An Imperfect Offering from me to you

another book that you absolutely must read (well, if you are in to this kind of stuff, that is) is An Imperfect Offering by Dr James Orbinski.  again, like many of the books i read, it explores the challenges of humanitarian assistance during a violent conflict.  which, coincidentally was also the name of the masters degree that i finished a few years ago.

this book is not always easy to read, it is haunting, it is disturbing, and it left me with a lot  more questions than it answered, but i think that that is the nature of humanitarian or development work and Orbinski was honest, modest, and sincere in the telling of his personal story, which includes a career as a doctor, time spent as the director of Medecins Sans Frontieres, and many missions to countries in the tight grasp of war and violence.

like i said, it certainly doesn't give the answers to the questions of how best to implement humanitarian response activities, but it does provide insight into providing basic health care to those affected by war.  i'd be lying if i didn't say that this book made me wish that i was doctor because that seems like it could be more simple than what i do know how to do and this isn't the first time i have thought that.

i can never imagine being in the position that Orbinski was in to decide whether or not to go against organisational philosophy and principles (msf has historically refused to engage in the 'political' aspects of conflict) and speak out against government action (and indeed, inaction) and make bold statements about why the situation in rwanda, somalia, kosovo, afghanistan, and the drc is the way it is.  he chose to point msf's finger at the actors that could change things, if they so wished.  often, these actors are foreign governments and in reading his accounts of each of the above regions, i began to understand even further the complexities of humanitarians' involvement in a conflict.

the book could have easily gone the direction of Lloyd Axworthy's concept of The Responsibility to Protect, which i was a wholehearted follower of years ago (but my faith in this concept is no longer as strong as it once was) and will never become a reality, but Orbinski never gets overly idealistic and keeps the dialogue in his book based on the real challenges and potential impossibility of having one 'right answer' to its many questions.

the book's title, An Imperfect Offering, comes from a Leonard Cohen lyric and it couldn't be better suited for the realities and complexities of its content.

easing back into it

before i even begin to talk about the wonderful trip i just returned from (and try to gloss over the horrendous flight delays, cancellations, and airlines i had to contend with to get back home), i thought i would do a relatively easy review of a few books i read on my trip that i must discuss (have i mentioned i need a book club to join?!).

Two Lives (Vikram Seth)
i had seen this book before and perhaps i didn't attempt it as i didn't get even halfway through the author's A Suitable Boy (which i know some people have raved about), but i picked it up in the dublin airport in case i made it through the other books i had with me and it is a good thing i did.  in my time at airports and hotels alone i finished all 500 pages of this beauty and i wholeheartedly recommend it.

the story is a true one and covers the relationship between a young indian man and his future german bride, all the way from when they both must leave germany before the first world war to his stint in the british army to her tracing of her jewish family's fate to the life they rebuild in england and his dental practice (with one arm!) and their relationship with numerous friends and family.

i was mesmerised with this book and gobbled it up.  i loved the transcription of letters that were written between all the 'characters' in the book and it made me think that it truly is a lost art.  the language that was used, the honesty with which they spoke to one another, and the incredible subject matter that they were required to discuss.  imagine writing to your friends about the nazis, the holocaust, the fate of your sister and mother, the betrayal of friends, and the state of post war europe in your own handwriting and language.

this seemed like such a rare story, the interracial and interreligious relationship between two people in the first half of the century and yet, as you read it, it makes perfect sense.  i sincerely insist that you pick this book up, a great way to learn more about our shared history, love, and why it is important to know where we come from.  fantastic.

The Good Mayor (Andrew Nicoll)
i finished this book begrudingly.  i didn't much care for the characters or their decisions and wasn't really sure where the 'love' in this love story was to be found.  i had to find out what happened though, so i finished it.  in the fictional town of dot, there are things like lust, obsession, and abuse, but not much love as far as i was concerned.

i have never been one for fable-like stories and this seemed one of those, something not entirely believable and not deep enough to really have a sense for who the characters were or what their intentions were.  so i was a bit disconnected throughout.

i read it, but i wouldn't recommend it.  not when there are so many fantastic books out there!

