Why do I always seek to understand people who will never explain themselves to me? Why does it mean that much to me to know why an ex employee would purposely leave me out of events that I should be a part of? Why does it mean that much to me when people whom I thought were my friends, and with whom I took a step too far, but without force, not wish to associate themselves with me on any level anymore? Why do I still miss someone who has obviously wronged me by accusing me of something I didn’t do? Why do I care when a new friend judges me for a mistake which has nothing to do with her, but which questions my personal morals? Why should such people be allowed to diminish my day that started out well because I got free tickets to a concert I have been dying to see?
This is me.
This is my heart bleeding.
This is my soul slowly dying with every step that I take away from each one of you.
May God's Love be with you Always.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
All Good Things Come to an End
I'm sure we have all felt at some point in our lives that the song we hear over the radio or which a friend recommends just describes how we feel about something or someone. I have many such songs that I no longer need to write a diary. I just play a song and I am instantly brought back to a time and place in my mind's eye.
Offlate I have been listening to "All Good Things (Come to an End)" by Nelly Furtado. The lyrics go like this:
(Lyrics by N.Furtado/C.Martin)
Dogs were whistling a new tune
Barking at the new moon
Hoping it would come soon so that they could die
Honestly what will become of me
I don't like reality
It's way too clear to me
But really life is daily
We are what we don't see
We miss everything daydreaming
Flames to dust
Lovers to friends
Why do all good things come to an end
Traveling I always stop at exits
Wondering if I'll stay
Young and restless
Living this way I stress less
I want to pull away when the dream dies
The pain sets it and I don't cry
I only feel gravity and I wonder why
And the sun was wondering if it should stay away
for a day until the feeling went away
And the clouds were dropping and
the ................. the rain forgot how to bring salvation
The dogs were whistling a new tune barking at the new moon
hoping it would come soon so that they could die
(To listen to the song and watch the video, click http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j5_7V0DMkA)
I suppose it summarises how I often feel after a trip or after a sweet but brief affair in the most unexpected places and at the most unexpected time.
The lines:
"Traveling I always stop at exits
Wondering if I'll stay
Young and restless
Living this way I stress less
I want to pull away when the dream dies
The pain sets it and I don't cry
I only feel gravity and I wonder why."
...seem most apt.
I think it's time to space out. Too sleepy to concentrate on work anyway. I'll go out, sit on the steps behind my office, face some greenery, listen to the song on my iPod, smoke a cheap cigar and think about my oh-so-short-passionate-yet confusing weekend in Bangkok (8-12 June, 2007).
Offlate I have been listening to "All Good Things (Come to an End)" by Nelly Furtado. The lyrics go like this:
(Lyrics by N.Furtado/C.Martin)
Dogs were whistling a new tune
Barking at the new moon
Hoping it would come soon so that they could die
Honestly what will become of me
I don't like reality
It's way too clear to me
But really life is daily
We are what we don't see
We miss everything daydreaming
Flames to dust
Lovers to friends
Why do all good things come to an end
Traveling I always stop at exits
Wondering if I'll stay
Young and restless
Living this way I stress less
I want to pull away when the dream dies
The pain sets it and I don't cry
I only feel gravity and I wonder why
And the sun was wondering if it should stay away
for a day until the feeling went away
And the clouds were dropping and
the ................. the rain forgot how to bring salvation
The dogs were whistling a new tune barking at the new moon
hoping it would come soon so that they could die
(To listen to the song and watch the video, click http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j5_7V0DMkA)
I suppose it summarises how I often feel after a trip or after a sweet but brief affair in the most unexpected places and at the most unexpected time.
The lines:
"Traveling I always stop at exits
Wondering if I'll stay
Young and restless
Living this way I stress less
I want to pull away when the dream dies
The pain sets it and I don't cry
I only feel gravity and I wonder why."
...seem most apt.
I think it's time to space out. Too sleepy to concentrate on work anyway. I'll go out, sit on the steps behind my office, face some greenery, listen to the song on my iPod, smoke a cheap cigar and think about my oh-so-short-passionate-yet confusing weekend in Bangkok (8-12 June, 2007).
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
The Scent of Afghanistan
I’ve started a new job. It’s proving to be a bit of an adjustment as it’s been sometime since I’ve worked in a proper setting in Malaysia or anywhere else for that matter. It’s a deskbound, 8am-4pm kind of job you see. Gone are the days when it took me a second to work – because my office was quite literally at my foot step. Thankfully my new job isn’t with the private sector so I can still run around wearing sloppy cotton tops and sandals.
