Frida's Notebook

On empathy and imagination (with thanks to J K Rowling)

A little over a year ago I tried to put into words here some thoughts I had on empathy and imagination and what they had to do with activism for human rights and social justice. What I managed to say was:

"Ultimately, though, I believe that the strongest motivator for the defense of human rights is ... empathy. It is because I can imagine how it might feel to be a Palestinian mother who watched her child die because the ambulance carrying him to the specialised hospital in the West Bank was not allowed to pass an Israeli checkpoint that I feel compelled to work towards securing the right to freedom of movement for her and for everyone else. It is because I can imagine how it might feel to be an Algerian asylum seeker in New Zealand, labeled a security risk by the central intelligence agency but unable, even through my defense lawyer to see the basis on which I am accused of being such a risk, that I feel bound to do what I can to defend the right to a fair trial and a defense for him and for everyone else."

Today I watched the commencement speech that the amazing J K Rowling gave at Harvard University. I know it has been emailed and posted in various places, for good reason. It came to me from Blue Poppy, via Swirly. So I took a break from studying about how community psychologists should be committed to working with oppressed people to help achieve their goals for liberation and watched this video.

She puts it so well and I was not expecting it. Although I probably should have been expecting it, her Harry Potter books explore complex themes of marginalisation and social justice, including a fairly intense exploration of racism and xenophobia through the device of the "mud-bloods". But I wasn't. I under-estimated her and expected a speech about how important imagination is to the creative act. Which it is, of course. But she goes on to talk about how that creative act, the ability to imagine, lies at the heart of what makes us human. We, apparently unlike all other species, can imagine what it might be like in someone else's shoes and based on that creative act of imagining we can feel empathy. 

What I said in May last year was that I didn't believe that empathy was a "static quality that we are either born with or without. I think we can generate empathy, I believe we can cultivate the quality of empathy within ourselves."

I also had some ideas about how to generate empathy - they included a certain kind of travel and releasing ourselves to the transformative power of literature, art and film. I think those are still great tools for generating empathy. In fact my very next post was an exercise in using the creative power of poetry to cultivate the moments of powerful empathy that I experienced in day-to-day life in Afghanistan. But what I have been also learning, over and over again. Is the power of the simple practice of letting go, through seated meditation or whichever practice works for you, and revealing our natural warmth, compassion, imagination and empathy. 

16 Days

The wife of my colleague agreed to let me take her photo this week on the condition that her face was obscured. She was shy, but still friendly to a strange woman who turned up outside her house trying to speak Dari to her even though she only speaks Pashtu. Duh

This week I've been emotionally triggered what feels like a thousand times a day. I'm heading into my very last week in Ghor and my emotions are heightened, but the events of the week were fairly intense anyway.

Between last Friday and today the good people of Ghor have experienced tribal conflicts in Shahrak which had in the preceeding week culminated in an ambush on a police convoy killing the District Chief of Police and at least five of his soldiers, plus two tribal elders in the vehicle with him. The police this past week set out to rescue three men abducted in the ambush. Officially this rescue was to recover police officers but according to some local sources they were armed men from one tribe who had been travelling with the police to carry out attacks on the other tribe's villages. In any case the police operation seems almost certainly to have been complemented by reprisal attacks from the other tribe which were either ignored or actively supported by the police.

I don't know what kinds of feelings are generated in you when you read this kind of report. Pema Chodron talks about the reversion to numbness in the face of an overwhelming sense of helplessness. That seems to be a common response in much of the world, and understandably so. As for me I feel angry and sad at the same time about these events, and yes, I feel some hopelessness.

The week went on. This week was the first week of the international campaign "16 Days of Activism to Eliminate Violence against Women" (let's just say "16 days" from here on in, huh?). In my part of the world this week was marked by a grenade attack on the home of the Head of the Department of Women's Affairs, a grenade attack on the home of the female Provincial Prosecutor, renewed death threats against another woman holding a position of public office and rumours about the Head Teacher of the Girls High School.