Something to Tell You (Hanif Kureishi)
after watching an interview with Kureishi, i picked up his book having never read anything he had written and not knowing what to expect. well, was i ever in for a whirlwind!

the story is largely about the search for pleasure (or at least that is what i took away from it).  it takes places in london and london is a character unto itself in the story (which is something i always love).  the main character seems to be at a crossroads that he never expected and is looking backwards and forwards to find out how to tie his loose ends while at the same time searching for something that will make him feel 'good.'  as you would expect, where he expects to find pleasure and contentment is not where he manages to find it and the twists and turns in the story are taken by the the main character, a psychoanalyst, in stride as they parallel the same search that is going on by those around him.

i am really not sure how i feel about this book apart from it really made me think and the characters are still alive within my mind.  and yet, did i enjoy it?  not particularly.  i liked the story, but i didn't like the experiences of the characters or what they were searching for.  and yet, it brings to light the fact that when anyone is seeking pleasure (and everyone does) that what they find often looks a lot more like pain, emotional or physical, but sometimes that is exactly as it should be.  and perhaps that is why i was uncomfortable with the story at times, because it was real.

i know i will be thinking of this novel for a long while, so in the meantime, if i have not done it justice, check out some other reviews at the guardian and the independent.  and if you wouldn't mind, could you please read this book so we can discuss it?!

and in this research, i found out that Kureishi and i went to the same uni in england!

never forget

'never forget:

justice is what love looks like in public'

~ dr cornel west

i had the opportunity to see the film call + response last night and it is such a well crafted piece of advocacy on human trafficking as well as a few hours of solid entertainment.

if you love music, demand social justice, and want to support worthy causes, see this movie and then buy the soundtrack on itunes.

books about africa

i was recently asked for an email with my suggestions on books about africa and this is what i came up with so i figured it might be useful to someone so i am also posting it here.

here are some of my favourite books about africa:

The Zanzibar Chest (Aidan Hartley) - memoir about life as a foreign correspondent in Africa and that whole post colonial guilt thing.

Sweetness in the Belly (Camilla Gibb) - fiction about a white woman who grows up in Muslim Ethiopia, amazing read.

Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) - fiction set during the Baifran war in Nigeria, awesome and based on a lot of real events.

My Traitor's Heart (Rian Malan) - memoir of an Afrikaaner who fought against apartheid in South Africa, truly explores the white guilt and the issue of Africanness, I think you'd like it a lot.

In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz (Michela Wrong) - journalist writes about Mobutu and his rule in the DRC, the one I was telling you about. Tough to get through at times, but you'll learn a lot about why the country remains effed to this day.

We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families (Philip Gourevitch) - excellent account of the genocide in Rwanda and the role of the international community in prolonging the killings.

Shake Hands With the Devil (Romeo Dallaire) - the book that the commander of UN peacekeepers in Rwanda during the genocide wrote about his experience and frustrations with the UN system and watching people die, also a bit tough at times, but there is a glossary that always helps!

Don't Let's Go To the Dogs Tonight (Alexandra Fuller) - memoir of a poor, white Zimbabwean family, so interesting and an easy read.

Tick Bite Fever (David Bennun) - funny memoir of growing up white in Africa. Not fantastic, but an easy read.

Swahili For the Broken Hearted (Peter Moore) - I don't love his writing, but he did a trip through Africa riding solely on public transport and wrote about it, so there are some gems in amongst the other bits.

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (Gil Courtemanche) - fiction (but probably mostly true) about the expats during the genocide in Rwanda. The story will make you cry, but I loved the raw writing of the French Canadian author.

Acts of Faith (Philip Caputo) - an awesome novel about the war in Southern Sudan, the community of pilots, how the UN capitulates war, and the scandals of it all, a really great read and I know from my pilot friends that the story is true and the names were just changed.

Emma's War (Deborah Scroggins) - non fiction, about a British woman who rocks up in Southern Sudan in the middle of a civil war, marries one of the rebel war lords, becomes his second wife, and then actively participates in the war, alienating most people she knows. I also think you'd really like this as it shows the naivity and sincerity of foreign aid workers and those who feel th eneed to 'save' Africa. One of the characters in the book above is based on her, undoubtedly.

You asked for it, and there you have it! I surprised myself with how many books I could pull out of my head and I clearly could start my own post-colonial African literature course...

