Frida's Notebook

On the run

Sunset in Ghor, August 2007

I'm due in the office in 30 minutes and then I'll be on the run until I fly out on Thursday morning so this is a post on the run.

Please go to Raising Yusuf Unplugged: Diary of a Palestinian Mother. Read Laila's post about the Lifemaker's Centre in Rafah, Gaza Strip and consider whether you would like to support this project, which provides after school care and play time for children in Rafah. Many of these children are severely traumatised. It really doesn't matter what you stance is on the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this is a project to which you could donate whatever your stance, helping these children recover from trauma and discover their creativity and sense of possibility is a critical contribution to a peaceful future. One of my best friends and my neighbour for the two years I was in Gaza was a Scottish artists who did art therapy with kids in Rafah and Khan Younis and I beleive to this day it was amongst the most important work I saw in Gaza.

Tomorrow I'm running a workshop for all the key stakeholders in relation to violence against women and women's access to justice in Kabul - on my way out for leave. This includes Afghan government officials from the Ministry of Women's Affisrs, the Attorney General's Office, the Ministry of Interior and the Elimination of Violence Against Women Ministerial Task Force. It will also include UN agencies like UNAMA, UNIFEM, UNHCR, UNDP and UNICEF. There will be experts and passionate advocates, people who have seen it all and people who think nothing will work. My job is to facilitate a discussion which will, hopefully lead to an agreed set of priority areas for intervention, a matrix of who is doing what where and some direct suggestions for my agency which has agreed to take on a national project in this sector next year tasking me to design it. I'm excited and nervous and am looking for your top tips for getting all the key players on-board with new projects and then keeping them.

A few weeks ago I made my decision to stay an extra five months until the end of December, at the time it felt scary and I wondered why my heart was telling me to do this, when my wobbly fearful mind was so unsure. Three weeks later I'm absolutely on fire at work, I feel as though I have finally hit my stride in a number of projects and there is no doubt in my mind that staying was right for me. My heart knew it at the time, but my head and my stomach were not convinced. Sometimes I have to trust, take brave steps and know that if I am following my heart then the rest of me will eventually follow. Now I have decided to study next year I have a whole series of new decisions to make (keep working and study part-time and by distance, or leave the field and study full-time on campus, and if so which campus?). But I know that eventually I will know which option is right for me - my heart will know first and the rest of me will come around eventually.

On Thursday I'm off, stopping by Stef in London on my way to see Susannah for a weekend then off to Portugal for a week. When I get back I have a mission from a human rights and police expert in herat for three days, then I'm flying back up to Ghor with not one but two special missions, one to train the Department of Women's Affairs staff to interview women victims of violence and record their cases in a standardised form. The other is to conduct the survey of the children currently using the orphanage - so that the new children's centre can meet their needs better.

It will be a busy and exciting three weeks and I don't know how often I'll get here. Or over to your places. But there will be a great flutter of photographs and posts as soon as the dust settles!

Tell your story

Women in camp of displaced people, July 2007

This phrase has woven in and out of my life and thoughts over and over again through the past year. My personal experience of an extreme trauma response taught me the importance of telling my story, in my own words, my own time and my own way, as part of my healing. In my work I hear many trauma stories and I often think about the possible disconnection between the reasons why people chose to tell me their stories and the reasons why I have been sent to listen.

The trauma story is a personal narrative told in the person's own words about the traumatic life events they have experienced and the impact of these events on their social, physical, and emotional well-being. It is not someone else's interpretation of events, although it may contain observations on the reactions of family members and the local community. The storyteller may tell the story to others for many reasons, including to get benefits or medical care. Similarly, the survivor may have many personal and social reasons for keeping the nature and history of their traumatic events a secret (for example, in the case of rape trauma). Richard F. Mollica, MD, Healing Invisible Wounds.