I struggle to know what to do with the sadness and anger that is generated by these attacks. The morning after the first grenade attack I was at her house, and she was calmly showing me where the windows where smashed, where her car was damanged and where she shot a bullet into the door of her own car as she grabbed a gun and fired wildly in response to the attack. She took calls as we talked and thanked me for coming to see her and she asked me how my trip to America was - she herself having just returned from a trip away. I watched her and tried to learn from her how to behave under these circumstances.

Three days later she called me to her office, asking me to come alone and therefore without a translator. I went and we struggled to understand each other but in the end I got the point. She wanted to know what I was doing to push the police to find the person who attacked her. She was insisting that I should personally do more. My reaction? Not anything I'm proud of. I was overcome with a wave of anger.

It was anger born out of frustration because I have been meeting the responsible security officials, I have been exhorting them to do everything they can to find whoever is doing this, but they look me straight in the eye and tell me whatever they think I want to hear and I know that these meetings are achieving nothing.

So was I really angry at her for asking me to help? Of course not.

I was angry at the people who threw the grenade in the first place, for not having the courage and the decency to come out and publically speak their minds rather than sneaking around at night throwing grenades, putting children at risk and terrorizing those people in this town who are standing up for what they believe in.

I was angry at the Chief of Police for not putting an end to this - in a town of 10,000 people I cannot believe that it is impossible to find and arrest the person who has carried out five such attacks in the past month.

I was angry at myself for being so entirely useless in these circumstances.

I was angry at the journalist who had been visiting for two days, giving the impression that Afghanistan and it's stories of grenades and improvised explosive devices was a great lark, a 'boy's own adventure'.and who seemed disinterested and distracted from the real stories all around him.

For several days I allowed all these triggers to feed the angry, despairing wolf and by Wednesday as I sat in a special ceremony to mark the "16 days" I was on the verge of tears the whole time.

I was aware of the young Lithuanian soldiers patrolling the perimeter on foot specifically because I was here. Because by standing alongside the Head of Women's Affairs to give our speeches at this occassion I was now putting myself at risk of grenade attack. I thought about the risk that this entailed for those young men and I thought about their families at home.

I thought about why I needed to be at the ceremony and about all the other people who had agreed to come and stand up for women's rights. The Deputy Governor, one of the local Mullahs, the Head of the Provincial Council, the Head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. I thought about the people who, by sneaking about at night and throwing hand grenades, were trying to undermine all that this ceremony stood for.

I watched five young girls sing a song based on the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and I wondered which one of them might be killed, maimed, beaten, raped or tortured in the years to come. I watched five beautiful boys stand up along side those girls and participate in a battle of the genders quizz. And I thought about which of those beautiful boys would end up hating his life, beating his wife, consumed by anger and hopelessness.

I know! Great thoughts for feeding the despairing wolf right, right?

Finally when the ceremony was over I came home and let myself have a good cry. I just let the anger and the sadness wash out of me.

When the crying was over I wrote. I wrote for myself, I wrote to the journalist, I wrote to friends who would understand and share with me in the pain. I wrote out the anger. I wrote to the other side. Sometimes, for me, writing is what I can do when I am too filled with emotion to sit in meditation. Sometimes writing is what I need to do first.

Then I sat, and I tried to get in touch with my natural openness, my natural warmth, my natural intelligence. Here are some of the things that came up for me:

Maybe the journalist was not callous and shallow. Maybe he was out of his depth and a bit overwhelmed. Maybe the sarcastic humour was a cover for confusion or even fear. Maybe the distracted twitchiness was not because he found the people around him uninteresting but because he didn't know where to look first, he didn't know who to talk to or what to make of it all. Maybe a little more kindness from me would have made all the difference.

I have to confess I didn't get quite that far with the guy(s) throwing the grenades. But I did find myself much less overwhelmed with emotion everytime I thought about them.

When I think about how hard it is for me to deal with all these emotions I have to stop for a moment and give respect to the people who are more directly affected by all these events. If it takes me a week to figure out how to stop reacting to the triggers and get back in touch with my basic goodness and my belief in the goodness of others then what does it take for the families in Shahrak whose fathers, brothers, sons were killed in the ambush? What does it take for the women whose homes have been attacked by grenades in the night, scattering deadly shards of glass across the room where their children sleep?

