please click on the link, read the article, and share it with others. The more widely read this article is, the more supportive Yvette’s editors will be of her efforts to continue covering Pakistani Americans and their work, including possibly traveling to Haiti with Dr. Salman Naqvi and others from Orange County.

The other article is a good New York Times op-ed by Mark Danner, who has written about Haiti before:

HAITI is everybody’s cherished tragedy. Long before the great earthquake struck the country like a vengeful god, the outside world, and Americans especially, described, defined, marked Haiti most of all by its suffering. Epithets of misery clatter after its name like a ball and chain: Poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. One of the poorest on earth. For decades Haiti’s formidable immiseration has made it among outsiders an object of fascination, wonder and awe. Sometimes the pity that is attached to the land — and we see this increasingly in the news coverage this past week — attains a tone almost sacred, as if Haiti has taken its place as a kind of sacrificial victim among nations, nailed in its bloody suffering to the cross of unending destitution.

And yet there is nothing mystical in Haiti’s pain, no inescapable curse that haunts the land. From independence and before, Haiti’s harms have been caused by men, not demons. …

Todd Shea of CDRS Pakistan is on the ground in Haiti leading what is, as far as I can tell, the single most intelligent relief initiative since the earthquake last Tuesday. (Read the joint statement from Todd and me titled “How Pakistanis Can Help Haiti - and Why”.) He has opened a supply route for medical and relief supplies across the border from Santo Domingo, capital of the neighboring Dominican Republic. Todd’s latest email tells why his effort needs your support NOW - even if you’ve already, and admirably, donated to the Red Cross or Partners in Health or Medecins sans Frontieres:

I’m sad to report that the situation in Haiti is acute and worsening. People are beginning to get even more desperate and frustrated. The leadership of the Government of the U.S. and its partner nations are ”forming up” great things that will take shape in a week or so down the road, but they really need to quickly work through the current paralyzing logistical challenges. Many large agencies are failing to think selflessly and share their financial, operational resources with smaller but super-effective agencies. This attitude is not helping anyone. Quite frankly, I would have thought some of them would have learned an important  lesson from other disasters where some of the same mistakes were made.

Here’s the bottom line: If things don’t start improving very rapidly, then life and limb-threatening infections and deadly dehydration and unnecessary conflict will likely emerge on a scale that has the potential of becoming rampant and widespread. The correct option would be to stage multiple and overwhelmingly robust and well-managed multi-national supply lines and helicopter sorties using locations and bases other than Port au Prince airport, particularly from the Dominican Republic through the border near Jumani. It’s a darn good road compared to the roads in the Pakistan earthquake-affected areas that I’ve been traveling on for the past four years. Distributing aid from several points over a more widespread area can reach far more people far more quickly.

Why should Pakistanis in particular be doing this? There are several good reasons, including your experience of a similarly devastating earthquake in 2005 and the fact that many of you in the U.S. are highly skilled physicians. The Prophet Mohammed (pbuh) answered the “Why?” question best, though, when he said, “He who sleeps on a full stomach whilst his neighbor goes hungry is not one of us” and “A believer wants for his brother what he wants for himself.”

I’m proud to say that quite a few Pakistanis of my personal acquaintance are already responding. Dr. Salman Naqvi, Laila Karamally and others are taking the lead in Southern California. Tahmena Bokhari in Toronto is leveraging her new position as Mrs. Pakistan World to recruit volunteers and raise funds and awareness for a relief trip from Canada soon. Speaking of Canada, my friends at the Pakistan-Canada Association in Vancouver have launched a fundraising initiative locally and on their website. In an email exchange Raza Mirani, the PCA’s general secretary, told me: “This Haiti situation has really hit home, and this is what I see myself doing community work for.  Not putting on events or having dinners. If we can’t help out in this type of  situation, then what are we good for?”

What should you be doing, right now? For starters please, now, give money through this link - any small or larger amount - to support the relief convoy Todd Shea of CDRS Pakistan has established from Santo Domingo. Time is of the essence.

And in the weeks and months ahead, Haitians will continue to need our help and attention and active human sympathy - just as Pakistanis need and deserve the human sympathy from Americans that is the purpose of this blog and my books. You can be sure that as I continue to write and speak around North America, I’ll be continuing to call Haiti to your attention - beginning later this week in Detroit and Ann Arbor, where I’ll be covering for Todd on several speaking engagements. Batool Raza of the South Asian Awareness Network at the University of Michigan told me by phone last night how proud she and others at SAAN felt of Todd when they learned he was dropping everything - including his commitment to speak at their annual conference - to go to Haiti. Let’s all express our pride in Todd by supporting his crucial relief convoy concretely with money, supplies, and our volunteer time.

