made bolani for the first time today and it turned out so good 😭❤️

Transitioning to Manhood

Will felt a strange nostalgia looking at the box his mother had sent him, although it wasn’t a bittersweet feeling. It was a twisting feeling in his gut, a horrible reminder that his mom was clearing the house of all reminders of her child, trying to get the child she thought she remembered to snap out of a phase and return home. He picked up a knitted hat, barely the size of his fist- he’d been born premature, and his grandmother had knitted the tiny pink hat as soon as she received news of his birth. It was a pale pastel pink, almost white, a pearly quality to the colour, but years of collecting damp in a cardboard box had tinged it a dusty, damp grey. There were photographs, and Will was bombarded with pigtails and frilly dresses and patent shoes buckled with bows. “I think I would have cried if I’d been put in that monstrosity,” Lou-Ellen said softly, pointing at the photograph Will was currently holding, featuring him in a pink frilly dress for a Church wedding, holding a basket of bright pink and red rose petals, bawling his eyes out and lifting up the hem of the skirt to wipe his face. He looked about five.

The next picture showed the same dress covered in mud, Will grinning like a maniac chasing the vicar’s daughter with a worm in his hands and one shoe missing, hair a tangled mess. Cecil snorted and laughed. “Please tell me you put that worm down the back of her dress!”

“Nah, she picked up a bigger worm and chased me with it instead. We were friends in kindergarten,” Will replied, pointing out a photograph of him in pink flowery dungarees sitting opposite the girl, who was wearing the same dungarees in blue. “We made mud pies and put them in her father’s shoes in that picture,” Will said sadly, “we got into trouble for boyish behaviour and making a mess.” Will unceremoniously shoved the photographs into the bottom of the box, taking a few deep breaths.

“Are you okay, Will,” Lou-Ellen asked gently, placing her hand on his back and rubbing small circles.

“Yeah,” Will sighed, staring emptily into the box before picking out his birth certificate and staring at it. “I don’t know,” Will amended, and Cecil took the certificate out of his hands.

“We should burn this,” Cecil announced, “it’s useless. If you end up needing it for anything, you can just get it re-printed at the register office. Although you might wanna make some changes to it first. Until you can do that legally, Connor and Travis owe me a massive favour, if you’d like.” Will let out a small laugh, burying his face in his hands.

“My whole childhood is in this box,” Will said quietly, “and my mom’s throwing away all of her favourite memories of me, and I can’t bring myself to look at them.”

“Hey,” Lou-Elllen began gently, “we’ll make new memories, new photographs.These aren’t your memories, they’re your mom’s ideal childhood for you, it’s all the parts she didn’t like taken out and the select few moments she did pruned carefully and displayed to be her image of perfection. You don’t have to keep any of this, because that’s not how your childhood felt to you. They aren’t pictures of you, they’re pictures of the child your mom wanted everybody to see, they aren’t pictures that truly represent your childhood. You aren’t obliged to hold onto somebody else's image of you.”

“We can burn all of it later, mate,” Cecil offered, “just us if you want. And Nico too, of course. Kayla and Austin too maybe, if they aren’t busy.”

“Yeah,” Will sighed, “shoot it with a burning arrow or something.”

“That’s the spirit,” Cecil grinned mischievously, taking the box from Will, “I’ll go take this to my cabin and get my siblings to thoroughly vandalise everything so before you burn it you can have a laugh.”

“Thanks,” Will laughed, and Lou-Ellen pulled him into her shoulder.

“I’ll see you later, dude,” Cecil smiled, “and you, my bi-hexual girlfriend!” He kissed Lou-Ellen’s cheek and jogged off.

“Do you wanna go find Nico?”

“He’s got training now,” Will replied, “but I wanna go talk to Clarisse, do you know where I could find her?”

“I saw her heading to her cabin before I came here,” Lou-Ellen replied, “I’m gonna go work on creating some more sigils, okay?” She kissed Will’s cheek before heading towards her cabin, and Will set out to find Clarisse. She wasn’t in her cabin, or in the armory- Will found her sitting outside the currently empty Aphrodite cabin, holding a pale green and cream chiffon scarf in her hands. Will sat beside her, bumping her shoulder.

“It was Silena’s,” Clarisse said gently, “her favourite hijab. She used to cover it with pins and I’d put flowers through the pins. After we burned her shroud, we uh… her parents invited me to her funeral, at the Masjid. The mosque, that is.”

“It’s beautiful,” Will said, “you should keep it. She’d want you to have it.”

“Yeah,” Clarisse sighed, “don’t tell anyone I went soft, you hear me, Solace?”

“Message received and understood,” Will smiled, and Clarisse punched him lightly in the arm.

“She taught me how to put on makeup,” Clarisse admitted, “she used to do it real subtle, so nobody would know. She’d contour my whole face and she’d put on neutral eye shadows and clear mascara, cherry chapstick muted with matte powder.”

“I never noticed you wearing makeup,” Will replied.

“That’s because that was the point. She made it look completely natural. I’m not exactly… feminine.”

“But she taught you how you could be butch and still be pretty, right?”

“Exactly,” Clarisse replied, “she helped me to pass.”

“A true ally,” Will smiled, resting his head on her shoulder, “how have you been recovering from surgery?”

“I’ve had worse pain,” Clarisse smiled, “I’m still getting used to the extra weight on my chest, but Chris likes them just as much as I do, I think.” Will chuckled lightly, and Clarisse put her arm around him. “Anyway, you look like shit, Solace, what happened?”

“My mom,” Will replied dejectedly, “she sent a box of stuff from my childhood. I’m gonna burn it all later. Cecil’s idea.”

“I’ll be right there with you,” Clarisse said, squeezing his shoulder roughly, “providing I can take a baseball bat to everything first.”

“You can rip the birth certificate before I shoot everything with a burning arrow” Will offered, and Clarisse chuckled lightly.

“That’s my boy,” Clarisse grinned, punching his arm lightly.

“The thing is… I don’t hate my childhood,” Will began honestly. “I didn’t always know I was trans, I didn’t always hate myself, I just couldn’t understand that weird out of place feeling, you know? I didn’t know why things made me uncomfortable. I only started figuring it out when I came to camp… and now, it hurts to look at all the pictures, because they… they don’t feel like I’m looking at photographs of me, and the more I tell myself that’s me, the more I can’t stand to look at them, because I look so female. But my childhood wasn’t a sad one, I… I was loved once, I used to pretend I had nightmares so my mom would give me these butter cookies with warm milk. She knew I was usually faking it, but she didn’t care as long as I smiled.”

“Tell me more,” Clarisse probed gently, before wrapping Silena’s scarf around his shoulders when she noticed a breeze, keeping her arm around his shoulder.

“She didn’t always have a lot of time for me, with the singing and all,” Will began, “but when she did have time for me, we always did something. She used to take me to my grandma’s farm a lot. The chickens didn’t like me much, but there was this baby calf my grandma let me name. Which was a terrible decision, I called it Dustbin Grass,” Will announced with a small laugh. Clarisse snorted, and Will continued. “Anyway, the calf used to come in through the back door and lay down in the middle of the sitting room, and I’d curl up next to the calf. We had a height chart on the wall, and I’d always compare my height with the calf every week. And other days, my mom would take me on day trips. Sometimes it was just to the local park or play area, we’d feed the ducks and sit in the sun with a picnic. I’d always go on the slide, although some days it was so hot the metal burned and I’d start crying. My mom always used to wrap me up in a warm hug and she’d tell me that it was all okay.”

“That sounds nice,” Clarisse said sincerely, and Will continued to share his memories.

“I wasn’t so good with all the school stuff. When I was a kid, I hadn’t been diagnosed with ADHD yet, or dyslexia, but I still struggled. I was behind everybody in the class on my reading and writing and my handwriting was always terrible. I used to get frustrated and walk out a lot. And after break time, I always had a hard time calming down, so I used to be super bouncy and I’d need something to fidget with. And of course, I was a kid, so the louder the better. I’d get into trouble a lot and get sent out of class. I used to cry because I thought I was dumb, but my mom always told me I was the smartest. She’d take me on nature walks, and she’d point out different trees and birds and insects and I’d tell her what they were. And at one point, I could identify native birds by their calls. My mom made me feel smart, and I didn’t feel smart again until I came to camp.”

“How the fuck did they think you were dumb?”

“Classism, sexism, and ableism. Anyway, my mom and I used to have pamper weekends, where we’d just sit out in the garden with bowls of cold water for our feet and face masks, and we’d watch the clouds if there were any. Mom never used to put enough sunscreen on herself and she used to end up looking like a lobster. We’d talk about how our weeks had been, and about my mom’s record deals and tours. She mainly toured the South, she didn’t usually go far out from Texas, but I’ve always been travel sick and I can’t really handle anything over half an hour, so it was always better to leave me at home with my grandma sometimes. My mom and I lived in the city in Austin, but my grandma lived on a ranch. She used to make me cookies all the time and she’d tell me stories of mom’s childhood and her childhood. She’d tell me how lucky I was. My grandma was a lesbian, but things when she were young were… well, worse than they are today, so… she married a man and had kids and buried who she was. She always told me that I couldn’t help who I was, and that if ever I figured myself out and I wasn’t straight, then it was okay and she’d love me just the same. The vicar used to sit and have tea with my grandma every day, because he had a gay son and he wanted her advise on how to support him.”

“Your gran is a legend,” Clarisse smiled, “is she still with us or…”

“I wish I knew,” Will sighed sadly, “grandpa died when I was six and the year after, my nan met a woman, and she moved away and my mom refused to let me have her address or contact her. Everyone always assumes my mom is kind and loving because I have such happy childhood memories. But when you have a child, if you can’t love your child unconditionally, then you never loved them at all. I grew up, knowing, just knowing… that one day, I’d do or say something and my mom would know I was bisexual and my mom wouldn’t love me anymore. Knowing that your own mother will stop loving you, for the very thing that gets you beat up in the playground, for the very thing that gets you harassed, knowing that your own mother believes with all of her heart that her child deserves to burn in hellfire and brimstone for eternity just for being attracted to somebody… from a young age I knew that my mother’s love was conditional. For years, I knew that I didn’t meet the conditions for my mother’s love. And then I stopped going home because I was scared and I wasn’t ready to be abandoned by the same woman who promised unconditional love. And then I came out as trans to her and… she sends me the box. And it’s not just a box to remind me of my childhood, it’s all her favourite memories. It’s the drawings she stuck to the fridge, the photos she showed guests, the things she was most proud of me for. It’s her way of telling me that she hates me so much that those memories are worthless to her. Happy childhoods are empty gestures when a parent’s love is conditional. And I have to face biphobia and transphobia every day of my life, but it’s worse knowing I don’t have a home. My home is a summer camp. I’m alone. If the woman who swore to love me unconditionally, swore by her bible to love me and protect me and fulfil her god given role as a parent, can cast me aside like I’m disgusting, then how am I ever meant to feel anything but wrong? How am I meant to convince myself I’m worthy of love? I can’t even use public restrooms without fearing for my safety, how am I meant to feel safe enough to trust anybody?”

“Hey,” Clarisse began, squeezing Will’s shoulder, “you’re never alone. No matter what, I’ve got your back. I’ll kick a transphobes teeth, you know I will. We have to stick together, we can’t let the community be divided, okay? We’ll look out for each other. You’re not unloved. I love you. My mom is your mom now, okay? Actually no, I’m your mom now, kiddo. And you have the best friends you could ask for, okay? Lou-Ellen can and will hex anybody who tries to put you down. Cecil’s always got your back, he pranked that Athena kid real good, remember? And you have Nico. You’re dating the Son of Hades. He can and will turn anyone into a ghost if they hurt you. That boy loves you, okay? Your self-worth is not defined by your mother’s prejudice. Nico’s friends- Jason, Percy, Frank, Hazel, Annabeth, Piper, Reyna, Leo- they’re all allies we can trust. You’re not a boy anymore, Solace, you’re a man now. You’re making your own way in a world where the odds are stacked against you. You just gotta keep going. People will hate you no matter what you do. So surround yourself with allies, keep going no matter how bleak, stay strong, and when you can’t stay strong, use your support network. We’ll both survive if we stick together. If you feel scared to go outside, come and find me. We’ll keep each other safe. And remember. You’re perfect, don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. Aphrodite would want you to respect yourself and love yourself. Your dad would want you to shine and spread light amongst the hate, to rise no matter how many times you’re pushed down. My dad would want you to fight back and never stop fighting for your rights, our rights, for what you believe in. And I’m sure most of the other gods support you too.”

“Damn girl, now I know why you’re in charge of motivational battle speeches,” Will smiled, and Clarisse ruffled his hair.

“Good boy. Now, you’re gonna get back to that infirmary, and carry on as normal, okay? And then we’re gonna burn your birth certificate and all the other stuff.”

“I had my T shot this morning,” Will stated with a small smile, “after a few months, people no longer misgender me when they hear my voice and for once in my life, I like how I sound. I feel like me. My dysphoria is… it’s so much less intense than it used to be. I feel safer in public, I feel confident enough to speak as loud as I want without fearing judgment or misgendering or violence.”

“You’re getting a bit of a fluffy mustache too there, Solace,” Clarisse teased light-heartedly, and Will laughed happily. “I’ve gotta go teach the Aphrodite girls some self-defence classes, you have to prepare for the influx of inevitable injuries because the Ares cabin and the Athena cabin are sparring in the arena.”

Will went about the rest of his day with his head held high. For once, he felt proud of who he was, of the man he’d become, of the way he hadn’t let the hate he’d heard turn him hateful, how he helped people, how he tried his best to make every camper feel like they had a safe space, a home. He never wanted anybody to feel the way he had for such a long time. He prided himself on his kindness, and he vowed never to lose it.

So later that day, the camp stood around a pit of flames at the beach, all turned out to show their solidarity bar a few. Will wore his flag as a cape, and everybody cheered when Clarisse marched in still in her armour from the day, with a ‘fuck the cis-tem’ jacket, and ripped up Will’s birth certificate. Will smiled as he threw the photographs into the flames, one by one, his friends all cheering and clapping. He watched every painful reminder, every perfect image of his mother’s ideal child- graffitied on with funny mustaches and devil horns on his mom, courtesy of the Hermes cabin- of conditional love and rejection, go up in flames. For once, Will wasn’t defined by his past, but rather by his future, one surrounded by allies and friends from all walks of life. People of many religions and races, sexualities, and genders. And even better, he received a loving kiss from his boyfriend in front of the crowd. For once, he didn’t look back.

@solangeloweek day 2, childhood/back story building

Hassan Nasrallah Biography and Profile

New Post has been published on https://www.politicoscope.com/hassan-nasrallah-biography-and-profile/

Hassan Nasrallah Biography and Profile

Hassan Nasrallah (Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah) of Hezbollah (Hizbullah) was born August 31, 1960 al-Bazroieh – Tyre District, married to Fatima Mustafa Yassin, with whom he has five children, including: martyr Mohammed Hadi, Mohammed Jawad, Zeinab, Muhammad Ali, and Muhammad Mahdi. His Eminence, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s birth and residence was in “Karantina” neighborhood, one of the most impoverished and underprivileged neighborhoods in the eastern suburbs of Beirut, he was the oldest of three brothers and five sisters. There he received his elementary education in the private “Kifah” School, and continued his secondary education at the “Educational Secondary” High School, in Sin El-Feel suburb.

At the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon in April 1975, his family returned to Albazouria, where he resumed his high school education. Despite his young age he was appointed local organizational official for Albazouria in Amal movement.

Howza (Islamic School) Education Influenced by Sayyed Moussa Sadr since his youth, Sayyed Nasrallah showed keen interest in religious study. When he moved to the south in 1976, Sayyed Nasrallah used to lead worshipers at prayer times in Tyre mosque.

It was there where he met the religious authority and scholar Mohammed al-Gharaway, who had been assigned by Imam al-Sadr to fill his place in Tyre; Sayyed Nasrallah shared his wish to go to the Educational Hawza in Najaf.

His wish was met with encouragement and facilitation, along with a “recommendation letter” to Sayyed Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, with whom al-Gharaway shared a strong friendship… and so it was. Sayyed Nasrallah gathered the necessary funds to reach Najaf, where he arrived empty-handed.

He arrived at Najaf carrying a “message of recommendation,” there he met a group of Lebanese students of religion, and asked to be accompanied by one of them to deliver the letter to Sayyed Sadr; they introduced him to Sayyed Abbas Moussawi, who had a close connection with the Marge’a (religious reference authority) figure.

In that meeting a humorous incident occurred when Sayyed Nasrallah thought Sayyed al-Moussawi, with his dark brown complexion was Iraqi, so he spoke with him in classical dialect, Sayyed al-Moussawi responded clarifying “I am a fellow Lebanese from Nabi She’et.”

Thus began the relationship between al-Moussawi & Nasrallah; to Nasrallah, Moussawi was a brother, a friend, a teacher and a comrade over 16 years of struggle, which ended when Moussawi passed away to the higher realm as martyr.

Sayyed al-Moussawi took care of the young man at the request of Sayyed Sadr. When al-Sadr received the letter, he looked at him and asked if he had any money, Sayyed Nasrallah answered “I possess nothing.” Then al-Sadr turned to al-Moussawi and said: “his lessons, education, room and follow-up assistance are to be under your care,” and asked for the “young man” to be extended with the necessary funds to buy his things, clothes, books and monthly expenditure.

Sayyed al-Moussawi concerned himself with the finest details in the young man’s life. He secured him a room close to his family home in the Educational Howza, where married students are allocated independent homes, while every two or three single students share a room, and each receives a small monthly allowance.

Sayyed Nasrallah joined a similar aged student group taught by Sayyed al-Moussawi. Moussawi was stern and firm in teaching his students; what usually requires five years, they accomplished in two years, since this group did not take the planned Ramadan, pilgrimage and seasonal holidays, or weekends. Everyday was dominated by continued educational attainment without interruption or rest.

Sayyed Nasrallah completed his study of “Introductions” with distinction in 1978; he showed thirst for knowledge as he studied in earnest in order not to disappoint the teacher who became his friend. In that year the Iraqi regime increased harassment of students to the level of expelling many from different nationalities.

Up until then, the fact that most Lebanese students had not come from academic backgrounds, used to create a certain degree of Iraqi unease, according to what had become tradition that a Sheikh usually sent his son to the Najaf, to study religious sciences and become a sheikh.

In the mid-seventies, however, Najaf witnessed the arrival of university educated young men who are not from traditionally religious backgrounds.

When the Lebanese war break out, the Iraqi regime started bringing accusations against Lebanese students of having belonged to this or that group, to “Amal” Movement, the “Syrian Baath” party, Syrian intelligence, or to the “Da’awah” party. Then the regime went further by placing some of the students under arrest and deporting several months later.

Sayyed Nasrallah was outside the Howza during the raid hour, on his return and on discovering his comrades had been arrested, he immediately left the Najaf to another province, and succeeded in returning safely home to Lebanon.

Sayyed Nasrallah’s ambition was to complete his study of religious sciences, this he achieved after Sayyed Abbas Moussawi founded, with a group of learned teachers, the al-Muntazar (May God Hasten His Return) Howza in Baalbek, where Sayyed Nasrallah began teaching the initial introductory stages while studying the advanced stages, without leaving his political and jihadist activities.

Resistance work On Feb. 16, 1992 the occupation forces assassinated Sayyed Moussawi, Sayyed Nasrallah cried that day over his professor, friend and ideal. The Shura or “Consultative Council” met and chose Sayyed Nasrallah as secretary-general, despite his young age as compared with other Council members.