In these moments the cycle of violence makes sense to me, and I find myself coming back to the drawing board about how I can make my small contribution to peace in these times of war.

Thanksgiving: Ghor-style

Remember these guys? Do you recall that I mentioned in that post that we were cooking up "schemes to walk all the way to the summit one weekend"?

Well, after various comings and goings we are all back in town again. Yesterday the three of us headed out in an attempt to reach the even-farther-away hill. There is nothing better, in this town, than striding out over the hills with two good-hearted, funny, do-gooder blokes for company.

We pushed ourselves a little harder and further this time and I was not the only one huffing and puffing up the final hill, but we got there and although I don't have a photo to prove it (I was walking camera-free yesterday) I can assure you the view was stunning.

As we walked (for two and a half hours this time) we talked about our work, the challenges of our isolation and the frustrations of our failures. We talked about our respective plans to travel home for Christmas (two of us are leaving Afghanistan at Christmas and the third will be home until mid-January) and our concerns that we may be overwhelmed by the abundance. We talked about how will will respond (or how we hope we will respond) and what we are looking forward to most.

We talked about books we are reading about Afghanistan and about developments in the southern part of Ghor. We talked about what a man could do to capture a woman's heart (I suggested making her icecream - a little tip I picked up from Boho-boy).

We talked about why we are here and what we hope we are achieving. We laughed at ourselves and at each other, we laughed at our puffing and wheezing. We posed for a self-timer portrait of the three of us at the summit, although not on my camera or I would show you all the proof that we really got there.

Then we started to talk about dinner, which I had decided to host at my place, and we got hungry. So we walked back, found the fourth member of the tiny community we call ours, and set about cooking up a pasta storm in my teeny kitchenette.

As we cooked and ate we talked some more. We also had some treats to share with each other. I had chocolate from a lovely friend who thought of me in the midst of all that she was going through herself. He had cheese that he had carried all the way from his home in France. She had more chocolate. He had one precious bottle of red wine. We swapped books we had finished reading and shared our treats and I knew that each small luxury was appreciated by this wee group more than a feast or a pile of gifts would be appreciated in many other settings.

We were very thankful.
Thankful for our cheese, chocolate and red wine.
Thankful for the chance to live and work here.
Thankful for each other's company and friendship.
I guess although only one of us is American we kind of got the idea of this Thanksgiving deal.

Dreaming of a happpy ending.

So where is the happy ending?

Today I finally settled into catch up on all that has been going on in Ghor while I was away. There have been more grenade attacks in town - last night a rocket was fired into a small wooded area on the edge of town. There are rumours around town that these attacks have been carried out by the police themselves in order to distract attention from the fact that they are busy providing an armed escort to drug traffickers hauling their illicit wares across the province.

In Passaband in the south of Ghor there was an advance into the province of numbers of Taleban fighters, faced with an advancing regiment of Afghan National Police they seem to have retreated to just inside the border and regrouped.

In Shahrak, in response to an ambush on a police convoy earlier this week that killed 10 police officers (including the Cheif of Police) and saw five more wounded and five abducted - the Afghan National Police are now preparing for operations in the area which may - sadly - turn out to look more like retribution than crime control.

All over the province there are reports of an impending humanitarian disaster as food aid trucks continue to fail to get through to Ghor. I just got back from a long meeting which made me realise finally just how confused everyone is about the food shortage and just how unprepared some key players seem to be.

I had a long meeting this morning about a string of unresolved human rights cases in relation to which the Government does not seem to be taking very proactive steps towards resolution. One case was of a 15 year old girl abducted and forceably married to the soldier of one powerful commander and then taken for a month to the house of the commander himself where she was allegedly repeatedly raped by the commander and eight of his armed men.

And everyone is looking at me asking me to help them find a solution.

And I have just over two weeks left here.

Talk about feeling separation guilt. I'm drowning in it tonight. One half of my heart and mind is screaming at me "How can you leave!!! You know that you have been making a difference here. You know that you can do more. These are your friends and your colleagues and you can't really be planning to abandon them!".

