The Nile Meter July 31, 2008
Cairo-Old things are pretty cool.
The Nile Meter has been used to measure the rise and fall of the Nile river for a thousand years.
Its located on the island of Rodha, but now slightly more sophisticated devices are used to measure the swellings of the Nile.
Radovan Karadžić Sent to the Hague July 30, 2008
Cairo-War criminal Radovan Karadzic is being sent to the Hague today.
Radical party members were bussed into Belgrade yesterday and violent protests took place in the capital.
Visiting a construction site near the Presevo valley (read my May 2008 entry on Presevo here) President Boris Tadic respond to the threats against him.
“Everyone who wishes the country well, but maybe does not wish the same for my family and me, must know that every one of their messages is weighed by the world and sends a signal of what kind of country Serbia is,” Tadić said.
The Pyramids July 28, 2008
Giza-”You’re a good rider,” my guide, Ali, said before whipping my horse, causing it to gallop off again through the sand.
It was a nice compliment, and Ali backed it up with an almost complete disconcern for how fast or where my horse went, letting me charge through the desert and up the mounds of sand and around. Not that there was a possibility of getting lost. There wasn’t much around. Just some sand, some tombs, the Sphinx, and a few massive pyramids.
The pyramids. The ones we all think of when we think of pyramids.
Ali was a pro. He knew all the best spots to take photos from and stopped and let me snap a few and then took my camera and did a photo of me in front of each pyramid.
The pyramids were enclosed inside a fenced off area that tourists can be driven around in a buses or ride a horse or camel through.
They were massive. Blocks piled atop one another, going up and up and up. Some pyramids took thirty years to make. Ingenious work done by humans, and, yes, humans. Visiting the pyramids you see that each block was not so perfectly placed that they were sent down by aliens from space.
Most of the other tourists were from Saudi Arabia or the Gulf countries. A lot of tourist police stood near the pyramids and off in the distance in the sand hills with guns and radios. Any kind of attack on tourists significantly drops the Egyptian economy and the government has instructed the police to keep the tourists safe.
The tour lasted two hours. A wander around the pyramids is one of those must dos in life. Having that wander on a horse or camel is even better. Egypt has some great modes of transportation. Saturday night or rather very early Sunday morning, I was in a flaluka, a small sailboat that cruised around the Nile playing what claimed to be “Cairo’s number one hit radio station.” Cairo’s skyscrapers, framed around us, were impressive as the flaluka cruised. Crazed taxis, a flaluka, a horse. In Egypt, I’m on the move.
Cairo Initial Impressions July 26, 2008
Cairo-The horses that pull carts and carriages outside the apartment where I am staying clomp along briefly before rounding the corner and disappearing from earshot.
I am in this apartment and am quite happy about that. I’m also trying to win the affections of Sasha the Cat, but that will be a trial with no sure ending.
Cairo is everything that Amman isn’t, which is to say Cairo is not boring or ugly. It is a city with a deep presence of culture and history, even among its dilapidation
At first I thought I wasn’t going to like Cairo. There was a Disneyland feeling upon arriving at the airport and in the part of downtown where my hostel was. Five touts came up to me in the first few hours with outstretched hands claiming they were artists…were students…did not want my money.
Once I finally got away from them they acted offended, as if I was insulting their hospitality by not wanting what they offered or to take their business cards and bitterly said, “Fine, go, go.”
I do not know what is more obnoxious. That touts exist or that there are tourists stupid enough to give them a reason to exist and to be so persistent.
That is all behind me now. The apartment is on the Nile Island of Zamalek. Many foreigners and upper class Egyptians live here. There are a lot of embassies. The residence of the head of the EU mission is here. Orange cones with EU stickers keep cars from parking in front of his house. The police on nearly every corner would probably beat any tout that came over from downtown. I wouldn’t feel bad for him.
Yesterday, I walked across the city in the mid-day sun, something that was not so smart, but the humidity made the heat bearable, though I paid for it later with headaches.
Along the side of the road I saw a seven or eight year old boy dump out the contents of an expensive backpack. Some trail mix, a book, and a hat spilled out. The boy was poor and had probably stolen the backpack from some distracted or stupid tourist and he kept shaking it, hoping for something of more value to fall out, but there wasn’t anything else.
The Nile
My first night in Cairo, I meandered along the Nile.
There wasn’t a moment in memory without the Nile. Knowledge of this river is one of the first things that we have. Nobody knows really how they first heard about the Nile. It was discovered in some story or some book, but it has always been there, part of our personal database like our parents names or the need to drink water.
There were crowds of Egyptians gathered along the Nile. Some got onto boats that had flashing pink, green, and red lights blinking on and off and loud wailing Arab music. Some people were part of a wedding party. A girl from the hostel that I was with got a kiss from a four year old Egyptian girl that stared at her slightly confounded. Some people were selling food and drinks. Others were just hanging around, the weather perfect for being out.