Hezbollah (Hizbullah) leadership chose Sayyed Nasrallah as the best man for the job at the helm of the party and the resistance, at a time when the internal political and security conditions were super-sensitive. He had unique attributes and distinctive leadership Charisma, cohesion of party principles and grass roots experience of field developments. He was in touch with the situation on the ground and had the leadership members’ confidence behind him, in particular martyr Sayyed Abbas al-Moussawi.

During his term in the Secretariat, Sayyed Nasrallah says that Sayyed Moussawi used to give him the task of representing him in celebrations, festivals and party meetings, when organizationally these matters are the duty and responsibility of the Secretary General, who has to attend among top command posts in the decision making processes and political discourses. On one occasion Sayyed Nasrallah asked Sayyed al-Moussawi the question as to why he was given these tasks, to which Sayyed al-Moussawi replied “Because you qualify, as for me; my situation will not last long ….”

Sayyed Nasrallah continues that he did not understand Sayyed Moussawi’s phrase until sometime later, on February 16, 1992 when he was martyred along with his wife and child Hussein, in Tiffahta town, on his return from Jibsheet in southern Lebanon. He had just delivered a speech on the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Sheikh of the Islamic Resistance martyrs, Sheikh Ragheb Harb… It was then that Sayyed Nasrallah understood the meaning of al-Moussawi’s phrase.

Sayyed Nasrallah rejected his election because he was only 32 years of age, the youngest of the Consultative Council members, but obliged when they insisted and completed the mandate of the martyred Sayyed, which ended in 1993. Sayyed Nasrallah was later re-elected for the second, third and fourth time…

During Sayyed Nasrallah’s Party Secretariat, the Islamic Resistance fought a number of heroic confrontations with the occupation army. The most significant of these confrontations was “Settling the Account” war in July 1993, “Grapes of Wrath” war in April 1996, through to the great historic achievement of liberating the greater part of Lebanese territory on May 25, 2000, arriving at the historic and strategic victory in 2006. He continues to exercise the Secretariat duties today.

Under Sayyed Nasrallah’s leadership, Hezbollah (Hizbullah) plunged widely into the midst of internal political life in Lebanon and participated in parliamentary elections in 1992. It was the first parliamentary elections to be held after the end of the civil war in Lebanon. Hizbullah’s important election victory brought 12 of its members into the Lebanese Parliament; they formed the Loyalty to the Resistance Bloc. Hizbullah also plunged into Ministerial work in 2005, with two Ministers in the Cabinet, Dr Trad Hamadeh and Hajj Mohammad Fneich.

On September 15, 1997, his son Muhammad Hadi was martyred in a heroic confrontation with the occupation forces in Jabal al-Rafi’a (High Mountain) region of south Lebanon. The day His Eminence was told that contact was lost with his son Hadi, Sayyed Nasrallah took the news calmly and deliberately, as if he was anticipating a greater tragedy like his home being shelled by the Israeli occupation forces, and his entire family wiped out.

The day he received news of Hadi’s martyrdom, Sayyed Nasrallah secluded himself and cried, he missed his eldest son like any father would, and his only consolation is that he will join him one day. Yet he was happy for him on the blessed martyrdom he achieved, something Sayyed Hassan honors and prays to God to be granted the same blessed fate.

Leadership work Sayyed Nasrallah began partisan action as member in Amal movement ranks with his younger brother Hussein, and soon became the movement’s organizational official in the town, despite his young age. It had only been months when he decided to travel to Najaf, as soon as a chance arises, to take his study in religious sciences; his dream was to become a learned scholar of religion while his family’s was for him to become a doctor.

Lack of material resources stopped him from realising his dream, however, when the political situation there prevented him from completing his studies, he returned in 1979 to Lebanon, and joined the “al-Muntazar ((MGHHR)) Howza” in Baalbek, and at the same time resumed his partisan and organizational work among the Amal movement ranks.

Sayyed Nasrallah gained his experience through performing his duties where he was appointed within the Movement in 1979. He later became the political official of the movement in the Bekaa region, and then became member of the Politburo in 1982, which saw the Israeli invasion.

In 1982, Sayyed Nasrallah withdrew from Amal movement, together with a large group of officials and cadres, following differences in vision at the time with the political leadership of the movement, on ways to confront the political and military developments resulting from the ‘Israeli’ invasion of Lebanon.

He joined Hezbollah (Hizbullah) ranks, while keeping up with his educational activity at al-Muntazar (MGHHR) Howza in Baalbek; Sayyed Nasrallah assumed different roles within the party, since its foundation in 1982, and the start of the Islamic Resistance Movement in Lebanon.

Within the party he occupied a series of positions which were all created it to accommodate his changing and growing roles, until 1985, when he went from being a member in the Reception Group in Baalbek, to being in charge of mobilizing resistance fighters, to Baalbek Regional Official through to Bekaa State Party Official.

Sayyed Nasrallah then moved to Beirut with Sayyed Ibrahim al-Amin, where the latter was designated party official in charge of Beirut area and Nasrallah his deputy. When political and organizational work was separated, Sayyed Nasrallah turned to political action where he became in charge of Beirut.

He was then assigned to the newly generated position of Chief Executive General, thus a member of the “Consultative Council”, which is considered the highest authority in Hizbullah leadership. In 1989, Sayyed Nasrallah left for the holy city of “Qom” to join the Educational Howza anew to continue his studies.

Pressured by unfolding practical, political and Jihad level developments at the time in Lebanon, core officials and cadres reached a decision within the party calling the Sayyed to resume his duties, a request he accepted and left al-Najaf to return home only one year after arriving there.

With the General Conference Of the party held in May 1991, Sayyed Abbas Moussawi was elected secretary general, Sheikh Naim Qassem as his vice-president, while Sayyed Nasrallah returned to the operational responsibility.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah Quick Facts

Personal: Birth date: August 31, 1960

Birth place: Beirut, Lebanon

Father: Abd al-Karim, who worked as a grocer

Marriage: Fatima Yassin

Children: Muhammad Hadi (died in 1997); Muhammad Jawad; Zeinab; Muhammad Ali and Muhammad Mahdi

Education: Islamic seminaries in Iran and Iraq

Religion: Shiite Muslim

Other Facts: Oldest of nine children. Wears a black turban to signify that he is a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad.

Timeline: 1975 – After civil war breaks out in Lebanon, the Nasrallah family leaves Beirut and moves to a village near Tyre.

1976 – Nasrallah moves to Najaf, Iraq, to attend a Shiite seminary.

1978 – Is expelled from Iraq during a time of Shiite repression (President Saddam Hussein was a Sunni) and returns to Lebanon along with his mentor, Abbas Musawi. Musawi establishes a religious school in Baalbeck, where Nasrallah teaches and studies.

1978-1982 – Member of the Shiite Amal movement during Lebanon’s civil war.

1982 – Organizes a group to fight against the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. This group eventually evolves into Hezbollah.

1987-1989 – Studies at a seminary in Qom, Iran.

1989 – Represents Hezbollah in Tehran.

1991 – Musawi becomes the secretary-general of Hezbollah. Nasrallah returns to Lebanon.

February 1992 – Replaces Musawi as secretary-general of Hezbollah after Musawi is killed by an Israeli helicopter strike.

1997 – Nasrallah’s son, Muhammad Hadi, is killed in a clash with Israeli forces.

July 12, 2006 – Hezbollah crosses the border into Israel and captures two soldiers during a raid; a 34-day conflict ensues.

September 22, 2006 – Nasrallah makes his first public appearance since the beginning of the conflict in July, addressing hundreds of thousands of people at a rally in Beirut.

November 30, 2006 – In a speech broadcast on TV, Nasrallah calls for open-ended peaceful protests in the hopes of Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s resignation and the creation of a national unity government. The next day, security sources estimate that at least 200,000 protesters gather in the streets of Beirut, Lebanon.

May 2008 – Declares the government’s move to shut down Hezbollah’s communications network “a declaration of open war.” Armed conflict breaks out between Hezbollah fighters and pro-government militias.

May 21, 2008 – After five days of talks, representatives from the Hezbollah-led opposition and Lebanon’s Western-backed government reach an agreement in Doha, Qatar, ending the 18-month political crisis.

May 25, 2013 – In a televised speech, Nasrallah publicly acknowledges for the first time that Hezbollah fighters are in Syria battling in support of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

December 2017 – Joins calls for a Palestinian uprising following the United States’ recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah Biography and Profile

2017 in review

I always say that I’m going to post a “how my year was” at the end of the year, but I have an awful memory so I never remember what happened in each month. This year, I tried to post about each month as it finished- the good and the bad. Under a cut because of course it got long, and I never seem to post about my real life, so this may be boring if you don’t actually know me.

January

Got a snow day after having students for just one day

Accidentially read a book in one night (Perfect) because of aforementioned snow day/borrowing it electronically from the library/not knowing how many pages there were (not that many since it’s YA)

Got two more snow/ice days because my county has mountains in it and we’re in the South, so we’re not prepared for winter

Saw Hidden Figures and cried about how good humanity can be when we actually allow and encourage all people to be their best (black women!!!! they did that!!!!!!!)

Helped my students navigate our county’s program of going one-to-one with Chromebooks (there were many good things, such as getting my kids to play freerice for extra credit; there were many bad things, such as a quiz getting screwed up because I shuffled the questions but had asked my co-teacher to help me by reading the quiz [as she normally does] to a half dozen students...who all had a different order of questions...).

Went to a conference for new teachers and while a lot of the information was repetitive, there were a few things I got from it (such as 6.5 professional development hours aw yis).

Got to see lots of family I don’t usually see on this weekend!

Started reading The Diary of Anne Frank with my students because this country allowed fascism to be A Thing™ and I’m going to resist however I can.

Got two (!!!!!!) days off at the end of January for sick days (apparently other students in the county? not us but we benefitted!!!!)

February

Finally had an entire 5-day week of school

Then got another two days off for sickness (8th grade was doing our part by asking ENTIRE classes “Hey! Anyone feel sick? Anyone want to go get their temp checked???”)

Went to an open house at a local mosque, and y’all, I live in The South™ but their parking lot filled up a good 15 minutes before the event even started and there was an overflow room and so much support for this community during the Muslim Ban and it just filled my heart with joy

Got a haircut (it was literally down to my butt y’all!!!!) and now it’s right below my shoulders

Had pedal extensions installed in my car because I’m 4′9 and would have literally died if the airbags went off.

March

Got my professional teaching license! I’m no longer an apprentice! I don’t have to have 4 observations a year!!! Only 2! And while I’m REALLY good at playing the observation game (and am MUCH better at this than the testing game), it will be nice to not think about it so much.

My mom came to stay for a few days because it was her and my sister’s spring break.

During that week, I had a LONG 4 day week, which included staying at my school until 7:30 for a town hall meeting/carnival/extravaganza. F U N.

My spring break was purposefully low-key. I rested a lot, read books, caught up on Netflix, shopped at Old Navy, and went to the local art museum for the first time (I’ve only been in this city for 8 years...)

April

I found that I actually enjoy teaching how to write an essay. The 5 paragraph essay, while it has many faults, is a really good place for beginning writers (which 8th graders are) to begin. I had a student tell me that she liked how I made each sentence have a specific purpose because she was able to plug in her evidence and thoughts more easily- this honestly made my whole day.

That being said, I HATE teaching essays when students are absent. Trying to get them caught up and keep everyone else on track is SO MUCH WORK. Especially when the absent students don’t come to me during my plan to make up their work...

For two whole days, my last period class was not allowed to use erasers because some people (two boys, as it turned out) were shredding and throwing them at each other.

I turned 26

The Welcome to Night Vale Live Show FINALLY TRAVELED TO TENNESSEE AND Y’ALL CECIL (REAL CECIL NOT THE CHARACTER) IS FROM KNOXVILLE!!!! The weather singer was super fun (she played Rocky Top and we ate that shit up like biscuits and gravy with no shame whatsoever) and the show itself was just so much fun even though I went alone. It was almost an hour of normal segments with the plot of the glow cloud, but they also brought in Steve Carlsburg and Tamika Flynn (I diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiied when she walked on stage because I majorly crush on that actress whoops) and watching those actors interact on stage was so much fun.

May

End of the school year is always chaotic and better left forgotten tbh

We took the 8th graders to the local theme park, and it was really good (though my expectations were super low because last year’s trip SUCKED). The weather looked like it might rain, but it was nice all day, the kids were pretty good, and the rides were fun.

There were some really sad community deaths around this time :(

The teacher who normally MCs the 8th grade commencement is now an administrator, so while we still had him open the ceremony, I gave out several of the awards, and I don’t think I did a bad job (two of the other teachers hate public speaking and the last one was new to the team this year, so I was really the only choice).

June

Worked my church’s festival, which is always fun. The crowds are never what they ought to be (due to a combination of rain threats and poor marketing), so a lot of people missed out on some really great food and music.

Great music included a new band- Southern Avenue- that I got to see again later in the year.

I had to miss the third day of the festival because of a friend’s baby shower. I knew a few people (besides the couple), but they left early; luckily, the people throwing it were a lot of fun. We played games (don’t get caught saying “baby”; pin the sperm on the egg; etc) and decorated diapers/onesies/bibs for the baby). The next day, we went to church (IN A MOTHERFUCKING MONSOON) and for Mexican food.

Started my reread of Harry Potter (it had been about 5 years since I’d last read the series). I cried in almost every book, and not always at sad parts. I’ve become very protective of Harry as I’ve gotten older.

My younger brother found an NES, which was the console I grew up with and my parents gave away years ago. They really loved to play on it, so this was a wedding anniversary present for them. The Legend of Zelda is the shit.

July

I finally got a new phone (I’d had mine about 3 years, and it died in May) and I know it’s fun for iphone users to shit on Android users, but I really do love the camera quality on my Samsung.

Rachel came to visit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We drank wine and went to the zoo and got real bbq and the best donuts in the world

Had a Treat Yo Self Day which included:

WAFFLE HOUSE

BITCH!!!! B I T C H

DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU CAN GET AT THE WAFFLE HOUSE

DO

YOU

KNOW

COUNTRY HASHBROWNS!!!!!

aka

biscuits and gravy minus the biscuits plus the hashbrowns

I just had regular biscuits and gravy BUT ALLI HAD THE GLORY

I LOVE THIS PLACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

McKay’s

I bought Pokemon yellow because I never played/watched it as a kid, and while at my house for the summer, I found the old black & white gameboy an older cousin gave me, so naturally I had to do it.

Pokemon Go

yes still

You know what once I was back in town I went to my favorite library almost every day for an hour or two and read while opening Pokemon Go every few minutes so there

Went with some of my best friends to visit another one of our best friends who lives in the middle of fucking nowhere and had adventures including, but not limited to: getting pizza because we were too weak to change out the gas’s grill, waiting 5ever for food at dinner, and watching the entire Flowers in the Attic series.

August

School started back up, and at the kick-off for all the teachers, I won $500 in a drawing of all the people who hadn’t used a sick day last year!!!!!

And I didn’t even realize that I’d won $200 at the previous school board meeting in the same type drawing!!!!

New class started off with 85 students. It was a DREAM to be able to focus on individuals and not just herd cats.

I actually felt more confident in the classroom with my early units (poetry & our whole class novel).

September

Still felt confident in the classroom!

I got my testing scores back from the previous year (this shit takes 5ever and it’s dumb) and did better in about the only way I could have, so that was good to see.

I had about 10 county people in my classroom (principals, academic coaches, etc) to see a certain style of teaching ELA that the county is working on. It’s basically making sure that teachers keep students engaged in complex text (which is what I do almost every day anyway) and I had been to two of these trainings already, so I knew what sort of lesson worked. Well...they LOVED it!!! The kids were in small groups and did SO GOOD discussing evidence/answering questions (they all got candy afterwards) and I got some good feedback about how I talk to my students. Then that same day the superintendent came in my room (one of several rooms he visited while doing his yearly observation on the principal). That visit was super unannounced, but still fine.

The academic coach got rid of my classroom’s desks and found tables and chairs instead!!!! My classroom is tiny and weird shaped, so this works SO MUCH BETTER.

I help coach volleyball (aka I keep the books) and the girls won district (beating out a team with a redneck grandma in the stands who literally came up to our girls and yelled at them for cheering on their own damn team in the previous game). They didn’t do so well at sectionals, but that’s ok.

October

Holy shit I won another $200 in that drawing!!! And this time my parents let me buy them plane tickets so we could see family over Christmas.

LESLIE ODOM JR CAME TO MY CITY AND HE PERFORMED BEAUTIFUL MUSIC AND I WAS THERE AND I DIED

Got to see a lot of family at my cousin’s ‘wedding party’ (he got married last year in Europe since he met his now wife over there, and wanted to have a family party here). I learned that my uncle and his son dance exactly the same at the same level of alcohol.

November

I should have known something was up when my first 9 weeks went so well. Apparently my county is in the bottom tier for the state, and now everyone is freaking out (never mind that the data to support this was mONTHS LATE AND BASED ON STANDARDIZED TESTS WHICH WERE A CLUSTERFUCK TO BEGIN WITH) so there was a lot of school stress during this time.

Nice things though- got to see friends when their baby was baptized and went home for Thanksgiving, where my dad came into the Catholic Church.

I organized most of the 8th grade field trip for the semester- going to see “A Christmas Carol” put on by my old college’s theatre. I was stressed the entire time because if something went wrong it would be on ME, but it was absolutely wonderful and I cried which honestly surprised me. We went to the local mall for our lunch and it was good to see the kids just relax. It was a great field trip and several people including the principal thanked me for my hard work which felt great after a hard month.

December

School was nothing but survival mode per usual.

Hosted the Christmas party for my friend group at church and it was a lot of fun.

The actual break was fast- we flew to Texas with one of my mom’s sisters and her family to visit their brother and his family. I hadn’t been to Texas since high school, so it was fun to explore and eat good food.

My final count for books was 93 (67 new and 26 reread) (I’m trying to finish an audiobook I’m borrowing from the library but I still have 80 minutes left and literally 4 hours to finish it so we’ll see!!!).

Snapshots [Chriseva/Post 4.10/Future Fic]

Dedicated to all the Chriseva fans left hurt, angry and disappointed by the finale. I wrote this as something therapeutic for myself to try and get over my sadness even though I didn’t think I could ever bring myself to read or write another Chriseva fic again.  

May we all stick together and bring each other up in this time sadness. I love you guys. The Chriseva fans have been some of the nicest and best people I’ve met on this site.

I hope that this may ease maybe a little bit of the hurt we’re all feeling.

Snapshots

When Eva was fifteen, she thought she had everything figured out. If someone had asked her then where she saw herself in ten years, she’d probably said married to Jonas with two kids, a pair; one boy and one girl; the girl with a long mane of cascading black hair and the boy with a head of tight strawberry blond curls and the eyebrows to match. Or it could be the other way around, or neither, it didn’t really matter to her. But she genuinely saw her happily ever after with Jonas and if she pretended hard enough she’d be able to ignore the agonizing stab of guilt that came along with it.

When Eva was sixteen, she just wanted to make it through the school year without too much trouble and she wanted Jonas to love her the way she loved him and she kept hoping that he wouldn’t keep putting her in the corner with the rest of the things he constantly took for granted. At least that’s what Eva felt on the inside, on the outside she was living her happily ever after with Jonas. Right?

When Eva was seventeen, she just wanted to party and she wanted to fuck, all the time and everyone. She partied with Chris most of the time and fucked him even more frequently than that. Chris was easy; he didn’t expect anything more, just like she wasn’t willing to give anything more. He always came prepared with his Cheshire cat grin and his devil-may-care attitude and he was hot as shit and fucked just as well. He was what Eva needed in the moment. But just that moment. Right?

