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!

Dr. Shahnaz Khan (center), a family practice physician in Zephyrhills, Florida and co-chair of the Human Development Foundation, with Ethan Casey at an HDF location at Kharol War outside Lahore, April 2009

Dr. Shahnaz Khan, co-chair of the Human Development Foundation, has sent me this message:

Pakistanis all over the world were mobilized into action. I decided that sitting in front of the TV and watching the disaster and crying was not the way I wanted to contribute.

Two nations, two earthquakes, one humanity

I have been thinking about the earthquake in Haiti. It reminded me of October 8, 2005, when a similar disaster hit Pakistan. I watched the images on the television of the crumbling buildings, people trying to dig out their loved ones from under the rubble with their bare hands, children buried under school buildings and crying for help, people in shock and disbelief. The disaster unfolded slowly, and the number of dead, injured, maimed and homeless kept creeping up slowly.

I kept thinking: How will this poor nation cope with it? How will life be ever normal again? But then I also saw the images of the rest of the nation jumping into action. Peeple all over the country collecting food, clothing, blankets, tents and money. Trucks filled with supplies lining the roads and almost chocking the entry and exit points. True, it was chaotic and disorganized, but it was also how the nation found a way to heal itself. People coming together; victims feeling they were not alone. If nature had been cruel, human beings were kind and generous.

Pakistanis all over the world were mobilized into action. I decided that sitting in front of the TV and watching the disaster and crying was not the way I wanted to contribute. So, as the co-chair of the Human Development Foundation, I called an emergency conference call. Everyone pretty much had the same feeling. There were some initial reservations. HDF is not a relief organization; its charter is sustainable development. But then I said, “When the house is on fire, you put out the fire first before you decorate it.” So HDF officially became a part of the community of organizations and individuals who were trying to help the victims.

My heart goes out to the people of Haiti. But I take comfort in the fact that the rest of the world is not going to stand by and leave them feeling alone. And yes, there is chaos and disorganization as is almost expected in a third world country, but still people are better off with it than without it. I also hope that people of Pakistani origin are feeling the pain and doing their best to help out.

I think back to the Pakistan earthquake and know that life is not and perhaps never will be normal again for some of the victims. But what frustrates me is that the same people who get all energized during the acute stage of a natural disaster are mostly indifferent to what happens to these people in the longer run. Children who lost their parents, families who lost their breadwinners - what is happening to them? Perhaps there are neighbors and some charitable people who are still supporting them, but no one really knows. There is no systematic follow-up or data available. Pakistan does not have an organized welfare system.

I am afraid the same will happen to Haitians. Hundreds of NGOs who are there, and without whose help Haiti will have a difficult time getting over the acute stage of this disaster, will move on in a few months, because people stop donating after a while and the resources dry out.

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.

Todd Shea of CDRS Pakistan is on the ground in Haiti leading what is, as far as I can tell, the single most intelligent relief initiative since the earthquake last Tuesday. (Read the joint statement from Todd and me titled “How Pakistanis Can Help Haiti - and Why”.) He has opened a supply route for medical and relief supplies across the border from Santo Domingo, capital of the neighboring Dominican Republic. Todd’s latest email tells why his effort needs your support NOW - even if you’ve already, and admirably, donated to the Red Cross or Partners in Health or Medecins sans Frontieres:

I’m sad to report that the situation in Haiti is acute and worsening. People are beginning to get even more desperate and frustrated. The leadership of the Government of the U.S. and its partner nations are ”forming up” great things that will take shape in a week or so down the road, but they really need to quickly work through the current paralyzing logistical challenges. Many large agencies are failing to think selflessly and share their financial, operational resources with smaller but super-effective agencies. This attitude is not helping anyone. Quite frankly, I would have thought some of them would have learned an important  lesson from other disasters where some of the same mistakes were made.

Here’s the bottom line: If things don’t start improving very rapidly, then life and limb-threatening infections and deadly dehydration and unnecessary conflict will likely emerge on a scale that has the potential of becoming rampant and widespread. The correct option would be to stage multiple and overwhelmingly robust and well-managed multi-national supply lines and helicopter sorties using locations and bases other than Port au Prince airport, particularly from the Dominican Republic through the border near Jumani. It’s a darn good road compared to the roads in the Pakistan earthquake-affected areas that I’ve been traveling on for the past four years. Distributing aid from several points over a more widespread area can reach far more people far more quickly.

Why should Pakistanis in particular be doing this? There are several good reasons, including your experience of a similarly devastating earthquake in 2005 and the fact that many of you in the U.S. are highly skilled physicians. The Prophet Mohammed (pbuh) answered the “Why?” question best, though, when he said, “He who sleeps on a full stomach whilst his neighbor goes hungry is not one of us” and “A believer wants for his brother what he wants for himself.”

I’m proud to say that quite a few Pakistanis of my personal acquaintance are already responding. Dr. Salman Naqvi, Laila Karamally and others are taking the lead in Southern California. Tahmena Bokhari in Toronto is leveraging her new position as Mrs. Pakistan World to recruit volunteers and raise funds and awareness for a relief trip from Canada soon. Speaking of Canada, my friends at the Pakistan-Canada Association in Vancouver have launched a fundraising initiative locally and on their website. In an email exchange Raza Mirani, the PCA’s general secretary, told me: “This Haiti situation has really hit home, and this is what I see myself doing community work for.  Not putting on events or having dinners. If we can’t help out in this type of  situation, then what are we good for?”

