Collateral damage has a face

 We were just outside the NATO camp last week when a local family came up to us and asked us for help getting medical care from the hospital within the camp.  We honestly have no contacts with that hospital, so there was nothing we could do.  The woman showed my wife her bandaged arm, and said she had been shot during a joint-military operation 5 nights ago.  The woman appeared about 20 years old and had a 3-year-old child beside her, and the man must have been at least 60 years old.  We understood them when they spoke in the language we know, but they would also drift into their village dialect that we don’t understand.  What we did understand, from looking at their eyes, was that they were exhausted, scared, and just plain sad that they were going through this.  The woman had been wounded in her home village, 2 districts away.  Since she was wounded by soldiers, she was entitled to medical care at one of the army camps. 

I hate war.  The longer I am here, the more I hate it.  I hate what it does to humans. 

I hate when life is reduced to a tolerable proportion of loss, in the achievement of a stated mission.  I hate that people like this 20-year-old woman are nothing more than a statistic.  Where was she supposed to go, when soldiers descended on her house in the middle of the night?  How is she to know who the “good guys” are, when they storm into her house and she is accidently shot?  How should she feel when she has to accept medical care from the very men that shot her, even though it brings great social shame on her to be touched by these strangers.  They tell her to come and get follow-up medical care at the army camp.  Is she supposed to be relieved by that?  Now she has to choose: does she risk infection in the wound if it goes untreated, or does she risk her family’s safety traveling a full day, outside of her tribe’s land, to reach the army camp?  If she can reach the camp, does she really want to face the foreign soldiers again, remembering their faces when they burst through the door of her house?  Would her family even let her get this medical care at the camp, knowing that the insurgents are hunting and killing anyone that associates with the army? 

Next time you hear about civilian casualties in this country, think of this girl, and think of the amount of courage it takes for any of the common, neutral people of this country to just live here.

Birdtales

My barber stole my bird.  No that’s too harsh.  I lost it, and he found it.  I bought “Perry” in the bird bazaar in the capital city in Dec 2010 when we returned.  The bird bazaar is a story of it’s own, that I won’t go into now.  T’s mom was with us, and actually gave Perry to us as a gift.  Then we traveled through the capital city airport, with a bird, in a cage.  Not a big deal really, we did this in 2008 as well with “Firni”.  Actually carrying a bird through this airport is one of the easiest ways to get through security checks.  The guards melt when they see the little song bird, and just wave us through.  Perry the canary was a great pet, we enjoyed his songs so much, and little t loved to sit next to the cage and watch.  On nice days, we hung Perry’s cage from a tree outside so he could enjoy the sun.  Then one day we came home and the bottom of the cage had fallen out, and Perry was gone.  End of story?  We thought so…

Yesterday I was getting my hair cut by the usual fellow I go to in the bazaar, and he was telling me about his birds.   I had noticed his birds before, but they were hung in a place where I could not get a good look while I was in the barber chair.  This time he told me that one of his customers had wanted to buy one of his birds, and had said to him, “name your price, I’ll pay anything for that bird!”  My barber replied to this customer that this bird had been given to him by God, and he would not sell it.  The barber then went on to tell me about the day last spring when he heard a great song, and went to the street to see a beautiful canary there.  It took him a while, but he managed to carefully catch the bird, and has kept it in his cage since then.  He then said to me again that after God had given him such a nice bird, there was no way he could sell it, not even for a high price.  This is remarkable since this guy is really poor.

So, Perry lives on, and his songs are a blessing to my barber and his customers.  I didn’t accuse him of stealing my bird, and I didn’t ask for it back, it just didn’t seem right.

...even to ends of the earth

A short time ago the women’s team of our community development project started a new hygiene health and sanitation course.  The course started after the team made some visits to the 8^th and final community in the large village on the east side of the river.  They have been offering hygiene health and sanitation courses for women in this major village for over a year.  They started in a community they assigned the number 1, and have gradually progressed.  Now they have finally reached the last community in the village, and they have realized that this is the poorest community (17 families) in the whole village (over 1000 families, big village huh?) 