When Eva was eighteen, everything suddenly turned out too complicated. Chris wanted something more, more than she was willing to give, and Eva fell back into old habits, doing the same thing she always did when things got too hard: she ran. This time the path led her to Jonas’s door and his bed. But this was what she really wanted, right? Getting back on the right path, the path that included Jonas and their two kids and the white picket fence on their lawn and the big blue house that sat at the edge of the cobblestone path. Chris said he loved her and that he was ready to settle down with her even though she wasn’t, and as it turned out, Chris wasn’t ready either.

They came together but they left separately, but that was okay.

When Eva was nineteen she realized that Jonas would never really change; not for her, not for anyone. She’d fallen back into bad habits and lost the voice she’d finally acquired after so long. Once again her opinions always came in second; her needs were always put last and her feelings were always made to be a joke. One day, Eva just picked up her strewn clothes from off the floor and left, and she never looked back.

When Eva was twenty she put herself first for the first time in her life. She finally put men to the side and hooked up only on the weekends when she’d meet up with the girls for a night out. She went back to school and studied to be a teacher; perhaps one day she would be able to help a kid avoid making the same mistakes she had in her youth. She still partied hard on the weekends with her crew. They’d laughed when she used that term for the first time, but Eva thought it was appropriate. The little voice in the back of her head laughed at the irony of everything, but for some reason the laughter sounded too familiar, but it didn’t belong to her.

Every night though, she’d go home alone, but that was okay.

When Eva was twenty one, she met Chris by chance at the club during the weekend she was out. He was DJ-ing at the club that night and meeting him had been purely by chance, or maybe it had been fate instead. She went back home with him that night and he left early in the morning after fixing her breakfast. He had another gig that night in a club in a different city. They promised to keep in touch.

They didn’t, but that was okay.

When Eva was twenty-two, Vilde announced that she and Magnus had gotten engaged. Everyone thought it was too soon, but no one said anything, not even Sana. Magnus made Vilde happy and it was obvious and that was the only thing that mattered. She asked them to be her bridesmaids at her wedding and all of them were too happy to oblige. That night they went out and got shit faced drunk. Eva had sex with the bartender in the backroom of the club, but she left alone.

When Eva was twenty-three, Vilde and Magnus married. She, Sana and Noora were the bridesmaids and Chris was the maid of honour. Vilde looked absolutely stunning in her white dress and Magnus looked smart and sharp in his tailored suit. Eva didn’t think she’d ever seen Vilde that genuinely happy in her life. Perhaps it was only in part because of the wedding, the other part was probably because her mom was there, present and sober and walked her proudly down the aisle.

When Eva was twenty-four, she finished her studies and moved out of her mom’s house into her own apartment. She found employment in the elementary school just down the street from her new place and it was perfect. Everything was perfect. The day she graduated, her mom and her friends all managed to make it to the ceremony to watch her receive her degree. It was the proudest moment of her life. She went out partying that night with her girls at the club and the DJ playing the music winked at her from across the room. She was too drunk on alcohol and giddiness to really pay attention to the person until she was locking lips with him in the dark corner of the club while the music was blaring in the background.

Chris went home with her that night and they stayed in the whole weekend fucking.

When Eva was twenty-five, she’d spend the weekdays teaching and molding the minds of the younger generation of children and the weekend partying hard before going home with Chris at the end of the day. Chris had found a permanent position as a DJ at one of the local clubs and had stopped moving around so much. He had his own apartment not too far from where Eva was living, and on the weekends, after a night of partying and drinking, they’d find themselves stumbling home, either Eva’s place or Chris’s, and would spend the remaining time snuggling in bed and kissing or having sex. It was usually the latter.

Eva didn’t expect it to be anything more, but that was okay.

When Eva was twenty-six, Noora and William finally tied the knot. She was Noora’s maid of honor and Chris was William’s. Vilde was pregnant with her first child by that point and Sana and Chris were both looking very cozy with their respective dates on that day. She and Chris were already undressing each other before they could even make it to the bedroom that night after the reception was over. That was also the first time Chris had brought that particular subject up.

Marriage? Eva had a vague recollection of wanting that so badly at one point in her life, but through the years somehow it had just become rather inconsequential. She said as much, and Chris had looked thoughtful but he didn’t say a word.

Eva suddenly realized that it was exactly one year and eleven months to the day that she and Chris had made this rendezvous a regular thing.

When Eva was twenty-seven, Sana and Yousef married. It was a beautiful Muslim wedding which started with a ceremony in the mosque and then went onto the most extravagant wedding she’d ever seen in her life. It was one of the most breathtaking celebrations she’d ever seen. She went with Chris, but shot down all and every insinuation her friends were making about them together.

They were just fuck buddies; that was more than enough. Right?

When Eva was twenty-eight, Even and Isak got married. It was a small ceremony attended by only their closest friends and family. Even’s mom cried. It wasn’t funny, but it was kind of funny that she was the only one who cried harder than Elias. Everyone had such a proud look on their faces that day but no one glowed brighter than Even and Isak. Eva actually teared up, and a glance out into the crowd showed her that she wasn’t the only one. Chris reached over to dry the tear off her face with the back of his finger and all of a sudden it was like Eva finally saw him for the first time.

When Eva was twenty-nine, girl Chris broke the news that she’d met a guy while on holiday and they’d had a drunken night out and gotten hitched at a pop up church down the street from a stripper bar. It wasn’t a funny situation at all, everyone was rather gob smacked until she introduced them to her new husband.

It was Mahdi. They spent their honeymoon the next morning at the waffle house two shops down from the hotel they were staying.

She and Chris had been waking up in the same bed together for the better part of five years, two months and eleven days. It wasn’t as smooth a road as it sounded. They weren’t together, not officially anyway, even though he came to all her school functions and friendly gatherings, she’d invited him over to have dinner with her mom more often than not. He’d invite her to his special gigs and left VIP passes for her and her friends at the door and they spend the whole night making eye-sex with each other from across the dance floor.

But they weren’t together-together, and that was okay. It was a ridiculous notion anyway, her and Chris. Penetrator Chris settling down with her of all people. Or rather Penetrator Chris actually settling down at all. Or her, for that matter. Her dreams of a marriage and two point five kids with a nice blue house and a white picket fence was something fifteen year old Eva yearned for, but older and wiser twenty-nine year old Eva knew better about. Life didn’t turn out like you imagined when you were a kid. The guy you thought you’d end up with would turn out to be a serial cheater. Every other guy you meet would be nothing more than a fifteen minute hook up in a dark corner. You worked; you went to sleep; woke up and continued on the cycle over and over again.

That was the way life was, but that was okay.

But then for the first time, Eva really started looking. She looked at Chris properly for the first time in nearly thirteen years, since that very first encounter in the club when she mistook him for the wrong Chris. Then looking at his face when they were lying side by side on her bed, just before her mom made her unceremonious entrance. Then during all the sporadic encounters they’d have in the years that followed. Even though everything changed in the years that passed, one thing remained a constant in her life:

Chris.

She looked at his face properly for the first time, and he was the most beautiful person she’d ever seen, inside and out.

When Eva turned thirty; the big three-o, it was a monumental occasion. Everyone thought so anyway, she just wanted to curl up in bed with a giant tub of ice cream, a big bag of nachos and marathon the saddest Hallmarks movies she could find. Noora was pregnant with her and William’s first child, Sana just had her and Yousef’s first boy (the start of their football team, she’d said) and Vilde had just given birth to her second daughter, much to Magnus’s excitement—being a father agreed with Magnus, Eva thought. Chris was still living off the bliss of her impromptu wedding and brushing off all of Vilde’s attempts to get her to have a ‘real wedding’, as she’d put it.

They wanted to celebrate; Eva just wanted to curl into a ball and sulk while binge watching TV shows like a real adult, but they weren’t having any of it.

Everyone was there at the party thrown at the hotel owned by Julian Dahl. It was a celebration much bigger than Eva was truly comfortable with but she powered through it with a smile on her face and a sparkle in her eye. Chris was by her side through the whole thing; holding her hand and laughing in her stead at all the terrible jokes being flung her way. She watched him while he laughed, and listened to the ringing sound of his laughter and the way it put her mind at ease. In that moment, there was no one else in the room besides her and Chris and she’s looking at him and she’s seeing him and all of a sudden she realized that maybe this wasn’t nothing. Maybe this was actually something; something important and something beautiful and something she never before realized she needed in her life.

It was a beautiful realization.

Chris was beautiful.

Eva was thirty years, four months and three days old when she came to the realization that she loved him.

It took her too long to realize that but she knew what Chris would say if she told him that.

“That’s okay.”

She didn’t say those words to him that night.

Instead, one night, when he had the day off; she came home from work with a bouquet of flowers, the same flowers he’d come to her door with all those years ago when he was still a fuckboy and she was still blinded by her fear. She didn’t just slide the key into the lock, it didn’t matter whose door it was, they had keys for each other’s apartment anyway, and instead she knocked.

She was met by his confused face when he appeared to open the door, before it quickly morphed into one of humour and he said with a grin, “Lost your keys?”

“No,” she’d said simply, an easy grin on her face mirroring his. “I just wanted to do something special tonight.”

“Is there a special occasion I’m not aware of?” he asked, moving to lean one shoulder against the doorframe, eyeing her hungrily.

“Yes and no,” she said. “Yes there is a special occasion, and no you’re just not aware of it yet.”

“Well, I’m kind of turned on right now,” he said.

Eva didn’t answer, she just pulled the bouquet of flowers from behind her back and presented it to him; watching a myriad of emotions play on his face before settling on the expression he’d started with: confusion. He reached for it almost hesitantly, looking between Eva and the flowers in his hand and back to Eva, one eyebrow raised questioningly.

Before he could verbalize the question though, Eva had her own question that she wanted to ask him. So without letting him get a word in, she reached into her pocket of her coat, grabbing at the velvet box resting snugly at the bottom near the lining and without a word, she slowly lowered herself onto one knee, opening the velvet box and revealing a sparkling silver ring nestled inside.

“Christoffer Schistad,” she started swallowing the lump in her throat and watching his eyes widen, her heart thundering inside her chest. “Infamous cheating fuckboy and the best person I have ever met in my life. These past few years haven’t been the easiest but you’ve always been there for me, as you’d been there for me many times in the past since I was sixteen years old. We’ve grown together, gone through shit together and matured together and somewhere along the way, I’ve come to realize that I can’t imagine living my life without you in it and by my side,” she said. “I love you,” she added after a beat, feeling the warm tears start pooling in the corner of her eyes before she could even finish. “Will you marry me?”

Chris’s mouth opened and closed like a guppy on dry land and Eva tried not to laugh, mainly because it might have caused her to burst into tears instead. But the corner of his lips soon curled up into a small smile and his eyes were warm and Eva felt the same warmth seep into her own soul.

He kneeled down without a word, right in front of her, reaching up to grasp her hands still holding the ring box to him with both his own and he held them there in front of him like they were the most precious things he’d ever touched.

“Eva Kviig Mohn,” he said when he met her gaze. “The biggest dick tease in Oslo,” he added. “I would be honoured to marry you.”

And they hugged, and Eva was crying and she could feel the warm droplets of Chris’s tears splash down onto her shoulder.

“I love you, Chris” she said.

“I love too, Eva,” he replied.

It was short and simple and they were still kneeling out in the cold air but that was okay. For the first time in her life, Eva thought that everything truly was okay.

Eva turns thirty-one as Mrs. Chris Schistad, or does he turn thirty-three as Mr. Eva Mohn?

That’s a story only time could tell.

The end

What I’ve Found From Riding Trains, by Isabelle Hoonan

Even if countries were connected across oceans by trains, I still wouldn’t take them every day. Even if the gilded splendors of a Moscow mosque or the thin air of Everest were readily available, I would take caution to parcel out this privilege. Perhaps I would hop on once a month to preserve the delicacy of anonymity. Riding a train to a foreign locale is an act of accepting calm before unsettlement. It is an intentional act of leaving, followed by a chaotic thrush of discovery with each new thing you encounter: it is a gift to not waste. Should the opportunity arise to disappear on a train for a while, towards something you do not know, it should still be reserved in rarity so it doesn’t lose its meanings.

Imagine closing your eyes in the shady enclave of the Redwoods and waking up to the smell of creamy espresso in Budapest. Your face is welted by the imprints of your backpack zipper because you took care to sleep on your few belongings. Instead of the steadiness of an airplane ride, sitting on a train is to be a witness of the changing landscapes, of the people coming on and off the platform, the scrum of moving forward and learning how to sit still.

I have found three things I have faith in while riding on trains: love, solitude, and asking questions. They are, in ways, extensions of each other. To love is to embed within the grains of affirmation and failure. The humility and ego that come uninvited with these experiences of loving require asking questions of yourself and another, while also stepping away to remember who you are outside of someone else.

There’s no order to loving and being alone and asking questions: they are all a combustion of reacting to what must be done to be better, to be greater than what we think we are. To survive. They are our mirrors of experience deepened into no-name meaning. Clarity is not a guarantee, because we all are capable of lying, of having former selves answer for us.  But a train pulls us along to see what is to come.

To ask questions is not as intellectual as it may sound. It is to want to feel a situation outside of your life view, to know the stories that happened before the outcomes. It is to strive to not be trite no matter the hardships you’ve pillowed beneath the joys, because questions are not about who you are. To ask questions… is a loving choice of asking to know what you do not know, an act of saying you do not assume, that you will not judge, that you are listening. It is a gesture to surrender to the expanse of all that you may not ever know fully when you speak to someone. These moments of asking, in silence and the soft punctuation of voice, are interims of existing. They consist of an invisible transformation after everything that’s already been done but now voiced. They are a guiding prelude of everything you must do now. Hold onto them, let them go, and let them return.

I found love on a train in India. One morning, I was woken up by the strange strokes of small fingers against my dirty socks and the smell of burning trash when I blasted my eyes open. Three sets of children’s arms were half teetering on the ladder to my upper bunk, giggling as I twisted myself off of my lumpy backpack to face them. They ran away, bumping into old women in magenta and capsicum hued saris. They wove their way towards samosas being sold through the cracks of metal barred windows rusted from the 1950’s. I settled into my book, a pilfered find from a hostel back in Varanassi, Alex Haley’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” My boyfriend slept soundly on the bunk below. The thin plastic mattress creaked as I shifted to stretch a little before we would get off in a few hours to the mayhem of Mumbai.

It would have been 28 hours on the train, our route starting in Varanassi near the ghats and ending in Mumbai’s maze-like metropolis, where cows walked in the roads next to skyscrapers. This was our second full month together, which began in Nepal in October and would end in May in Mumbai after seven months of travel, without a single day spent apart.

When I look back at this relationship, my very first boyfriend, I cannot help but feel that it was more than just my first series of train rides: it was learning how to give trust to uncertainty, because things always seemed to work themselves out after 28 hours. We rode so many trains on that trip that became a stamp of first love, the gift of freedom that gave us mornings huddled together on a rain soaked train winding its way through the jungle of Sri Lanka and the promising endlessness of starched bright desert in Jasailmer. 

Sometimes we were quiet from the night before, when we argued about money or about small infractions, like how I wasn’t okay eating street food (so dumb, just get sick it’s fine, I think now). Sometimes we were so content drinking chai out of small ceramic cups, a rupee each. Sometimes I could feel the burst of my heart against the walls of fear when he would run off the train with not a minute before it left, swinging around the corner into our section with newspaper-wrapped samosas and I would wrap my arms around him with this melting relief.

Those trains led us all around India, all the way to the North of Thailand from Bangkok, where we worked for a month at a holistic rehabilitation center near Chiang Rai. We found our way back to India running onto trains that led us from Kolkata to Agra, to Rajasthan. It pierces me how much of the good and the bad were catalysts of the train, of losing money and stumbling upon conversations of what we wanted in our lives that would last for hours... the exchange of ideas of what we were reading swelling our need to move and find things out for ourselves, together and apart in our own thoughts. The mixture of sitting still while staring at the reel of passing desert into darkness, only to watch it all fall away, brought the next round of chai’s and holding each other’s gaze. It was as if to let the other know we were there without saying anything, that it was okay to be afraid sometimes, to trust, because that too would fall away. Home was far away but becoming wherever we were sleeping that night. I imagine this when I imagine how my traveling life began on trains. I was twenty.

I found solitude on a train from Seattle to Bellingham. Amtrak became my constant companion my first year of college, when each ambling walk to class became myself obsessed with figuring out who I was going to be, and who I was going to be was not where I was in this docile hippie college town. The swarms of joining and breaking social groups in the dorms, where girls would form quick alliances then herd from gym to cafeteria to class, confused me. I had dreamed college would be a slew of coffee dates and discussing pretentiously directed seminars on Camus. People who had lived in Paris would become my friends, and they would inquire about my time living in England as a thirteen-year-old loner who found solace reading in the musty library and asking strangers if I could eat with them. Basically, I expected my life to be like a low-budget indie feature film.

Each weekend became a disappointment of how lame the parties were, although I still wanted to go to them, and classes packed with four-hundred people discussing Murphy’s Law. I would go home to see my parents and unload my existential grief, but these train rides gave me a harsh glare of my entitlement, my craving for direction that I couldn’t create at that moment, a space for me to daydream of what was to come, which involved going to far off places where I would truly feel like an “artist.”

So I would draw and draw, write, think, listening to music and seeing the mountains meeting the Sound in a new way. I remember my first winter break lugging my duffel onto the train and settling at a window seat, the saltiness of the air and my feelings weighing heavy on my pen as I set myself on drawing my way into Juilliard or some New York bound school. I was all about the accolades, the rewards, recognition. 

Doing art made me tired of myself sometimes, and for good reason, because I asked so many questions but didn’t know what else to do with myself. Why couldn’t I just be someone who simply enjoyed things? If I was to accept my peripatetic leanings, I needed to decide what kind of artist I would be, which is probably why I posed like a judgmental-sensitive Kate Moss fascist in all black 24/7, dangling my Baudelaire book and willingness to take a tequila shot at a fake rave because I was so intent on being well-rounded COOL. Ugh.

Maybe I’d be an actress or a street artist or… I don’t know. At that moment, I was really into replaying the start and stop of the night before, which had transpired like a really shitty Boy Meets World revival that I thought was really, really deep. I had tried to kiss a boy I’d already kissed before, swirling in innocent dorm drinking, celebrating the end of finals and the ending legalization of Four Lokos. He was from Colorado, liked watching Planet Earth but had sworn off weed in favor of incense, and was very unattainable because he was in an open relationship. So… complicated, and thus very appealing to figure out. This was even before astrological compatibility was en vogue.

He made me want to do shrooms because apparently you could see the universe in a kaleidoscope and have some Jungian insight about your priorities. He was worldly and had lived in the Utah desert and was set to go to India and wrote Arabic on his notecards with my calligraphy pens when we would study together in the library. But yes, he had rejected my optioning that we could be a thing, because he was focused and that made me angry, because it meant that I had none if I was going after a boy who wouldn’t chase me. So I did what I always did when I fell down, which was to reject the rejector and still chase after them half-heartedly and be sort of apocalyptic about how my art would always be the most consistent and torturous thing to pursue. I filled so many afternoons drained with furiously typing poems that I later hated. I wish I had seen the sweetness of it all then, which now I see as beautiful for trying to make things matter, even if it was all a bit contrived and suburban girl angsty, like a bad 90′s sitcom spinoff doused in nice clothing and bad cocktail choices in a college town.

“I’m okay,” I would think after I would finish the train ride and disembark towards another destination: home, filled with heated coffee cups and roads I knew well enough to sleepwalk drive, even for a temporary time. I was nineteen.