I’m the kind of girl who likes to make her surroundings as cosy and comfortable as possible (in this case my desk and little corner at work). I usually like putting up photos and a piece of décor or two. So one night I began looking through my still photos which I keep in my bedroom drawers. The first ones I saw when I opened one drawer were the ones I took in Afghanistan. It’s been some time since I looked at them. I would say a good few years. Unlike Sudan, I never came to terms that I had to leave the country. Without going into intimate details, and without placing blame – I was kind of forced to leave due to circumstances out of my control – and in a way because I was naïve and easily manipulated at the time. But I digress.
I find that looking at my photos of Afghanistan and any evocation of memories of my experiences there always puts me in a melancholic mood and brings a tear or two to my eye. The first photo I picked was one of a few children running around in an internally displaced people’s (IDP) camp in Spin Boldak which borders the west of Pakistan. The sky was a bright almost turquoise blue while the ground was terracotta brown. The tents housing the IDPs, already torn from the harsh winds and hot weather were different shades of grey and no bigger than 3x3 meters each. Yet the children were smiling toward my camera – me, a woman trying her hardest to blend in by wearing the local garb – taking their photographs so I could bring home a memory I could look at to remind me of a country I never dreamt I would see in my lifetime.
And yet I hardly look at these photos anymore. It fills me with both a sense of loss and longing. Some aid workers have told me that your first mission is almost like the first love that you could never have. It’s your first experience, you fall in love head over heels with the discovery of a new way of life which may be of some use to others, you get addicted to feeling needed, and yet eventually you have to leave wanting more. My leaving Afghanistan was a break-up I didn’t want to happen. A six months love affair with a world I shared in common with because of my religion yet was a stranger to because of my culture, gender, education and opportunities in life. It was a first love that I was meant by God to meet and yet a love that was rudely disrupted by disapproving eyes. The first thing that hit me when I looked at that first photograph of Afghanistan was the sudden memory of a smell. I remember I was asked during my masters’ degree what I first recall when I entered my first IDP camp. I said the awful strong smell emanating from the camp. I remember that my lecturer wasn’t impressed by my answer. I didn’t mean it to sound degrading. I was stating a fact. I had never been in an IDP camp before, let alone been in a country which had little access to water or had been facing a drought for more than 5 years. Of course it smelt. That’s what made the poverty and stark difference between my life and the IDPs so very deep and wide. It made a major impact on me - an urban child educated in Britain and from the moment I was born lived in a bungalow and stayed in 5 star hotels. Yet…I soon got used to that smell because I stopped noticing it – until I returned home one day for a break and unpacked recently washed clothes from my luggage – and oooph…I couldn’t believe how bad it smelled amidst my Mom’s plush furniture.
Yes, I got used to the smell and moving within confined spaces, and confined times. I got used to having to cover my hair as soon as I left my bedroom because we shared an office and a home with men from conservative Pakistan and Afghanistan. I got used to washing my own clothes and taking them to the rooftop to dry while looking out to the wide plains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. I got used to eating hard bread, oily beriyani, getting diarrhea every so often, the security threats, the languages, the beautiful faces of the Afghan men with their hawk like expressions and stances, I got used to the fact I hardly saw women and when I did found how amazingly green their eyes were beneath their burqas.
I began to relish leading a simple life where your only entertainment was talking to your colleagues as you watched the stars from the rooftop. I began to take pleasure in finding the latest Glamour magazine amidst magazines that had glitzy Indian models, finding a beautiful cotton cloth and having it tailored into a salwar kameez (a top and a trouser) at a mere all inclusive price of RM20, I began to have an appreciation for Afghan carpets. I began to discover the value of being one of the few foreigners in a land which most foreigners made assumptions about from a distance without truly understanding the wider context of the country’s history and culture.
I fell in love with a young pretty boy and he with me. I discovered what it was like to have a teenage love affair at the age of 30. Where dates that could have killed us also led us along the beautiful rocky hills, a fair ground that glorifies Pakistan’s first nuclear arm, cheap hotels along dark alleys and stolen moments in any vehicle we could get a hold of – all in a part of Pakistan that used to belong to Afghanistan and which modernization had barely heaved a breath.
And just when I got used to my life there and my forbidden love affair with the boy had ended, and at a moment when I was confident enough to execute projects for the people – it was all taken away from me. Without warning. Without any clear justification except “I did it for your own safety”. An act which to this day I don’t understand and realise that I cannot forgive no matter the good intentions in which it was done.
Afghanistan. A place so many have described as unique, magical, mystical, moving, a place where in most places, time had frozen. The Afghanistan that I knew was filled with moments negotiating with people that looked so much like the man the greater world is still hunting, – moments where I shared their food, their tea, their homes and was given the privilege to sit with their women.
