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.

Ethan Casey with Pakistani friends in Minnesota, November 28, 2009. Photo by Munir Abid.

Well, 2009 is finally over and it’s time to turn the page, with big plans and hopes for 2010. As my mother likes to say, life is a constant leaf-turning process. It’s an anxious and melancholy moment in our world, but we’ve gotten used to those, and I think the only effective way to combat the otherwise inevitable, and all too understandable, despair and paralysis is to insist on living in hope – by which I mean not just sitting around choosing to feel hopeful, but turning hope into meaningful and concrete action.

For me, 2009 was all about researching and then writing my new book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. It feels as though it’s been a long, hard slog, but at the moment I’m feeling tired in a pleasant and gratifying way, with a big load off my shoulders. If you’re on my email list, you know that throughout the fall I was writing the book while also taking daily Urdu language classes and starting a master’s degree program in South Asian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I live, as well as traveling a lot to promote the book project in both mainstream and Pakistani communities across the United States and Canada. November in particular was a crazy month for me, with trips to Orange County and San Diego; Portland; Fort Worth (speaking along with my colleague Fawad Butt at Texas Christian University); and Minneapolis/St. Paul.

The point of all the travel has been to raise awareness of and support for the book ahead of its publication this March, and the point of the book is to encourage – and to participate in – a much-needed conversation between the Muslim world and the West, and specifically between Pakistanis and Americans. From fifteen years’ worth of direct personal experience of Pakistan, I know not only that it’s a country that faces severe challenges – everyone knows that – but that those challenges are different from what most Americans suppose them to be. And I know that Pakistanis are resourcefully rising to the occasion in meeting them, and other Americans need to know that too. And they’re challenges faced by Pakistani people – parents who worry about their children’s education, health and safety, for example, just as American parents do, geopolitics and religion notwithstanding. But of course those things can never quite be notwithstanding; they impinge too much on all of us, especially these days, especially in Pakistan.

If 2009 was, for me, the year of the book, 2010 will be the year of the blog. It’s understandable enough that I haven’t posted on this blog since November, but with the book finished and its publication coming soon, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to blog weekly. Authors I admire, such as James Howard Kunstler, whose important book The Long Emergency I recommend highly, do this very effectively. From reading Kunstler weekly, I’ve come to see how a blog can supplement and complement a book and vice versa. If, as I say, it’s all about initiating and continuing a needed conversation, then there can be few better ways to do that today than by blogging frequently and on a reliable schedule. For several reasons, I plan to publish a new entry every Tuesday.

I’ll be doing other things too, including plenty more travel around North America. My travel schedule is public on Google calendar as “Ethan Casey’s travel calendar,” or visit the Calendar page of this site. I’ll be in Southern California in late January, visiting several colleges in Colorado in the first half of February, in Texas (Dallas, Houston and hopefully Austin) in the third week of March, and in San Jose and Fresno in early April. If I’m coming to your city – or if you’d like me to – please drop me a note.

Ethan Casey in Port Angeles, Washington, September 12, 2009. Photo by Jim Dries.

There are several concrete ways you can support my work. By all means, invite me to your city if you can – and, if your group’s budget is limited, we can work together creatively to make it worth everyone’s while. I’m starting to schedule my calendar for fall 2010 now. Also, now is a great time to pre-purchase your copy of Overtaken By Events, if you haven’t yet. There are buttons in the upper right corner of this page, and you can buy it singly, or in a package with my previous book Alive and Well in Pakistan, or multiple copies to give to family and friends. All pre-sold copies will be shipped, with a thank-you note from me, in late March or early April, immediately after the book is published.

You also can help by sending the link to this or any other blog entry far and wide, and by otherwise encouraging people you know to visit this website and follow my work.

That’s all for this week – talk to you again next Tuesday!