I have a mandate to ask people to share their trauma stories with me in order to document human rights violations and abuses. The purpose of this documentation is several fold and the different objectives may or may not overlap with the reasons why the survivor has chosen to share his or her story with me. The objectives and their possible outcomes for the individual are:

i) to record and report on trends and patterns of violations in order to inform and influence policy making and implementation. This objective aims for long term and systematic change and is unlikely to bring any immediate or direct benefit to the individual telling me their trauma story;

ii) to verify allegations of serious human rights violations to be followed through the justice system for the purpose of holding the State accountable and promoting justice for victims. In some cases this objective will lead to direct (although rarely immediate) benefits for the individual, although not necessarily the benefits which he or she is seeking. The justice system, even when it is working perfectly, can meet only a limited ranges of needs such as having the truth of your experiences validated by an authorative body, seeing the perpetrator of injustice against you held accountable for his/her actions and occassionally, but not often, receiving material compensation for the wrong done to you.

iii) to identify cases were immediate protection is required and to assist individuals to find protection when they need and want it (this might include reference to shelters in the case of women facing ongoing violence or threats of violence, for example).

Because I am part of an integrated mission, I can also sometimes meet other, more material needs of trauma survivors. If someone, in telling me their story, tells me that what she really needs is some food for her children or a tent so that she doesn't have to keep living in the back room of a hostile brother-in-law, I may be able to attract the attention and assistance of humanitarian actors who can provide those kinds of material aid.

In the process of listening to and documenting personal trauma stories I may be contributing to other needs such as the need to be heard, to be taken seriously and to have the seriousness of the wrong done recorded by someone. But I am aware that the people who share their stories with me often have many other reasons for sharing and many of them I will never even understand, let alone be able to meet.

I am trained as a lawyer, and as a human rights monitor, to interview and record trauma stories as legal events, asking direct and indirect questions to try to fix down the factual details required to complete a case report. I often find myself asking people for more details about dates and times and places. These are important for legal verification, but they are often of very little relevance to the storyteller and I often wonder what impact this interrogation for details has on the storyteller.

Conducting an interview that helps patients tell their trauma story is difficult and takes practice ... traumatic life histories can be very elusive. ... Because the trauma story is so loaded with meaning and so closely associated with the essential worldview of the traumatized person, it can only be presented to someone else in an oblique way. The emotions and events that are the most important to you are difficult to tell directly to other people. The trauma story itself remains hidden until the patient finds the opportunity to reveal just a fragment. Maybe this is reluctance exists because the survivor fears rejection, or , worse, because he or she fears the intended listerner has no interest or curiosity in the story. Understanding the trauma story demands a considerable amount of skill from the listener, not just to share the emotional feelings but also to enter into an examination and apprecation of the historical, cultural, and personal meanings of the events. This well-rounded approach allows even the most severe trauma events to be told. Richard F. Mollica, MD, Healing Invisible Wounds.

Um, so you mean I shouldn't just keep asking "when exactly did this happen?", "what was the name of the man who came to the village and killed you children?", "did anyone else see this happen?"? I'm being a little facetious, of course I don't leap on the teller of traumatic stories with those kinds of direct questions. But given limited time and overwhelming workload, I know that I am sometimes impatient to get the kinds of details I will need in order to enter this "case" into our database.

Where is the time to simply listen? To listen to the story as the teller wishes to tell it. To let it be, perhaps, for today, explaining that I would like to document this story as a human rights case but that in order to do that I will need to ask more detailed questions. To ask if I could return to do that another day, once the storyteller has had time to think about what he or she wants to get out of telling the story to me. Where is the time to do that?

I understand that it is my responsibility to make that time. But that can be challenging when you have responsibility for monitoring human rights across four provinces where literally millions of people with millions of stories of trauma and violation live and when on top of that you are responsible for the set up and running of a new office including building relationships with local authorities and coaching staff on work planning and reporting, and when on top of that you are responsible for the research and development phase of a new national project on violence against women and women's access to justice in this country where the UN Special Rapporteur found that "severe violence against women [remains] all-pervasive" and when on top of that you try to maintain relationships with friends and family at home and abroad, to nuture your creative self with personal time for reading and writing and to make time to exercise and to cook, clean house and get the laundry done.

I'm not complaining, I love my job and the privilege of doing this work. But there is so much to think about in order to honour those who chose to tell me their story and I often feel rushed and overwhelmed with work and I worry that I don't give them the time and patience they need and deserve.