Postscript: I’m planning to set aside a portion of the proceeds from sales of my books in a fund to make donations to the Pakistani nonprofit organizations whose work in Pakistan I support. For now, because of the urgency of the Haiti situation, I’ll be donating 20% of the retail price of all sales of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events to Todd Shea’s emergency relief work in Haiti.

There’s now a direct link on GlobalGiving.org to support the urgent relief work that CDRS Pakistan’s Todd Shea is doing in Haiti. Todd reached me by phone late Friday night and said emergency supplies are being donated, but he needs money for truck rental, to pay local staff, and for other running costs. Please donate any small amount through this link.

Todd is back in the Dominican Republic now, filling another truck and meeting a couple of doctors arriving from the US, at least one of whom is Pakistani. They will drive back to Haiti on Sunday with fresh supplies.

Todd has established a staging area at Croix des Bouquets, a major crossroads east of Port-au-Prince that is much more accessible to the border and to surrounding towns and countryside than the city itself is. Todd has done the smartest possible thing: he flew into Santo Domingo, found the best road from there into Haiti, and is creating and maintaining a supply line in the opposite direction from the congested Port-au-Prince airport.

The most helpful thing we can do to support Todd’s urgent lifesaving work at this moment is to give quick cash to make sure he can cover costs over the next few days. I’ve just made a donation, and I urge you to, too. Here’s the link again.

I was interviewed Saturday morning on Vocalo 89.5 public radio in Chicago, and host Jesse Menendez was also trying to reach Todd by phone. I hope he reached him, so people can hear directly what the situation is like on the ground.

Please visit the new How Pakistanis Can Help Haiti - and Why page on this site to read a joint statement by Todd Shea and Ethan Casey on the situation in Haiti after the January 12 earthquake. Todd is on his way to Haiti.

For more than twenty years travel has been a purpose, a vocation, for me. More than a pastime or a job requirement, it’s simply what I do, and I could tell you why. Maybe I will sometime. For now suffice it to say that, as a reporter, I endorse my colleague Anthony Davis’s observation that “There’s no substitute for the sniff on the ground.” Reading books and crunching numbers are necessary activities, but they can’t substitute for the simple act of showing up and bearing witness.

Which is why I’ve always kept a wary lookout for anything that might limit my freedom to travel. In the 1990s, that time of innocence and excess, I cherished my blue passport and made good use of it as I bounced incessantly around Asia. The world was my oyster in those pre-9/11 days, and I saw every reason to hurry up and explore it. In the middle-class, middle American world I come from, many people - albeit, to their credit, not my parents - tend to see youthful wanderlust in terms of “getting it out of your system” before “settling down.” Put money in the bank now, is the idea, and then when you retire you’ll be able to travel (i.e. go on cruises and/or drive around America in an RV). I considered that mentality myopic and parochial even at the time. Now I really do. As I told a younger journalist colleague recently, the older I get, the more I feel vindicated in the reckless choices I made in my youth.

The thing is, if you get with the program and keep your nose clean, you don’t get rewarded in any terms that I value. More directly to the point, the only good reason to have freedom is to use it, now. Later, you might not have it anymore.

All of which is to say that I’m very glad I did as much traveling as I did in my twenties and thirties, because I wonder how free I, or anyone, will be to travel in the looming future. In Asia, in the good old days, I learned that not only was my blue passport an asset to cherish, but so was my white skin. There were times when I was insouciant and oblivious about it, but I did figure it out. It’s not fair, but it’s true, and it’s a privilege I no longer take lightly. Along with the relative freedom I enjoy - to be blunt, freedom to board airplanes with relatively little fear of being subjected to a humiliating interrogation or full-body search - comes a responsibility to try to speak for people who can’t or, out of fear, won’t speak for themselves.

As I’ve traveled in recent years among the affluent, law-abiding, family values-ish, even boringly suburban denizens of Pakistani North America, I’ve been told many stories, privately, about what they go through when they travel into and out of, and around, the United States. I might compile some of these stories sometime, but for now suffice it to say that not many white people I know would stand for what brown people - U.S. and Canadian citizens - put up with routinely and largely without complaint.

Now, since the “underwear bomber” was foiled on Christmas Day at the airport in Detroit - after inexplicably having been allowed to board without screening in Amsterdam - the New York Times reports:

WASHINGTON — Citizens of 14 nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, who are flying to the United States will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that was imposed after the Christmas Day bombing plot, Obama administration officials announced Sunday.