Afghanistan. The land where the weather could become so unkind you sometimes had to stay in for days on end and yet children could walk barefoot while you had on your warmest clothes. A land so barren yet you could find pockets of grapevine trees that could bear fruit to become the best raisins I have ever had in my life. A land so sparse of life that people could share with you the sweetest melons the tongue could taste because there were those few who had enough money to build wells.
Afghanistan, a country known for its extreme laws and yet when you wandered deeper, you would come across fields of pink flowers that looked pretty in the wind and green plants which you were tempted to pluck just to feel the freshness of a mystical herb which could get you hanged at home.
The smell, the sights, the wonder of Afghanistan will never leave my soul. I have been to many places since, seen many things but never are they anything comparable to my Afghanistan. Many a times I thought of returning but either God has His reasons for not opening the path to me or I fear that I may return wanting something I had painted in my head using colors of ignorance, naivety and romance of a life which seemed more real then, than the life I lead now.
I’m the kind of girl who likes to make her surroundings as cosy and comfortable as possible (in this case my desk and little corner at work). I usually like putting up photos and a piece of décor or two. So one night I began looking through my still photos which I keep in my bedroom drawers. The first ones I saw when I opened one drawer were the ones I took in Afghanistan. It’s been some time since I looked at them. I would say a good few years. Unlike Sudan, I never came to terms that I had to leave the country. Without going into intimate details, and without placing blame – I was kind of forced to leave due to circumstances out of my control – and in a way because I was naïve and easily manipulated at the time. But I digress.
I find that looking at my photos of Afghanistan and any evocation of memories of my experiences there always puts me in a melancholic mood and brings a tear or two to my eye. The first photo I picked was one of a few children running around in an internally displaced people’s (IDP) camp in Spin Boldak which borders the west of Pakistan. The sky was a bright almost turquoise blue while the ground was terracotta brown. The tents housing the IDPs, already torn from the harsh winds and hot weather were different shades of grey and no bigger than 3x3 meters each. Yet the children were smiling toward my camera – me, a woman trying her hardest to blend in by wearing the local garb – taking their photographs so I could bring home a memory I could look at to remind me of a country I never dreamt I would see in my lifetime.
And yet I hardly look at these photos anymore. It fills me with both a sense of loss and longing. Some aid workers have told me that your first mission is almost like the first love that you could never have. It’s your first experience, you fall in love head over heels with the discovery of a new way of life which may be of some use to others, you get addicted to feeling needed, and yet eventually you have to leave wanting more. My leaving Afghanistan was a break-up I didn’t want to happen. A six months love affair with a world I shared in common with because of my religion yet was a stranger to because of my culture, gender, education and opportunities in life. It was a first love that I was meant by God to meet and yet a love that was rudely disrupted by disapproving eyes. The first thing that hit me when I looked at that first photograph of Afghanistan was the sudden memory of a smell. I remember I was asked during my masters’ degree what I first recall when I entered my first IDP camp. I said the awful strong smell emanating from the camp. I remember that my lecturer wasn’t impressed by my answer. I didn’t mean it to sound degrading. I was stating a fact. I had never been in an IDP camp before, let alone been in a country which had little access to water or had been facing a drought for more than 5 years. Of course it smelt. That’s what made the poverty and stark difference between my life and the IDPs so very deep and wide. It made a major impact on me - an urban child educated in Britain and from the moment I was born lived in a bungalow and stayed in 5 star hotels. Yet…I soon got used to that smell because I stopped noticing it – until I returned home one day for a break and unpacked recently washed clothes from my luggage – and oooph…I couldn’t believe how bad it smelled amidst my Mom’s plush furniture.
Yes, I got used to the smell and moving within confined spaces, and confined times. I got used to having to cover my hair as soon as I left my bedroom because we shared an office and a home with men from conservative Pakistan and Afghanistan. I got used to washing my own clothes and taking them to the rooftop to dry while looking out to the wide plains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. I got used to eating hard bread, oily beriyani, getting diarrhea every so often, the security threats, the languages, the beautiful faces of the Afghan men with their hawk like expressions and stances, I got used to the fact I hardly saw women and when I did found how amazingly green their eyes were beneath their burqas.
I began to relish leading a simple life where your only entertainment was talking to your colleagues as you watched the stars from the rooftop. I began to take pleasure in finding the latest Glamour magazine amidst magazines that had glitzy Indian models, finding a beautiful cotton cloth and having it tailored into a salwar kameez (a top and a trouser) at a mere all inclusive price of RM20, I began to have an appreciation for Afghan carpets. I began to discover the value of being one of the few foreigners in a land which most foreigners made assumptions about from a distance without truly understanding the wider context of the country’s history and culture.