Another dimension of listening to trauma stories that I worry about here is the process of translation. As you can probably tell from the extracts above, I've been finding Dr Richard Mollica's book incredibly interesting and soaking up his experience and expertise gained from many years of 'treating' people who have undergone trauma and torture. One of the first and most important lessons he learned about listening to trauma stories was that language matters. The words people chose to use to describe their experiences are very important and that the listener who wants to understand their story must pay very careful attention to the precise words and phrases chosen and to their historical, social and cultural meanings.

Another major breakthrough in our approach was an intentional focus on culture and history as revealed in the words that our patients used to describe their traumatic life experiences. The uncovering process, the seeking of historical origins and meanings of words and phrases that can bring us closer to the actucal world of the storyteller - is a powerful method of interpretation. ... Words, especially those that describe traumatic events, need to be carefully defined in the life of the patient, family and community. Richard F. Mollica, MD, Healing Invisible Wounds.

I conduct all my interviews through a translator. These translators are all fluent in local language and culture, but most of them are far from fluent in English. We often have to accept that there a large gaps in our understanding of each other and I am painfully aware of how much I am missing because of this. As the time which I have spent in Afghanistan slowly grows towards the two year mark I am beginning to recognise key words in Dari and to recognise certain phrases. Little by little I am developing the ability to notice words anf phrases that come up often in interviews and I keep a note of them in the top margin of my notebook. Some are very telling - just this week I hear several different storytellers respond to my question about what they would like to see happen to address the wrong done to them by saying that Afghans can forget all terrible things done to them by praying. It is a phrase that jars when I hear it. I spend enough time listening to trauma stories that date back 30 years to know that many Afghans have not forgotten the wrongs done to them. So I understand that I do not understand what the speaker really means when he or she says this.

Some people might tell me to concentrate on my work as a lawyer and human rights monitor and not to stray to far from what I know into the complex territory of psychological responses to trauma. But I can't see that boundary very clearly. More accurately perhaps, I see the boundary but the reality of work doesn't not respect it. Stories are not always about facts and events, they are often about feelings and responses to those events. The remedies people seek are not always about justice, they are also about the acknowledged need for reconciliation in order to build a peaceful tomorrow. In Afghanistan our human rights work is always going to cross into the territoriy of 'transitional justice' and all the questions that come with that.

I know my limits, I know how very much there is that I do not know or understand, but I am not going to let that stop me trying to understand more. Hence the Amazon order of books on the psychology of trauma and healing. Hence the weekend hours spent reading Richard Mollica and frantically scribbling notes and further questions. Hence the plan to go back to university and study psychology next year.

Gratitude and Anger (how's that for a combo)

Shadow me with rocket launcher, Cheghcharan

What a great day! I feel lucky.

Today I've been reminded that we can welcome wonderful people into our lives and hearts whereever we are, we can find ways to keep connections close even when we are far apart and also that it is possible to make really special connections with people who live thousands of miles away.

I'm still coming to the themes that were on my mind this morning (this may be a long post) but first a little celebration of friendship in strangest places and across the miles

H is an Icelandic woman who lives and works in the army base here in Ghor. We just hit it off from the first time we met. There are cultural similarities between Iceland and New Zealand. But more than that, she's a woman after my own heart, a soul sister. Today she came over and we did an hour of yoga, talked about the challenges and achievements of our weeks and then agreed to form our own wee mini cluster to support and encourage each other through a 12 week creative nuturing process using Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way".

Does it seem strange for a human rights officer and a development advisor in the middle of Afghanistan to embark on the artist's way journey? Maybe, but H and I agree that nurturing our creative energy is the secret to continuing to find creative responses to the complex humanitarian, political, development and human rights challenges we face in our work each day. We also think that caring for our creative selves is a good project to embark on for its own sake, keeping alive the spark of electricity that makes everyday a little joy - even when it is filled with challenge.

So here, in the middle of the Hindu Kush, I found H, a soul friend. A friend with whom I can be entirely myself, with whom I can stop being the local diplomatic representative and instead be the excited girl who brags about her achievement of the day, or the naughty girl who admits losing her temper too quickly once too often this week.

Lucky huh?

Then there is J - we were stationed here together. Me, a single female human rights lawyer from New Zealand, he an ex-army married father of two from India. You might think we would be an odd couple.