Last week our women reported some interesting stories about the 17 families in this community.  It seems that about 9 years ago, this group of families made a decision that they could no longer sustain life in their remote mountain village in another district.  They lived way out in the boonies, in a place where there is no arable land, so they depended on their flocks of animals to survive.  This also was not easy, because the mountains were made up mostly of a red sandy stone that was brittle.  All too often an animal would slip on the mountainsides because of this brittle rock, and fall to its death.  One drought year the whole village nearly starved because they had lost so many animals to the climate and the land.  So they decided to do the impossible and try to move close to a town.  They didn’t have any relatives near a town that could help them, so that first move of 4 of the families was an extremely vulnerable time.  In this culture people don’t stray far from their tribe, especially to become renters among another tribe, but that’s exactly what these families did, having no other choice.  Somehow they found permission to tenant some land on the far edge of the village, far from the irrigation canals and roads.  That is where they have been for the past 9 years, and every year they scrimp and save and struggle to bring another family or two from the red stone mountains, to their new promised land. 

Our staff have remarked over and over about how interesting it was to find that this village, by far the poorest, has been the most content and most grateful for anything we could do for them.  When the community was facilitated in selecting who would take part in the hygiene health sanitation course, there was no fighting at all (there’s almost always fighting at this stage).  When the course started, no one held it up with complaints about why we would not give a bag of flour or pay the course participants to come (this is also a common occurrence).  The course started smoothly, and after 6 meetings together, the experience continues to be positive.  Our female facilitators excitedly told stories this morning about how eager this community has been to learn.  The only problem in the course had been that older children were showing up at the lessons, and these kids can’t be turned away!  One kid spied on the course the first day, and told her friends what she heard, and they all applied it.  The next time our team came to the village, the girls all had washed their hands and feet (that were previously filthy), and were waiting with smiles.  One of our facilitators challenged he kids about how they would sustain the new practice, and an 8-year-old boy answered quickly saying, “it’s simple, when this first bar of soap runs out, we just need to sell 3 eggs, and we can buy another one.  We can do that any time we need more soap.”

I’m not sure about you, but this story makes me sad and happy at the same time.  Happy that such positive results have come from this community, but sad that it took so much time and effort to reach them.  It took us a year to deal with the more powerful people of the village, before they would permit us to help the really really poor people as well.  They hide their poor, rather than really advocating for them, because they’d rather pocket what we intend to share with the neediest.  It makes me sad to know for a fact that most if not all the other NGOs here miss communities like #8, because they don’t have the time to work at the depth we go to.  “The big boys” as I call multi-million dollar NGO programs, are geared to cover whole districts, provinces, regions.  This ends up to be just a sprinkling of aid here and there.  It’s like one story in a book I read often: crippled people gathered around a pool of water, waiting for healing if they can be the first in the water after an angelic stirring.  One man waits there for years, because there is always someone stronger and quicker than him, who takes his privilege, his turn to be healed.  Then a special healer came one day, and noticed that man, and met his need. 

Oh God help us notice the ones that you would notice if you walked through this land.

Zip's advice

 One of our community development facilitators (I’ll call him Zip) was recently doing some shopping in the bazaar when he heard some men conversing, and the topic of taking a second wife came up.  Zip tuned in and heard one of the men say that he was tired of his first wife, and if he could find the money he would take a second. 

“I heard you want to take a second wife if you can find the money,” said Zip, “and I have good news for you.  I will give you the money you need for your second marriage.”

The man straightened up and asked Zip what he would have to do for this favor.

Zip replied, “I will give you the money you need for your second marriage, but first you have to do some things, exactly as I tell you.  Are you paying attention? Okay here is the first thing you have to do: you must to select and buy and use birth control for the next 2 years.”

“HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT!  You can’t challenge my right to have children!” screamed the man in return. 

“How many children do you have?” asked Zip.

The man thought for a moment, “Well I don’t know, they’re children, they’re hard to keep track of.”

“Exactly!” said Zip, “and have you ever noticed that your wife gets more tired with each pregnancy and birth and new child?  Now pay attention and listen to what else you have to do if you want the money I have promised you:

You must buy your wife a piece of fruit to eat every night.  DON’T let your children eat it, save that piece of fruit especially for her.

You want a beautiful wife right?  You must give her something beautiful so that she can be!  Buy her a new dress, perfume, jewelry.   

Lastly, you must give her a break.  Every day, you need to be at home and take care of the children for 2 hours so that she can take a break. 

You do these things, and then in 2 years come and tell me you still want a second wife.”

Popularity contest

Today we finally put some structure around a question that has floated through our project for the past year: “How do we make it popular?” 