Another part of my heart and mind knows perfectly that I am not the solution to anyone's problems, that these problems are not going away anywhere fast and that it will never be the right time to leave. It may never be the right time to leave but I think that it is the right time to go home.

Then I got this email from a dear Palestinian friend living in Gaza:

"Dear Marianne,

I am not good my dear, every things around us in Gaza very disappointed, and so hard this time, no medical supplies in Gaza, no drinks, no food, every thing finished from the markets, we will not found it after that, I don't feel for any hope in the near future that something good will happen in Gaza, I think it will be more more worse, more closure for long time………. Any way, this is Gaza.

Thanks Marianne again for your kind message, and keep in touch.

With my love,

J"

I remembered with a rush the same mix of emotions thoughts and feeling when I left Gaza. I know very well that I could have stayed in Gaza all these years and the outcome for my friends there would not have been significantly altered. These messes are so much bigger than us.

That isn't the voice of hopelessness - I still believe we all have to do as much good as we can with whatever resources and opportunities we can find or make for ourselves. But I also know that the macro-level dynamics of Gaza and Ghor are equally out of the hands of one human rights officer/ humanitarian worker.

So it is pretty important not to start to feel as though you should be able to do more than you can do. It is pretty important not to start believing that this place and these people "need" me. It is pretty important to stay focused on doing what good I can and then letting go of the rest.

Still tonight I can't help heading off to bed dreaming of a happy ending for Gaza and for Ghor.

Food issues in Ghor

A woman collecting her food rations as part of the WFP/DoWA food for literacy project in Ghor

I've caught myself complaining quite a lot lately about the poor quality of the food I can access in Ghor. I was complaining mostly about the failure of my colleagues in HQ to send up the boxes of fruit and vegetables I had been promised. I love to feed my body well, to eat heathily and choose the freshest ingredients so that I can eat raw as much as possible.

In the Ghor market there are often only one or two vegetables available and even those are never fresh, having been transported over bad roads for days to reach our remote location.

While in the USA recently I visited a Whole Foods supermarket and that moment consituted the height of my culture shock on the trip. I stood in the middle of a deli section completely overwhelmed by the abundance and range of food available.

In Ghor I will go into town and come home thrilled if I found some home-made yoghurt or white cheese, so many people sold their livestock during the big drought two seasons ago that very few local families have dairy products to sell.

I am always happy when a colleague or friend comes back from their village because they bring me eggs. Eggs which the local communinty in that village almost certainly need more than I do but which constitute the basic form of protein in my diet.

I struggle to know what is ethical in this situation. I've heard of people living in these kind of remote posts who refuse to have food shipped in. I never heard a full explanation of their argument for this position so I may have missed an important point but my tendency is to the opposite. I'm happy to support the local shop-owners by buying tinned beans and pistachio nuts from him, but for fresh fruit, vegetables, dairy products and eggs I feel uncomfortable consuming the local supplies when I know there is already not enough to go around.

This feels like a question to which there is no entirely correct answer, whether I ship food in or buy from the very scant local market I am always going to be massively more privileged than anyone in the local community. On the one hand that is completely unjustifiable - there is no justification for me to have more, to enjoy more, than anyone else here. But on the other hand I want to maintain my health for the long term and this poor diet has had a noticeable impact on my immune system and my general well-being (skin, hair and nails are all showing signs of degradation).

I was overwhelmed with the easy access to good food that I enjoyed in my two week holiday in the States. Even here in Kabul, if you have the money you can get hold of pretty much anything you want (in Kabul I recently ate imported French cheese with a friend who had got it at one of the stores targetting the international workers in the city).

In Ghor we are still struggling to get in place the 14000 metric tonnes of food aid which it has been calculated will be required to get the population through the winter without too many casualties. The security problems on the southern ring road (which passes through Kandahar, Helmand and Farah) have been causing endless hold-ups and several serious losses.

In the face of that scale of suffering how can I possibly complain about not getting my box of fruit and vegetables this week? Or feel a pang of envy when I read about a dear friend's morning juice recipe, knowing how much good a juice like that will be doing her and what good it would do my tired innards as well.