But we are such great company for each other. We talk about yoga and meditation, and last night after I worked 12 hours straight on an emergency response committee J cooked me curry and we sat on the floor of his unit discussing Gandhi and non-violence and the pervasive popularity of Indian pop culture.

We share a desire to make friends with the wild kittens and we share a taste for incense and spicy vegetarian food and for gin and tonic. This is one of the special delights of my line of work - finding great friends in people who come from extremely different backgrounds and who have had very different experiences.

Lucky huh?

Then there is the wonder of the internet and the ways it helps me keep in touch with dear friends in far flung places. Today I was chatting on Skype with three really good friends. We all lived together in Wellington for a few spectacular years - now I was typing in Afghanistan, A from the Solomon Islands and husband and wife team L and J from different rooms in their home in Wellington. I was laughing so hard at points in the conversation that I forgot we were not all in the room together and could almost see the tables and walls of our favorite Wellington bar, the Matterhorn, all around. I told them funny and irreverant stories about my work - stories that anyone who didn't know me might be shocked by (like the way I made up a whole new religion on Monday night to answer questions from a woman in a village in Dowlatyar). My friends laughed and reminded me that as well as being an earnest campaigner for human rights I'm also a mischevious monkey.

Lucky huh?

The after H left I logged on and opened my email and found messages from a couple of very special new bloggy friends - Swirly and Susanna - both of whom I hope to meet in person before the end of this year. I'm also off on leave in a week and on my way for a week in Portugal (yup! Portugal! lucky huh?) I'll be passing through the UK and get to see a couple of really fantastic women for the second time, Susannah of Ink on My Fingers and S of Travels into the Unkown. This whole blog phenomenon is still a bit like magic to me. I type these words, then I click my mouse on "post" and they somehow get popped into a place on the world wide interweb and people find them. I never quite know how but they do - and some of the people who find (or whom I find myself) are people who I just know I was meant to find, or be found by. I wonder how it woulod have happened without the magic of the internet. But in this case that is how it happened and it is such a crazy, 'what-are-the-odds' phenomenon that I just have to smile and believe.

Lucky huh?

So - yeah - I'm feeling like a very lucky girl today. After a quiet reflective morning, which I'll come to now, my day turned into this joy of connections.

But back to the morning thoughts. This post is already kind of long so I'm going to pick just one of the threads of thought that I had going on this morning - the thread about anger.

This week and for a few weeks now I've found my anger bubbling up to the surface (and sometimes up and over the edge) more often that I'd say was 'normal' for me. After eight years of human rights work I've finally come to recognise the cycle of emotional responses that I have to the more extreme level of violence and injustice that I come across. Anger is one of the very healthy responses - so it doesn't bother me to feel it rising. The difficult part is figuring out what to do with it.

Sometimes it feels right to direct a little of my anger at the people most responsible for causing it - and I will sometimes speak with anger in my voice and with anger in my words directly to the people around me (whether they be warlord, politician or rude colleague). But more often than not my anger, though very legitimate, is not going to help progress the work. So what then?

I know that keeping it in, pressing it down, is bad news. I'm quite convinced that anger pushed inwards can become self-loathing or depression and so that's clearly not a good choice.

In NZ I used to exercise through my anger, a really hard run or a session of one-on-one boxing with my trainer would leave me anger free and, even better, filled with happy chemicals. But here my only really reliable exercise option is yoga and as much as I love it, I don't yet find it to be an easy way to release anger.

So I write it out in my journal, I use the words HATE and ANGRY quite often some mornings. Last weekend when I was mad as hell at three people who kept ignoring the boundaries I had put in place to protect my personal space and my personal time I spent an hour cutting and glueing and stamping a collage in my journal all about boundaries and how rude it is to violate them. Yeah! That's telling em.

I also have a special friend with whom I chat on Skype almost everyday and I say terrible things about other people in our chats. He knows that I spend so much of my time being diplomatic that it does me a world of good to write "stupid kid" in reference to a perfectly innocent but sometimes annoying colleague. He lets me release all that anger and laughs with me at my own pettiness, while letting me have this safe space to let it all out. Thank goodness for good friends.

Yes - this week I've been thinking about anger and how - when it comes from good and healthy places - to release it and even to use it.