Examples: Soap, toothbrushes, rubber gloves, biosand filters

Of the above examples, soap is perhaps the best.  In our hygiene course we make the point very clear that handwashing after using the latrine and before you eat is pretty much the biggest measure villagers here can take to stay healthy.  We don’t just tell this straight up mind you, this comes after a week or two of participatory games and things that lead the village women themselves to the conclusion that the lack of handwashing is a big problem for them.  Then we bring in soap and water and actually get them to practice a thorough washing, and they get to keep the soap.  Then after the course we visit the local shopkeeper with one of the locals, and together request him to make soap available at a reasonable price, because now people are interested in buying it. 

A few months after the course, we go back to evaluate each of the communities that took the hygiene course.  Our women visit with women in their homes, and men visit with men and the shopkeeper, to see if people have been applying what they learned.  One of the most telling parts of the evaluation is to ask the shopkeeper, “okay, really, have the people been buying soap or not?”  In some places, they have been, and we are extremely encouraged by this.  In other places, they have not, and this is disappointing.  A bar of soap sells for a few pennies, a price that even really poor people are willing to pay, for something that they want. 

This is why we keep coming around to this question, “How do we make it popular?”  What we believe it takes in this culture to make it popular is the following 3 things:

• ·      The people have to understand what it is, why it’s a good thing, and how to use it.
• ·      The local shops have to have it available, and for an affordable price.
• ·      The neighbors have to have it (or at least covet and talk about it).

We take various initiatives on the top 2 points, but still it seems that without that third point being present, it does not spread. 

So what do you think?  Is there more to popularity, and is there more we can do?  

Community Development Annual Plan 2012

 As I wrote earlier, the local leaders and I have just written the annual plan for our Community Development Project.  For those of you that might take an odd interest in the details of what we do, I will write a little summary of what is planned.  Italics are used here because, while we make initial plans to prepare budgets and training that we'll need to act, the actual projects will be largely designed and shaped by the communities we serve.  That said, here goes:

Hygiene courses will continue, and the 4 female facilitators that we hired this past March will step up and lead those more.  We estimate reaching 5,760 women with this course, as the results have been very good.

Biosand Filters will continue to roll out, especially after the water levels decreased and contamination increased during the 2011 drought.  We estimate we’ll distribute 1,000 Biosand Filters in one way or another. 

Latrine work never ends here, but because our sanitation work is more in the way of advocacy and/or social pressure, we estimate we’ll only pay for 50 latrines next year.

Water sources are another ongoing emphasis.  We’ve planned for 22 groundwater projects.  These could be wells that need repair, springs or pools that need protection, or the engineering of a water tank or pipeline project.

Disaster mitigation training is planned for 2012, although that depends on all of us getting some necessary training first!  This is a big part of our drought response program.

Agriculture for women will include plastic tunnels in February, and training in gardens in April.

Agriculture for men will include training in tree pruning, tree nursery grafting, protection against a variety of pests, and orchard set up.

Demonstration chicken farming is new for 2012.  This will be a 3-year project in which all community members are welcome to come for training and do hands-on learning in chicken raising.

A chickens distribution is also planned for widows this spring, as part of our drought response program to the most vulnerable people in the community.

Big greenhouses are moving out to villages in 2012 as well.  Our experiments and training in the greenhouses in school or government departments have been good, now we’ll move some out for communities to gain wider participation in the demonstrations.

An agricultural cooperative is also slated for 2012, and this is new.  We’re still writing the terms on this, but it will likely be that all village members contribute 1/3 of the dues, and our project will contribute the other 2/3 to increase their initial capital for investment.

Government capacity building is also continuing.  This means that we routinely give local government people a call and invite them along to see what we’re doing, and then we train their socks off and advocate for them to do more programs for the poor.

Birth Live Saving Skills course will restart after a few years break.  This course for local midwives (plus any women interested) has an excellent, participatory methodology, and it has really had dynamic results.

Child-2-child health training is another activity we’re trying to restart.  It makes sense, after hearing x number of old locals say, “I never died from not washing my hands after going to the toilet,” to look for a younger audience for health training.

Women’s skills training has been something we have talked a lot about this year, but we’ve had trouble getting this going.  What we really need is to have a market for products made and sold by women.  Until we have that, we’re training women to make things that they probably can’t sell.  Anyone want to come and commit a decade to women’s rights here?

Beyond these plans, there are also things that seem to happen every year, like small bridge buildling, and tree planting on public grounds. 