I fell in love with a young pretty boy and he with me. I discovered what it was like to have a teenage love affair at the age of 30. Where dates that could have killed us also led us along the beautiful rocky hills, a fair ground that glorifies Pakistan’s first nuclear arm, cheap hotels along dark alleys and stolen moments in any vehicle we could get a hold of – all in a part of Pakistan that used to belong to Afghanistan and which modernization had barely heaved a breath.
And just when I got used to my life there and my forbidden love affair with the boy had ended, and at a moment when I was confident enough to execute projects for the people – it was all taken away from me. Without warning. Without any clear justification except “I did it for your own safety”. An act which to this day I don’t understand and realise that I cannot forgive no matter the good intentions in which it was done.
Afghanistan. A place so many have described as unique, magical, mystical, moving, a place where in most places, time had frozen. The Afghanistan that I knew was filled with moments negotiating with people that looked so much like the man the greater world is still hunting, – moments where I shared their food, their tea, their homes and was given the privilege to sit with their women.
Afghanistan. The land where the weather could become so unkind you sometimes had to stay in for days on end and yet children could walk barefoot while you had on your warmest clothes. A land so barren yet you could find pockets of grapevine trees that could bear fruit to become the best raisins I have ever had in my life. A land so sparse of life that people could share with you the sweetest melons the tongue could taste because there were those few who had enough money to build wells.
Afghanistan, a country known for its extreme laws and yet when you wandered deeper, you would come across fields of pink flowers that looked pretty in the wind and green plants which you were tempted to pluck just to feel the freshness of a mystical herb which could get you hanged at home.
The smell, the sights, the wonder of Afghanistan will never leave my soul. I have been to many places since, seen many things but never are they anything comparable to my Afghanistan. Many a times I thought of returning but either God has His reasons for not opening the path to me or I fear that I may return wanting something I had painted in my head using colors of ignorance, naivety and romance of a life which seemed more real then, than the life I lead now.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
A Constant State of Mind
After some months of trying, I have finally got a job offer. I have for a while now been thinking it’s time I moved on from the NGO I’ve been working and been associated with for the last four years. While I am ever grateful to its founder and staff for helping me get to where I am professionally and personally – sometimes you have to venture further to be of better service because you have outgrown what made you what you have become.
I am terribly grateful to Almighty that I have been given what I have been seeking. It is not entirely everything I wished for but enough that it should get me by until something closer to my dreams comes along.
Yet I often doubt my decision to continue my line of work. Some days I am so convinced what I am doing is right. Other days I am so unsure. Some days I think well, I have to do this as I need to be a participant in all that I read in the World section of the newspapers. Rather than sitting in yet another cosy corner complaining and crying foul the demons that walk the earth. Other days I wonder whether what I do and the sacrifices I make are making any difference to anyone but my own sanity.
I have for sometime been trying to come to terms with the sense of guilt I often feel when I am away or so occupied with my work. Today, I could relate to Nelson Mandela when he states in Long Walk to Freedom, “I wondered – not for the first time – whether one was ever justified in neglecting the welfare of one’s own family in order to fight for the welfare of others.”
Do I fight my guilt and critics of a system that sometimes does more harm than good in the hope that compassion will prevail? Do I continue to sink in further into myself when my surroundings disappoint me or fail to meet my idealistic reasoning? Should I simply give up and give in to a normality that has never been in me?
What if I am wrong? What if I do wrong? Then what will become of me?
So many questions. So little time. So much to do. So far to go.
Round and round I go, where I’ll stop, nobody knows.
I am terribly grateful to Almighty that I have been given what I have been seeking. It is not entirely everything I wished for but enough that it should get me by until something closer to my dreams comes along.
Yet I often doubt my decision to continue my line of work. Some days I am so convinced what I am doing is right. Other days I am so unsure. Some days I think well, I have to do this as I need to be a participant in all that I read in the World section of the newspapers. Rather than sitting in yet another cosy corner complaining and crying foul the demons that walk the earth. Other days I wonder whether what I do and the sacrifices I make are making any difference to anyone but my own sanity.
I have for sometime been trying to come to terms with the sense of guilt I often feel when I am away or so occupied with my work. Today, I could relate to Nelson Mandela when he states in Long Walk to Freedom, “I wondered – not for the first time – whether one was ever justified in neglecting the welfare of one’s own family in order to fight for the welfare of others.”
