Some of the impressive children of the Pakistani-American community mentioned in the blog entry below - volunteers at a fundraising dinner for Todd Shea's organization CDRS Pakistan at the Islamic Association of Greater Detroit, Troy, Michigan, January 23, 2010.

The shock waves of the earthquake in Haiti reached as far as Seattle, where my life and plans have been thrown out of whack. Whenever I feel especially depressed or overwhelmed, though, I put my problems in perspective by reminding myself how much more disruptive, to put it mildly, the earthquake has been to Haitians.

Why have I been so affected? Any sensitive person would be, but for me it’s directly personal. Haiti was the first place I ever traveled outside the United States, at age 16 in 1982 with my father. How and why that happened, what it led to in my life, and what it means to me now in the earthquake’s aftermath is a long story - so long that I’m now planning to spend the rest of 2010 writing a book about it.

(You can support my independent reporting and public speaking by pre-purchasing that book and/or my other book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip, which will be published this March. See this site’s Books page. Until further notice I will donate 20% of all proceeds to the relief work Todd Shea of CDRS Pakistan is doing in Pakistan and Haiti.)

The earthquake is affecting the conversations I’m having with both the Pakistani-American community and mainstream America, in powerful and poignant ways. In Michigan, where I went January 20-24 to fill in for Todd Shea (who is still in Haiti as I write this), I found myself thanking a Pakistani audience for contributing not only its talents and material resources, but also its impressive children, to help build the new, improved America we all desperately need and yearn for in the 21st century, and invoking the Haitian Creole phrase Tout moun se moun - “All people are people” - to support my contention that Haiti means a great deal to all of us, that we’re all in this together. In Colorado, where I am now, I’m seeing old friends with whom I visited Haiti many years ago and telling audiences at talks arranged months ago about how, for me, the long and winding road to Pakistan ran through - indeed began in - Haiti.

But what does Haiti really have to do with Pakistan? Well, you tell me. This blog entry is an appeal to all Pakistanis, and others, to share your stories of the October 8, 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. Please post comments, or email me, telling where you were when that earthquake happened, what it meant to you - whether as a Pakistani, as a Muslim, or as a human being - how you felt about Pakistan’s and the world’s response to it, its longer-term significance, and similarities or differences you see between it and the earthquake in Haiti. Your stories will help shape and inform the book I’m writing. We’re all in this together. Tout moun se moun.

Bahut shukriya and Mesi ampil,

Ethan

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.

It’s been another long stretch since I posted on this blog, and the reason is that I’ve been kept all too busy finishing the manuscript of Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip, my new book to be published in March. I’m working with a very good, thoughtful and patient editor, and together we’re doing well keeping the project on schedule. But there’s a lot involved in the publishing side of a book, as I’m learning - from selecting a printer, to hiring editors and page and cover designers, to selecting photographs for the cover and inside pages, to planning ahead for launch events and other marketing well into next year. All this while also writing the actual book, plus starting a graduate program in South Asian Studies at the University of Washington, including Urdu language class every morning at 9:30.

Ethan Casey at the Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno, October 2, 2009. Photo by Irfan Ali

I’ve also continued traveling around North America speaking to both Pakistani and mainstream audiences. In September I visited Chicago and Toronto, and over the first weekend in October, Todd Shea and I spoke at an Islamic center and two churches in Fresno, California. Many thanks to my good friend and collaborator Fawad Butt in Chicago, Andy Merchant and the Canada-Pakistan Business Council in Toronto, and Irfan and Monica Ali and Dr. Mohammad Ashraf in Fresno. Those in-person visits help in pre-selling copies of Overtaken By Events as part of a $50 two-book package with the limited remaining copies of Alive and Well in Pakistan, and those sales are helping fund the printing of Overtaken By Events. I’d love to visit your city when I can. In the meantime, learn how you can support my work by visiting the Books page of this site.

My Dawn column has just been cancelled - along with other columns - which is unfortunate but, in a way, well timed. I’m a bit over-committed through the autumn and need to stay focused on finishing up the writing and publishing of Overtaken By Events, planning ahead for its promotion in the spring and summer, and doing well in my classes. I also will be continuing to travel: in November I’ll be visiting Orange County and San Diego (to speak at a fundraiser for Shehzad Roy’s Zindagi Trust - look for more from me on this), Fort Worth (speaking at Texas Christian University), Portland (speaking at the Multnomah County Public Library at 1 p.m. on Saturday, November 21), and Minnesota. To see my full travel/speaking schedule, visit the Calendar page.