I found asking questions on a train heading from Toulouse to Bordeaux to St. Foy La Grande. I was twenty-five, on the heels of a breakup, and headed to go meditate for a week straight to “get rid of” this self-antagonizing, self-fabling stewing. I wanted to stop screwing myself over. I couldn’t keep dwelling.

It was time to transfer at Bordeaux, a mad dash to get my ticket and run to the next train for St. Foy La Grande, where Buddhist nuns would be awaiting to bring a group of us to Thich Nhat Hahn’s “hamlets.”

I scanned the train times and asked a stern looking attendant where I was supposed to go in halting French, trying to rephrase before she threw her hands up and gave up. “Fuck… okay,” I got mad at myself then realized this was whatever, I’d figure it out. I decided to say c’est la vie and run to the platform I thought was usually the route, with an end stop of Bergerac. I ran through a bunch of peacoats and perfectly lipsticked French faces to the platform with an end stop of Bergerac and found it was my stop: ça roule.

“Is this the train to St. Foy La Grande?” a woman asked me in English. She was carrying a small luggage with her and had a twangy Australian accent, looked about in her sixties, and had sassy frosted pink lipstick and had matched her powder blue luggage to her cashmere sweater. She was also traveling alone and had a beautiful French train employee named Pierre carrying her other bag for her. Her name was Sheryl. I liked her immediately. She had the exact kind of throw caution to the wind but take care of yourself older woman allure that I wanted. We ended up talking the whole train ride to St. Foy La Grande, where I asked her questions and she asked me some and more.

I asked where she was from (New Zealand, my faulty mistake). I asked why she traveled (her husband had died a few years ago and she needed to move). She gave me the salt of the earth older woman advice that I so craved as a wandering but not quite so young but sometimes a beginner mid-twenty-something-year-old.

“I started traveling when I was young, but over the last few years I haven’t settled much until now,” she told me. “No matter how much I moved around after Alan’s death, the grief still followed me. I could be waking up in a villa in Santorini, greeted by the sun and the surf, looking fantastic in a white string bikini with sangria and pool boys surrounding me, and I would sometimes feel close to nothing. I would feel grateful while watching a sunset, but my head would be a haze of sadness. These things follow you, you know. Loss. You just have to learn how to sit still with time and somehow, after going through all of that hell, you find some light without needing to try so hard.”

Now she was having a light affair with her gardener and had the cut the bullshit and go be awesome attitude that was hard-earned with age and experience.

“Honey, as hard as it is, it’s important to learn how to keep it light. I was like you and tried to find the depth in questions.  I wondered how men who didn’t wonder so much about me could be figured out or try and find something that didn’t quite exist in them. Just learn to leave it. Just be an international woman of mystery, and the suitors will come calling, but they’re only the appetizer. The most important journeys, like train rides, are the ones where you ride alone or are accompanied by a friend to cut you up in laughter. Or the ones you stare out the window wondering where you’re meant to be. These journeys are the ones that sweeten the real love, that bring a friendship deeper to yourself or with a girlfriend. They are the ones where you discover yourself most that will give you the type of grace and grit that allow you to say hello and goodbye to places and people that don’t ask anything from you as long as you don’t ask anything from them. These sweeten the deal of life.”

When I headed back from St. Foy La Grande to Bordeaux to Toulouse Matabieu, I had spent a week meditating, especially on Sheryl’s life wisdom. I had thought a lot and not thought so much simultaneously. Who knew breathing could be breathing into something greater. It lightened my soul to feel the depth of being good enough for now again, of being curious, of realizing it wasn’t all about me, all these thoughts and feelings backstories but not the main show.

The main show was being right here, no dress rehearsal needed or discussing too much so as to not infringe upon instinct to act with that grace and grit Sheryl spoke of. I sipped a super fine glass of wine after a week of tea and watched a sheet of bright blue sky and laughed at and with myself, this me sitting at a cafe by the train station while the nuns waved, pretty damn happy with myself. Because being young and free can be a whole life thing if you can laugh a wild laughter in the heart of sadness, not to discredit, but to say “I’m back” even for just a second. I was twenty-six.

May 29, 2019: Columns

Amazing talent, missing tables...

By KEN WELBORN

Record Publisher

With our 14th Annual ChickenFest behind us I do want to take just a moment to mention two especially talented young people who were kind enough to play for us this past weekend. 

First is 13-year-old Libby Harbour, a fiddle player who just gets better and better. At our opening ceremonies, after the VFW Post 1142 Honor Guard had placed the flag at half mast and played Taps, Libby stepped up and played the National Anthem on her fiddle.  It still gives me goose bumps to think about it today.  Later she played on the Tut Taylor Spotlight Stage to the delight of everyone.

Another of the many wonderful people who played was a young lady of 16 named Cali Johnson. I first heard Cali play guitar and sing during a couple of the Open Mic events at the 1915 Artisan Center in Wilkesboro.  One evening she began with a CCR tune, played a couple of originals she had written, and ended by singing the Coat of Many Colors song by Dolly Parton - and nailed them all.  She also performed at ChickenFest on the Spotlight stage and had folks mesmerized.

Speaking of ChickenFest, it is always something of a ritual to put our hands on all of our tables and chairs-what with them being periodically loaned out.  This year it was easy, but it still reminded me about the "table" story for the ages.

It involved my dear friend Max Joines

Not too long after we built The Record Park, Max, and his wonderful wife Jane, were planning some kind of soiree for one of their sons who had graduated from college.  Max called me to see about renting my tables for the event-note I said rent-he doesn't know how to accept a favor-yet he will do anything for anyone-anytime.

He finally agreed to borrow them and picked them up on the appointed day-12 of them which he securely strapped to a trailer and was on his way.

The event was a great success, and I can personally attest to the food being amazing. The next week Max called to set up a time to return the tables and I went to the park to meet him.

I waited.  And waited.  Then I got worried-Max is always early, not late.  I was about to call Jane to check on him when he finally drove up-looking like his last friend had deserted him. It seems as though while loading up the tables, he only had 11, not 12.  He drove the route he had taken with the tables hoping to find the one that had somehow blown off.  He made that trip about three times before deciding to give up and come on.

Nothing would do but he wanted to buy me another table.  I tried to assure him it wasn't that big of a deal, but he kept insisting.  After a bit we unloaded the tables with Max apologizing all the way.

Then I saw it.  The 12th table.  It had never left the building because it was so covered up in junk that we both missed it.  I thought about trying to get Max out of the building without telling him, but soon thought better of it.  The simple fact that he never had 12 tables to begin with took a bit to sink in, but relief took over aggravation and he was soon smiling  as only Max Joines can.

We decided to end the day by agreeing that "...sometimes you simply cannot see the forest for the trees."

Words to live by, eh Max?

Truth is on Israel's side

By EARL COX

Special to The Record

Israelis are very good at many things but public relations is not one of them.  It seems they are always defending themselves rather than pointing out their positives and this is largely due to the way mainstream media reports any and all news about Israel. 

One of the major charges of the anti-Israel media is that Israelis are hate-filled, evil people who live in a perpetual state of animosity and fear. Of course, if these critics were to visit Israel, they would see that the people of this special little nation go about their daily tasks with great freedom, purpose and enthusiasm. Public places are bustling with active and smiling people, none of whom seem intimidated or fearful. Ben Yehuda Street in downtown Jerusalem is alive with people from around the world visiting the many shops and restaurants, enjoying the music of street musicians and engaging in activities which underline Israel’s freedom and sense of safety and security.  

The young nation of Israel enjoys great freedom of speech and movement which cannot be found in any Arab or Muslim nation in the Middle East. In Israel there is also less crime — whether robberies, rapes or killings — than in any other country of the world.

The international media consistently attempt to paint Israel as undemocratic, discriminatory and racist — even going so far as to accuse Israel of being an apartheid state. Of course, everyone in the country knows that they have a well functioning democratic government, quite different from all the surrounding, authoritarian Arab and Muslim governments of the Middle East. Every Israeli adult, including women, has the right to vote; and what many do not know is that there are more than a million Arabs who are Israeli citizens with the same rights and privileges as all other Israeli citizens — including representation in the Knesset. 

Furthermore, most Israel bashers do not realize that more than a million Arabs live in the Jewish cities of Jaffa, Haifa, Nazareth and others without fear of being harmed or discriminated against. And they don’t realize that in the Galilee, dozens of Arab villages are mingled among Jewish villages, with the Arabs free to come and go and do as they please. Half of the Old City of Jerusalem is inhabited by Arabs, and all Arabs have free access to the Muslim shrines on the Temple Mount however the same is not true for Jews and Christians.  The Temple Mount is controlled by the Jordan-based Waqf which is an Islamic trust that governs the Temple Mount compound.  Jews and Christians are forbidden even to pray on the Temple Mount.

 Now, like any other nation on earth, Israel is not perfect; but its critics will have to look long and hard to find discrimination or apartheid. Yet they report such untruths without blinking. Another charge on the list of the anti-Semitic media is that Israelis are hateful and violent people who react with disproportionate force to any small Arab or Muslim provocation. If these critics would honestly compare the actions of the Arabs to the reactions of the Israelis, they would see a great difference.

Palestinian Arab terrorist groups have regularly attacked innocent Israeli civilians ever since Israel was restored as a nation. They have fired explosive rockets into civilian villages, and they have sent suicide bombers on to Israeli buses and into Israeli gathering places. Their leaders have urged people in their mosques and children in their schools to hate and kill Jews.

In response, Israelis have refused to descend to the same level of depravity as their enemies. Only when their patience has been exhausted have they reluctantly retaliated in self defense; and even then, they have been extremely careful to avoid harming innocent civilians — especially women and children.

Through it all, the Jewish people have proved beyond any doubt that God has miraculously brought them back to their ancient homeland, He has justifiably restored their nation, and He has divinely preserved and prospered it. Israel has fulfilled the Torah promise that it would be a good land, “a land flowing with milk and honey.”

The God-given innovation of the Jewish people, along with their indomitable spirit and high ethical values, has made modern Israel a great wonder of the world … in spite of what the anti-Semitic international media think or say.

·              

Stop. Just stop…

By HEATHER DEAN

Record Reporter

"Happy Memorial Day!"

Does anyone besides me want to rip down the signs with that phrase off of business windows, and give a good tongue lashing to anyone who says it? 

 Discussing plans to sit by the water and barbecue, because "you're so stressed out from of life in general and need a break" isn't showing respect for the Fallen. Let’s discuss their “day at the beach” on June 6, 1944, compared to your lovely long weekend, shall we? 

Yes you have a first amendment right, but please don’t be thoughtless- no one says “HAPPY anniversary on the day your momma died” so why would you make the appellation to Memorial Day?  

Let me put this into perspective:Just last year hundreds of us in several counties lined the highways, standing in silent respect for local State Trooper Samuel Bullard, who gave his life to fulfill his oath "protect and serve." 

The summer before that, thousands of us lined the highways from Wilkes County Airport all the way to Ashe County for Dillon Baldridge, who gave his life trying to protect his friends and comrades, and the freedom we hold so dear. 

Putting up American flag window clings, lining your yard/business with tiny flags (that are made in CHINA) that have gotten rained on and knocked over and are lying in the grass, is NOT showing respect for those that gave all. Not to mention against flag code, but that’s another column.  

What this is, is a long weekend to reflect on those who are no longer with us. Our Veteran parents and grandparents who fought perhaps; and especially Chris Thompson, Larry Bauguess, Sam Bullard and Dillon Baldridge.I am never happy about the loss of life, but I am eternally grateful, and hold a space at my table on such days to the fallen, and the families left to grieve their absence.

The local VFW Post is holding a traditional ceremony, on actual Memorial Day, May 30, (this Thursday) starting at 10 a.m. I encourage you all to be there, to give thanks to the men and women who gave everything for you.               

·              

A Dipper Full for Everyone

By CARL WHITE

Life in the Carolinas 

I’ve been spending more time in the garden lately. 

It all started at Kindred Gallery at Rosemary House Bed and Breakfast in Pittsboro. It was during an interview with noted folk artist Cher Shaffer. 

We were coming to the close of our second on camera visit when I asked her what she would recommend as a good thing for all of us to do in order to have greater peace and happiness in our lives. That’s easy she replied, “Play in the dirt and do it often. It will help you connect with the earth and life.”

 I listened as she explained on her thoughts. It seemed reasonable but it would be on my drive home that my mind would give it a good thinking over.I had already done a bit of planting in the garden. However, I had not thought of it as playing in the dirt.

 At the same time, I could tell that Cher was serious with her words. So, I committed to the idea. I knew it would be a challenge because it had been many years since I had done anything resembling playing in the dirt. So much so that I honestly could not remember ever playing in the dirt. 

While it has been a busy time for the show, I decided that working time in for dirt play was now on my must do list, even though I had no idea how it was going to work out. We had already planted some tomato and cucumber plants; however, I knew we needed more plants.

 I decided to visit some new greenhouses in hopes of inspiration for new plants and to question plant people on how they play in the dirt. I soon found out that I was not alone in how I thought about gardening. To some it’s a lot of work and not playful at all. That however was not the case with most of the people I spoke with. As it turns out the smell and feel of dirt brings happiness to many people.

 With this idea in mind I purchased a wide variety of tomato, pepper, okra, and other plants. I like dill so I decide that an herb garden might also be a good idea. I may have gone a bit overboard.

 As I drove home I though about all those plants and the task ahead and the more I thought about it the less playful I become.

 Unloading the car, I realized that I had almost 150 new plants. The first day I planted and watered one flat, the next day I did the same and within a week I had them all planted. 

It was on the third day of this process that as I was bending over planting pepper that I become a bit dizzy, so I took a knee in the dirt. For the first time during this process I was feeling the dirt. The smell was sweet, and the dirt was becoming playful.

 At that very moment I was flooded with memories of childhood times in the garden with my grandmother. It was as if I was there again walking with her as she was giving each plant a dipper full of water.

 I could hear her say, “A dipper full for everyone.” I could see my Dad picking green beans in the summer. I was flooded with warm comforting memories of family now gone but still in the garden. Every morning I get up early and go play in the dirt. I water the plants; everyone gets a hello and full dipper of water. 

They are all doing well, and I have learned how to play in the dirt.

And I can tell you one thing for sure, it’s a good thing.           