That pretty well rounds out the annual plan for 2012.  Got any questions?  Yeah, so do I, but go ahead and ask and maybe I can answer.

Story-telling

Today I heard an interesting story, or proverb, if you could call it that.  I’ll translate it to you just as I heard it:

A boy was walking through the bazaar one day and heard a man advertising the sale of a camel for 1 dollar.  The boy went home and excitedly told his dad about this.  To the boy’s surprise, the boy’s father replied, “Ah, that’s too expensive.”  A few weeks later, the boy is walking through the same bazaar and hears that a camel is now selling for 40 dollars.  At home he told his father with disappointment that the price of camels had gone up forty-fold.  The father replied, “That’s a cheap price, go and buy it right away!” 

(The story-teller stops at this point and waits for one of the listeners to state the point that everyone in this culture understands: When a person doesn’t have any money, everything is expensive.)

Now that I’ve told you one story that you may or may not completely understand, let me go further by telling a horrible joke that I’ve heard a few times:

Mullah Nasruddin was sitting in his 10^th story apartment one summer day when he heard someone shouting from the ground level of the center stairwell.  He leaned an ear into the hallway and heard, “Ahmad Jan, I’ve returned from your home on the river, and the news is terrible!  Your daughter has eloped with a Pakistani!”

Mullah Nasruddin immediately reacted to this news, realizing that his family name and honor was now ruined.  He was so struck by this tragedy that he immediately decided to end his family’s dishonor, and he jumped off his balcony.

But while he was falling, he began to think…

When he passed the 7^th story balcony he asked himself, “Whose name did that man call out?”

When he passed the 5^th story balcony he also realized that he did not have a house on the river.

When he passed the 2^nd story balcony he stated aloud, “Wait, I don’t even have a daughter!”

A horrible joke indeed, but when people tell it there is a teaching point included.  The point is that this society needs to think about how quickly they leap to passionate, if not violent, conclusions that have irreversible consequences.  

The land (borrow pictures)

A while back I posted some pictures of people from this land, and noted that they were not my pictures, but those from my colleagues, taken during years when picture-taking was not such a dangerous business in our part of the country.  From that same library of pictures I've found some nice pictures of the land to share with you.

This is a fancy shelter for a melon guard.  Melons are pretty serious business here.

The rolling hills around our city, unlike any place I've seen before.

One of my favorite pictures of friends on their commute.

This is the greenest village graveyard I've seen.

Men sifting grain after harvest.

Some villages have very little water.  One like this is a very hard place to live.

The shortcut between valleys.

The beautiful thing about this province is that some years it rains, and when it does, the dry hills actually grow something!

An update from the project office

 We’re back from holiday and I have had to work hard to catch up on things around the project office.  Now we are the only family here and I’m the only foreigner in the community development project, so life has to move at a faster pace just to keep up with all that needs to be taken care of.  I actually feel encouraged with the way things are going.  My role with the project is much more defined, and that should help me avoid getting discouraged like I was prone to in the spring and summer.  I am now the “Programme advisor,” which essentially means I’m responsible for building capacity in our local staff so that they can do their jobs, while keeping the projects in line with the purpose of our organization.  I like that I do not have to do a lot of day-to-day management, and am not responsible for all those decisions that managers hear grumbling about.  It’s a new challenge to work so closely with our local leaders to do reports, proposals, and budgets.  Somehow we need to come up with fluid and logical documents in English, but to get there I have to be extremely patient and sip a lot of tea while we debate in repetitively cyclical circles and argue in 3 languages.

This week’s big task is submitting our 2012 project plans and budgets to our donor organizations.  I’m pleased with the progress so far.  To keep the process going, I have to think about the simplest way to introduce each task to the guys, and then come up with the right questions to draw out their thoughts and keep them on topic (ha).  Then I sit at my computer and quickly type notes in whatever language comes out first, and come back to clean them up later.  I’m really pleased that there have not been any big disagreements, even when discussing the budgeting of a lot of money. 

I will write soon with a description of the project plans for 2012, because I think some of you might be interested to hear them.  With the rest of my time tonight, I thought I would mention a couple nice discussions I had with local staff today.