What should you be doing, right now? For starters please, now, give money through this link - any small or larger amount - to support the relief convoy Todd Shea of CDRS Pakistan has established from Santo Domingo. Time is of the essence.

And in the weeks and months ahead, Haitians will continue to need our help and attention and active human sympathy - just as Pakistanis need and deserve the human sympathy from Americans that is the purpose of this blog and my books. You can be sure that as I continue to write and speak around North America, I’ll be continuing to call Haiti to your attention - beginning later this week in Detroit and Ann Arbor, where I’ll be covering for Todd on several speaking engagements. Batool Raza of the South Asian Awareness Network at the University of Michigan told me by phone last night how proud she and others at SAAN felt of Todd when they learned he was dropping everything - including his commitment to speak at their annual conference - to go to Haiti. Let’s all express our pride in Todd by supporting his crucial relief convoy concretely with money, supplies, and our volunteer time.

Postscript: I’m planning to set aside a portion of the proceeds from sales of my books in a fund to make donations to the Pakistani nonprofit organizations whose work in Pakistan I support. For now, because of the urgency of the Haiti situation, I’ll be donating 20% of the retail price of all sales of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events to Todd Shea’s emergency relief work in Haiti.

For more than twenty years travel has been a purpose, a vocation, for me. More than a pastime or a job requirement, it’s simply what I do, and I could tell you why. Maybe I will sometime. For now suffice it to say that, as a reporter, I endorse my colleague Anthony Davis’s observation that “There’s no substitute for the sniff on the ground.” Reading books and crunching numbers are necessary activities, but they can’t substitute for the simple act of showing up and bearing witness.

Which is why I’ve always kept a wary lookout for anything that might limit my freedom to travel. In the 1990s, that time of innocence and excess, I cherished my blue passport and made good use of it as I bounced incessantly around Asia. The world was my oyster in those pre-9/11 days, and I saw every reason to hurry up and explore it. In the middle-class, middle American world I come from, many people - albeit, to their credit, not my parents - tend to see youthful wanderlust in terms of “getting it out of your system” before “settling down.” Put money in the bank now, is the idea, and then when you retire you’ll be able to travel (i.e. go on cruises and/or drive around America in an RV). I considered that mentality myopic and parochial even at the time. Now I really do. As I told a younger journalist colleague recently, the older I get, the more I feel vindicated in the reckless choices I made in my youth.

The thing is, if you get with the program and keep your nose clean, you don’t get rewarded in any terms that I value. More directly to the point, the only good reason to have freedom is to use it, now. Later, you might not have it anymore.

All of which is to say that I’m very glad I did as much traveling as I did in my twenties and thirties, because I wonder how free I, or anyone, will be to travel in the looming future. In Asia, in the good old days, I learned that not only was my blue passport an asset to cherish, but so was my white skin. There were times when I was insouciant and oblivious about it, but I did figure it out. It’s not fair, but it’s true, and it’s a privilege I no longer take lightly. Along with the relative freedom I enjoy - to be blunt, freedom to board airplanes with relatively little fear of being subjected to a humiliating interrogation or full-body search - comes a responsibility to try to speak for people who can’t or, out of fear, won’t speak for themselves.

As I’ve traveled in recent years among the affluent, law-abiding, family values-ish, even boringly suburban denizens of Pakistani North America, I’ve been told many stories, privately, about what they go through when they travel into and out of, and around, the United States. I might compile some of these stories sometime, but for now suffice it to say that not many white people I know would stand for what brown people - U.S. and Canadian citizens - put up with routinely and largely without complaint.

Now, since the “underwear bomber” was foiled on Christmas Day at the airport in Detroit - after inexplicably having been allowed to board without screening in Amsterdam - the New York Times reports:

WASHINGTON — Citizens of 14 nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, who are flying to the United States will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that was imposed after the Christmas Day bombing plot, Obama administration officials announced Sunday.

But American citizens, and most others who are not flying through those 14 nations on their way to the United States, will no longer automatically face the full range of intensified security that was imposed after the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight, officials said.

There’s plenty more to say about this development, and I’ll be sure to continue covering the issue of travel restrictions in this weekly blog. For now, I have to get ready for my daily Urdu class, so I’ll leave it at this: It’s all well and good for white people to say things like, “I don’t mind a bit of inconvenience if it’s making us safer” or “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you shouldn’t have anything to fear,” but we don’t know - literally, we don’t know - what brown people are going through. And it really is largely a matter of skin color; these are in many cases our fellow U.S. and Canadian citizens and taxpayers. The least we white people can do is to cultivate an awareness of our position of privilege, and that awareness should teach us a measure of humility.

As usual, the prophetic voices of our time come from marginal communities, where experience tends to be all too directly edifying. Here’s what Haroon Khan, trustee of the Pakistan-Canada Association and the Al-Jamia mosque in Vancouver, said on the Bill Good Show on CKNW radio on January 6: “The amount of security that we’re facing is quite intense, and the full-body scanning really represents a tremendous intrusion on the privacy of all of us in the name of security. … It’s really a dangerous precedent that’s being set and it’s a line that, once we cross it, I’m afraid it’s just the beginning.”

Bon voyage! I welcome your comments on this and any other posts on this blog.