But American citizens, and most others who are not flying through those 14 nations on their way to the United States, will no longer automatically face the full range of intensified security that was imposed after the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight, officials said.

There’s plenty more to say about this development, and I’ll be sure to continue covering the issue of travel restrictions in this weekly blog. For now, I have to get ready for my daily Urdu class, so I’ll leave it at this: It’s all well and good for white people to say things like, “I don’t mind a bit of inconvenience if it’s making us safer” or “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you shouldn’t have anything to fear,” but we don’t know - literally, we don’t know - what brown people are going through. And it really is largely a matter of skin color; these are in many cases our fellow U.S. and Canadian citizens and taxpayers. The least we white people can do is to cultivate an awareness of our position of privilege, and that awareness should teach us a measure of humility.

As usual, the prophetic voices of our time come from marginal communities, where experience tends to be all too directly edifying. Here’s what Haroon Khan, trustee of the Pakistan-Canada Association and the Al-Jamia mosque in Vancouver, said on the Bill Good Show on CKNW radio on January 6: “The amount of security that we’re facing is quite intense, and the full-body scanning really represents a tremendous intrusion on the privacy of all of us in the name of security. … It’s really a dangerous precedent that’s being set and it’s a line that, once we cross it, I’m afraid it’s just the beginning.”

Bon voyage! I welcome your comments on this and any other posts on this blog.

Ethan Casey with Pakistani friends in Minnesota, November 28, 2009. Photo by Munir Abid.

Well, 2009 is finally over and it’s time to turn the page, with big plans and hopes for 2010. As my mother likes to say, life is a constant leaf-turning process. It’s an anxious and melancholy moment in our world, but we’ve gotten used to those, and I think the only effective way to combat the otherwise inevitable, and all too understandable, despair and paralysis is to insist on living in hope – by which I mean not just sitting around choosing to feel hopeful, but turning hope into meaningful and concrete action.

For me, 2009 was all about researching and then writing my new book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. It feels as though it’s been a long, hard slog, but at the moment I’m feeling tired in a pleasant and gratifying way, with a big load off my shoulders. If you’re on my email list, you know that throughout the fall I was writing the book while also taking daily Urdu language classes and starting a master’s degree program in South Asian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I live, as well as traveling a lot to promote the book project in both mainstream and Pakistani communities across the United States and Canada. November in particular was a crazy month for me, with trips to Orange County and San Diego; Portland; Fort Worth (speaking along with my colleague Fawad Butt at Texas Christian University); and Minneapolis/St. Paul.

The point of all the travel has been to raise awareness of and support for the book ahead of its publication this March, and the point of the book is to encourage – and to participate in – a much-needed conversation between the Muslim world and the West, and specifically between Pakistanis and Americans. From fifteen years’ worth of direct personal experience of Pakistan, I know not only that it’s a country that faces severe challenges – everyone knows that – but that those challenges are different from what most Americans suppose them to be. And I know that Pakistanis are resourcefully rising to the occasion in meeting them, and other Americans need to know that too. And they’re challenges faced by Pakistani people – parents who worry about their children’s education, health and safety, for example, just as American parents do, geopolitics and religion notwithstanding. But of course those things can never quite be notwithstanding; they impinge too much on all of us, especially these days, especially in Pakistan.

If 2009 was, for me, the year of the book, 2010 will be the year of the blog. It’s understandable enough that I haven’t posted on this blog since November, but with the book finished and its publication coming soon, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to blog weekly. Authors I admire, such as James Howard Kunstler, whose important book The Long Emergency I recommend highly, do this very effectively. From reading Kunstler weekly, I’ve come to see how a blog can supplement and complement a book and vice versa. If, as I say, it’s all about initiating and continuing a needed conversation, then there can be few better ways to do that today than by blogging frequently and on a reliable schedule. For several reasons, I plan to publish a new entry every Tuesday.

I’ll be doing other things too, including plenty more travel around North America. My travel schedule is public on Google calendar as “Ethan Casey’s travel calendar,” or visit the Calendar page of this site. I’ll be in Southern California in late January, visiting several colleges in Colorado in the first half of February, in Texas (Dallas, Houston and hopefully Austin) in the third week of March, and in San Jose and Fresno in early April. If I’m coming to your city – or if you’d like me to – please drop me a note.

Ethan Casey in Port Angeles, Washington, September 12, 2009. Photo by Jim Dries.