This morning our youngest staff, who was married last year and has a new baby, was admitting to the other men that his wife is upset with him.  He said this was because he has been working long days, and when he gets home he has to study for the courses he is taking as well.  His wife has bluntly asked him, “where’s the benefit for me in this marriage?”  The men all turned to me and asked me what he should do, so I told him exactly what I thought.  I told him that when he goes home, he needs to put everything aside and take 10 minutes, and look in his wife’s eyes, and talk to her.  Ask about her day, and tell her about his, and keep eye contact the whole 10 minutes.  Further, he needs to pay her 2 compliments in that 10-minute talk.  And if she asks him why he is being so strange, he has to tell her it is because he loves her.  The reactions from the guys were mixed, clearly some of them thought this was a stretch for the male of this culture, but others signaled they agreed with me.  I will let you know if I find out how this went for our guys.

The last story for tonight is about two guys on the project, who took notice of a desperate family, and took action in response.  They were in a village monitoring some agriculture projects, when they came across a family living in a house that looked inhabitable.  They took some time to visit with the man of the house, who was ashamed he did not even have a cushion for them to sit on.  One of the most telling signs of poverty was also evident: there was nothing covering the windows mud openings in the house; no glass, no curtains, not even plastic to slow the cold wind.  Now, this sounds like the type of person our project should be helping, but we have strict rules about handouts, because they become so problematic.  Their hands a bit tied, both of my staff took this man’s situation to heart, and both responded personally.  One of my staff invited this man to come to his house the next day and work for him in his yard.  The next day came and the man happily went to work.  My other staffer stopped by with a whole load of clothes for this poor man to take home with him. 

This latter story is a big encouragement for me.  There are many days when I worry that our investment in this project and this staff is not going to produce the fruit that we hope for: transformed people.  Then stories like this come out of nowhere and remind me that the Spirit is roaming this place looking for hearts that have heard truth and are softened by it.  

Here, take a sip from this fire hose

In a couple weeks I will be the lone foreigner in the Community Development Project here.  Although I have been here over 10 months, the sudden learning curve feels like drinking from a fire hose.  Taking over the responsibilities of 2 very capable teammates is one edge of the challenge, and making new strategies and brining them to life is the other edge.

Before I lead you to believe that something has gone terribly wrong for me to be left in this situation, let me explain how, in a way, this was done on purpose.  We talk a lot about raising the capacity of our local staff, unto the point that they can take management responsibility.  The couple that is now leaving has been with the project since it started 6 years ago.  They poured themselves into this project, especially in leadership development, and now it’s time for them to move on in order for those leaders to continue to step up. 

So, what will I do?

•         Advise on development strategy, budgeting, and big-picture planning
•           Give ongoing training and support to the facilitators, equipping them with new tools to address new challenges
•         Bridge the gender gap between our male and female staff
•         Be the liaison between the non-English speaking project, and the rest of the world
•         Mediate tensions between local staff, and intervene in power abuses
•         Hold the leaders accountable to the original vision of the project and values of the organization
•         Play policeman and watch for finance fraud
•         Continue my own side-gig of producing publicity and marketing materials
•         Tinker with new technologies, to see if there is anything new under the sun (that will actually be sustainable and replicable here)
•        Teach English to our staff (oh how I hate this- I’m a lousy excuse for an English teacher!  But it is a great way to relate to my staff)

Some of these responsibilities are easier because of the foreigners that started here 6 years ago, and some are made harder.  Local staff are able to completely manage the day-to-day activities, the upkeep of the office, vehicles, and the bulk of administration and finance, and it’s great to hand all that off.  However, the staff are not as open to new ideas for their work with villagers, because they sometimes think they’ve learned it all.  One of the glaring tasks that I’m concerned about is the new strategies that are needed in the next 6-9 months.  Here are some of the matters we are sorting through:

We are considering expanding our working area into a third location.  We currently have 2 teams in 2 locations, and we want to branch out further from the city, but of course the big concern will be security.  We will need a whole new strategy of how we go about our work in less secure areas, and how we mitigate risks.  Essentially it will be figuring out how to keep good relationships with local people powerful enough to get our staff out of a bind.  This will be hard, it weighs heavily on me to send staff out when both they and I know they’re at risk.

The Biosand Filter factory has been going over 1 year, and we’ve distributed more than 900 filters, so we are ready to turn a corner and try to market them rather than give free distributions.  Some of our staff will really resist this change and make my life difficult for a while, so it will take a lot of patience and testing of new ideas to get this change made. 

The way our men’s and women’s teams work together needs to improve.  In most of the work, the women need to lead, and men need to take a more supportive role.  This won’t be popular either, but I believe I can prove it will improve our whole project.