Do I fight my guilt and critics of a system that sometimes does more harm than good in the hope that compassion will prevail? Do I continue to sink in further into myself when my surroundings disappoint me or fail to meet my idealistic reasoning? Should I simply give up and give in to a normality that has never been in me?
What if I am wrong? What if I do wrong? Then what will become of me?
So many questions. So little time. So much to do. So far to go.
Round and round I go, where I’ll stop, nobody knows.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
We Are All Under the Same Sky
(Thanks Brother M for giving me the courage to share my inner self)
I haven't really cried for sometime now. Not my atypical crying. I used to cry a lot because it always made me feel better. Some people get mad, hysterical, drunk...I simply cry my eyeballs out. I used to cry just about anywhere - most of the time on my own - as my thoughts drifted to old memories, regrets, loss, heartbreak, anger.
The last few months however have been dry. It's not that I haven't revisited memories nor because nothing bad has happened to me. I guess it was a case of being all cried out. I never quite understood what that meant until recently.
Two nights ago I bawled my heart out while sitting alone under the starry sky on a beach infront of my chalet in Langkawi. I had just had enough of some merciless teasing about my weight from a friend - a teasing I honestly didn't mind but which was simply getting downright rude.
And so...I took a chair out to the beach. I started listening to songs by Nelly Furtado (Why do all good things come to an end), Justin Timberlake (What goes around comes around), Joshua (May God's love be with you), Coldplay and Michael Stipes (cover of May God's love be with you) and Coldplay (Fix you) on my iPod and started smoking a Backwood Berry cigar.
I sat under the stars feeling like I needed a moment to reflect before going home the next day on what has been and what was to be. Before me was the dark sea lit by a row of fishing boats along the coast. Behind me were lights emanating from the chalets along the beach. Lights which unfortunately shielded the sky from showing all its glory. I had no particular thought in my head. I was simply chilling out.
I then realised that what I saw above me was a shadow of what I used to see everyday in Sudan. I suddenly remembered how beautifully the stars shone over Darfur and how I used to gaze at the sparkling diamonds in the sky with wonder and peace.
And suddenly, while I listened to music which I found both a comfort and a reminder of things lost, I cried from beneath my heart.
I cried for the love I had in Sudan - a love I never knew I could find. I cried for the people who I saw but didn't want to know because I couldn't do everything I should have to help them. I cried that I had lost a love I thought was stronger than the green eyed monster. I cried for all the people I left under the glittering stars who can still see the sky through their thatched roof waiting for intruders to steal their peace.
Most of all I cried because I cannot control what is not mine to have or mine to change.
I haven't really cried for sometime now. Not my atypical crying. I used to cry a lot because it always made me feel better. Some people get mad, hysterical, drunk...I simply cry my eyeballs out. I used to cry just about anywhere - most of the time on my own - as my thoughts drifted to old memories, regrets, loss, heartbreak, anger.
The last few months however have been dry. It's not that I haven't revisited memories nor because nothing bad has happened to me. I guess it was a case of being all cried out. I never quite understood what that meant until recently.
Two nights ago I bawled my heart out while sitting alone under the starry sky on a beach infront of my chalet in Langkawi. I had just had enough of some merciless teasing about my weight from a friend - a teasing I honestly didn't mind but which was simply getting downright rude.
And so...I took a chair out to the beach. I started listening to songs by Nelly Furtado (Why do all good things come to an end), Justin Timberlake (What goes around comes around), Joshua (May God's love be with you), Coldplay and Michael Stipes (cover of May God's love be with you) and Coldplay (Fix you) on my iPod and started smoking a Backwood Berry cigar.
I sat under the stars feeling like I needed a moment to reflect before going home the next day on what has been and what was to be. Before me was the dark sea lit by a row of fishing boats along the coast. Behind me were lights emanating from the chalets along the beach. Lights which unfortunately shielded the sky from showing all its glory. I had no particular thought in my head. I was simply chilling out.
I then realised that what I saw above me was a shadow of what I used to see everyday in Sudan. I suddenly remembered how beautifully the stars shone over Darfur and how I used to gaze at the sparkling diamonds in the sky with wonder and peace.
And suddenly, while I listened to music which I found both a comfort and a reminder of things lost, I cried from beneath my heart.
I cried for the love I had in Sudan - a love I never knew I could find. I cried for the people who I saw but didn't want to know because I couldn't do everything I should have to help them. I cried that I had lost a love I thought was stronger than the green eyed monster. I cried for all the people I left under the glittering stars who can still see the sky through their thatched roof waiting for intruders to steal their peace.
Most of all I cried because I cannot control what is not mine to have or mine to change.
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