For the more wealthy there were large two and three story barges. They had names like Imperial and Nile City. There was a Chili’s inside Nile City. Everything was expensive. The bridges that go across the Nile were crowded with honking traffic.
Everywhere is crowded with honking traffic actually.
Crossing the street is a foolish game of chicken. The first few hours in Cairo I saw several near accidents, car on car, car on persons, and even a horse drawn carriage that hit a car and bounced off it, their respective drivers jumping out to yell at each other.
Afterwards some passerby gives the offending driver a disgusted look, but walks on. Traffic doesn’t stop for these near accidents. It didn’t really stop for the carriage and car accident either. It definitely doesn’t stop for pedestrians, but at the least the traffic makes a person engaged with Cairo’s streets.
Egypt suffers from all the same problems as most other Middle Eastern countries and most of the developing world: an entrenched system of inept, corrupt politicians that mismanage what few resources exist and a tired, population with little faith in their government and who, in many cases, are turning towards Islam in reaction to the West’s labeling of Middle Easterners and Muslims as “terrorists” and because many Islamic organizations offers the poor better social services than the government.
While there isn’t oil here, Egypt has tourism and enough tourists come every year that Egypt should be in a better place than it is. But, according to journalist Steven Glain, as of 2002 the average Egyptian makes $1,200 a year. This is an old statistic, but despite the organized, receipt offering taxis at the airport and the smooth ride into downtown, Egypt is a mess. And perhaps it is an even more inexcusable mess because Egypt has so much here. You feel it.
Karadzic Finally Arrested in Belgrade July 22, 2008
Amman-Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic was arrested Monday in Belgrade where he’d been living and working as a practitioner of alternative medicine.
NYT article. B92 reaction from Serbian politicians.
This is pretty incredible.
For a long time it has been unbelievable that the Serbian Government has not known where war criminals Karadzic and Mladic have been hiding since comitting genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s.
Many people believed that the government was actually helping the men remain hidden, or at the very least not arresting them because of the possible backlash from Serbia’s strong nationalists against the politician who ordered the action.
Things changed in Serbia after President Boris Tadic Democratic party’s surpise victory last May in parliamentary elections.
The Democrats and the Socialist party, amazingly the former party of Slobodan Milosevic, formed a government earlier this month that intends to move Serbia down a path that will lead to eventual EU membership.
The election showed that the Serbian people do want to move closer to the EU and the new government must feel secure enough that they ordered the arrest of Karadzic, a move that will bring Serbia another step closer to the EU.
Now Serbia has to bring in Karadzic’s partner Ratko Mladic.
During the election in Belgrade last May I was pulled off the street by one of the bodyguards of Serbian Radical Party leader Tomislav Nikolic.
He led me into one of the buildings near students park and introduced me to one of the biggest men I have ever seen.
That someone’s fingers “can be like logs” is a cliched way of describing a person, but with this man…it fit.
One of the first things I noticed was a poster of Karadžić on the wall and next to it a photo of the man and Karadžić.
He claimed to be one of Karadzic’s former bodyguards and went off on Karadžić’s greatness for awhile before asking what I thought of Serbia. He called me “very stupid” again and again for what I suppose was his lack of agreement with my analysis. He than led me through the building, which he said he owned, pointing out the USAID plaque and instructed Nikolic’s bodyguard to remain in the office as we got into an elevator to go up to the next floor.
“Why are you scared?” he kept growling at me.
I didn’t tell him that he was the most frightening person I’d ever shared an elevator with and that I wasn’t eager to be beaten again in Serbia.
Both the man and Nikolic’s bodyguard admitted to having fought in Bosnia. I gave Nikolic’s bodyguard my email and he promised to send me documents and photos that proved “the truth” about the war in Bosnia. He never e-mailed me.
When I met up later with Dominic and told him about what I’d felt had been a dramatic inccident, he shrugged and said, “Sounds more like he was just trying to be friendly.”
The man claimed that Karadzic was “a fighter” though and that he had done “great things for Serbia.”
There will be many people angered by his arrest. But the one thing that all parties in Serbia agreed upon during the last election was that Serbia needed more interaction with the EU. What Karadzic’s arrest shows that Tadic and the new government must have decided to risk that Serbia is really ready and wanting to go to the EU and are willing to risk the backlash.
Keep on Blogging. It’s A Good Idea They Say. July 21, 2008
Amman-I’ve been sleeping a lot, which isn’t too inspiring.
Wednseday though I’m going to begin a lot of jumping around with a class and then will be headed to Finland and Russia in September.
