It’s been nearly a month since I posted here, but it’s been a busy month. Since March 17 I’ve been to Haiti and back and have also spoken on behalf of my new book, Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip, in Tampa and San Jose, with other engagements scheduled in April and May in Seattle, San Diego, Santa Monica, San Francisco, and other cities. (I plan to visit the East Coast, Colorado and the Midwest in the fall)

Overtaken By Events is now in print, with about 3000 copies (out of 5000 in the first printing) currently sitting in my garage. I want the hundreds of you who pre-purchased it to know two things: that I’m grateful for your crucial early support, and that your copy will be in the mail to you within the next two weeks. I’m currently finalizing some printed cards that I want to enclose with pre-purchased copies along with a handwritten personal thank-you note from me, and to use for other purposes. Those should be ready by the end of next week.

If you haven’t yet purchased Overtaken By Events or Alive and Well in Pakistan, or pre-purchased my Haiti book in progress (to be published next spring), please support my work by doing so, from this site’s Books page.

I have plans to revamp this website, and I also will be launching a new companion www.ethancasey.com site to promote my public speaking and as a more appropriate long-term online home for my Haiti book and other projects. Stay tuned for more on these over the coming weeks.

In the meantime, if you’re on Facebook, please join the new Ethan Casey fan page being developed by my friend Asim Razzaq in Silicon Valley, which will be another way to keep up with my work:

http://www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans

Facebook is an excellent way to spread the word about creative projects and independent writing around the Internet and the world, so please do help in this way if you can.

Many thanks,

Ethan

Ethan Casey with Todd Shea, Dr. Farzana Naqvi (front row, second from left), Dr. Salman Naqvi (back row, next to Todd), and other members of a Pakistani-led group that provided medical relief after the earthquake in Haiti, at a reunion in Irvine, California, February 28, 2010.

If I haven’t posted a blog entry in more than two weeks, it’s because - as usual - I’ve been busy with other things. I spent a successful week in Colorado in early February, speaking at two churches and three colleges, including the Air Force Academy. And I just returned from a busy weekend in Orange County, California, whose main event was a fundraiser for Todd Shea’s organization SHINE Humanity (see its excellent new website). The short speech I was able to give there was very gratifying, because I’m very proud of and grateful to Todd as well as Pakistani friends for responding so promptly, intelligently and compassionately to the earthquake in Haiti. Haiti is a very old friend of mine, so my gratitude is personal. Here’s a short excerpt:

Todd is not the only American in this room who has worked in Haiti since the earthquake. I want to single out two others: Dr. Farzana Naqvi and Dr. Salman Naqvi. The story of how Farzana, Salman and others have stepped up as physicians, as Muslims, as Pakistanis who know the devastation an earthquake can cause, and not least as Americans, is a powerful message that the American public needs to hear.

I’ve published the full speech on this website under the “Speaking” tab, along with some photos that I showed that evening.

My new book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip is at the printer and will (inshallah) be published later this month. I’m looking forward to introducing it at events in Chicago on March 27 and Tampa on March 28. More on those, and other travel and promotion, as the publication date nears. If you haven’t yet purchased your copy, now is a great time to ensure that your copy comes signed and with a personal letter from me by pre-ordering it from this website. I’ll be sitting down in early April to send out all pre-ordered copies.

More soon!

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

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

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

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

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