When and how does a new year begin?

One of the most important questions at the end of the year in Europe seems to be, where you celebrate with whom New Years, while wearing what and shooting how many christmas crackers in the air.

In Pakistan there are no dirty streets caused by new year's fire crackers, no drunken party guests stumbling over the left overs of yesterday's party: the islamic year has begun two weeks earlier, is regulated by the moon and not even a great cause of joy and partying: it is Muharram

In the first ten days of Muharram, the shiits are celebrating one of their biggest mourning festivities, the ashura rites, in which they remember the death of imam Al Husain in the battle of Kerbela.

I went for these celebrations to Lahore, the border city to India, where huge processions of people walked through the streets, chanting songs and cutting themselves with knives. With hurting themselves they demonstrate their belief and support for imam Husain and show the suffering he went through aswell. What seems strange to outsiders and even to Sunnis (the other main sect in Islam), is of essential base in the Shia belief. It reminded me of the self flagellation in the christian belief, which was mainly practiced in the 16^th century for getting rid of the worldly demands.

We watched it from above, sitting on the roof top of a house and were invited afterwards for some food and a chai by the people who had let us on the roof top of the houses. The festivity was filmed and observed closely as the days of Muharram seem to be riot prone or sectarian violence. Sad enough that a bomb, detonating in Karachi on the Muharram festivity, triggered such sectarian violence.

Our visit to Lahore, aswell as the New Years Evening in Islamabad stayed calm. No fire crackers, no acted or true violence. Two old and two new years. And more to come.

christmas cake

Pakistan is a country with a rather small population of a religious group, which is called christians. Christians follow a 2000 year old beliefsystem, which is based on a singel deity, whom they call “god“. They belief that he has send his “son“ onto a small and rather unimportant planet called “earth“ to rescue the people, spread some love and do a lot of wonders. Although the spreading of this religion hasn't always been as peaceful as the messages conveyed through the “son“ (whom they call Jesus), the arrival of him is still being celebrated in many places of the planet earth.

Despite the fact that there aren't so many christians living in a state which claims to inhibit mainly muslims, the date of the arrival of the son (christmas) was more than consciously in the minds of the people around me. And as they considered me a follower of christianity, tons of christmas-messages arrived on that day in my phone, wishing a happy christmas day. An electronic dancing Weihnachtsmann greeted me at the entrance of the bakery and the uni had a day off due to christmas. It made me a lot thinking how many german christians in my home country would be conscious about celebrations like Eid and would congratulate their muslim fellow citizens?!


As my pakistani family had never celebrated christmas before, they were eager to get to know how christmas was celebrated with my family in Germany. So we decided to make a christmas party and went out to buy loads of food. On the way we stopped at the bakery: I should decide on the christmas cake. Christmas cake?!? That was new to me! But the family was of the firm belief that a christmas cake would belong to a real christmas celebration.

If you want to picture our christmas party: take loads of food (a 'german' potato soup and a great feast of pakistani yummy food of the best pakistani cook I know (my pakistani mom)), the most different people that you can imagine (from an old army officer, a young guy who always pushes to his limits and learns the art of diplomacy by pulling back and an anti-drug officer) and let them meet in an art school somewhere in a war torn country as Pakistan is right now. No snow, no going to church, but friendship, laughter and christmas cake.

Home? Where is home?

Is it made? Does it come along without us doing something for it or do we have to create it? Is it connection, rhythm, knowing? Is it where you are born or where you choose to live? Is it a smell, a taste, a feeling? How constant is it? Can I find it in myself? Is the outside just a reflection of my inner feeling of being at home with myself? Can it be anywhere, in any country, in a hotel room, a candle lit hut, under a tree, in a renovated room in Berlin, on the road between here and nowhere?

I sometimes listen to myself using the word in different contexts. Sometimes even after a day at a friend's place when asking him if „we want to go home“, meaning: to go to his place, which is a home for him and has become one for me.

I started feeling at home in Pakistan. In Rawalpindi. In old Lalazar, near the Tulsa Road. It maybe came when I started to know the route for the taxi at night, when I knew which chowk to turn at and when the tailors in the next street open in the morning. Maybe it began the day when I didn't think about the strange fact any more that I was in Pakistan, going to a foreign university, but just grabbed my stuff and ran out of the house, draping my dupata around me, thinking about which uni text I had forgotten to read.

