My best-laid plan to blog reliably once a week on Tuesdays in 2010 is on hold until further notice, since the earthquake in Haiti. I’m in the middle of a very encouraging, and deeply moving, four-day visit to Michigan as I write this, which I’ll write about in more detail in another post, hopefully this coming week.

In the meantime I want to recommend two articles for you to read. One is by Orange County Register columnist Yvette Cabrera. It’s headlined “Pakistani Americans in OC helping Haiti,” and here’s an excerpt:

When the Haitian quake struck last week, Naqvi said he and fellow board members of the quirkily named Sustainable Healthcare Initiatives Now Empowering, a.k.a. SHINE Pakistan, (they’re the locals who help finance Shea’s work in Pakistan), rallied behind Shea’s decision to fly to Haiti, though none of them is Haitian. They also backed his plan to set up 10 urgent care facilities around the periphery of the capital, to help those fleeing Port-au-Prince.

The tragic images out of Haiti remind Naqvi of Pakistan – and that, in turn, reminds Naqvi that suffering knows no nationality.

“We can feel it… We’ve gone through it over there (in Pakistan),” says Naqvi, who wanted to get on a plane to Haiti last week, but has been delayed because he recently became an American citizen and has not yet received his passport from the government.

Please click on the link, read the article, and share it with others. The more widely read this article is, the more supportive Yvette’s editors will be of her efforts to continue covering Pakistani Americans and their work, including possibly traveling to Haiti with Dr. Salman Naqvi and others from Orange County.

The other article is a good New York Times op-ed by Mark Danner, who has written about Haiti before:

HAITI is everybody’s cherished tragedy. Long before the great earthquake struck the country like a vengeful god, the outside world, and Americans especially, described, defined, marked Haiti most of all by its suffering. Epithets of misery clatter after its name like a ball and chain: Poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. One of the poorest on earth. For decades Haiti’s formidable immiseration has made it among outsiders an object of fascination, wonder and awe. Sometimes the pity that is attached to the land — and we see this increasingly in the news coverage this past week — attains a tone almost sacred, as if Haiti has taken its place as a kind of sacrificial victim among nations, nailed in its bloody suffering to the cross of unending destitution.

And yet there is nothing mystical in Haiti’s pain, no inescapable curse that haunts the land. From independence and before, Haiti’s harms have been caused by men, not demons. …

Kamala Harris and Dr. Asif Mahmood, Whittier, California, November 7, 2009. Photo by Dr. Salman Naqvi.

I’d like to offer a sketch of the several interesting and encouraging Pakistani-American events I attended last weekend in Southern California, rather than wait until I have time (that I might not actually have any time soon) to gather quotes and write the fuller, newspaper column-type blog entry that the old-school newsman in me thinks I really should write. I’ll be at Texas Christian University all next week - will post about that too, inshallah - so I’d better post about California now.

I flew down from Seattle on Friday and took part in these events:

• a fashion show featuring the work of leading Pakistani designer Amir Adnan, put on by the Irvine Pakistani Parents Association to benefit the Irvine Public Schools Foundation. In her remarks from the stage, my friend Anila Ali said that she was inspired to found the IPPA by the example of the well-established Irvine Korean Parents Association. Anila believes it’s important “to get Pakistani parents mobilized and engaged in their child’s education so that they can give back to the community they live in.”

• a fundraiser in a private home in Whittier for San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, who is running in next spring’s Democratic primary for Attorney General of California. Among the friends I wasn’t surprised to run into was Dr. Asif Mahmood, who believes strongly in political involvement as a way of enhancing the Pakistani community’s presence and standing in US society.

• a fundraiser in San Diego for the Zindagi Trust, a very admirable education initiative in Pakistan founded by musical star Shehzad Roy. Shehzad and his wife Salma were in San Diego, as were my Chicago-based friends Sadia and Tauheed Ashraf, who are very actively promoting Zindagi Trust around the US these days.

Keep on truckin' near Islamabad, available as a fridge magnet. Photo by Pete Sabo.

The common thread in all three events is Pakistani Americans, who are as American as they are Pakistani, putting themselves on the line and addressing concerns we all share, from public schools to state politics to improving education (and thereby combatting extremism) in Pakistan.

P.S. I’ve printed another Pakistan fridge magnet (see photo at right). I sold a few of each magnet in San Diego and will be taking them to Texas, Oregon and Minnesota later this month. Am hoping soon to be offering them online, along with both of my books and a few other fun things.