One of the reasons for living a life which takes me into spaces like Ghor where I might never otherwise get to go - a life which brings me face to face with the true living situation of most people on our planet is exactly this - to remind me always that I did not earn the incredible privilege into which I was born. To remind me that we are all connected and that the suffering of staving families in Ghor is, whether we like it or not, connected to the over-stocked supermarkets in the West.

It is not an comfortable truth and not one that I like to wave in people's faces - for fear that I will simply induce guilt - an emotion I believe is unlikely to inspire productive response for change. But it is true and it makes me stop myself in my tracks when I start (again) to complain about the poor food available to me.

Still - it is fair enough for me to want to take care of my long term health and the serious negative physical impacts of life in Afghanistan (lung infections all over the place from the pollution and dust, loss of bone density due to the restrictions on all forms of walking and malnutrition from the poor food availability and quality) are also a good reason to go home after two years and take a healing, recuperative break.

Getting out of the "deep field" Part II

On Sunday I got two pieces of news that made me sit up and pay attention. The first news was that the airstrip in Ghor was closing on Wednesday for repairs and the second news was that my Afghan visa had expired and I would not be let out of the country until it was renewed.

So I jumped on the first flight out of Ghor (a week ahead of plan) and spent a day in Herat transfering money from my Afghan to my NZ bank account and trying to charm the consulate staff at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs into overlooking my lapsed visa and renewing it. An Afghan friend with extraordinary diplomatic skills and a great network helped out and they promised to issue it by next Tuesday.

Then it emerged that I would need a transit visa for India or be forced to sleep overnight in the terminal, but I could only get that visa in Kabul. So I left my UN passport in Herat, jumped on the first plane to Kabul (via Mazar) and took my NZ passport to the Indian embassy on Thursday morning - to be told initially that they require three working days to issue a visa and because of the Eid holidays my passport would not be ready until next Thursday (when I am due to fly). But again something worked in my favour: charm, smiles, the end of Ramadan approaching; I don't know what did it but be 4.30pm I walked away from the Embassy with my passport and new visa in hand.

I think this trip is charmed - every step of the way little unexpected challenges have popped up and against all odds and in direct contradiction to the predictions of seasoned hands - solutions have appeared, in time.

It looks like I won't be needing a donkey this time.

PS: Go visit Laini's blog where she makes me feel like a superstar by posting about my love affair with Magpie, the lead character in Laini's "Faries of Dreamdark" series.

Frida did good!

So - if you've been reading for a while you'll know that I settled into Ghor full-time three months ago, and that one of the first issues I started working on was the camp of Internally Displaced People living on the outskirts of Cheghcharan. At first things moved fast, with indications that these IDP families would be returned to their homes before winter. But that all come to a grinding halt when the Supreme Court decided to refer their case (regarding ownership of the land they were displaced from) back to the provincial level court to be retried.

So this past week I've been encouraging the Government to find the families housing for the winter. It has been getting cold fast in Ghor and the tents were clearly no longer adequate.

Today I visited 19 of the 27 families in the houses they moved into this morning. The baby girl in this photo is three months old, she was born just as I arrived in Ghor and I was so happy to visit her and her mother today and see them settled into a decent house for the winter.

I certainly didn't make this happen by myself, but I have been very persistent in following up the issues affecting these families and they obviously think that it has made a big difference. The smiles I saw on the faces of mothers in every house today made up for my really, truely horrible weekend (we had rockets landing next to our compound through the night on Friday and I was alone, not my idea of a good time at all).

Eid is coming up in just over a week, and this is the time of year for making an extra effort to help those who need a bit more help. I think the spirit of Ramazan helped get the assistance these families needed and all in all it was a day that made me smile.

Now - I'm signing off in order to welcome some Thursday evening visitors! Two of the regular visitors to Ghor are about to arrive for a quiet drink. Lovely.

Getting out of the "deep field"

This morning, over at The Road to the Horizon, when I read this post about what it meant to be in the "deep field" and this post about the heart-lurching experience of trying to get out on RnR, I realised that Ghor - like Bor - is deep field.