What can I say - I didn't have a TV for a number of years... nothing like reading a book when you are in bed with a hangover in Nairobi.

i am never eating ice cream again

really, i mean it this time.

ick.

extra, extra! read all about it

some interesting stuff in the news today:

after sudanese president omar al bashir was indictied on war crimes charges by the international criminal court, he expelled aid agencies from darfur, including staunchly apolitical organisations like medecins sans frontieres. it is incredibly troublesome as these organisations not only provide some of the only sources of aid in a country that tightly controls the un's access to populations it has systemically starved, killed, and forced from their homes, but they also act as the world's eyes and ears to a genocide.

i have a good friend working in darfur, and for some reason her organisation was not kicked out of the country (war child canada) and i am curious to hear how she has fared these past few days and what the prospects for her youth projects continuing.

story at the globe and mail.
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i always knew that diet coke would give you cancer! if it is not the aspartame (which i am seriously convinced, with no scientific evidence to back me up) is giving us cancer (for the record, i am also convinced that splenda, margarine, cosmetics, chemical based cleaning products, and hydrogenated anything are also to blame), now it is the cans that diet coke comes in! and baby bottles, water bottles, soup cans, energy drink cans...

that dastardly bisphenol a is showing up again, this time in cans. apparently, the cans are coated so that the metal doesn't come into direct contact with the liquid inside. i've said it here before, it concerns the crap out of me that this estrogen-mimicing compound is finding its way into our bodies and doing god know's what in there. causing cancer, i am sure.

i have never really liked pop so i am home free on that front, but i do like soup and some vegetables that come out of cans, which i am now going to think twice before eating. and again, those with lower incomes, poorer diets, and lower education are probably ingesting the most bisphenol a of us all.

story at cbc.

reading machine

(july 18, 2008)

with extra time on my hands, i have been doing a lot of reading and am happy to report i have two big thumbs-up recommendations.

the first is a book that i had heard a lot about, but was always turned off because of its title, is Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. it is a book that answers a lot of questions i have always had about why countries like canada were colonised but countries in europe were the colonisers and why certain technological advancements have never taken hold in sub-saharan africa. it is a non-academic academic book that tells the scientific story of how guns, germs, and steel (and other fascinating things like plant and animal domestication)dictated who colonised who and explains the current power distribution in the world.

if i had a critique, it would be that the book is too much about papau new guinea and the author’s own experiences and that it drags in places, especially where he goes over concepts he has already covered. but his day job is a uni professor, so i guess that is to be expected. i loved the first half of the book about plant and animal domestication (and now i know why no one bothered to domesticate zebras, which are EVERYWHERE in africa doing little else than eating and herding together) and how our fruit and vegetables became edible. a good read.

the second book on recommendation, although a quarter of the size of the first, is as difficult to read due to the setting and topic of the book. i had had this book on my To Read list for ages and finally found it on amazon.ca (thanks to my ma!) and brought it with me to germany. titled A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali and written by canadian author Gil Courtemarche and translated into english from its original french, it is a fictional account based on a journalist’s experience of the situation at the famed Hotel Milles Collines (Hotel Rwanda) during the genocide in 1994.

if i had to find a word to describe the feel of the writing it would be raw. but i think that it is warranted and as hard as parts are to read and as the author says in the preamble, the story is not wholly fabricated.

interestingly, the book also chronicles canadian involvement in rwanda before and during the genocide, Romeo Dallaire’s role in the conflict, and the lifestyle of the humanitarian aid workers in kigali. i always enjoy these accounts as they are close to home for me and my recent experience. this book deserves to be read.

my book pile is running low and soon i will have to dig into the soldier’s conspiracy theory books (...), does anyone have any reading recommendations? not having english book stores to peruse makes it tough to remember books i wanted to read to look up on amazon.

jenoside

(march 23, 2008)

i have been captivated by the rwandan genocide since reading romeo dallaire’s book Shake Hands With the Devil years ago. since then i’ve tracked down other authors and movies about the events of the 1994 genocide that attempt to provide information on the actions taken by government and social leaders with the goal of eradicating an entire ethnic group of people while at the same time laying bare the facts and details of an apathetic and inactive international community and united nations and the calamitous effects of that inaction.