I found this post on successful blogging on the Web. 2.Oh…really? blog.
Blogging does improve your writing and preception of the world, if only to encourage yourself to always have something to say.
Keeping this blog helps me digest a lot of the information I come across, though if I was to write everything up I wouldn’t ever turn off the computer!
Or they posts would get too long, not a good idea according to Web 2.Oh…really?
Working with the Aurora Agency July 19, 2008
Amman-Cooling off. That largely is what I’m currently doing in Amman.
Its not that its so hot in Amman. It is, but not horribly so. People say that Amman is like an air conditioner in comparison to the rest of Jordan.
Its more that I’m broke. A translator that insisted on charging me the entire day when he did three hours work has pushed me into an uncomfortable position.
Amman is not exactly an expensive place, but, incredibly, the dinar is valued at greater than the dollar. Throw in the overseas charges from the ATMs and things add up fast.
Not that I’m living the high life. I get breakfast with my hotel (9 dinars/ night), buy water for the day (70 piastres), and have another water (50 piastres) while checking my email at a bookstore. I eat humus and falfel at the famously inexpensive Hashem restaurant downtown for dinner (1 dinar).
Basic living. The odd taxi ride across town is about 8 more dinars per week, but now I’m confining myself to the hotel, holed up and using the time to look for that sense of inner calm that people say exists if you take the time to find it.
That I am having difficulty living like this, my stomach has pains from the lousy diet, makes me wonder about the average Jordanian and how they fair with the inflation and globally high food prices.
Do their stomachs also consistently hurt from a poor diet? Doubtful. Probably they’ve accustomed themselves to an unbalanced pita bread heavy diet.
Unfortuently I haven’t. Downing a box of juice for the vitamin C on the sidewalk today (1 JD) and buying a burned copy of Blood Diamonds (1 JD) to watch when I don’t feel like reading any more in the hotel seemed like a fair move today. A little distraction.
The Jennifer Connelly character is a fair representation of what many “difficult places” journalists are like. She’s not macho enough though and doesn’t sleep with enough people.
Some of her best lines:
“I’m a print journalist. I drank it.”
“Its gotten hard to go back to sipping lattes and discussing interest rates.”
“Three out of five ex-boyfriends recently polled say that I prefer to be in a constant state of crisis. Maybe I just give a shit.”
If Connelly’s character was a real person she would have spent plenty of time watching noisy fans make uneven circles while on a bad diet.
Journalism is a practice succeeded in by doing and for the people that believe in doing it on the ground there’s a long time to wait before the checks begin to match the effort.
As it is today I just got e-mailed a contract to begin submitting work to the Aurora photo agency.
This is another step in the right direction, but there are probably quite a few more years of odd feelings in the body and watching those rickety fans.
No Place Like Home…Travel the Great Equalizer July 17, 2008
Amman-The place to be if you are a foreigner and want to feel at home in Amman is Rainbow Street.
There’s the Good Bookstore, an English language bookstore with reliable wireless. I’ve been going there and checking my email for about a week and I have yet to see someone actually buy a book.
The Brits, Americans, Germans, and occasionally locals that come into the bookstore are obsessed with the wiifi and mocha.
There is one German with a very loud deep voice that is always there int he mornings, debating from behind his laptop some point related to Jordan. Often times he is talking about things that happened a thousand years ago and sounding outraged and astounded in his running shorts.
The groups that come in. Long skirts from natural fabrics for the women. Men in tilly hats. The identical red straps of their canon cameras.
Occasionally a women in full cover comes in and warns her children to be quiet in British accented English.
At La Calle there are Johnny Walker ashtrays and Jordanian waiters with tattoos and MTV with volume muted and a Spanish trance track on the speakers.
Its all “normal” on Rainbow Street for the Western traveler. Off the first circle up from downtown its a quiet area, home to the British council and three machine gun toting soldiers (their clips not inserted into the guns) shuffle around int he heat.
The feeling of home is something that after a certain amount of time travelers start to seek out or at least very much enjoy when they come across.
Moist cookies, certain kinds of beer, steak and mashed potatoes, soft beds are things I’ve seen people gush over after a couple of weeks of traveling.
Rainbow street is a good place to feel some of that comfort.
I wonder though that if after a certain amount of time on the road that satisfaction one feels in the feelings of home lessens.
On Rainbow street I’ve felt none of the good or relaxed feeling I should have. La Calle with its leather sofas seemed the same as the downtown cafes with their ramshackle poor lighting and waiters that only seem small amounts of English.
After a certain amount of time traveling does everything equalize?
All around the social aspects of life are unequal. The disparities between rich and poor, people that have access to what can make their lives better and people that don’t and the level of compassion in people when they are confronted with uncomfortable reality.
