Last Days and the Problems of Pakistan

My Islamabad days coming to an end. This has very much been on my mind: the process of conclusion and preparing for the next phase. It seems that I am not the only person concerned with my departure; others are aware and want to talk about what this means.

My hairdresser, a foreigner who’s been working in Pakistan for five years, asked about my experience in Pakistan. After I shared he asked “but aren’t you going to miss having people do everything for you? The driver, the cook, the cleaners... When I go home, I really hate having to clear the dishes from the table.” When I explained we had someone come to clean our house twice a week he exclaimed in his hairdresser’s animated best “You did not have the full Pakistani experience! That’s the best thing about living here! You can have someone do everything for you!” Indeed you can.

Our guards found out that I am leaving. “I know it’s your last day in Pakistan, madam.” said Haider Rahman after he handed me the receipts from the laundry. “Madam, I have a request” he looked away in the manner of a 10 year old boy who got in trouble on the playground. He waited until I urged him to continue. Then pointing at the other guard seated a few feet away “Madam, me and my friend live in Pakistan.” Hmmm... where is this going? “We live below poverty line.” Again he looked at me, waiting for a cue. “Can you help us out Ma’am, so we can build better our family’s house or improve the education of our cousins?” Oh... I see. “No. I can not give you any money.” I did not apologize. “It’s OK, Madam, never mind” he said smiling bravely and backing away from me. Perhaps I was too abrupt.

The woman who comes to clean our house, is same age as I, has two children, drives a car and speaks English unusually well. Janniaz, one of the driver’s has observed that our “female servant is very rich.” Rehana knows our time in Pakistan is drawing to a close and has asked me several times to recommend her to other foreigners, “to anyone [ I ] know at the embassy.” Like most Pakistanis she overestimates my sphere of influence. She likes to share with me about the problems of her country. She told me about a disabled neighbor boy who can’t go to school. “Please, Barbora, tell people on your project that we need to get education for these people. He has not even a chance to be a sweeper. Nobody wants to take care of him.” When I expressed frustration about the frequency of loadshedding (power blackouts) she informed me that “this is the VIP area and loadshedding happens regularly. In area for normal people power goes off any time of day, for long periods.” Last week we had brown water coming out of our faucet, and again seeing my frustration she explained that at her house “now in the summer time there is very little water from CDA (capital development authority). So we call water truck and buy from him water for one week for 900 rupees (about $12, and about what Rehana makes in the 3 hours she cleans for us). This water is only for washing ourselves, our clothes and dishes. I have to be careful about using it. I don’t do laundry very much.” This week she shared about another “main problem in Pakistan” not related to education or power or water issues. I suggested that Rehana gives her phone number to the real estate agent who brings people here now to show the house. Maybe some of his clients could use her services. “No, Barbora, I do not want to give my phone number to any Pakistani man. Pakistani men are always bothering Pakistani women. Now you are leaving and I can tell you. Like that man next door who is always staring at me!” she pointed frustrated toward the house next door. I knew exactly whom she was referring to. The driver from next door, who aside from one or two errands a day, and the bi-daily car wash, does nothing except squat on a grassy lawn in front of the house, or loiter in front of our gate and stare into our windows. “Every time, I wash the dishes, he is always looking at me. When I get out of the car, he is always looking at me, and he bothers me when I walk by him. Pakistani men think they can treat women any way they want. I do not want to give my information to any Pakistani man. They would bother me and my family. That is the main problem in Pakistan.”

Right now, apparently, the biggest problem in Pakistan is Facebook. Protesters are out in front of the Parliament, not demanding clean drinking water, electricity for their homes, or education for their children. They are demonstrating against sacrilegious imagery on Facebook (which only 1% of Pakistan’s population uses). Perhaps this is the main problem in Pakistan.

Eight Days

Eight days left of my stay in Pakistan. In eight days, it will be exactly 5 months that I’ve been here with Tom, and it will also be when I will return to the US.

Only eight days left, to conclude one chapter in life, one chapter of our marriage. Such transitions are important, and should be commemorated, marked somehow. Sure, one can throw a party, but there must be other ways to prepare us for the end of one cycle and beginning of another? Without marking or acknowledging these transitions, our life would be like one long canal carrying water from point A to point B. But life is much richer and more complex, and hopefully in the process of getting from point A to point B we change and transform who we are; from a brook, to a stream, to river which merges with larger and larger rivers, until finally it becomes the ocean. I like this metaphor, because it implies that we get bigger. We get more expansive. As we navigate each life change, we are able to grow and expand. Also, like the water, we become deeper and more still.

In the eight days still left in Pakistan, while I continue to recover from typhoid fever, I shall mark the end of one chapter and prepare for the next.

Call to Prayer

“Allahu-akbar!” (God is Great!)

The call to prayer. Oddly, one of the things in Pakistan that have brought me comfort. “Oddly” because I am not Muslim, nor Christian, nor religious for that matter. But there is a certain quality to the call, the muezzin’s voice inviting and pleading at the same time.

It inspires a similar feeling to one I had years ago while in Oaxaca for a summer. Dealing there with bouts of illness, loneliness and various existential crises of the mid twenties, I sought solace in churches. The silent, cavernous structures, brought me peace and stillness. I had been brought up areligious, atheist, and this behavior, these experiences were incongruous with my upbringing. And yet they brought me solace.

There is, in the heartfelt call to prayer, in the solemnity of a church, something that grabs at me. Something that grabs, right at the center of my chest, and says: this is home. This is home. And the breath gets pulled inside by my lungs, almost involuntarily swirling right into my core, expanding and resting there. And for a brief moment, just before the exhale, I know: this is home.

Baba Nityananda, a holy man of India, once said: Heart is the the hub of all holy places. Go there and roam in it.

I can’t quite roam there yet. But I can steel glimpses.

“Allahu-Akbar!”

The muezzin’s voice carries from an amplifier just a few feet from our windows. It is an invitation to pursue the breath into the center of my being, and there find home, just briefly catching the holiness of it. And then I exhale. It is an invitation I did not expect from Pakistan, the invitation to my own heart.