A different part of Asia 05/29/17-07/01/17

Back in February, just after the Iraqi army and coalition forces had liberated eastern Mosul from ISIS and initiated the West Mosul offensive, I had contacted the Academy of Emergency Medicine (AEM), a Slovakian NGO, and requested information on what was required to volunteer with their organization. I sent in the required documents, but not a peep did I hear back from them afterwards, so I figured that it was a no go- plus I am so busy with M-EMS that I didn't think I would be able to volunteer with them even if I was accepted. So I was completely taken by surprise when on Thursday the 25th, on our second to last day of EMR training in Myawaddy I received an email from AEM stating that not only had I finally been checked and approved, but that if I was available there was currently an urgent need for medics to treat escaping civilians as well as the soldiers fighting ISIS. The only problem was that I knew I wouldn't be able to take that much time off on such short notice so I didn't even get my hopes up. However, the month of June was when we had planned to teach a large EMR course up in northern Myanmar, and because of multiple setbacks in that area we were forced to cancel. So now we actually did have an entire month where we weren't scheduled for anything major. When I mentioned the opportunity at our post-training team meeting on Friday, Myanmar EMS was excited about the prospect and volunteered to sponsor my time to make the mission happen pending finalization of a couple of scheduling issues with the AREMT. So now I was excited! I spent an agonizing weekend not knowing what I was going to do, but finally Sunday night we received the confirmation that assured I would be able to go! Monday the 29th I purchased my ticket and started getting packed. Tuesday morning though I woke up and found an email canceling my ticket with no explanation so I had to quickly go through the entire ticket finding process again and was able to find a replacement that wasn't too expensive and only pushed my flight back by one day. (Which is amazing because for some reason there aren't too many flights headed to Iraq!) Thursday, June 1st I woke up super early to make it to the airport on time for my flight. Some of my team were traveling to Thailand to take care some banking business (Myanmar's banking system is Byzantine) and show our school property to a potential buyer so it worked out perfectly for them to drop me off at the airport on their way. The first leg of the journey went from Yangon out over the Bay of Bengal, straight across India, and over the Persian Gulf to Doha, Qatar. The airport sits right on the water and the end of the runway is actually a seawall so I felt like we had taken a wrong turn and were on final approach to Saint Martin before we actually landed and I could finally see that we were in the middle of a sandstorm that was partially obscuring my view of the skyscrapers and sand dunes! Inside the airport everything was extremely plush and lavish, there's an entire mall inside with every exclusive retailer in the world seeming to have a storefront. There's Mercedes, Ducati, and Lamborghini showroom models for sale and raffle scattered around, and if you're interested you can buy gold bars or coins in any of the jewelry stores! After a 3 1/2 hour layover, I boarded another almost empty flight that flew me northwest over the Persian Gulf towards Mosul and ISIS. The destination for this flight is Erbil, the capital city of Iraqi Kurdistan, a fully autonomous region in northern Iraq about 90 km from the city of Mosul and a major staging ground of the Battle for Mosul that has been underway now for the better part of a year. At first after crossing into Iraq the terrain was flat, bone dry, and arid desert, but the farther north we flew the more rugged and mountainous it became. Eventually I started to see trees on the higher hills and finally we started flying over snow covered mountains! Shortly after leaving the mountains behind we began to prepare for landing. Instead of beginning our descent a couple hundred miles away from our destination, we remained at nearly cruising altitude until we flew over Erbil. Then the pilot flew in a figure eight pattern while dropping us down towards the runway. We descended so fast that I felt like I was training for a trip to the space station while nearly levitating under my seatbelt! In the airport I went through customs and then took a shuttle to the civilian meeting point where I was picked up by Oliver and Sven, who run AEM operations in Iraq. After introductions they took me to their main base in Erbil. This is in what used to be a very nice mansion but it's been neglected for a while now and is surrounded by mostly abandoned and run down compounds. After we got there I was introduced to Monir, another paramedic who had arrived last night. Oliver gave us an orientation talk and then we went to the market to buy whatever gear we didn't already have with us. By this time it was 0130 for me with time change so I went to bed. In the morning we loaded up and met with Pete and Walter from Global Response Management to form a convoy on the 90 km drive to Mosul in Nineveh province. I was even allowed to drive one of the Toyota hiluxes in the convoy! After leaving Erbil we drove northwest through the desert passing countless checkpoints and places in the road where at some time either a large dirt berm had been across it and recently bulldozed through or where the road had been mined and the craters filled in with dirt. The closer we got to Mosul the more damage there was. Houses completely riddled with holes, burned out, or with blast damage. Finally ahead of us we could see the smoke over the city and as we stopped at the last checkpoint before crossing the floating bridge over the Tigris River we could hear the fighting. After arriving in western Mosul we stopped along the side of the road as refugees flowed by going in the opposite direction, a Predator drone circled overhead, and one of ISIS' Dushka heavy machine guns intermittently barked out strings of epithets a half mile to our left. We had stopped in this prime location for our mandatory security briefing:...Don't talk to the jihadi's...don't get shot or exploded...Don't run outside and wave at unidentified drones...If there's a problem run in that direction... Etc. Afterwards we struck off towards the Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) forward operating base 1 and 3, which were combined after they sustained too many losses to operate separately. They are stationed in a couple large abandoned houses just west of the Old City. Along the way we had to drive within 700 meters of ISIS around the outskirts of ISIS controlled Old City. Here we dropped off a truck full of supplies as well as Monir to help reinforce two paramedics and several Iraqi medics who are already staffing this trauma stabilization point (TSP) co-located with ISOF. As the name implies, a TSP is located as close to the fighting as is safe and is where front line injuries come for stabilization so they can survive the trip to various field hospitals located several kilometers farther away from the front where they will receive additional stabilization or definitive care. Then we continued on to ISOF 2's FOB where Walter and I would initially be stationed with a team of several Iraqi medics and two Americans, Chris and James, at a second TSP that AEM is staffing. ISOF 2 is based in an old mosque just southwest of the Old City and had been an ISIS stronghold up until less then 2 months ago when this block was liberated. ISOF are US trained, urban warfare specialists who are engaging ISIS in close quarters, sometimes in hand to hand combat as they work in cooperation with the Iraqi army and the various militias and coalition forces to liberate the maze of alleyways and neighborhoods of Mosul's Old City inch by bloody inch. The challenge that makes this so difficult is that the streets of the Old City are so old that they are too narrow for tanks, Humvees, or even pickup trucks so all the fighting must be carried out via drone or other air strikes or dismounted, on foot. Also, ISIS refuses to let civilians leave the war zone and tries to shoot anyone who does, currently holding approximately 180,000 civilians (6/2) as hostages for their own enjoyment and as human shields, preventing coalition forces from simply razing the entire area to the ground. We threw our gear into the library aka bunk room and started introducing ourselves to the ISOF medics who were there at the moment. Before we even finished this our first patient came screeching up to the front gate in the back of a Humvee. An old man had been attempting to flee the Old City with his family when he was spotted by a sniper and was shot in the flank which also fractured his pelvis. We quickly stabilized him as much as possible and then called up one of the ambulances donated by the WHO and staffed by local volunteers to transport him to the hospital. It is amazing how all the civilians here in the neighborhood around the TSP and in all the liberated areas, many of whom escaped from the Old City only within the last week or two, are attempting to pick up their life where it was interrupted by ISIS. While many houses have been completely destroyed and thousands of homeless people are making their way to relatives homes or the IDP camps, even more are staying behind to begin the daunting task of rebuilding their lives and city. Some people are opening up their market stands and other businesses again, others are repairing damaged buildings and plastering over bullet holes, and city employees are repairing water, power, and sanitation infrastructure and clearing away as much of the rubble as possible. There are IED's camouflaged everywhere in the liberated areas, as well as unexploded ordnance, broken glass, disabled vehicles, and craters in the roads either from air strikes or IED's. Many roads are still barricaded on purpose to deter ISIS from driving their never ending supply of VBIED's (vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices) past the siege of Iraqi and coalition forces and into the liberated areas of the city. At first our patient volume was fairly low with just a few soldiers per day and the majority being civilians. The most common civilian problem was symptoms resulting from observing Ramadan which is from May 26 through June 24 this year- dizziness, weakness, tiredness, syncope, and kidney failure from not eating or drinking all day and then eating loads of salt and sugar at night. During the day the temperature rises to 115-119 degrees Fahrenheit and everybody is chronically dehydrated. Next most common problem is injuries resulting from exploding IED's- burns, shrapnel, head injuries, soft tissue injuries, "danglies", and amputations. Anywhere ISIS occupied for any length of time (all of Mosul) is infested with ingeniously disguised explosives. Candy bars, coke cans, toys, microwaves, refrigerators, faucet handles, livestock (we saw both a chicken bomb and a donkey bomb), doorknobs, and pressure plates under the tile floor running to a claymore built into the wall and plastered over are just a few of the items ISIS rigs to explode when families try to return home. Every day the sounds of the fighting echo in the background of everything we do. The sharp ringing and cracking of small arms fire that occasionally sends a bullet ricocheting off the wall of the mosque, deep heavy whumping of coalition air strikes and ISIS mortars, brrrrrrrrrrrping of A-10 Warthogs strafing insurgent positions, and the chest resonating kaboom of the occasional VBIED that would cause the curtains to jerk and the doors to shake and send up a massive fireball into the dusty sky became so normal that we hardly noticed them any more. After 10 days of working at ISOF 2 being on call 24/7 Walter and I took our truck and convoyed with Oliver and Sven back to Erbil to rest for a couple days and bring back supplies for the TSP's. In addition to sleeping and washing clothes we enjoyed exploring the city of Erbil which happens to hold the distinction of being the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world! You could probably say that we were all pretty exhausted and happy for a respite from the constantly "switched on" mode of the front but occasionally it went too far. One day while we were back in Erbil a huge shipment of medical supplies arrived at the airport for us and Oliver and Sven went to pick it up with one of the trucks and a cargo van. Unfortunately it was stuck in customs and wasn't accessible that day so they came back home. After getting back they realized that they had both ridden back in the truck and forgot the van at the airport! That very next day Monir, who had come back a day after me from the other TSP for a quick break also, went to get food from a great little restaurant close by and not only could he not find the shop, but when he walked back to where he thought the truck was parked it was gone! After frantically searching for it everywhere without success he got a taxi back to the house and told Oliver. Oliver and Sven took the keys and went to do a quick drive-by before calling the police and found the truck sitting nicely parked and locked within sight of the restaurant! After the break when we returned to Mosul Walter and I were assigned to staff ISOF 1 and 3 along with Monir, a paramedic named Anthony who was the team leader and a nurse named Steve, because two paramedics from Australia had arrived to volunteer for a while and were placed at ISOF 2. The Australians were very friendly and fun to hang out with. They were super health oriented and tried to work out on the roof of the mosque two or 3 times per day. It was extra funny because after just 2 days they both got violently sick from the food or water or both and had to go back to Erbil for a while to recover! Working at ISOF 1 and 3 came with a couple perks. For one, the ISOF medics here weren't as incompetent and tried to be proactive when treating patients. For another, there's a kitchen and a cook here so food doesn't have to come from ISOF headquarters! Only downside is that we have to keep our heads down behind the low wall on the flat roof because ISIS snipers have a clear line of sight to this position. On Wednesday the 14th ISIS rushed the front line and launched a counterattack with 7 VBIED's and approximately 100 men. At least 23 ISIS (aka Daesh) were confirmed killed and the rest were pushed back into the Old City. Casualties were plentiful and were divided up over several TSP's. On Sunday the 18th the Iraqi army and coalition forces officially announced a new assault on the Old City after almost a week of fighting at a standstill. This lull had occurred because one of the regiments of the 9th division had become bogged down while clearing their assigned section of the the Old City and everyone else had to stop their advance and wait for them to catch up again. Because there are so many players assisting in the Battle for Mosul, there are huge variances in training and proficiency and effective communications between everyone is sometimes lacking. Now that everyone is back in place the Iraqi army is confident that this is the "final chapter" in the Battle for Mosul that has been dragging on for almost a year. On the 22nd we woke up to discover that during the night the 844 year old Great Mosque of al-Nuri, from which Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had announced Islamic State's so called caliphate on July 4, 2014, had been blown up by retreating jihadists. 😥 The Great Mosque is where the world-famous 148 foot tall leaning al-Hadba (the hunchback) minaret had been before it was also destroyed. Our TSP had been close enough to this piece of history that we could clearly see the black flag of ISIS flying at its peak. As the coalition continued gaining back ground from Daesh our TSP's at ISOF's forward operating bases started getting farther and farther away from the front line, which meant that anyone injured in the fighting had a longer way to come to reach medical care. So one day Oliver, Sven, and I went to find a new building to use as a stabilization point. After driving down the main road a little over a mile we found a water purification facility with a walled compound that would work great for us once it was de-mined. Unfortunately, the very next day it received several direct hits from a 120mm mortar and was completely destroyed. We then made contact with the 16th division of the Iraqi army who had a small first aid station set up in a carpentry shop a couple hundred yards further back from the water plant. They had three army medics working around the clock treating dozens of soldiers and over 150 civilians per day with almost no supplies. When Oliver asked Major Ahmed if we could bring in some medics and supplies to work with them the Major almost started crying. So starting the next day AEM started staffing medics at 16th division including myself, being sure to keep some volunteers at ISOF 2 and ISOF 1 and 3 to maintain coverage. Although some civilians just can't take it anymore and try to escape before the army recaptures their house or street most wait because one of the things ISIS enjoys the most is shooting men, women, and children in the back as they try to escape. Those who are liberated or make it to the Iraqi lines and searched and questioned and then walk down the road right past our TSP on their way to a family members home or an IDP camp. If they were shot or wounded by an IED on their way out of the Old City we would treat them and send them to the hospital via ambulance. There were also many patients with old injuries that we would assess and clean, and we treated hundreds of patients with life threatening dehydration. When the civilians were uninjured, we would simply greet them as they walked by, celebrating with them if they were happy and consoling them if they were sad. And there was always work to do assisting other humanitarian agencies in passing out food and water to the starving, malnourished children and their families. If the TSP was relatively quiet we would sometimes go and pick up loads of elderly, sick, or injured civilians in our ambulances or the large open freight trucks that the UN funded NGO 'Muslim Aid' uses to haul in food and water for the refugees passing our TSP and haul away dead bodies. This helps take some of the load off the Iraqi army who have evacuated hundreds of the injured on their armored Humvees either sitting or lying on stretchers tied to the hood. On the 23rd our position was overrun with overzealous reporters who had found out about our TSP and all the refugees fleeing down our road as the army pushed in opening escape routes and were trying to get stories. We banned them from the critical patient side of the carpentry shop and kept on working as best we could. After an hour and a half however, we began coming under mortar fire and all the journalists quickly started leaving. The army intelligence officers who worked with us at the TSP sniffing out disguised Daesh and their families discovered that one of the reporters had been hosting a live news broadcast and ISIS had used it to work out our location. Those reporters won't be coming back. They quickly called in coalition air support to locate the source of the offending projectiles and after several air strikes that were close enough to set off car alarms and rattle all the metal doors up and down the street everything was back to normal. Across the Tigris in east Mosul, which has been a liberated and semi- functional city for the past 5 months, three suicide bombers blew themselves up in a residential neighborhood in retaliation for the increased pressure they are feeling from the offensive, killing 5 and injuring 19 others. The next day on the 24th Major Ahmed received intel that we had a suicide bomber of our very own who had made his way through the army lines disguised as a cripple and was targeting our TSP. We quickly shut everything down and went to evacuate when Monir realized that he had lost the truck keys! We waited for several tense minutes until Pete arrived from ISOF 1 and 3 and we all piled into the back of his truck and called it a day! A total of 5 suicide bombers infiltrated the city that day and later that night we were woken up to care for some of their handiwork. On the evening of the 25th I was just relaxing after a suspiciously quiet day when I started hearing shouting and extra shooting and then convoy after convoy of Humvees, MRAPS, and M1 Abrams tanks screaming past the TSP away from the direction of the Old City. When I went up to the roof and looked around the entire city to the Southwest of our position was nothing but smoke and fire and shooting. It turns out several dozen Daesh had slipped past the Iraqi army's siege around the Old City through a series of "rat holes" (holes punched through the walls of interconnected houses as well as subterranean tunnels) and launched a massive surprise counterattack after popping up just on the the other side of ISOF 1 and 3 where I had been working that day. They lit houses and cars on fire and then began fighting their way back towards the Old City and us attacking Iraqi and coalition positions from behind. For a couple hours we were within line of sight of the new front line and I could see ISIS muzzle flashes and angry red tracers cracking through the air past the TSP. As you can imagine we were busy that night as panicking civilians tried to evacuate and fled in all directions without rhyme or reason, some fleeing east toward the Old City and some west towards the new offensive with cows and flocks of sheep and goats all mixed in. After the army got organized and started pushing back the offensive quickly crumbled and by midnight victory was declared although there was a thorough house to house mop-up in the morning. The last 3 jihadis involved in the counterattack who weren't killed barricaded themselves in a house holding a family of 14 hostage. After an 18 hour standoff 2 ISOF snipers were able to get in position to shoot two of them and the third was overpowered by his hostages. Before the army could move in the family opened the front door and tripped a claymore placed by the 3 Daesh to deter an attack on their position. Five family members were rushed to our TSP in critical condition and after doing what we could to stabilize them they were transferred to Mosul General. On June 29th, my last day in Mosul, the Iraqi army recaptured the destroyed Great Mosque where the iconic leaning al-Hadba minaret had once stood. This was met with great happiness by Iraqi army and citizens alike as a symbolic victory over ISIS in Mosul. That afternoon I had to tell all the medics and soldiers I'd lived and worked with for the past month goodbye, then I left Mosul and drove back to Erbil to clean up and pack so I would be ready to leave the next morning. In Erbil also I had to say goodbye to many friends that I had met and spent time with over the last month. Afterwards Sven dropped me off at the airport and after barely catching my flight I flew back to Doha, Qatar, and then on to Yangon, Myanmar arriving at six o'clock in the morning on July 1st. Volunteering in Mosul for this month was an amazing experience, making lifelong friends and memories. Even though there were so many sickening and twisted things happening while I was here I was able to help a little and make a difference for a lot of people and I am hoping to come back again sometime!

Almaty - Bishkek - Osh

29/04/2017 K9595 Train from Urumqi South to Almaty 2 at 23.14 Duration 33 hours Hard Sleeper - £150

The train started screeching to a halt as we approached the Kazakh border only a few hours after leaving Urumqi. Before we could get out of bed and look half decent, Chinese border guards were on board, wanting to rummage around in our luggage and scrolling through photos on our camera. I think they just want to make sure you have not taken any photos that could harm the stability of the peoples republic. It was all quite friendly in the end, our guard started sharing with us similar tourist snaps from his phone from his weekend in Xi'an with the mrs.

Mohammed, our Chechen friend on his way back to Grozny from a business trip in Urumqi, explained the Kazakh side would be much smoother, which turned out to be the case. The guard assigned to our cabin was eager to practice his English and hear about our trip and then spoke at length in Russian with Mohammed. After 6 hours spent travelling about 2 miles we pulled into the ghost town border station where we got off to stretch our legs as the train had it’s wheels changed to match the different Russian gauge width. Mo knows this station cafe and the staff well, and insists on buying us lunch. He is a big fan of UFC fighting and with great pride he plays us youtube videos from his phone of several Chechen fighters in action whilst we tuck into our beef noodles.

Some Kazak border guards approach our little private section of the cafe, shocked to see some tourists at ‘their table’. They suddenly see Mo, give him a nod of the head, and we continue to sip on tea as we are shown more videos, this time of Chechen rebel leader, Akhmed Zakayev, being interviewed at his excilled home in London. This then begins to make me wonder, why is Mo travelling this route? 33 hours on a train to Almaty, 4 hour drive to Bishkek airport in Kyrgyzstan, before a 4 hour flight to Grozny? Is a photo with this guy a wise move? Is it gonna land me in serious trouble with the russian border police in a few weeks time?

Almaty is very quiet on the May day bank holiday. After the crowds and noise of Urumqi we are pleased to have the city to ourselves as we get a big goodbye hug from Mo, and make our way to our hostel at sunrise. The view from the hostel rooftop has to be one of the best city backdrops in the world, with the snow covered Tien Shan mountain range surrounding the entire south side of the city.

The air feels so much cleaner here as we head towards the mountains and take the bus up to 'kok tobe’ a favourite weekend hang out for local families wanting snaps with the city view behind them and next to the only Beatles statue in the world with all the fab 4 together (apparently)?

Back down in the city, we visit the Grand central mosque. We are not certain if Lo could come in so I Left her outside went in and had a look around briefly. It seems a nice quiet space, but not much praying going on. Lots of men just sitting in corner texting on their phones.

Food is getting welcomingly less soup and noodles and more cornish pasty like sincle leaving China. The staple Kazakh snack food is a fried bread filled with potato and is sold on stalls every few meters it seems. Some have mutton in if you get lucky. The fast food soviet era cafeterias dotted all over town provide cheap school dinner like meals, you take a tray, point at what you want and a dinner lady shovels a load on your plate. Sausage and mash, mutton stew and rice, bit of cake for afters… just good simple stodge that fills you up and doesn’t cause problems the next day.

Which is important when you have a long day of hiking planned. Determined not to spend any money on cable cars and ski resort entrance fees, we took the bus up to the impressive looking Medeu outdoor ice rink and followed a hiking trail up into the mountains. We passed an old stripped out soviet tank which was fun to play around in for a bit, pretending we were en route to Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban. The fun and games were all over when we realised the snow was getting seriously deep along the trail we were following, which was no longer really visible. We were the only people up there and couldn’t work out a way back down till we spotted a big Russian geezer trekking in just speedos and boots with walking poles. Happy looking chap, and a lovely tan he had on him, but we were worried we would be disturbing his peaceful time alone up in the mountains, but he was very helpful and pointed us to a safe way down. 'Plov’ (rice with chopped up mutton and veg in it) for dinner was just reward for our hiking efforts.

4/5/2017 Almaty to Bishkek Marshrutka (minibus) 5 hours

Credence clearwater revival, 'put a spell on you’ played us out of Almaty, our 'marshrutka’ (public minibus) driver obviously had great taste in Music. Dylan, Cohen, Eagles, all made for a great head bobbing, palm tapping on thigh, journey along the dusty A2 highway to the Kyrgyzstan border. It felt good to be on the road, the Tien Shan mountains, a natural border zone, were always in view outside the left hand windows. No more railway journeys now till we depart from Tashkent for Moscow on 3rd June, just long hours in less comfortable 'Marshrutkas’ but with some amazing scenery along the way.

The border crossing into Kyrgyzstan is smooth and without too much delay. No bag searches, no questions asked. This was expected to be the easiest of the 3 central asian border crossings we were to encounter, the former soviet state border police having a pretty bad reputation for hassling foreigners for bribes, we were relieved with the friendly Kyrgyz welcome.

On arriving in Bishkek we were dropped off close to the huge Lenin statue that still stands tall here. Some flowers had even be laid below his feet, probably to mark 100 years since the revolution. Our host in Bishkek was Liza, a proud Kyrgyz lady of Russian heritage. She made us feel extremely welcome at our little homestay, an old 1960’s soviet era house, one entrance, 3 different little homes around a courtyard. We had our own little bedsit and an outside toilet and shower all for just $10 a night. Back in Dalston it would be rented out for £1700 a month, bills not included. 

Liza seems to be a face around Bishkek. As she walks us to the bus station the next morning lots of people stop to talk, eager to see where her new guests are from. She tells us of the history of the different populations that have settled in the city over the last century and the glory days of the Soviet Union when life was much simpler, people were free to travel the whole of the central asian region without the ethnic tensions of more recent times. “Then people got greedy!” she bemoans.

Liza sees us safely on to our Marshrutka for a day trip to beautiful Lake Izzy Kol, the second largest alpine lake in the world. 30 mins in and the Marushkta has a tyre blow out. No safety triangle on a fast moving highway, I stand 50 metres up the road and act as a human safety triangle waving my arms at bemused drivers urging them to slow down as they pass our driver and some younger passengers helping to change the outside wheel. I think Louisa is really embarrassed to be associated with me at this point. “The safety of your passengers is the number one priority as a bus driver!” Steve Sparkle, at the arriva london training school, drummed it into me on my first day 7 years ago. We’re never off duty!

The place along the lake we are dropped of at is a little underwhelming. Stunning scenery overlooking the lake, but all the beachfront appears to be sectioned off for rich russian holiday homes, and being out of season the place is a bit dead. We managed to find a little bit of public beach, got our swimming costumes on and tried to go for a dip. 15 seconds in the water and your limbs start to go numb with the cold so we didn’t stick about for long, especially after being joined on our little beach by an angry looking herd of cows.