But to go in and out of different social classes, different kinds of restaurants and hang out spots, I notice the difference in the shisha, but don’t have any feeling of difference. I only change the shirt that I wear.
And there are no satisfactions in those tastes of home. Its all becoming another place and…blending.
One of the reasons why people who travel so often have a hard time coming home is that after they realize the ease and similarities of places it becomes only too easy to live anywhere.
A place to sleep becomes a place to sleep. Food to eat becomes food to eat.
Travel and the varying degrees of quality one experiences on the road equalizes the experiences and forces us to accept them as they are and digest them without getting too bent out of shape by the discomforts or disparities.
Consequently, there becomes no satisfaction in the tastes of home.
Literally there becomes no place life home.
There is no home.
Or rather there are many.
Enjoying the Shisha in Amman July 16, 2008
Amman-This city, despite it’s complete lack of romance or charm, has good shisha.
It comes in varying qualities and I’ve tried everything from the very fine to the mediocre to the plain. Overall it’s good stuff.
Try it at sunset as the light changes across Amman’s brown crumbling rock hills. There is little better.
I was in a restaurant up the hill from my hotel last night. It was the kind of place that was nice without being expensive, boxes of Kleenex on the table for napkins and a quieter atmosphere than the downtown places I frequent to read Lawrence and make notes.
The music was Arab pop. A not entirely unpleasant, but what I find to be a completely unserious genre that has the consistency of a Barney sing along or a Christmas carol.
The call to prayer sounded out.
Sometimes people interrupt their shisha to pray. “A five minute spiritual connection,” A told me once.
In southern Serbia Terike said, “I will pray for you” to all of us that did not move for the prayer. Here in this Amman restaurant, no one moved for the Imam’s wailing cry, but the Arab pop was turned off and, at least over me, there settled a little clam.
I could never live in Amman, but like Bogota (where I could live) I feel content to sit and be in and watch without wanting much. Which is a good feeling to have. There is not much to want here.
That there isn’t is part of the problem. But for those that can move their mind to enjoy it, like Arab pop, Amman works.
Draft of the text available with the Wounded Iraqis Images July 15, 2008
In hopes of attracting editors I am posting parts of my work here as I complete it, using this blog as part advertising space, part notebook. Interested publishers can get in touch with me at justinvela@gmail.com
Amman-Saba was getting used to the violence.
“What should we do?” she says. “Life should go on. Explosions continue to happen. We go to our working places normally. We kind of got used to it.”
That was before Saba had her legs badly burned in a car bombing in Basra. She was not a direct victim of the attack. She was in her kitchen cooking and the blast was so large that it shook the building, causing the portable stove she was cooking on to fall and set fire to her skirt, burning her legs.
“I don’t know if there were civilians in the car,” she says. “Usually it is suicide bombers. Other times the car is left and then it blows up. My brother was wounded in a different car bombing. We saw the driver. He left the car and five minutes later it exploded and killed all the people around it.”
Saba is one of the victims of the violence in Iraq that was luckily enough to survive their injuries, but due to the insecurity and lack of medical services was unable to receive proper treatment inside Iraq.
Her legs became infected and doctors thought they would have to be amputated until it was recommended that Saba be transferred to a Medicines Sans Frontiers hospital in Amman, Jordan where she could receive the treatment she needed free of charge.
Medicines Sans Frontiers is a French NGO dedicated to helping victims of war and natural disasters throughout the world.
Though unable to operate inside Iraq, they run programs to help the wounded Iraqis in Kurdistan, Iran, and Jordan.
In Amman, they have forty beds at the local Red Crescent hospital and a team of four surgeons and six doctors have performed over 500 plastic, orthopedic, and reconstructive surgeries in the last two years.
“They are first treated within the Iraqi health system, but some of them require a more complicated intervention,” says Jean Guy Vataux, the MSF program director for the Middle East.
Most of the patients require multiple surgeries and often times stay several months in Jordan. During the time between surgeries they live at a hotel MSF has rented in central Amman. There they live in a suit with a care taker and another patient and have access to both physical and psychological therapy.
“It is important they undergo psychological therapy to relieve their trauma both of the incident and also to prepare them for their future life with a handicap,” says Vataux. “We try to limit the handicap, that is the point of our project, but they still have a more difficult future to face.”
Hanan, 13, has her head shaved because of a head injury and her entire body is covered in burns. She was caught in a blast in Najaf while driving to the mosque with her family. Her mother, father, and two brothers were killed, but she survived and is undergoing a series of surgeries in Amman. “The treatment for my burns is doing well,” she says. “The first surgery in my head didn’t work well. The last one was better.”
“I hope that the future of Iraq will become better and that the explosions will stop,” Hanan says. “My most important dream is to have plastic surgery so my face will be prettier.”
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