i’ve visited 3 memorial sites in rwanda, the first being the Kigali Memorial Center, which is a fine example of a museum and is alone worth the trip to kigali. set in memorial gardens that have been planted around mass graves and with a view of the city where the genocide began, it is a testament to those who were murdered, to those who survived, and to those who carried out acts to be considered no less than heroic. the country’s colonial and post-independence history, the genocide, and the effects are explained simply without losing the details in kinyarwanda and french and english.

i was struck how the memorial seemed to be designed to appeal to rwandan and foreign visitors alike and it was extremely tasteful without diminishing the atrocities nor reducing the realities to something to be absorbed in an afternoon. it does an excellent job at allowing those who were not there to have a better understanding of what those 3 months were like and it honours those who were there while being unapologetic on the known causes and contributing factors that led to nearly 1 million people dead at their hands of their fellow countrymen, women, and children.
but if i thought the room containing the bones and clothing was disturbing, i was unprepared for what i would see and feel at the Nyamata and Ntarama memorial sites.

both were catholic churches and both served as sites of mass murder when tutsis sought refuge in the only place they thought would be safe, which was utilised by the interahamwe to kill almost all of them inside the church walls. the skulls and larger bones like femurs have been collected and piled up as a memorial and reminder of what happened. some bones have visible hack marks from machetes and some have obvious holes in them. one still has a spear sticking out the top of it. some are small enough to be babies, who were apparently thrown against walls until they died.

more upsetting than the bones are the clothes hanging from the rafters of the church. they are filthy and still hold smells that bones cannot. the items people carried with them into the churches have also been kept – jerry cans, beans, school notebooks, mattresses... – and those things more than the bone make it real for me. that they came to escape the violence with the hope they’d survive. a children’s notebook carries with the belief that preceded the reality.

the man showing me around was there the day the interahamwe came into the church and began killing until there was no one left alive, but managed to escape. i felt in one moment an opportunistic tourist and the next, a member of a civilisation who should carry the weight of the consequences of doing nothing in the face of hatred. those working in the memorials are intimately and forever connected to their reason for existing and have lost more than i can begin to imagine and yet they continue telling their stories and the stories of the thousands who were killed so we can know what happened. they walk in every day and see the skulls of their family and community members who did not survive and talk about the horrors they witnessed.

bricks stained with blood, bullet holes in an altar, a machete left behind by a killer, thousands upon thousands of skulls, hair and bones scattered amidst the rubble of a sunday school, rosary beads, smoke stains from fires that burned people alive, holes in brick walls from grenades, coffins of newly found bodies to be buried this year during the upcoming national week of memorial.

i’ll keep reading about the genocide and i will still be utterly confused when attempting to understand not only why but how. just that now it will be so frighteningly real.

impressions of my new favourite african capital

(march 23, 2008)

my first impressions of rwanda are that it is indeed the land of a thousand hills and that i’ve never been to a country as green (although even with my magnetism to irish men, i’ve yet to make it to ireland, but i bet rwanda give it a run for it’s green money).

when i first arrived, i couldn’t help by wonder though, who was who, was here during the genocide, and who has returned since. i couldn’t help but look at people’s faces and wonder if they were hutus or tutsis (or h’s and t’s as i’ve heard people say because today, they are all to be considered rwandans). i wondered how exhausting it must feel to be constantly confronted with the country’s ethnic division and history. then i realised that you just get on with it. because the country’s present and future are just as fascinating as its history.

kigali is thus far the cleanest and most beautiful african city i have visited (usurping arusha, my previous favourite) and it is incredibly photogenic. the entire city spills over and up and down the hills and houses are built right into the sides of the hills that give this country its name.

as an expat in this whole thing we call development, i was always ask myself if i could live here, where ever ‘here’ is at that moment. my answer in kigali so far is yes. although it might become monotonous – the landscape, the limited amount of entertainment options, and the greyness that sets into these hills on overcast days. but the city is safe, using plastic bags is against the law, the roads make sense, and i’ve located a coffeehouse that rivals its kenyan counterparts (being nairobi java house and dormans, but of course) with its rwandan twist on the concept made famous and profitable by starbucks.

as in kenya, a photo of the current president graces the walls of all business establishments in rwanda. but unlike kenya, people here seem to revere their leader, paul kagame, and as far as i can tell, i would if i were rwandan. i think i still do even though i am not.

keep your eye on rwanda, i think this place will continue to capture an audience and not just for their gorillas. oh, but the gorillas...!