6/5/2017 Bishkek to Osh Marshrutka - 13 hours

Again Liza insists on walking us to the chaotic Bishkek bus station to make sure we get on the right Marshrutka, this time a 13 hour journey to Osh in the south of the country awaits us. The driver, Safiq, a cheeky chappy with the common Kyrgyz gold toothed smile, another good friend of Liza’s, is excited to hear that I’m a bus driver in London and insists me and 'your guest’ are allowed up front next to him. Result!

After Saffiq, stops off at a few mates houses on the road out of Bishkek, to pick up some parcels, we finally start to make some progress. The views out the window for the whole drive are pretty special, as the Marshrutka struggles up the several mountain passes en route. We start passing a few brave cyclists along the way, this route, all the way down to the Pamir highway, being a bit of a mecca for Eurasian crossing lycra warriors from around the world. I’m slightly envious of the challenge they are undertaking, then read in the guidebook that a 5km mountain pass tunnel we pass through “was the scene of a tragic carbon monoxide disaster” a few years ago.

Despite only brief toilet stops for 12 hours, just an hour from Osh, Driver Saffiq decides it’s time for a sit down meal at a shashlik (kebab) house he knows. It’s nearly midnight and we are struggling to keep our eyes open, but as the guests of honour at Saffiq’s table, we are treated to a pot of tea and after prayers some meat on a stick and bread. I show Saffiq a photo of me with a London bus, much to the amusement of his mates around the table who start mocking him about my bus being bigger than his bus. Great banter.

In coming to Osh we are now back on the route of the ancient silk road after a slight Northern detour. Only a 4 hour drive from the Chinese border, this city claims to be over 3000 years old, “older than Rome!” they say. There is not much in the way of historical ruins here, the old famous bazaar is a ram shackle mix of metal shipping containers stacked on top of each other with shop windows cut of the front. It’s a lively place though and lots of cheap fruit and veg is available, perfect for us, as we try and give our immune systems a boost before we head south to the remote Pamir Highway. Also plenty of scenic hikes about an hour drive out of town, into the Alay Valley. On Victory Day bank holiday we are joined along the rapid flowing river banks by lots of Kyrgyz families enjoying the day off work in the sun and celebrating the soviet unions most important holiday of course.

The Osh Guesthouse hostel is the place to stay for people looking for 4x4 ride shares into Tajikistan. A big whiteboard is updated every hour wth requests for people to help spilt the costs, of what can be an expensive drive at very high altitudes. We get lucky on our second day when Fergus, from County Westmeath, Ireland and Antonio from Barcelona arrive and are looking at a similar 10 day itinerary to us.

We will start with a stop close to the Tajik border at the town of Sary Mogul, famous for it’s views of towering Peak Lenin (7,100 meters). Then into Tajikistan, all the way down to the Wakhan Valley, hugging the Afghan border at Khorog before returning to civilisation in the Tajik capital Dushanbe. Not much electricity en route, let alone Wifi, so you won’t be hearing from us for a while.

County Westmeath, Antrim and Down all represented on this road trip! Should be plenty of GA football chat to help pass the time.

HOW TO FLIP A DISTRICT BLUE

Lessons from a Swing District Team that Succeeded in 2016 by Ayana Haviv and Shabbir Imber Safdar

California Away Team’s Shabbir Imber Safdar talked to me about the efforts of his group, in a safely blue district in northern California, to volunteer in nearby swing districts in Sacramento (CA-07) and Reno, NV (battleground, entire state!). We discussed strategies and tactics of the effort.  His team’s post-election analysis is here on medium.com, but here’s the summary:

“During the 2016 election cycle our 40 volunteers made 10 trips to Sacramento and Reno. 3,343 doors knocked on, 44 voters registered, roughly 759 hours of volunteer time given. We won the state of Nevada’s electoral votes for the Democrats, helped elect a new US Senator (Catherine Cortez Masto NV), a member of Congress (Rep. Ami Bera CA-07), and a Nevada state Assembly member by 38 votes (Skip Daly NV-31). We also passed a ballot initiative that closed the background check gun sale loophole in Nevada. Oh, and legal weed was on the ballot and passed in both CA and NV.”

Shabbir’s team is currently in the process of relaunching their project for 2018’s elections, and intends to have a presence in at least 4 locations in CA and NV, as well as start a satellite team on the East Coast.   To answer your question, they are not yet ready for you to volunteer with them, but we are working together and Shabbir’s excited to see lots of other efforts get underway that he doesn’t have to lead.

ACTIONS THAT ARE HELPFUL TO FLIP/KEEP A DISTRICT BLUE:

a) Registering Democratic voters in the district, well ahead of time;

b) Canvassing in the district in the months and weeks before the election;

c) Coordinating with the local Democrats in the district to find the best places to engage in a and b, as well as to help get people to their rallies and other events and to amplify their message; and

d) Donating to and fundraising for the campaign of the Democratic candidate. This blog post will focus on strategies a and b.  Statements directly from Shabbir are in quotes (“”). Everything else is my interpretation of the conversation. 1.       DO IT WITH FRIENDS.

To engage in registering voters and canvassing most effectively, start with a group of friends. Have a core of 4-5 people who are going to commit to multiple weekends. The friend group is important because you want to build camaraderie and make the experience as fun as possible. It’s possible (but not necessary) to coordinate with groups like Sister District Project , Swing Left, and Flippable, but sign up a friend or four to do it with you.

2.       WORK WITH THE LOCAL DEMOCRATS ON THE GROUND.

Call the county Democratic party in the district you want to flip, and/or the precinct captains. You can also work directly with the campaign of the candidate you’re endorsing. Those organizations should provide you with suggested locations to canvass or register voters, voter registration forms, canvassing packets, etc. The local Democratic club or Indivisible group can help you think of great places to register voters or canvass, and could send volunteers to join you.

3.       VALUE YOUR VOLUNTEERS.

Registering voters and canvassing is physically and emotionally draining work, and early volunteer burnout is a real danger. The more fun you can make this activity, and the more efficient you can be with your volunteers’ time, the better. Things that don’t work:

Letting outsiders dictate your group’s volunteer parameters without thinking, “How will this make my volunteers feel?” One example is the Hillary buses in 2016 that spent more time on the road than actually working on the ground in Reno (8 hours travel, 4-6 hours canvassing).   Many that went from SF to Reno burned out after one trip, and told Shabbir they felt poorly utilized.    

As a comparison, Shabbir’s team drove up to Reno, NV Friday night, ate dinner together, had breakfast together on Saturday, canvassed 7-8 hours, had dinner and drinks and relaxed in their suite together.  Then they repeated the same thing on Sunday,  but ending around 4pm to get back to SF at 9pm. It was incredibly hard work, but there’s no doubt they did good work.

“Another thing that didn’t work was once when I brought 2 volunteers to a Congressional race after the campaign staffer told me they would be manning a voter registration table.  I set the volunteers’ expectations for that.  They were excited to register voters.  We got there, and I went out canvassing with the rest of our crew.  I found out the minute I left they got redirected to phone bank and stayed in the office doing that for 6 hours.  That’s kind of a miserable 6 hour job, and they didn’t need to drive 2 hours each way to phone bank.   The volunteers felt bait-and-switched, and I told the campaign staff that I couldn’t yank my volunteers’ expectations around like that, and that if they wanted us to keep coming back (we made 6 trips this cycle) that they had to treat my volunteers better.  It never happened again.”

Things that worked:

Going to Reno for the entire weekend. Arranging hotel blocs to make accommodations easier and keeping people close together (always in a union hotel!).  Renting out a suite together, which is always stocked with food and drinks, for breaks and for get-togethers in the evening. Going out to eat or happy hour every day with the other volunteers, who are based around a group of friends. Talking extensively on social media and in person about the friends who did this and how awesome they are – creating a kind of “in” crowd of cool volunteers – for peer pressure purposes, and to make your volunteers feel special. After all, they are! Celebrating small victories, like getting one voter registration. Making your volunteers feel rewarded at the end of every day of volunteering.

4.       PREPARE. 

Some tried and tested preparation methods: Have a practice canvassing session for anyone who’s new at it before every volunteer day. Do your own 1-page guide on your candidate’s position on all the issues, with possible scandals/red flags that might come up on the back (and arguments to refute), and give to your canvassers as part of their training. 5.       EXPERIMENT. Try voter registrations in new places that are likely to attract many Democrat-leaning voters. Some ideas: synagogues, mosques, gay bars, African-American churches, Section 8 housing, Latin-American markets, marijuana dispensaries. Some of us are planning to register voters in line at Comic-Con in San Diego!  (Shabbir thinks this is brilliant, by the way) “The first time we rolled into Reno in late summer of 2016, the local Democrats informed us that the Republicans were ahead of us by 5,000 registered voters.  I freaked out.   Everyone in Washoe’s Democratic community (staff, volunteers, etc) pulled together to close that gap, but we still went into the election 3,800 registered voters behind. I swore that I would never fail to monitor and participate in that during the off year before the election EVER AGAIN.”

5.       YOU DON’T HAVE TO ACTIVATE PEOPLE ON THE ISSUES YOU CARE ABOUT MOST.

“When we were canvassing in the 2016 election, when we met someone under 30 who seemed like they didn’t care about politics, we led with legal marijuana on the ballot. When there was a tricycle in the driveway, we led with a school bond measure.  Not everyone is motivated by your issue.  You have to speak to people about what’s important to them, not what’s important to you.    A great opener is ‘What is the issue that’s most important for you this election?’ When you get the answer, you can think back to your your 1-pager to talk about where your candidate stands on that issue.   Never use a campaign script, always talk to people in the way that you would like to be spoken to.  Nobody wants to be ‘talked at from a script’.  Campaigns hate that I say that, but once you’ve mastered the art of talking to people where they are comfortable, you can’t lose unless they’re a die-hard opponent, in which case you can wish them a nice day and move on.  Ain’t nobody got time to try and reason with cognitively-biased Republicans.” Good luck forming your team to flip your nearby swing district blue! Keep your eyes on the prize – winning that election.

Carlisle Chang

From the Caribbean Beat archives

Judy Raymond meets painter and designer Carlisle Chang (May/June 1998)

Waving his slender hands to emphasise a point about painting, Carlisle Chang raises his voice slightly above the music of gongs and flutes that chimes from a cassette player beside him. His face creases into a benevolent smile, and he looks the picture of a Chinese gentleman.

But Chang’s jasmine-scented room in a suburb of Port of Spain is half a world away from China, where his father was born; and Carlisle Chang is not as patrician, as conservative or as Chinese as he looks. Perhaps he inherited an adventurous streak from his father, William Chang, who left his home near Canton as a young man and crossed the globe in search of a better life. Arriving in the Caribbean, he opened a small business and put down roots.

So Carlisle Fenwick Chun-Yee Chang, born in San Juan, Trinidad, in 1921, says firmly: “I’m very fed up with this Chinese thing . . . It’s ridiculous for me to say I’m going back to my Chinese roots. I’m a Trinidadian.”

He’s not just a Trinidadian; Chang can also claim — though he’s much too modest to say so — to be the father of Trinidadian art. In a career that has lasted 60 years, he became the first local artist to make a living solely from art. (The 19th-century Trinidadian artist Michel Jean Cazabon produced many landscapes and portraits, but his income was supplemented for most of his life by revenues from his family’s sugar estates.)

Like Cazabon, Chang was trained in fine art in Europe. But on his return home, he combined those skills with the folk arts of Trinidad, using forms that made those arts accessible to everyone. Even in becoming a painter at all, Chang was a pioneer. (By the time of his death in 1888, Cazabon had been largely forgotten, and he does not seem to have inspired any followers; it was only many years later that his reputation was restored.)

Chang himself said, in a lecture on Painting in Trinidad delivered in 1963: “In Trinidad before 1930 there was hardly any practice of painting at all. One is left to assume that it was more a sort of genteel pastime, like sewing or embroidery for girls or lessons on the violin for a boy. Ours was a society with its eyes fixed on Europe, adapting external experiences willy-nilly without reference to the conditions which obtained here.” Chang was one of the artists who changed that, by showing that art was not a pastime but a vocation and that Trinidad was a fertile — and valid — source of inspiration for an art of its own.

Today there is no single place you can go to assess Chang’s work and its impact, no museum or gallery. Incredibly, it was only last year that he held his first solo exhibition: in the 25 years when he ran his own gallery, he was too busy organising shows on behalf of other artists to hold a formal exhibition of his own work. And often his paintings were sold off the easel to visitors to his studio before they were even finished.

No, if you seek Carlisle Chang’s monument, look around you. Much of his own work has been literally ephemeral — for 20 years he designed Carnival costumes, which are paraded for two days of glory and then thrown away. The only traces they have left are a few photographs and a handful of the artist’s exquisite line drawings.

But Chang has also designed stage sets and logos, produced handicraft, decorated hotels, churches and offices, constructed and painted murals at a dozen public sites. In all these ways, his work has passed before the eyes of a far larger public than the few who visit galleries and museums. Some of his work endures; and his vast influence still spreads through the work of the generations of fine artists and Carnival designers for whom he blazed a trail.

Mark Pereira, owner of the gallery in which Chang’s exhibition was held last year, says of him: “Carlisle Chang is in the realm of myth . . . He’s respected not only as a painter, but for several other areas of cultural achievement — stage set and costume design, mural design, ceramics, copperwork and Carnival costume design. His work — like himself — has a sense of timelessness, spanning perhaps the most important 50 years of art history in this country.”

It’s in that most transient — but most popular — of forms, Carnival, that Chang has had the most visible influence. His work presaged that of designers like Peter Minshall, who went on to make Trinidad’s kinetic art world-famous with his designs for the Olympic Games in Barcelona and Atlanta. It was Chang who, drawing on all of his Trinidadian heritage, from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, transformed a creole craft into an art admired by the world.

Chang’s formal education is in art — he wasn’t at all academically inclined at school. “I’ve never passed an exam in my life,” he says. But he’s tremendously knowledgeable, and his conversation, untrammelled by the rules of academic discipline, meanders leisurely here and there to include nuggets of esoteric information from every corner of the globe. Chang imparts them with a smile, recalling a pleasurable memory or simply enjoying the telling of a story.

By inclination Chang is an aesthete. Recalling his student days in Italy, he tells an anecdote about a weekend in a Tuscan palazzo. It was more than 40 years ago, but he remembers every last detail: “I thought, my God, this is Romeo and Juliet!” The family and their guests, he recalls, discoursed on Petrarch in the library after dinner. “Of course, I didn’t understand any of it,” he adds with his usual self-deprecation.

Despite his European education in fine art, and his delight in the more elegant and cerebral pleasures of life, Chang never lost touch with his origins. When he studied art in London in the 1950s he saw the funerals of George VI and Queen Mary, and met members of the aristocracy. He wept bitterly at having to leave, he recalls. And yet it was while he was an art student in London that he began to work on designs for murals which clearly showed the influence of African forms, with monumental, sculptural figures. He still has a photograph of one that he designed for his diploma. “It’s a totally African expression,” he points out, “but through modern art. I was concerned with Trinidad.”

In his most recent work, too, he’s gone back to his roots, coming full circle after a long and amazingly varied artistic career. Chang took up his paintbrushes again in 1995, 25 years after he’d last laid them down. Invited by a local insurance company to paint the illustrations for their 1996 calendar, he chose as his theme a familiar subject, Costumes and Festivals of the Caribbean, and painted a series of impressionistic figurative pieces showing Carnival costumes and characters from throughout the region.

Some of the paintings of Trinidadian themes were clearly based on Chang’s own childhood memories, and the commissioning of the calendar became a renaissance for him as he went on after its completion to explore those themes further. He held his first solo exhibition at Pereira’s Port of Spain gallery in October last year (all 20 of the new paintings were sold at the opening).

After a hiatus of a quarter of a century, Chang had to teach himself to paint all over again and returned not only to the themes but to the style and the scale of his earliest work, quite different from the abstract approach that typified his later painting, or the vast size of his murals.

“They’re very impressionistic — I can’t go into total abstraction at present. There are no faces — since school I decided it was not necessary to define physiognomy. A painting must show for itself what it’s about. There’s still a good deal of traditional painting: chiaroscuro, a certain amount of emotion. But I haven’t yet reached the point of dealing with more serious issues. I’m so cynical about Trinidad at the moment . . .”

And indeed the paintings are full of nostalgia, reflecting Chang’s advice to himself in painting them: Let me keep to the simple old things I remember. They sum up “an earlier, more graceful time and images that emerge out of the folk culture”.

Some are, again, portraits of remembered Carnival characters, king sailors, blue devils, mummers, moko jumbies who walk on stilts: suggestions of masked, dancing, glimmering figures, merging into the blues of twilight or dawn, evoking the mystery of these traditional costumes seen through the eyes of a child.

Others are more personal: they’re visual records of Chang’s own boyhood in a little country town which was only a few miles east of the capital, but was so rural in the 1920s and 30s that the only lighting was pitch-oil (kerosene) lamps, and you couldn’t stay in Port of Spain after 5 p.m. or it would be too dark to find your way home. The plump woman who holds a small boy by the hand as they make their way to church is Chang’s own nanny. “I was very fond of my nursemaid. She was a huge black woman, very kind . . .”

Other scenes draw on the culture of the area. Village life in those days, Chang has written, “offered a liberal education, rich with the culture of Hindus and Muslims, Ibo, Ashanti and Yoruba, Spanish mestizo, French patois-speaking creoles, and of course, Chinese.”

It’s the large Indian population of San Juan, though, that features most prominently in Chang’s memories and in his paintings. So he portrays the turbanned Indian windmill-seller, in soft, luminous apricots and blue-whites, passing in front of a mosque, while a small boy looks on with yearning. The Muslim festival of Hosay is evoked in brilliant oranges. And in the most abstract of Chang’s new works, Mirage, the Muslim emblem of a crescent is hinted at among vertical bands of glowing yellows and ochres.

Chang was steeped in Indian culture: he has Indian cousins, and as a child he was often sent to spend the day with the Indian neighbourhood carter’s son so that he wouldn’t be in the way in his family’s shop. Later he was drawn to eastern religion, and almost became a Hindu before settling on Buddhism. He acquired part of his early artistic education when he regularly helped his Indian friends to make tadjahs, the elaborately decorated floats pulled through the streets at Hosay, and to decorate their homes for weddings.

By then, he’d already been introduced to the art of making Carnival costumes, helping his sister Beryl with the outfit worn by a local man, a Mr Johnson, who played a red dragon. Young Carlisle also helped Johnson make the dragon’s scarlet papier-maché head. Carlisle was the youngest of three children. His father died when he was two, and his mother ran a variety of small businesses to provide for the children. She was willing to turn her hand to almost anything, and Carlisle later demonstrated the same versatility as he struggled to make his calling into a livelihood.

There was an artistic streak in the whole family, though their mother tried to persuade them to turn those talents to practical use. Beryl was a seamstress; Carlisle’s brother Wesley was a photographer, as was their mother’s cousin Isaac Chan; and their half-brother in China, from a previous marriage of their father’s, was the village calligrapher.

It wasn’t just his family, though: despite Chang’s scorn for “the Chinese thing”, the Chinese have played a significant role in the history of art in Trinidad: it was a Chinese artist, Amy Leong Pang, who gave Carlisle Chang his first formal training in art, and another, Sybil Atteck, who founded the Trinidad Art Society, to which Chang has belonged since 1944.

Carlisle began painting while he was at Tranquillity Government Boys’ School in Port of Spain, where he sat next to a boy called Boscoe Holder. More sophisticated than his friend from the country, Holder already knew a lot about painting. Like Chang, he too went on to become one of the grand old men of Trinidad art, but much of his career was spent abroad. At 18, Chang took part in an exhibition held by a group run by his art teacher, Leong Pang. (Other new names in that exhibition, also later to prove important in the history of Trinidad art, were Atteck and Holder.)

