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

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