Mediating conflicts and preventing power abuse is going to be a whopper.  About every 4 months, our local project manager and the office administrator reach the end of their patience with one another and start a yelling match.  There’s lots of little jealousies and personal issues that fester and boil over at times, and lately I’ve been receiving text messages that seriously undermine the local project manager, which tells me another subversive plot is taking shape.  I’m thankful for 3 years of experience working here, because I no longer take all these matters to heart, and little by little, God teaches me about grace, and that is good.

Well there’s certainly more, but this gives you a taste of what I’m up to now and how I need your prayers.  When you think of us, do pray for security, but please pray for more than that, because we’re not simply here to be safe, we’re here to promote, exemplify, and initiate change, and that takes a lot- so please hold us up on those regards as well. 

The People (teammate picture album)

We have had disappointingly-few opportunities to take pictures of people here in this location.  In the previous mountain location we lived in, everyone asked us to take their picture.  This place is not at all like that; this place is conservative and suspicious.  A foreigner in a bigger organization in our town was seen taking pictures of neighbors over the weekend, and before he knew it guns came out and he was in a serious situation.  It was resolved and no one was hurt thankfully.  So, with that being the flavor of this place, I'm not going to be able to share a lot of firsthand photos.  Lucky for you, I have several thousand photos from the last 6 years of work of our project.  These pictures were taken by teammates over the past years.  I hope you enjoy them, but I will ask you not to copy or use them elsewhere, deal?

This post is titled "The people" for obvious reason.  I want to show you a bit of the uniqueness of the culture of people here.

Parents often put eyeliner on small babies and childrens' eyes.  Some say it is to make them less attractive in order to ward off the evil eye.

Women taking dishes to the nearest water source to wash.

A group of farmers ready to get to work on a project.

Nice hats huh?

A group of women gathered to learn about safe birth practice.

This is the guy my wife calls KAkA in her blog.  He means a lot to us.

                                       

Men gathered to receive some relief wheat seed after a drought year.

Men gathered in an agriculture experiment garden.

Eid-e Ramazan

 A while ago I wrote about the practice of fasting here.  Actually I started writing about fasting and drifted into other matters in my typical serious fashion… anyway.  Today I’ll go back 1 month to the end of the month of fasting, and tell you what happened in what is perhaps the biggest of the “Eids” (annual holidays/celebrations) in this culture. 

As I wrote a while back, the month of fasting is observed differently in different contexts.  In this place, the majority of people were strict and devout about their fasting, even though they struggled to keep the fast through the intense summer heat.  During the fast I talked with some people that I knew were not religious, and they said that even though they did not care about the fast, they could not risk anyone finding out that they do not fast.  So, if the opportunity arose for them to take a drink of water on a day that was over 110, they would take it, but they said that because life is so communal, those chances usually do not come.  As a result, everyone was grouchy for the whole month, tempers flared and fights broke out easily even in our office, and overall, productivity was pitiful.  It was a hard time to be here, I was really discouraged for most of the month, and as the Eid at the end of the fasting approached, I was ready for some celebration.

In the week before Eid, the preparations we observed told us that this context makes a big deal about this Eid.  Each evening we could hear the chanting of neighborhood boys going door to door singing out a traditional song, asking for money for the holiday.  In the bazaar I saw the shopkeepers ramping up their stocks of sweets and goods that are special for Eid.  I went out to buy some of these goods for ours guests and our visiting, and was amazed to find that almost every store had a sidewalk full of nuts, fruit, and candies to sell, even stores that typically sell only nails or paint!  It was as if the whole town stopped their ordinary work to single-mindedly focus on one task: preparing for Eid. 

For us, the day before Eid included the cooking of a feast for our office staff.  All through Ramazan I had wanted to host an Iftar (breaking the daily fast in the evening), and finally we decided that we would do this on the last day of fasting.  My wife was a little scared of cooking for the whole crew, and rightly so, because it was a big lot of them, and they’re not so easy to please.  So we hired two local ladies to cook, and the guard and I ran for all the groceries.  It was a fun day of seeing the party come together.  We have a big enough patio that we could seat them all outside on a nice rug and cushions. 

We did not regret getting help with the meal, because you need to be quite exact with the preparations for Iftar.  Exactly 15 minutes before the night call to prayer, everyone can have some dates and fruit.  Then they should be doing their prayers in prostrations at the time of the call to prayer, and after this, they can return to their supper and eat the main course.  We served a meal calls Doshi: meat in tomato sauce with chickpeas, served over rice with raisins and carrots.  It went over very well!