Waking up this morning to learn of more than 80 people dead in a bomb attack on a market in Peshawar, the title of my new book, Overtaken By Events, never seemed more apt. All too apt. I can’t even remember all of the string of seven or eight violent events in Pakistan over the past few weeks - I should have written them down and kept a timeline.

What I’m trying to do, in my books and this blog, is to keep a longer-range and longer-term perspective on Pakistan, to look at the country, and listen to its people, with an attitude of human and personal sympathy, and to document events and impressions on the fly in a way that will be both relevant and helpful a year or two, or five or ten years, from now. I think I succeeded in that in my first book, Alive and Well in Pakistan.

I have to do my Urdu homework this morning before class, but I felt a need to post something. Here’s a powerful quote from my long March 2009 conversation with Ghazala Minallah, a woman in Islamabad who has been at the forefront of the lawyers’ movement for the past 2-3 years:

“What should I say to Americans who say, ‘Well, this is all very interesting, but what does it have to do with Osama bin Laden and the War on Terror and the fact that Pakistan is a naughty country?’”

“You can tell them that Osama bin Laden and all these other naughty people are playing havoc with us, more than they are with the Americans. We are at least as concerned about it, if not more so, than they are. And if they would only wake up and kindly pressurize their own government not to meddle in our affairs, and let us get on with it.

“And to look at it from the point of view of the people of Pakistan, for God’s sake. We want democracy over here. We do not want military rulers. We do not want terrorism. We want peace. We do not want mullahs ruling us either. The majority of this country, unlike what the West believes – they believe that the middle to lower class would not have a problem with maulvis. You just go out in the street, and you ask the people what they would think about maulvis ruling them. People may be religious, but that does not mean that they want maulvis ruling them. And they are sick to their teeth of terrorism. Because they’re the ones who are affected!”

As many of my friends know, I have an extensive collection of refrigerator magnets from around the world and America. Whenever I go somewhere new in my public speaking, I make sure to get a fridge magnet. Whenever a friend goes somewhere interesting, I ask him or her to bring me back a magnet. If I speak at a university - as I did at Pomona College in Southern California last February, for example - I specify, only half in jest, that my fee is $X, plus one t-shirt (size XL) and one fridge magnet.

The Moghal-era Badshahi mosque in Lahore, available as a fridge magnet. Photo by Pete Sabo.

I have magnets from everywhere from Cincinnati to Singapore, Pittsburgh to … well, not Pakistan, because there doesn’t seem to be such a thing as a Pakistan fridge magnet.

It dawned on me recently that I’m in a position to rectify that. I think it’s a shame that there aren’t scenic and touristy fridge magnets of Pakistan, which I’ve known for 15 years as a pleasant and interesting country to visit. So, in addition to prints and cards and other formats, I’m experimenting by having fridge magnets made from some of Pete Sabo’s great Pakistan photos. 10 copies each of the first two have arrived, and I’ll be taking them with me next month to Orange County and San Diego (Nov 5-9), TCU in Fort Worth (Nov 17-19), Portland (Nov 21-22), and Minneapolis (Nov 27-29).

Monkeys on the road to Murree, available as a fridge magnet. Photo by Pete Sabo.

These 4″ x 5 1/2″ magnets will sell for $5 each, and proceeds will support my ongoing work of writing and speaking about the human dimension of Pakistan. Look soon on the Gallery page of this website for an enhanced online store offering magnets and much more!  :-)

I had the pleasure of spending all last week with Todd Shea of CDRS Pakistan in Silicon Valley, Yosemite National Park (where we visited an annual Muslim summer camp), and San Francisco (where we both spoke at the annual APPNA conference). Here’s a picture of me and Todd at Yosemite, taken with my cell phone by some guy we met. If you haven’t already, be sure to read the recent New York Times article about Todd and his work in Pakistan.

From today’s New York Times:

Here’s a three-minute video of me and Fawad Butt, commenting on our visit last visit as guests of the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh.

Until the next printing, whose timing I don’t control, a very limited number of copies of Alive and Well in Pakistan are available. I’m making these available in a special offer with the sequel, which I’m currently writing, for US$50 including US shipping. The first book will be shipped to you immediately, the second as soon as it’s published in 2010.

You also can make a $100 contribution to support the Alive and Well in Pakistan project and receive a copy of either book (your preference) as a token of my thanks:

Other options for supporting this project financially will be offered soon.