So this morning when I opened my current read I was impressed to find this:

"Sometimes I think the fits of rage are like a huge creative urge gone into reverse, something dammed up that spills over ... The fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it becomes unbalanced I am destructive. ... I have sometimes wondered also whether in people like me who come to the boil fast ... the tantrum is not a built-in safety valve against madness or illness."

Mary Sarton, Journal of a Solitude.

More on decision making, trauma, healing and other topics tomorrow. I hope your weekend is as brilliant as mine was!

Gift of a day

Today is a bonus, a gift, the silver lining of a disappointment. I was supposed to be driving to Bamyan today - a twelve hour marathon overland journey through some of the most stunning scenery in Afghanistan. I was looking forward to visiting a New Zealand woman working as a doctor in a district six hours drive from here, I was looking forward to visiting the Bandiameer Lakes and Bamyan itself. I was also looking forward to the work that waited for me in Bamyan and the people waiting there to work with me.

But yesterday morning at 9.00 am the Provincial Governor called a special meeting and announced a special plan that requires my cooperation and support. It's great news because this is a plan that implements a court decision which has been effectively ignored for a long time. It was ignored because it's implementation would be difficult. Which it will be - for all sorts of reasons including the power of local commanders and illegally armed groups.

But this is what Afghan's are asking for, for the Government to act to enforce the rule of law and to end the rule of the gun.

I have so much more to say, I've been reading amazing books all morning and I want to pull my thoughts together into a post about anger and healing and the cross-cultural dimensions of listening to stories of trauma. About language and all that gets lost in translation. About solitude and the challenge of not being distracted from your own thoughts.

I want to post about making decisions, and how sometimes you know that you are making the decision that is right even when it terrifies you and makes you feel a little bit ill. About how quickly the reason why it was the right decision can emerge, but how when you had to make it you had to trust your gut because the reasons were not yet clear.

I'm going to do some and visit with a friend and then I'm coming back to all this and writing one heck of a post! At least that is the plan - I guess we'll see later today if it comes to fruition.

Mission not accomplished

I just got back from an overnight mission to a district of Ghor. I was there to undertake step one of our "conflict resolution" mandate in relation to a long standing and, sadly, bloody land conflict in the district.

Step one is to meet with elders from each of the five different tribes in the area and just listen to them, ask them what they have experienced, what the conflict has cost them and what they want to see happen. Step one is supposed to allow me to gather lots of information and begin to build trust.

Step one is not supposed to involve me challenging them to try to look at the conflict from any other perspective, nor is it supposed to involve me rolling my eyes at stories that I found deeply improbable. Neither of these approaches will build trust and it is far too early to ask them to listen to me. I have a lot of listening to do myself before I should expect them to do any in return.

Sadly I forgot this, and from time to time I interjected (after two hours of listening, she hastens to add) to ask what these elders had to say about reports they also had killed many people. On one occassion when the elders of a tribe accused of killed 280 people in the past 30 years told me they had killed only one person in that time I may even have rolled my eyes.

Hence, mission not accomplished. I'll have to hope they cut me some slack because I'm a Haraji (foreign) woman and maybe think I was confused rather than intentionally challenging.

But I did get to visit two schools - one a tent school where the girls were in class (they have the morning shift at this school and the boys come in the afternoon) and the other a stone building (the newest and one of only two in the district) where the boys were in session, and the girls due in the afternoon.

We slept over in the Police station where I was given the office/bedroom of one of the participants in our workshop in May - he remembered me and said that since I was his teacher he wanted to give me his room. I was happy to accept and thrilled to have my own room.

We were invited for dinner in a local home because the family were related to our driver. I spent most of the evening with one elderly woman who spoke no English answering her endless questions about my religion (do you fast? for how many weeks? do you pray? how many times per day? do you eat pork?) and her grandchildren.