Leong Pang’s group was called the Society of Independents, and they scandalised polite society by, among other things, painting nudes. Young Carlisle didn’t go that far, but he was heavily influenced by the Independents — not only by the style of their painting but also by their ideas about life and art. “The biggest influences on their work,” he wrote of them, “were probably Matisse and Gauguin . . . Their influences were drawn from Paris but their thoughts turned first of all to Trinidad.”

That was where they were truly independent; and that was where Chang followed them.

In the same lecture on painting, Chang paid tribute to his friend and mentor Hugh Stollmeyer, describing him as “the finest exponent” among the Independents. Stollmeyer was clearly a powerful influence on Chang’s own ideas about painting, his eagerness to work in different forms and media, and even his spiritual beliefs. “Stollmeyer,” wrote Chang, “was gifted with both talent and intellect. He had tremendous imagination, coloured with a quality of mysticism which led him to be influenced by Hinduism. His themes derived from native folklore and superstition . . . He was also the first person to experiment with concrete sculpture . . .

Neither of the young disciple’s oil paintings sold in that crucial 1939 exhibition, but he wasn’t deterred.

Chang’s mother sent him to work with her cousin Isaac as a photographer, and later he moved to his brother’s photographic studio in Kingston, Jamaica. In 1945 he went to New York to study photography. His mother was later to regret that decision, because it was there, surrounded by galleries and theatres, that Carlisle made up his mind to become an artist. “I didn’t dare tell her,” he remembers, adding that she eventually “died out of sheer despair” when he persisted. She had mortgaged her house to pay for his photography studies.

But her son was adamant. “As an artist and heaven knows what else — gay — I’ve had to choose my own way,” he says matter-of-factly. He knew that the life of an artist would not be an easy one. He’d seen what happened to the Independents. They were a remarkable, dynamic group: “The conjunction of these people . . . was something electric,” he recalled. But one of the things that bound them together was an external force — the opposition of those who disapproved of everything the Independents represented. “Not only were they drawn together by common sympathies and a great friendship, but they were welded together by an overwhelming unsympathetic attitude on the part of the general public to anything they had to offer.”

In later years the public wasn’t quite so hostile, but Chang would find that it wasn’t easy to make a living from art. He continued to work as a photographer for another five years, painting murals and designing theatrical costumes and stage sets in his spare time. Then, in 1950, he received a grant to study art in London, at the Central School of Arts and Crafts.

He spent three glorious years there, studying, visiting famous galleries and theatres, and meeting other West Indians involved in the arts. He sewed a costume for Beryl McBurnie, Trinidadian dance pioneer and founder of the island’s first theatre, the Little Carib. (He’d known her from home, of course: “I used to dance, I don’t know why. I couldn’t get her to teach me West Indian folk dance — she was into black politics”. So Chang had to stick to the European dance that was conventionally taught at that time, and to Chinese dance.) McBurnie was in London to perform at a charity concert organised by Trinidadian musician Edric Connor, another of Chang’s London friends. So was Jamaican storyteller Louise Bennett. Also among the small, close-knit group of West Indians in London in those days were the Trinidadian playwrights Errol Hill and Errol John (Moon on a Rainbow Shawl), novelist Sam Selvon and Jamaican writer Roger Mais. After three years in England, Chang spent a year studying ceramics in Italy. Then it was time to come home.

Back in Trinidad, he opened a studio and gallery and began to turn out all kinds of work — Christmas cards, paintings in oils and watercolours, costume designs . . .

He was commissioned to paint several murals, including one at Piarco Airport that became his best-known work. Fifty feet long and 15 feet high, it was called The Inherent Nobility of Man. It was painted in the course of three months in 1961, and it epitomised the spirit of the country in those days, during the countdown to independence from Britain. Art historian Geoffrey MacLean describes it as having been “possibly the most important work of art in the Caribbean”.

That was one of six murals that Chang painted between 1961 and 1964, and one of many public works of art — friezes, collages, panels and copper repoussés — that he was commissioned to do. The Piarco mural was demolished in 1979, to public outcry, when the airport building was extended. But other murals remain, such as Conquerabia, cast in cement, outside the Port of Spain City Hall.

was the original name of the Amerindian settlement that preceded the Spanish city, but in many ways the mural sums up Chang’s vision of the entire country. It epitomises, too, his vision of its art, in its symbolism, its style and even the materials used in its construction. The central panels of Conquerabia are enclosed between depictions of the gaping mouths of the Dragon and the Serpent — the names of the two passages which close off the Gulf of Paria, between Trinidad and Venezuela. A Spanish caravel is seen approaching the three Trinity Hills, on the south coast, after which Trinidad is named.

The artist included Amerindian motifs as well as images that embody the diverse racial and architectural elements of the modern city.

There are also religious images, in a reference, Chang explained, “to the remarkable tolerance which has always characterised the life of Port of Spain”. And in his quest for new and durable materials, Chang found a way to incorporate literal emblems of every corner of the country. The four panels include, among other things, grey and white stones from Sans Souci on the north coast, multi-coloured porcelainite from Erin in the deep south, and a green stone from Tobago.

That Chang found so many corporate patrons in those years was an indication not only of his own talent, versatility and reputation, but also of the ambition of a young country searching for its own identity, and anxious to see images of itself made by its own people.

Thus among the subjects of his commissioned pieces were Legends of the Ibis (Trinidad’s national bird), Folk Festivals, The Story of Oil and a Hindu theme, Lord Krishna and the Milkmaids.

Chang was awarded a national honour, the Humming Bird Medal, in 1964. That was also the year he first designed a Carnival band — Japan, Land of the Kabuki — for bandleader/producer Stephen Lee Heung. Just two years later, for the band Crete, Chang designed a prizewinning Minotaur, that year’s junior King of Carnival. And in 1967 he won the Band of the Year and Queen of Carnival titles with his China, the Forbidden City. (Chang’s eclecticism, his familiarity with cultural traditions from every corner of the globe, are visible in his choice of themes for his Carnival designs: they range from Les Fetes Galantes de Versailles through Yucatan, depicting “early hemispherical cultural links”, Russian Fairy Tales and 1001 Nights, to his last Band of the Year in 1975, We Kinda People, whose slogan was “all ah we is one”.)

Between Carnivals Chang was still running his gallery, but when the Black Power movement led to social unrest in 1970, the bottom dropped out of the fine art market. Chang easily turned his hand to new work, producing handicraft and even opening a factory that made exquisite Carnival dolls, copperwork, embroidery and woodcarvings. Even his mother might have been proud of his resourcefulness — except that commercial success eluded him.

Chang is practical in many ways — his Carnival designs were not merely works of art, but precise scale drawings, blueprints for the construction of the costumes. He’s always experimented with new materials, searching to find paint which would withstand the ravages of tropical humidity, mildew and insects: earlier he tried out vinylite for his murals; now he uses acrylics for his paintings, because they don’t fade in the tropics as do oils. Even now he’s interested in new ways to make the arts viable, offering suggestions as to how steelbands could be made profitable.

But he didn’t have any business sense, and the factory failed. Even that became an opportunity to venture into new areas: Chang took up interior design. In 1991 he won an award from the National Drama Association for his set design for Lysistrata. (The production was directed by actress and dancer Jacqui Chan, daughter of his mother’s cousin Isaac Chan, who had been Chang’s first employer at the Ace photographic studio half a century earlier.)

Until 1995, however, it seemed Chang’s career was over. He’d stopped designing for Carnival bands in the 1980s, and only watched Carnival on television. “The only band I’ve been eager to see in recent years is Peter’s,” he says, referring to Minshall.

He kept busy, though, even before his recent return to painting. Few exhibitions by any of the younger generation of artists opened without his benign but sharp-eyed presence. He began archiving the history of the Trinidad Art Society — perhaps deterred by his lack of academic success, Chang hasn’t written very much, but he recognises the importance of recording Trinidad’s artistic heritage.

And after all, who is better qualified? Chang has lived that history. His living room does duty not only as a studio but also as a study, and canvases are stacked against the walls between desks and shelves filled with papers, books, photo albums and files.

He’s often asked to give interviews to students of art and cultural history, and complains that such requests are far too time-consuming, but he finds it hard to say no: “I’m a thorough fool, I get browbeaten all the time.”

But Carlisle Chang remains a kindly, gracious mandarin. He’s an invaluable repository of wisdom and experience, shrewd judgment and perfect recall of the events of a long lifetime — a lifetime, what’s more, during which he has been a central figure in the visual arts of Trinidad.

Read the original article here: Carlisle Chang - Caribbean Beat Magazine - Caribbean Beat Magazine http://caribbean-beat.com/issue-31/carlisle-chang#ixzz4VSrOlZXe NB: this text is copyrighted, and only limited excerpting with full attribution is permitted. For licensing and reproduction permissions, please contact MEP Publishers directly. Follow us: @meppublishers on Twitter | caribbeanbeat on Facebook

Police in New Zealand said on Sunday that the right-wing terrorist behind a massacre at two mosques in Christchurch was acting alone, as it emerged the killer's manifesto had been sent to the country's prime minister minutes before the tragedy unfolded. Australian Brenton Tarrant, 28, sent a racist, rambling manifesto to prime minister Jacinda Ardern in which he denied being linked to any organisations and said he was acting on his own. The document, which praised President Donald Trump and Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik, was emailed to Ms Ardern's office just 9 minutes before the attack began. However, a senior White House official said it was unfair to cast the shooter as a supporter of President Trump based on one reference to him in the manifesto.  Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told "Fox News Sunday" that the shooter was a "disturbed individual" and an "evil person." Mr Mulvaney said attempts to tie the shooter to any American politician "probably ignores some of the deeper difficulties that this sort of activity exposes." It came as a man whose wife was killed in the attack as she rushed back into a mosque to rescue him said he harbours no hatred toward the gunman, insisting forgiveness is the best path forward. "I would say to him 'I love him as a person'," said Farid Ahmad, whose wife Husna Ahmad, 44, was killed at the Al Noor mosque - the first of two targeted by the gunman. "I could not accept what he did. What he did was a wrong thing," he added. A man reacts following the attacks on Friday. Asked if he forgave the 28-year-old white supremacist suspect, he said: "Of course. The best thing is forgiveness, generosity, loving and caring, positivity." Tarrant has also broadcast the massacre live on social media, using a head-mounted camera, which sparked an outcry across the world as platforms such as Facebook were slow to take down the grisly footage. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter had scrambled to take down duplicates of the video at the request of the New Zealand police. The footage showed worshippers being sprayed with bullets, with some trying to crawl away, as Tarrant moved through Al Noor Mosque. A spokesman for Facebook said it had blocked or removed 1.5m copies of the video after the original was streamed online. Traditional media outlets were also criticised for broadcasting lengthy segments of the 16-minute video clip. Sky New Zealand removed Rupert Murdoch-owned Sky News Australia from broadcasts after the channel repeatedly screened extracts of the footage. “We made the decision on Friday with Sky News Australia to replace their live news with sport,” Sky New Zealand tweeted on Friday evening. The call was made “to ensure coverage doesn’t compromise ongoing investigations in NZ”. On Sunday, Ms Ardern said the bodies of those who died were beginning to be returned to their families as of that evening. She said it was expected all would be returned by Wednesday. Two days after the massacre, Dunedin woman Jackie Lawton, 34, said she was "still just overwhelmed and so sad” thinking about the lives lost. She went to a vigil with hundreds of others, held outside Dunedin’s Al Huda Mosque on Sunday afternoon. The last time Ms Lawton attended a vigil was in December, to honour slain British backpacker Grace Millane. “When Grace Millane was murdered the whole country mourned, deeply, for weeks. We felt like we knew her, even though she’d been here for such a short time,” she said. “This is 50 people though – each one as loved and needed as Grace. This is Grace times 50 and I don’t know if we can even process that.” Flowers, candles, and messages of solidarity had been placed in front of the mosque and a group sang hymns before performing a haka. Vigils have been held the length of the country over the weekend. Christchurch local James Tawhiti, 41, had driven down to Dunedin on Saturday “because it was too tense and sad and awful." “We’ve all already been through the earthquakes, that screwed a lot of people up,” he said. “But this is somehow worse because it’s a man-made tragedy. Natural disasters aren’t evil like this and it just feels like we’ve lost something, maybe our innocence.” Three students from Cashmere High School were at the Al Noor Mosque for Friday prayers when the attacker burst in. Two of the students are presumed dead and the third is in the hospital with gunshot wounds. The father of Sayyad Milne, 14, told the New Zealand Herald that his son was last seen lying on the bloody floor of the mosque bleeding from his lower body. "I've lost my little boy. He's just turned 14," he told the newspaper. "I remember him as my baby who I nearly lost when he was born. Such a struggle he's had throughout all his life. He's been unfairly treated but he's risen above that and he's very brave. A brave little soldier. It's so hard ... to see him just gunned down by someone who didn't care about anyone or anything," Milne said. "I know where he is. I know he's at peace." Current students weren't the only ones caught in Friday's mass shootings, the deadliest terrorist attacks in the country's modern history. A former Cashmere High School student is also believed to have been killed, as was the father of another student. Outside the school on Sunday, students came in a trickle to lean bouquets of flowers up against a construction barricade, evidence of the ongoing rebuilding from Christchurch's 2011 earthquake. Principal Mark Wilson said counselors and trauma specialists will be on hand when classes resume at the diverse school of more than 2,000. "I'm very confident in our staff; I'm very confident in our school community. It's made up of awesome people," Wilson said. "It's still going to be hard. There's going to be a lot of grief. There's going to be a lot of sadness. I think we've also got to be very patient with each other." Wilson declined to talk about the boys believed to have been killed, but confirmed three students were at the mosque on Friday and said one remained hospitalized with gunshot wounds to the leg. The principal noted that schools can often be a safe place for children coping with trauma. He is also encouraging students to take up their own acts of love to counteract the tragedy.

In Today’s Blog Post, I Will Be Writing About My Adventure To Ghana, Kumasi For Medical & Disable Orphanage Experience With A Company Called Plan My Gap Year, I Went Away With Them For 3 Weeks & Was Such A Surreal Experience. There Will Be 3 Parts To This Blog 🙂 

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My Journey To Ghana Began On The 5th August 2018, I Flew To Accra With British Airways (6 Hour Flight). I Met Some Amazing People On My Flight. When I Arrived In Ghana, I Showed My Yellow Fever Certificate and Then Went Through Visa & Passport Control. I Then Collected My Bags, Got Them Scanned, & Found Dennis & Kristy To Be Taken To The Pink Hostel.

We Stayed At The Pink Hostel For The Night, Before Starting Our Journey To Kumasi To The Volunteer House. When We Arrived We Was Greeted By The Staff & The Gorgeous Kiddies Who Hang Around The PMGY House. We Was Shown To Our Rooms & Then Unpacked Before Joining Everyone In The Dinning Area To Have A Little Meeting / Twi Lesson.

The Following Day Was An Early Start As It Was Orientation Day. We Went To The Various Placements, We Visited The Kids At The School & Was Greeted With The Best Hugs. We Also Visited The Hospital & Saw Tiny Newborns Super Cute & Got Me Excited To Begin Placement. After We Had Visited The Placements We Went To The Kumasi Market Which Is The Largest Market In Ghana It Was Crazy!!. We Then Visited Manhyia Palace Museum & Learnt About The History Of Kumasi. We Then Went Back To The Volunteer House & Had Dinner. 

The Following Day Was Our First Day Of Placement, We Was Taken To The Hospital By Kristy & Dennis. I Was At The Hospital & Went To The Maternity Ward I Shadowed A Midwife, I Was Helping With Doing The Checks On The Labouring Women, Also Checking On The Women Who Had C-Sections & Their Babies. I Also Helped Transfer A Women From The Surgery Up To The Maternity Ward Where We Transferred Her On To Her Bed. It Was A Great Day & At 2pm I Got Changed & Met Everyone Downstairs To Meet Dennis To Go Back To The Volunteer House.

Today Was Our First Day Of Our Weekend Adventure!! PMGY Ghana Offer A Safari Weekend, So Thursday Was Our Village Day, So We Drove To Lake Bosumtwi Where We Was Shown So Much Love By The Local Children, We Was Taken To The Locals Homes & Sat Outside, We Was Given A Basket For Our Heads & The Guys Were Given Machete’s. We Ventured Into The Forest & The Guys Cut The Tree To Get The Fruit/Vegetables & Us Girls Carried It On Our Heads In The Baskets. We Brought It To The Women Who Cooked It Whilst Us Kids & Volunteers Relaxed Near The Lake. We Went Back & Pounded The Fufu, & We All Tried A Bit. We Then Drove To The Lake Where We Had A Boat Ride Across The River & Back Again, We Also Had Our Lunch Too. We Then Had A Swim In The Lake Before Heading Back To The House.

Friday Was An Early Start As We Had A Long Drive To Mole National Park, Before We Went To The National Park We Visited The Oldest Mosque In West Africa, We Had A Tour & Was About To Take A Photo But Their Was A Man Who Was Not Happy Of Us Being There (Fridays Were Praying Day) So There Was A Big Scene So We All Left & Went To The National Park. We Arrived & Had Some Lunch (I Had Pizza), We Then Checked Into Our Rooms, & Went On Our First Safari Ride. We Saw Antelopes, Baboons, Elephants & Different Species Of Birds. After A Few Hours We Headed Back, Went To Get Changed Into Our Swimming Suits When A Baboon Went Into One Of The Girls Room & Scared The Life Out Of Them & Stole Amy’s Tablets. It Then Ran Out & Chased Me, Abby & Flo Into A Corner It Was So Scary. After The Shock Of That We Went For A Swim & Relaxed For About An Hour. We Then Got Changed, Had Dinner. Then Travelled Back To The Village Near The Mosque & Had A Drumming & Dancing Session It Was A Lot Of Fun. We Then Went Back To The Hotel & Went To Bed.

On Saturday We Woke Up Really Early For Our Walking Safari Tour, We Only Saw Elephants This Morning But That Was Amazing, We Was So Close To Them & It Was Such A Surreal Experience. We Then Went Back & Had Our Breakfast Before Checking Out. We Then Drove To The Mosque & Got a Group Photo As We Were Unable Yesterday. We Then Drove 3 Hours To Quickly Have Some Lunch, We Then Drove To “Kintampo Waterfalls” Where We Had A Swim & Had A Lot Of Fun. We Relaxed For A Bit Before Driving To The Monkey Sanctuary Where We Fed The Monkeys Nuts & Bananas & They Climbed All Over Us. Me & Greg Then Decided To Try & Climb A Tree Which We Succeeded. We Then Went To The Gift Shop Where It Is All Hand Made, I Brought Some Ordinaments. We Then Handed Out Gifts To The Local Children. We Then Drove Back To Kumasi To The Volunteer House Where We Had Dinner, Had A Shower After The Long Day We Had, We Also Played Truth & Dare With Everyone Before Going To Bed As We Was All Knackered.

On Sunday I Woke Up Later Than Usual As I Was So Tired, I Got Ready For The Day & Me & Some Of The Volunteers Went To Kumasi Market. It Was A Lot Quieter Today As Sunday’s Are Church Day & Are Known As Family Days So Most Stalls Are Closed. I Brought A Few Gifts For My Family. We Then Headed Home Where I Began Editing My Vlog For The 1st Week Of Ghana, We Then Had Dinner & Then I Had A Shower. I Went To Bed Early As I Was Tired & Had To Be Up Early For Placement The Next Morning.

Next Saturday Part 2 Will Be Uploaded / I Hope You Enjoyed This & Are Looking Forward To Part 2.