Enrico's experience of having colleagues in Khartoum look at him in sympathy when they heard he was being posted to Bor is an almost perfect replica of the response I got - and still get - from Kabul (and Herat) based colleagues about Ghor.

Most of the time I disagree with them completely. I don't miss the "conveniences" of Kabul or Herat. Perhaps it is hard to get fruit and vegetables here, and finding "Super Lemon" (the local equivalent of Sprite) in the bazaar this week may have been an exciting event for me, but I feel much more accepted in the local community here and that makes up for an awful lot of missing vegetables.

The remoteness of this post, however, does bite a little bit when it comes to getting in and out of the country for RnR.

We have an airfield here in Cheghcharan, and over the summer, when the ground is dry, we have about a 50/50 chance of having the scheduled weekly flight turn up. In the winter, once the snow sets in, that rate drops considerably. If there is fresh snow on the ground the fixed wing planes cannot land and getting a helicopter up here requires a degree of political wrangling that can only be invoked a few times before you lose all credit - so I figure it is best to save that up for genuine emergencies.

Unlike Enrico, however, if my flight doesn't come there is no viable option for me to drive to the next airfield. The drive to Herat takes two days, as does the road to Bamyan. However, I think that if I was really desparate and I fed the drivers PowerBars and Red Bulls, I could pull off the Bamyan road trip in one very, very long day. Believe me, I've been through this in my head.

On my next leave I'm planning this amazing trip to the States. Getting there is quite an adventure in itself. First I have to get out of Ghor, there is (in theory at least) one flight per week, on Tuesday. This will take me to Herat to collect my pay and some warmer clothes. Then from Herat there should be a flight the next day to Kabul. Another overnight stop in Kabul and then I should (assuming all has gone according to plan so far, which of course it never, ever does) be on a flight the next morning to Delhi. From Delhi - I have just discovered, there is a direct flight to Chicago. Voila - in only four days I should have made it from home to my destination.

But it is almost out of the question that each step of the journey would go that smoothly. So instead of pretending it will and then finding myself, like Enrico, standing on the side of the airstrip wondering what just happened to my leave plans, maybe I would be wiser to drive from Ghor to Kabul. It would take three days and I'd need a security escort and permission from everyone who has a rubber stamp in this organisation. Even then, however, there would still be the risk of breakdowns or road closures due to snow or security.

So I have learned to make contingency plans and even then to hold on to my plans lightly. Be ready to release them if the stars are simply not aligning for me.

When I was on my way to my wonderful yoga retreat in Thailand, I made it all the way to Kabul with no hitch. The day before I was due to fly out I was in the office in Kabul doing some last minute work when the security guard ran in and told us to evacuate immediately, no stopping to gather our handbags, this was not a drill. Indeed it was not a drill. There was a fuel tanker parked outside our compound with an improvised explosive device attached to it. Holy crap. That's all I can say about that.

So we spent the afternoon in the relative security of a neighbouring compound waiting for word that the IED had been diffused and we could go back in. The word never came. We were eventually all told to go home. But wait. My handbag is in the office still. My passport is in my handbag. My flight to Dubai and then to Thailand is leaving tomorrow morning. I need my passport.

There is no way I am allowed back in. So I go home, figure there is nothing to be done for now, agree to go for a drink with a friend and keep my fingers crossed that the IED will be diffused over night. At 5.00am I call our driver and he takes me to the compound. I have never been happier to be allowed into the office. I collect my passport, send out the documents that I had been supposed to send the day before and head happily off to the airport where my favorite RnR travel buddy is making sure the flight doesn't leave without me.

I'll tell you two things I've learned in this country. There is never anything to be gained from fretting about what you cannot control, and it always pays to make back-up plans for your departure on RnR!

24 hours of peace... and Lessons in Letting Go Part VII

Car ornament, Ghor, 2007

21 September is International Peace Day. The United Nations has focused it's activities this year on Afghanistan. Shit - I just heard an enormous explosion. Perfect. It's the day of peace and I was about to write a post about all about peace and how it is not just a pretty word, how it is the result of a whole lot of hard work and the resolution of conflicts. About how the women who told us on Sunday that they would kill anyone who tried to take their land from them are not blood thirsty warriors but mothers and wives who know that without the land they all die anyway so they might as well fight for it. I had all sorts of thoughts about peace, development, security and human rights today. Instead I hear an enormous explosion.