Images from the girls school

So by now you might be wondering what you can do to help these little girls get a proper roof over their heads for school? Bearing in mind that it is currently hot, hot, hot and yet by November it will be cold, cold, cold (to get an idea of the contrast check out the comparative photos at the bottom of this post). Well - as a matter of fact on Sunday I met a great woman who was up here in Ghor delivering school tents. She has a day job, but also runs a volunteer not-for profit to which you can make donations through paypal. I'm very happy to introduce you to A Little Help

My dinner host and her grandchildren

Some of the elders I met (not the one's accused of war crimes, thought it better not to post photos of them, these men were great though because some of them were old enough to be eye-witnesses to some fo the events I am trying to reconstruct)

Images from the boys school

Finally - a comparison shot - the same bridge photographed in January and then again this week, in August.

One year of Frida

Blue truck cab, still life in Chaghcharan, Ghor. 17 August 2007.

It has been exactly a year since I entered the strange and wonderful world of blogging. To mark this anniversary I have created a new list in the sidebar - Frida's story in brief.

My intent was to select 12 posts, one per month, to summarise the story of Frida so far. But it seems that was far too symetrical an idea for my stubborn self and instead here you have it - Frida's notebook in 13 posts.

In August 2006 Frida is introduced.

By November she is self-medicating with bromazepam. What went wrong?

In December she herself is not sure yet - but she's functioning, and talking about torture with district police chiefs. So maybe all is well?

At 4.00am one January morning the pieces of the puzzle start to fall together, and Frida sees where things went wrong.

Later that month, one afternoon in Herat, she discovers that her spirit can literally soar free of all the darkness that has been dogging her when she looks at the world through a camera viewfinder. Frida's flickr page takes life.

Also in January, Frida pens a tribute to the two women who got her started in blogging and to many others who travel regularly through the magic of the inter-web and drop some inspiration and goodness on Miss Frida.

In February Frida uses a Sunday Scribbling prompt to write her little heart out on the subject of Goodbyes. That is one of my all time favorite posts. Then Frida turns decidedly prosaic to tell tales about what she does in a good week at the office (in Badghis) - this is one of my favorite posts about my substantive work in Afghanistan.

In March, while lying on her yoga mat one morning, Frida begins to understand the benefits of letting go - and so begins the climb up out of the dark winter into the light.

In April Annie's efforts finally pay off and the kids in Ghor finally get their woolies!

In May Frida has lessons in letting go all over again, it seems this country won't let her leave until she really gets this simple lesson.

In June Frida retreats into yoga and then under the ocean for a few weeks before re-emerging with a remewed commitment to be the change she wants to see in the world.

By July Frida has moved to Ghor and gives a radio interview which captures better than any post here ever has the real reasons why she does this work and just how lucky and happy she really is to be doing it.

Evening walk in Chaghcharan with my Afghan security guard

Me and my security guard walking in Ghor.JPG, originally uploaded by frida world.

He used to be a police officer here in Chaghcharan before leaving the force during the Taleban regime. He then worked as a security guard for the ICRC, UNOPS and then a French organisation that he doesn't name (but he tells me there were seven French women in the office during those times). Now he is one of our security guards. He is older than most of the other guards, and strikes me as both wise and kind. He generously and tolerantly walks with me some evenings so that I can stretch my legs and get out of the compound.

We chat away in Dari, I understand about a quarter of what he is saying but I understand that he has six children and he understands that my father is a farmer. I also understand that he moved to Chaghcharan from a district in Ghor 20 years ago. I notice that although he is Tajik, when he points out to me the village of Pashtun families who migrated here from Wardak 50 years ago he tells me that they are very good people.

At one point on our walk I hesitate at the sight of a group of young men up ahead and ask him if we should go on. He smiles kindly at me and assures me that he will always tell me if anything I want to do is unsafe. He's dressed in civilian clothing and I'm trying to pass myself off as an Afghan woman (although my tendency to pull out my camera every few minutes blows that cover). He tells me not to every worry about security when I'm with him, because I am his sister. I think to myself that he is more like my big, strong Afghan uncle.

Yoga DVDs

I had to share this - I just tried out, for the first time since I got the DVD on Monday, one of the two full length solar vinyasa flow practices on Shiva Rea's DVD Yoga Shakti. I absolutely love it.