Still excited about how the Iftar feast went, I was ready to head out with an idea of my own on the first day of Eid.  Tradition is that the first day of Eid is for families to visit one another, and that friends visit friends on days 2-3 (or 4 or 5!).  I thought about the importance of day 1 in this culture, and tried to think of who might be left out of the celebrations on a day like this.  I figured that one group of people that might be left out would be the old men that guard the stockpiles of animal feed on the river banks.  These men were always in their little wood shacks, faithfully protecting the feed from theft, and I figured they would have to be there on the first day of Eid as well.  I was wrong, the shacks were empty on the first day of Eid!  So, I came home and talked with my wife to come up with plan B.  She suggested police officers, so I grabbed my bags of Pepsi cans and cookies (what I planned to give to the men guarding the hay), and took off on motorcycle to look for policemen working on the first day of Eid.  My wife’s idea was a winner!  The policemen were so happy to be considered on the first day of Eid!  I went intersection by intersection offering treats to the policemen directing traffic (they didn’t mind taking a break!).  Then I headed out to the airport, and found the jackpot of policemen staying in a barracks just inside the grounds.  I didn’t have enough pop for all of them, but they were still thrilled when I left all that remained with them.  We had a brief chat, they remarked that no one has ever brought them something on their holiday, and they wished me well in my work here.  After the “Happy Eid-e” for the policemen, my family just enjoyed a nice day together at home, and prepared for the visiting in the next days. 

Visitation is a big deal here, especially during Eid.  Everyone is honored to have guests come to their homes, so we prepared a lot of bags of snacks and treats to take to neighbor’s houses.  We also had to be ready to go on “the tour of houses” with our project staff.  All the men went together on day 4, and the women on day 5.  Both times, the tour started by having everyone from the team come into our guest room, which we had prepared with lots of cookies, snacks, and candies.    The group sits down, eats some snacks, drinks some tea, says a prayer, and speedily moves on to the next place.  The men did not spend more than 10 minutes in each place, because there was an unspoken goal of finishing the visit to all 12 houses before noon.  The women took their sweet time, because they knew the office cook would make them lunch.  If my wife has not written about her time of visiting, I will bug her to do so, because it sounded like the women had more fun!  For me the highlight was seeing the homes of some staff I had not visited yet, and spending all the time driving around with the guys, sharing and laughing together.

Along with the team tours, we enjoyed visiting neighbors and some other friends at a slower pace.  Little t did not accompany either of the tours (good thing, all that sugar would have put him over the top!), but we did enjoy taking him to visit neighbors and other friends.  He is a joy to people here, because he does a good job of shaking hands and then putting his right hand over his chest to show honor.  It seemed like wherever we went, it didn’t matter what we brought as a gift, just that we came.  By the end of the 5 days we were pretty spent, but it had been such a worthwhile endeavor to try to really join this culture in their celebration.

To conclude, I’ll share one reflection I had while observing all the activities of Eid.  As we went around town visiting homes, I noticed that everyone had a light spirit, as if all the insecurity and poverty that IS their lives did not matter on their holiday.  I was amazed at the number of women and girls that walked the streets as they went place to place.  I would be tempted to call it a taste of freedom, but that is probably overstatement.  Perhaps the more appropriate term would be: reckless abandon.  Yes, the place is insecure, and on most days there’s significant risk of something bad happening to you, but that didn’t matter on Eid.  And yes, the whole society is strangled with poverty and lack of opportunity for any progress that the developed world would recognize, but during Eid everyone put on their best appearance of prosperity, and truly, many took the joy that they could from that day.  Maybe you take this description as something to be happy about, or maybe you take it as something to be sad about.  I was happy that the people of this city had one holiday in which the insurgents were quiet, and there were no incidents in our province.  I was also sad to think that this was just one brief holiday, and that during the rest of the year this culture of hosting and visiting and being out and about is confined, muted, and struggling to survive.  I am sad thinking that perhaps more aspects about this culture have also been pummeled into extinction by the war and poverty.  Will this people ever emerge from these struggles to be a healthy society?  Despite these shadowy reflections, I am also encouraged to keep the hope that the creator of this people can also bring peace, and restoration, and life.  These are certainly things to keep in prayer.