While on the subject of peace, and my view that it cannot be expected to flower until fundamental human rights are respected and conflicts are resolved. Over at Laila's blog she posted this week about new restrictions placed on civilians in the Gaza Strip. Read it and weep. The PR term for these restrictions is apparently "civilian levers". Civilian levers? How can they say this stuff with a straight face?

For some reason the spin has always been what makes me the maddest. If you are going to cut off the water, fuel, food and electricity supply to men, women and children who are trying to live a life of some minimum quality under unbearable circumstances then at least have the balls to call a spade a spade. These are not "civilian levers" this is a classic, text book example of collective punishment, and there is a reason it is prohibited under the Geneva Conventions. Maybe we should suggest that someone sits down and watchs "The Pianist" to remind themselves of where, when, how and why the Geneva Conventions were developed.

Sigh.

Aside from rants, I'm so full of thoughts and ideas and inspiration today. I can't quite get it all into order in my head to share it here. So this may be a little disjointed.

The lessons in letting go continue. This past two weeks the key theme has been letting go of "unrelenting standards". It's a phrase I picked up on a pop-psychology magazine and I can't get it out of my head. I guess it spoke to me. Little by little and with many relapses I am learning to let go of standards that don't help me, standards that used to hold me back by telling me that everything I did should be done well.

This week I read Keri Smith's post about her dust bunnies and smiled in recognition. It is so good that as well as linking I'm going to go right ahead and quote her here.

my house is never as clean as I would like, but I much prefer to spend time writing reading and making things than cleaning. i keep it at a point which it doesn't depress me, tidy but a bit dusty.

these are truths that a few years ago I would not wanted to have anyone know about. I would try and make people think that everything was pretty and funky and well functioning all the time. I am perfect and you should want my life.

at some point i became extremely wary and suspicious of the notion that people teach in self-help books that we should all aspire to a fully self-actualized high functioning life. this life and all it's messiness is what makes life interesting and intensely creative. i think often that's how creativity arises, in having to deal with things in the moment. the fact that some plans you have don't work out the way you wanted or "planned" forces you into a new way of seeing and operating.

in need of fixing is a perfectly good place to be. at times this is exactly who I am. sometimes life is uncomfortable and I no longer feel the urge to run from that. most importantly i no longer feel the need to live up to someone else's ideal. i can breathe deeper because I am not spending any energy hiding the truth from people.

because everyone else is messy too and has dust bunnies in the corners of their rooms.
some just hide it better than others.

Amen, Keri. My new friend Swirly was full of the same brand of goodness and wisdom this week.

It seems my stranglehold on my own life, demanding only the very best at all times, may have taken a little too long to overcome under normal circumstances so I led myself to Afghanistan. Here, I couldn't pick one day when I measure up to the standards I once thought were inviolable.

I too now miss deadlines, and hand over papers that I once would have never allowed to see the light of day, I drop balls and fail over and over again and - lo and behold - through it all I am still making a positive difference. I am still doing a good job.

I miss yoga sessions and haven't been for a run in three months, I eat what I can get which is sometimes the kind of food I would never have allowed past my lips in a past life. Yet, my health is good, my body has not collapsed or transformed into an unrecognisable blob. I still think that striving for excellence is great, that taking care of my body and meeting my committments to others are important. But in learning to survive here I've learned that nothing is more important than letting go a little bit. Letting go of my unrelenting standards and of my expectations of myself and others.

This week I'm also feeling closer and closer to realising my own power to make my dreams come true. Both Laini and Denise wrote about dreams this week, and I realised that I still have dreams that haven't yet had their day in the sun. I've never really lost my belief that, if I put my mind to something I can make it happen. As a little girl I dreamed of working for the United Nations, travelling to remote and troubled places and fighting for justice. A big dream for a farmer's daughter from small town New Zealand. Yet, here I am. I have more dreams, and now it is time to let some of them out to play. I'm pretty excited about that.

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!