There are several concrete ways you can support my work. By all means, invite me to your city if you can – and, if your group’s budget is limited, we can work together creatively to make it worth everyone’s while. I’m starting to schedule my calendar for fall 2010 now. Also, now is a great time to pre-purchase your copy of Overtaken By Events, if you haven’t yet. There are buttons in the upper right corner of this page, and you can buy it singly, or in a package with my previous book Alive and Well in Pakistan, or multiple copies to give to family and friends. All pre-sold copies will be shipped, with a thank-you note from me, in late March or early April, immediately after the book is published.

You also can help by sending the link to this or any other blog entry far and wide, and by otherwise encouraging people you know to visit this website and follow my work.

That’s all for this week – talk to you again next Tuesday!

Kamala Harris and Dr. Asif Mahmood, Whittier, California, November 7, 2009. Photo by Dr. Salman Naqvi.

I’d like to offer a sketch of the several interesting and encouraging Pakistani-American events I attended last weekend in Southern California, rather than wait until I have time (that I might not actually have any time soon) to gather quotes and write the fuller, newspaper column-type blog entry that the old-school newsman in me thinks I really should write. I’ll be at Texas Christian University all next week - will post about that too, inshallah - so I’d better post about California now.

I flew down from Seattle on Friday and took part in these events:

• a fashion show featuring the work of leading Pakistani designer Amir Adnan, put on by the Irvine Pakistani Parents Association to benefit the Irvine Public Schools Foundation. In her remarks from the stage, my friend Anila Ali said that she was inspired to found the IPPA by the example of the well-established Irvine Korean Parents Association. Anila believes it’s important “to get Pakistani parents mobilized and engaged in their child’s education so that they can give back to the community they live in.”

• a fundraiser in a private home in Whittier for San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, who is running in next spring’s Democratic primary for Attorney General of California. Among the friends I wasn’t surprised to run into was Dr. Asif Mahmood, who believes strongly in political involvement as a way of enhancing the Pakistani community’s presence and standing in US society.

• a fundraiser in San Diego for the Zindagi Trust, a very admirable education initiative in Pakistan founded by musical star Shehzad Roy. Shehzad and his wife Salma were in San Diego, as were my Chicago-based friends Sadia and Tauheed Ashraf, who are very actively promoting Zindagi Trust around the US these days.

Keep on truckin' near Islamabad, available as a fridge magnet. Photo by Pete Sabo.

The common thread in all three events is Pakistani Americans, who are as American as they are Pakistani, putting themselves on the line and addressing concerns we all share, from public schools to state politics to improving education (and thereby combatting extremism) in Pakistan.

P.S. I’ve printed another Pakistan fridge magnet (see photo at right). I sold a few of each magnet in San Diego and will be taking them to Texas, Oregon and Minnesota later this month. Am hoping soon to be offering them online, along with both of my books and a few other fun things.

Waking up this morning to learn of more than 80 people dead in a bomb attack on a market in Peshawar, the title of my new book, Overtaken By Events, never seemed more apt. All too apt. I can’t even remember all of the string of seven or eight violent events in Pakistan over the past few weeks - I should have written them down and kept a timeline.

What I’m trying to do, in my books and this blog, is to keep a longer-range and longer-term perspective on Pakistan, to look at the country, and listen to its people, with an attitude of human and personal sympathy, and to document events and impressions on the fly in a way that will be both relevant and helpful a year or two, or five or ten years, from now. I think I succeeded in that in my first book, Alive and Well in Pakistan.

I have to do my Urdu homework this morning before class, but I felt a need to post something. Here’s a powerful quote from my long March 2009 conversation with Ghazala Minallah, a woman in Islamabad who has been at the forefront of the lawyers’ movement for the past 2-3 years:

“What should I say to Americans who say, ‘Well, this is all very interesting, but what does it have to do with Osama bin Laden and the War on Terror and the fact that Pakistan is a naughty country?’”

“You can tell them that Osama bin Laden and all these other naughty people are playing havoc with us, more than they are with the Americans. We are at least as concerned about it, if not more so, than they are. And if they would only wake up and kindly pressurize their own government not to meddle in our affairs, and let us get on with it.

“And to look at it from the point of view of the people of Pakistan, for God’s sake. We want democracy over here. We do not want military rulers. We do not want terrorism. We want peace. We do not want mullahs ruling us either. The majority of this country, unlike what the West believes – they believe that the middle to lower class would not have a problem with maulvis. You just go out in the street, and you ask the people what they would think about maulvis ruling them. People may be religious, but that does not mean that they want maulvis ruling them. And they are sick to their teeth of terrorism. Because they’re the ones who are affected!”