As you can probably guess, living in the mountains of Afghanistan as I currently do, I rely entirely on DVDs from inspiring teachers to reinvigorate my yoga practice when it gets a little sluggish. I have accumulated a little pile here and I enjoy them all for different reasons and seasons. I started out with just one DVD by John Scott when I came to Afghanistan. But since then my discovery of new CDs and DVDs has shaped the development of my yoga practice and having reached this particularly high point this morning with the discovery of Shiva Rea, I felt like sharing the journey in case anyone esle out there is looking for their next yoga DVD.

My starting point, John Scott, teaches the classic ashtanga vinyasa primary series according to the teachings of Sri K Pattabhi Jois. John's style of teaching is very precise and traditional and his DVD has helped me come to understand the technical precision required to safely and effectively practice this series (more accurately - the beginners poses from this series) and also improved my discipline. John is also a New Zealander and I can't deny I quite enjoy listening to his instructions in a familiar accent. If you are looking for a traditional approach to the primary series I highly recommend John Scott.

When I arrived in Herat I was given an audio CD of the standard Sivanada sequence by an Italian woman who was a dedicated follower of the Sivanada yoga tradition. At first I was quite disconcerted by the differences between the Sivanada practice and the astanga vinyasa sequence to which I was accustomed. Some of the differences are small, such as the variations in the surya namaskara sequence. Buut some differences are very considerable - in Sivananda, for example, the sequence goes into inversions at the outset of the practice whereas in the traditional astanga vinyasa sequence these are the closing poses of the practice. It was good for me to learn that different approaches to yoga exist and to let go of some of my more limiting ideas about what might be "right" and "wrong" in that regard. I began alternating my practice depending on my mood, energy and the time available for my practice.

When I was in Portland last year I saw a Seane Corn DVD in the Wholefoods supermarket, and having read her articles in Joga Journal I thought I might enjoy it so I brought that back with me too. Seane Corn also teaches a vinyasa (flow) style of yoga but her DVD focuses very much on the importance of the breath and her slow rythmic style encourages me to slow my thoughts and my breathing so that my practice becomes a true meditation in action. I've read negative reviews of this DVD because of the care she takes to teach modifications and variations for beginners or people with injuries. I don't understand why anyone would complain about that. If you are experienced and able to do a full upward dog then it needn't stop you simply because Seane is demonstrating a gentle cobra. Personally I admire the care she shows for the people who are using her DVD and it doesn't hurt me to be reminded to listen to my body and start my practice from where I am, not where I think I should be.

So for more than six months I alternated between these three guided practices, sequences I made up myself for days when I was too tired, too bored or just too lazy to do any of them and infrequent but wonderful bursts of practicing with a real live teacher (when she was in town) who was trained in the Sivananda tradition but who was happy to take me through the Astanga Vinyasa primary series as well.

Fast forward to this week. I bought Rodney Yee's "Power Yoga Total Body" in my latest Amazon haul because a (male) friend of mine living in the very intense and conflict South East of Afghanistan does it every morning and swears that it helps keep him centred, calm and healthy in the midst of daily roadside bombs and fighting. I only got this DVD on Monday and I've only been through the practice once so far. I can see why he likes it and I think I will also use this DVD at least once a week. Yee's style is energetic and vigorous and I enjoyed the intensity of the standing sequences. I miss the meditative aspects of other teachers, but then again this DVD doesn't claim to be anything other than what it is, and for a girl who has very limited chances to get out and stretch her legs a vigorous physical practice is important at least once or twice a week.

Also in this recent Amazon parcel was the Shiva Rea DVD: Yoga Shakti. Which brings me back to the start of this post. This DVD has a little bit of everything I love about a yoga DVD. Shive Rea herself has a lovely calm, clear teaching voice, the setting is beautiful and simple (on a sandy beach in the Maldive Islands), and the music track is soothing and rythmic by turn. The four practices all look great. I've already done the beginners practice once this week and this morning I did (and loved) the first of the two full-length solar practices. I love Shiva Rea's unique flow sequences, like the Dancing Warriors. I had already learned some of them from Jessie Chapman at the yoga retreat in Thailand in June and they were amongst my favorite new sequences from that retreat.

But here is the really exciting part. This DVD is designed so that I can go into the matrix of all the sequences and put them together as I like to create my own custom designed practice. If I have 45 minutes and am feeling a bit blue I can chose heart opening and energising sequences and put them together with a shorter standing sequence. If I have two hours I can combine the entire first solar practice with the extra back bend sequences from the other practice and add the meditation from the lunar practice on the end. Basically I can create endless different customised practices.