Chelsea ❤

My Volunteering Experience In Ghana 2018 – Week 1 In Today's Blog Post, I Will Be Writing About My Adventure To Ghana, Kumasi For Medical & Disable Orphanage Experience With A Company Called Plan My Gap Year, I Went Away With Them For 3 Weeks & Was Such A Surreal Experience.

Mystery, murder and Marlowe

Words Elizabeth Rust; Photo Cat Arwel

Anna Sayburn Lane is an unlikely thriller writer. She’s nice, open and chatty. She may even come across as a bit of an academic – a university lecturer perhaps – but don’t let that friendly façade fool you. She’s a definite “dark soul”, as she claims, who has written a cracking new murderous page turner full of intrigue and mystery.

Unlawful Things is Anna’s first thriller novel. Set within some of South London’s most iconic spots, it follows the character Helen Oddfellow who is trying to find a lost play by the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. We first meet Helen, who is a Southwark and Bankside walking tour guide, being sought by a historian who suggests that Marlowe may have written one last play before he was killed at a boarding house in Deptford.

Intrigued, Helen, who is working on her PhD about Marlowe, joins the historian on the hunt to find the missing manuscript. On her quest she follows clues and deciphers codes, and is tortured along the way, only to learn that other people too are trying to find the play, and that some of those people may not have the purest motives.

Anna first become interested in Christopher Marlowe when she studied him at school, and then met his work again at university where she read history and English. But it wasn’t until she went on a walking holiday with her husband one Easter weekend that she got the creative spark.

The two were retracing the steps of the pilgrims in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. They started their walk near where the Tabard Inn in Southwark would have stood, which is where the Chaucer pilgrims begin their travels.

At Deptford Green, Anna was intrigued by a skull and crossbones on a wrought iron gate at St Nicholas Church. When she ventured inside the church she realised it was where Christopher Marlowe was buried. She thought this was interesting, but didn’t think much about it again as she and her husband continued on their pilgrimage through Blackheath, Dartford and onto Canterbury, along the way telling each other stories and jokes as Chaucer’s pilgrims would have done, until their journey ended in Canterbury opposite the Marlowe theatre.

That’s when she thought: what secrets may Marlowe have known that he could have taken with him from Canterbury to London? Could he have written a secret play? Anna then pored over Marlowe’s life story, researching his extraordinary life. “He’s a real enigmatic character,” Anna says. “Very little is known about him.”

During Marlowe’s theatrical writing career, he was the chief playwright at the Rose Theatre south of the River Thames. This is where his most famous plays would have been performed, including Doctor Faustus. The best kept records about the Rose Theatre are to be found at Dulwich College.

Edward Alleyn, who was considered to be the George Clooney of his time, and would have played Doctor Faustus, founded Dulwich College in 1619. His father-in-law was Philip Henslowe who owned the Rose Theatre. Henslowe kept incredibly detailed notes about the theatre including everything about ticket sales to how much was paid for the nails to build it.

“I wrote to the archivist at Dulwich College who was extremely helpful,” Anna says. “She invited me along to the librarian’s office. I remember there being a big round table. She then unlocked a heavy metal door and brought out a box of papers and a book box with letterheads between Alleyn and his family.”

Anna incorporates this experience at Dulwich College into the novel Unlawful Things. South London born and bred, her family owned a toy shop in Catford for 100 years, Anna now lives in Dulwich, and draws on many of her own life experiences throughout the novel. A journalist by trade, she started her career in the early 1990s on a South London local paper, the News Shopper, covering Lewisham and Greenwich boroughs.

As a journalist she covered hard news stories, including a string of crimes that included the murder of Stephen Lawrence. After his murder there were many anti-racist demonstrations, some of these turning violent when there were clashes with the British National Party which had its headquarters at Welling in Bromley. Anna covered these demonstrations for the newspaper.

“I got caught up in the middle of one of these violent demonstrations. I saw police in protective gear pulling photographers off fences and beating them with batons. Then I got smacked in the back of the head, possibly with a baton, but I’m not 100 per cent sure, it could have been a brick, and ended up in the back of an ambulance with half a dozen other people.”

Her editor made a complaint to the police. The police sent an officer around to her home. “He said in front of my parents, ‘I don’t think a young lady should have been caught up in that situation’. My father turned around and said: ‘If you lot had been doing your job, this wouldn’t have happened’.”

It’s an experience that still haunts Anna. “I was very young. It was my first job. I wish I was better prepared to investigate that story,” she says. But it’s made a real impact on her life. In the novel she uses this experience to describe how when local journalist Nick is caught up in an anti-Islam demonstration at the opening of a mosque in East Greenwich.

“I’m writing about South London. It would be madness to write about South London and pretend that everyone is white, middle class and Christian. It’s a mixed place. It’s important to reflect all the different types of communities there are here. That’s one of the reasons I love South London: it’s a diverse place. That’s what makes it interesting, but it also means that there are sometimes tensions within the community.”

As a novelist Anna also plays on fears. A woman, especially, she explains, may think about what would happen if they were at the mercy of someone else. In the novel Helen escapes from a villain via the roof of her flat. “I was actually locked out on the roof once. I looked at the drainpipe and thought I could climb down it, but I course I didn’t – I might have killed myself if I’d tried! – but as a novelist it’s about thinking about the worst that could happen and how you might escape.”

It took Anna about a year to write the first draft of the novel. She then wrote another draft while taking a couple of creative writing courses. After that she thought it was ready to shop it to an agent. “I got useful feedback, but basically it was I’m going to have to rewrite it again - so I rewrote it again.”

Anna eventually started working with an editor at a publishing house. He suggested she needed a final twist at the end. But unfortunately, when it came to publishing the book, the sales team decided it wasn’t going to sell at big supermarkets.

“Obviously I was disappointed. I eventually thought: no one ever said it’s not a good enough book to publish. People are telling me it’s a difficult book to publish commercially or they can’t quite see how they’re going to market it. Well the person who has the most interest in marketing and publishing this book is me. At which point I decided to self-publish.”

In March 2018 Anna went to the London book fair. She met many people who were self-publishing and learned that it can be done in a very professional way. She then worked with proof readers, copy editors and cover designers to get the book as good as it possibly could be. “I was editing right up until a week or two before I hit publish,” she says. She published it in October 2018.

“Self-publishing is now a decision you can make. Do you want to publish it yourself or do you want to get it published traditionally? Getting something published traditionally is difficult because you’re at the mercy of other people’s decisions. I just got to the point where I had enough. I wanted to give it a go.”

Anyone who is thinking about self-publishing should be prepared to be their own business manager, Anna explains. Anyone can fairly easily stick a homemade book on Amazon and sell it to their parents, but if you want to do it properly – if you want to sell books – you need to make it your profession.

So what’s next for Anna? She’s currently working on a sequel to Unlawful Things. She’s researching the life of William Blake, uncovering all of the mysteries that might surround him. If Unlawful Things is anything to go by, Anna has a bright career ahead of her as a thriller novelist. The twisty end of the novel will keep readers hooked right up until the last page. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t. That’s up for the reader to decide. It’s creative, none the less, and incredibly plausible.

Mole, March, and Moving Out

3/1/2018

It's March, and in about three weeks' time, I am out of here. It's still surreal. In this past week I have been up close and personal with elephants, bought my ticket back to California (April 18—hit me up!), and started to zone out when thinking about the void of what awaits me back in America: unemployment, no health insurance, political turmoil, tax hikes, an unavoidable consequence of crippling debt in every “adulting” maneuver, moving back in with my elderly parents, no prospects...

But at least I'll have access to Netflix, better beer, and hot cheetos to numb myself.

Of course, this is all the business of Future-Diana. Present-Diana has to figure out how to move out (read: get rid of all my empty wine and vodka bottles and holey undergarments at site), close my accounts, say goodbye, and not waste precious bodily fluids on tears when they can be excreted as sweat to contend with this persistent sweltering heat. Might I add: hot season means existing with multiple heat rashes all over one's body, two of which is unfortunately (and perhaps cosmically) located right where one's inner thighs rub and chafe; it is a stretch of time where the sanguine promise of mangoes is met with concessions to an unrelenting desire to lay butt-naked under the fan for all hours of each day. But I digress.

Let's talk about elephants. These majestic, larger-than-my-life creatures were truly a sight to behold. I still can't get over it. It almost feels like a dream. Mole National Park was a slice of some other country and that 1% life; it defied all the normal tropes of hot season, not that being in a high-end resort didn't help with the illusion. It didn't feel sizzling at all; if anything, it rained on our way there! And the area was a homeland of plentiful greenery and forestry. We saw a plethora of different antelope species, birds on birds on birds, a warthog, baboons frolicking away from our direction, and of course, elephants.

Mole National Park is probably the only worthwhile thing that the Northern region has to offer. Upper East has its holy crocodiles and woven baskets/hats. Upper West has its holy hippos. Everywhere else has beaches on beaches on beaches, UNESCO slave castles, monkey sanctuaries, waterfalls, that city aEsThEtIqUe, and (cheaper) fruit diversity. But hey—at least we got Mole National Park! Most volunteers save up for this experience because it is not cheap. Getting into the park, accommodations, safari, tour guides, etc. And it doesn't help that if you want to visit the oldest mosque in Ghana (and one of the oldest in West Africa)—Larabanga—you might get shafted by hustling locals (I don't blame 'em for trying to make a buck, but they have been known to be aggressive with foreigners... for good reason. Not their fault the mosque is a historical landmark). It’s been standing since 1421!! That's incredible. We didn't go to Larabanga since we've seen plenty of mosques, and I had no plans to go and pray inside. It wasn't worth it to us, but I can appreciate its magnitude. We had our eyes on The Prize: ~safari vaca~

I didn't take a lot of photos on the safari since my phone camera is two steps away from tragic. Of the few snaps I did manage, you can perhaps squint and see the silhouette of an antelope or two with the aid of my commentary. We woke up early and climbed into the safari jeep along with a handful of other guests. The majority of them were Britons. Honestly, I spent most of the weekend eavesdropping on people's mundane conversations just so I could listen to them speak in their lovely accents—English, Canadian, Belgian. Yes, please! I would be more than happy to listen to someone read the Bible, as long as they do it in a Scottish accent. This little Belgian nugget asked her mum how elephants celebrated their birthdays, and I near died with glee. The one thing I couldn't get enough of, no doubt, were the elephants.

There is an antelope in here. Seriously. Can you spot it?

Loxodonta africana (African Elephant) Did you know...

There are only two distinct species of elephant left in the world: The African elephant and the Asian elephant

The word “elephant” comes from the Greek word “elephas” which means “ivory”

Elephant behavior is associated with a unique animal intelligence that displays grief, altruism, compassion, self-awareness, play, art and music!

Elephants have two gaits – a walk and a faster gait that is similar to running. They cannot jump, trot or gallop, however they can swim and use their trunk as a snorkel.

The elephant’s gestation period is 22 months – longer than any other land animal in the world

All facts (and more info!) from Africa Geographic

Over an hour spent searching for elephants, and not one revealed itself to us. But it was still lovely to drink Ethiopian coffee and munch on some shortbread cookies during break. We stopped at a river and climbed onto some sort of roofed wooden post overlooking a crocodile hole that could be seen indifferently camouflaged at the bank. After snack the driver Abu gave us all a little piece of bitter bark from a special tree whose name I've long forgotten. The chemicals released from the bark relieved indigestion and malaria symptoms; it could even be brewed into tea! But its novelty wore off the second the acrid zing hit my taste buds. As we headed back to the resort a little crestfallen and elephant-starved, there he was! Right at the entrance! Ahhh, I was elated. Even more so than when the lunch buffet the day before had bottomless olives and feta.

Everyone took an excessive amount of photos while trying to give him his space. He was glorious. The resort also had two man-made watering holes that attracted many of the park's dehydrated inhabitants. That's how many of us gazed on bathing elephants—some of them whole families, with mama and her babies—like voyeurs.

The whole experience was incredible. The accommodations, the views, the food—truly a delight and wayyy beyond what I'm used to in my village but also in my typical lower middle-class life. It was a nice sprinkling of parm on top of this lasagna of a Peace Corps service in Ghana.

Alas, I still have a few good weeks left of service, and I still have a project or two to wrap up. My beekeeping project is finally ready to enter phase 2: honey harvesting. I'm hoping to prep all the materials by this weekend. It's been nearly a year, but we had to restart completely when a parasite infestation decimated our colonies. In the mean time, the local instructor has gouged the prices on me from our original quotes a year ago, much to my disappointment. But at the end of the day, Cedis are Cedis are Cedis, and as long as it helps the beekeepers, I'm content.

My counterpart has been elusive lately, which makes the last month particularly difficult as I attempt to wrap things up with a nice lil' bow. But it's for good reason. He's gotten another job as an evening review teacher with the local nuggets, so that's more income for him! But on top of teaching at the private primary school in the morns, teaching in the PM, and farming the rest of the time, that means there's no time for Peace Corps projects. It sucks, but I'm not going to fight it. The silver lining: I can appreciate all the times he was available and attentive at the start of my service much more, something I took for granted as some PCV's had to deal with an absentee CP from the get-go. He's also been my rock; all my other attempted CP relationships collapsed as people moved away or lost interest. So cheers to you Jacob!

One of the defining traits of PC service is the ephemeral qualities of some relationships and the everlasting bond of others. It's illuminating how, at the end of the day, we're all we've got, but there are people in the gallery looking out for us too.

It’s been another action packed weekend over here in Morocco, but before I get to that I’ll share an update on how things are going with school, volunteering, and other adventures that have been going on. 

First off, school. This past week for school has been the roughest yet, I’ll be completely honest! I had my first 2 exams hit one after the other practically and both were in my toughest subjects. Luckily, I made it through them just fine! We’re coming up on midterms pretty soon so school is definitely going to be getting a bit more time consuming within the next few weeks. 

Next, volunteering. I went to my first day of volunteering last week and I had a blast! I worked with a physical therapist named Ahlame for a 2 hour session with a patient who had just experienced liposuction surgery. Ahlame showed me how she massages the lymphatic knots throughout the patient’s body in order to help ease the pain and swelling in the areas that were operated on. She also gave me a lot of information on the body’s reaction to the surgery, clothing the patient must wear afterwards to apply constant compression, and many other interesting facts. I’m really looking forward to continuing my work with her in the following months. 

One more exciting thing happened this week before we headed off on our weekend adventure and that was a trip to the Hammam. A Hammam is basically a Moroccan spa and I was asked to tag along for a trip to one with Douaa (one of the coordinators here on campus) and a couple of other students. The Hammam consists of 4 different stations starting with a sauna room. When you enter the sauna room, you are hosed down with water and then rubbed down with a smooth, oily soap that separates your dead skin from the rest of your skin as you relax in the steamy heat. After a while in that room, you are taken to another room where you lay on a stone slab and have your skin exfoliated. As they scrub you down to remove the dead skin and hose you off, they apply lotions and oils to your skin as well as wash your hair. After showering, you are taken to a room where you can dry off and relax, lying down, on a couch. Finally, you are taken to a private room where you are given a head to toe massage on both the back and front sides of your body before you can shower once more and complete your Hammam trip. This experience was relaxing as well as informative and interesting as not only did we receive a spa day, but we also learned a bit more about the culture here in Morocco. 

Now on to the main event which was our weekend trip to Marrakech!

The trip began on Thursday night when, at 11 pm, we all gathered onto the buses and headed for the train station. We were headed on a midnight train to Marrakech! Each student was grouped into a room of 4 which had 2 sets of bunk beds packed into a pretty tiny space. Despite that, the ride was enjoyable and interesting to experience (even if many people didn’t sleep very much)! The following morning, Friday, around 9:30 am, we had arrived in Marrakech and were taken to our hotel for unpacking and breakfast before our day ahead. 

After breakfast, our tours for the day began. The first stop was the Majorelles Gardens, a gorgeous expanse of plants and flowers from all around the world in just one spot. It was a delight being given free reign of the gardens just to explore and enjoy the natural beauty of it all. Next was the Menara which was an expansive area filled with groves of olive trees ending in a large, man made lake filed with water from the Atlas Mountains and giant Carp munching on some bread being tossed by visitors. Driving to our next stop, we passed by the Koutoubia Mosque which is the largest mosque in Marrakech and has sister mosques in both Rabat, Morocco and Seville, Spain. Our last stop before lunch was at the original gate to the old city which lead through a street of merchants before emerging before a gorgeous mosque. Behind that mosque, we toured the Tombs of Saadiens which were the remains of tombs for kings, their children, their wives and mothers, and their servants. It was a beautiful place where everyone took in all the scenery with a quiet peace. 

After a pleasant lunch of chicken, couscous, and vegetables, we headed to our next destination which was the Bahia Palace. This palace was broken up into many different areas, even as you reach the main building. There is a courtyard which is then split up into 4 different rooms, each representing a wife of an old king, the largest room belonging to his first wife (Bahia, who the palace is named after). After the palace, we were taken on a quick tour through some of the main streets in the Marrakech medina before we finally emerged into Jema el-Fnaa square in the heart of the city. There, we boarded the bus back to our hotel for a night of delicious food, a refreshing swim in the pool, and a good nights rest. 

Saturday, we ventured off into the Atlas Mountains through the village of Setti Fatma. After driving the bus as far up the mountain roads as we could, we began to walk the last stretch of road to a cafe on the river where we rested for a lunch of couscous, salad, and fruit. The views were stunning and the people were kind as we explored the mountains. After lunch, we ventured back down the mountain to a local argan oil shop where we were shown how argan oil is made. Although we, unfortunately, did not get to see a goat tree where the argan nuts are harvested from, we did get some samples of things like argan oil (for cooking and cosmetic purposes), argan butter (a peanut butter like spread made with the argan nuts), and honey. Our last stop in the Atlas Mountains was at a traditional Berber tribe home were we not only got to experience the home lifestyle itself, but were also treated to mint tea and snacks before we headed on our way back to the hotel. 

That evening, my friends and I decided that instead of going out to the club or the bars for an evening of drinks and parties, we would rather explore the nearby mall. In the mall, we not only found a fun arcade that we rather enjoyed but also some bagels and ice cream which none of us had been able to eat for over a month. Overjoyed, we purchased our food and headed back to the hotel for a night of yummy snacks and card games. 

Finally, Sunday arrived and we checked out of our hotel before heading off for our final day in the city. Our first stop that day was the Badi Palace which consist of the ruins of an old, but elegant palace. From there we could see a view of the whole city including the royal palace off in the distance. We then headed to quite an American style lunch of burgers and fries before being set loose in the medina for a few free hours to shop or relax at a cafe. My friends and I decided to go shop around for a bit and we had a couple of interesting experiences. The first was at a small, woodwork shop where we had stopped in interest at the sight of a young gentleman seated on the ground with a saw in hand and a rod of wood in his toes. He greeted us as he carved the wood and the proceeded to offer us each a wood carved necklace, which he made right in front of us, for free as a souvenir. We then were taken into his shop where he showed us photos of his father and grandfather working in the exact same way he had just been previously before he allowed us space to take a look around the store. 

The second experience happened as we approached the dye market within the medina. In this area, we were pulled aside by a local shop keeper who took us on a tour of his dye factory, showing us how they weave the yarn, dye it, and hang it before it is made into scarves or other clothing items. He then showed us his shop filled with the finished products and proceeded to adorn us with scarves in the traditional Berber fashion before sending us on our way. After wandering into a few more shops, we met up with our group, arrived at the train station, and headed off on another overnight train back to Tangier. 

So overall, it was an amazing week and weekend to experience and I can’t wait to see what’s in store for me next!