On the updated Books page and Store page you’ll learn about several ways you can support this project. We also will soon be offering Pete Sabo’s photographs in fun new inexpensive formats, including postcards, Eid Mubarak cards, and perhaps the first-ever Pakistan-specific fridge magnets. But if you enjoy and appreciate my work and can’t support it in any other way, consider pre-purchasing your copy of Overtaken By Events today. It will be mailed to you in the spring, as soon as it’s published:

I haven’t blogged in a couple of weeks because I’ve been working hard to complete a first draft of the new book I’m writing. Over the summer the project’s deadlines have gone from vague and self-imposed to firm and interdependent. This is helpful, because it concentrates the mind and ensures that things get done. At this point, completing a draft by the end of August will allow me to take a month or so to polish it at relative leisure, before the assembly line of copy editing, design, printing etc. kicks in. This in turn will mean the book will be published on schedule in the spring, hopefully by early April.

By the way, I’m tentatively firm (how’s that for an oxymoron?) on a title: Overtaken By Events: A Pakistani Road Trip. To me, that title and subtitle seem both catchy and accurate. If you have any thoughts on the title, please add a comment to this entry or drop me an email. We’re starting to work on a cover design, and sometime in the next month or two I’ll put that online and start accepting straight pre-orders for Overtaken By Events. In the meantime, you can support the project by purchasing the $50 two-book offer.

I’ve already scheduled quite a bit of public speaking regionally around Seattle and Portland through the autumn, as well as in Texas in mid-November and Colorado in early February, plus Fresno in early October and possibly a trip to Chicago, Toronto and New York in the second half of September. I expect to sell out the remaining stock of Alive and Well in Pakistan at these and other events between now and spring, and this will help cover the costs associated with publishing Overtaken By Events. You can help by either inviting me to your city or group, or simply by purchasing a book or books online (or arranging with me by email to do so by credit card or check).

The title of this entry alludes to something else that’s on my mind. I showed slides of Pete Sabo’s photographs and spoke about our trip last weekend at a home in Vancouver, Washington. Afterwards, several attendees told the host they had enjoyed the evening but wondered what “next steps” I propose. And that’s the thing: I’m not about “next steps”; I’m about honestly narrating stories I hear and experience. This isn’t the same as being “objective” - that ersatz ideal of the American media establishment - but I am a reporter, not a policy wonk. And one of the guiding tenets I’ve long followed in my work is that understanding should always precede both judgment and action.

A Pakistani friend recently urged me to include a chapter at the end of my new book titled “Solutions”. I tried to explain to him that I’m a storyteller, not a solution provider, but he insisted: “You don’t have to change what you’ve already written - just add a chapter about solutions.”

Well, that’s what Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Fritz did in his otherwise excellent book about refugees worldwide in the 1990s, Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World. Fritz lost me with his last chapter, which seemed dictated by a very prosaic-minded publisher and laid out his recommendations for US policy on refugees. Policy is important, but so many people are already writing and talking about it, ad nauseum. And policy recommendations become dated very quickly, because political situations are ever changing - especially these days. Where I believe I can be useful is by doing what I’m inclined and built to do: helping change the way the global public sees and thinks about Pakistan, by simply and honestly narrating my experiences and encounters there.

This creates a different, fuller, more accurate context than the blinkered and alarmist context portrayed in most media outlets. As Todd Shea likes to say, on television Americans see 2% of Pakistan 100% of the time. What I’m about is showing at least some of the remaining 98% - people getting by, doing interesting and ordinary human things: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Solutions are another matter. I hope we find some, and I’d like to help. But Pakistan isn’t only, or even primarily, a problem for US or even Pakistani policymakers. First and foremost it’s a country where people live, and my main role is to tell some of their stories.

All that said, I do plan to include in the new book - and add to this website - a page listing Pakistan-based and Pakistani-led organizations and resources that I admire and recommend.