So all-in-all I am a very happy yogi this afternoon. Righto - back to the sofa and my Harry Potter...

Update on the orphanage

Boys at the Ghor orphanage in temporary rented buildings, January 2007

A few updates on child rights and child protection issues in Ghor - including the story of the orphanage which some of you have been following here for more than six months.

Following my coordination meetings last week we got a copy from War Child UK of an excellent report on orphanages and children's day centres in Ghor, based on an assessment done several years ago. The report was incredibly useful in that it identified the key problems facing these institutions and the children either living in or attending them. It also set out recommendations based on best-practice and the strategic priorities of the Government of Afghanistan in this sector. Using this report and the advice from the child protection experts I consulted with last week I was able to give some suggestions to the Development Advisor who has worked so hard to pull together the funding and support needed to get the orphanage in Ghor a new building.

As a result the project to construct a new building for the orphanage has been amended to build a more versatile building (one that could be used as a day-centre as well as a residence) - this allows greater flexibility for the future should the Department of Labour and Social Affairs manage (with support of child protection and child rights agencies) to implement the Government preferred approach of de-institutionalising children and assisting them to return to their families wherever possible.

The project is now referred to as construction of a children's centre - not an orphanage - since the hope is that a wide range of child protection and child welfare activities can be run out of this building.

PARSA (see my previous post on this subject for contact details) has agreed to be the implementing partner for the construction, on the understanding that they will contribute their expertise and experience in order to promote child welfare throughout the project implementation.

On the subject of PARSA - one commenter on my previous post asked whether they were still active, because the website address I gave was to a site which had not been updated recently. I can confirm they remain active, as their involvement in this project shows. They are a small organisation that is run on passion and volunteerism so matters like updating websites might fall through the slats.

Update: Thanks to Home in Kabul for letting me know that PARSA has a new website - explaining why the link I had provided was out of date. Home in Kabul also needs to get the credit for being the starting point for this whole process - she sent me an email from PARSA executive director Marnie Gustavson about orphanages in Afghanistan, which I forwarded to the woman driving this project and we went from there. Thanks HiK, I hope you'll make it up to Ghor to see what you had a hand in creating one day soon.

On a related note, you might remember the IDP camp where I met Ali, the 10 year old boy who is deaf. The construction company building the new children's centre has signed a contract with the IP providing that they will give first preference for labour to the men in the IDP camp. Since the children's centre is being constructed very near to the IDP camp this should work we for everyone.

While we are on the subject of Ali - a friend helped me get hold of a sign-language text book and teaching instructions which are now being used by a teacher from within the IDP community to try to tech Ali Afghan sigh-language. I suspect this is going to prove to be difficult without the teacher receiving any training, so we are still working on getting him into a training course in Herat province. But for the moment a start is being made, for the first time in his life, on education for Ali.

So this Friday morning I can feel like my efforts have had a positive effect these past few weeks. Time to curl up with Harry Potter and a big cup of coffee and relax for a few hours!

Five more things that make me smile

1. This journal page sent to me by the fabulously creative and inspiring Mahima of Love is Handmade

2. Citizen of the Month - Neil doesn't just make me smile, he makes me laugh out loud. How come some people get to be funny and the rest of us get stuck with being earnest?

3. The fact that my compound buddy J and I hosted a social evening tonight - combining his great Indian cooking, my social networks, and our respective contraband alcohol stocks we managed to get eight civilian internationals along to one Thursday night dinner and drinks in Chaghcharan, Ghor. It may have been a first.

4. Confessions of a Pioneer Woman - again with the whiney "why can't I be funny like her". I grew up helping vets put their hands up cows backsides and I love this city-girl's take on life on a ranch with her very own Marlboro Man and their mini cowgirl and coyboy punks.

5. Knowing that tomorrow is Friday (my day off) and that once I get through breakfast with the Chief of Police I can spend as much time as I like curled up on the sofa with my new books AND my long-suffering colleague J has agreed to take me for a walk again tomorrow evening. I don't know why he puts up with me since I tease him about walking too slow.