Home is a rhythm of coming and going. The smell of paint. The taste of pharatha, egg-omlett and chai in the morning. The hugs from people I love. Juggling at night in my room, watching the lights of the nightly Rawalpindi out in the window reflections. Talking with the taxi drivers in Urdu. Enduring hours of not wanting to be there, to do this and that and at the end finding out that I just loved it. Just the way it was.

kaleidoscope emergency

I'm not sure whether I should bring this up. But honestly: it worked once. A supergreat friend of mine has send me bread and cheese from europe, which lead me to enjoying what I had missed over four months.

Now something else (rather than my tummy missing europe- like food) is in danger:

my kaleidoscope.

Why does this girl make such a fuss about a children's toy?!

Ok. Get back to the basics: this side is called traveleidoscopia. Why? Because I'm travelling with a kaleidoskope. And? This is one of my ways of meeting people! While having sometimes no way of communicating with them, I share a beautiful moment with them by showing them something like this:

or this:

or this:

and I get smiles, laughters. And sometimes conversations start. And I share more than I thought I ever would. With different people.

But now this playing behaviour of mine is under threat. Why?

I carried my kaleidoscope from Germany all the way to Pakistan, keeping it in my shoulder bag, taking it out, giving it into children's hands

and older hands, seeing it sometimes being dropped or squeezed. And now, as it gets looser, squeezed from all sides, crushed a bit, it already lost some of its security features and now the dust and dirt is coming in, making it impossible to shoot nice pictures or to carry it everywhere I want.

I tried to get a kaleidoscope over internet. Either they didn't respond to my request because they thought I'm a mad one or they said they're out of stock. And no, I couldn't find any kaleidoskopes in Pakistan, I tried to find them, honestly.

What I'm asking of you (just one of you, who might be reading this...).

Please go in one of the shops in your town that sell children's toys and get a kaleidoskope with mirrors. One where you can see the outer world broken in different schemes. It doesn't matter how big this is. Sometimes they come to be very small. And send it to me in Pakistan. I'll give you the money for it aswell as for the stamps as for the thing itself, when I meet you.

Please let my journey go on as colourful as it started. My retireing kaleidoskope will be smiling rewardingly at you, when it gets a small friend at its side when it breaks down.

18steps

“We are more than happy, to welcome you, the daughter of the nation of Karl Marx in our home.“

The elderly man said smiling, sitting in front of me on a table on which we just had shared a meal as I was visiting a fellow student that I knew from university in her hometown in Sindh.

I looked at him with intent gaze.

“What do you think about marxism?“

He asked me and unfolded a talk that would last several days between us.

To understand the setting, my honest surprise and the significance of this moment, one must know a bit more, where this took place.

The interior Sindh is a place, which is mostly rural. You drive through long planes of agriculture, water sides are accompanied with water buffalloes, which are huge, black beasts of animals, trotting by and not caring whether there's a car coming or not. In Sindh I was confronted with many women wearing the burka. And with places where there are no women at all to be seen, just men. I was escorted by police from one place to another. Also to the home of this special family.

“Communism is basically against religion as it considers it as the opium of the people that is keeping them away from rising up and gaining their strenght and their right. How do you think about that?“ I ask being not sure where this question will lead me to.

Pakistan is a state, which was created in the name of being a islamic state. A state in which everyone is a muslim. Although there are a lot of different islamic sects and their practice aswell as views are different, still most of the people living in Pakistan consider themselves muslim (despite the fact that there are other religious minorities like christians, hindus, etc to be found aswell)

“If you say, you are an agnostic or a deist, I'm with you.“ he smiles.

I know that he could never make this statement infront of other people in the public. The consequences would be severe. I also get to know further that he was the first in his village to send his girls for studying outside of his district, for letting them go out without wearing a headscarf, for letting them choose their husband independently, for letting them wear westernized clothes, for letting them selfresponsibly free.

In the evening, he invites me to a walk. He's a doctor and he knows what a person needs for good health. I decide to accompany him. We put on our shoes and start walking: in the courtyard. 18 steps forth, 18 steps back. In Europe I meet friends to go for a walk along nightly streets and through parks. Pakistan's different. At least in interior Sindh.

He says it is a good sign when he hears about the protests against G8 or NATO from Europe. It tells him that these people are not just nodding with their heads to the capitalist system and its wars, but that they are thinking and trying to change something. We talk for hours, walking from one side to the other in the courtyard. Communist ideals, real implantation in societies, socialism (oh how I wished he could have spoken with my friends from a certain shared flat in Berlin, he would have had equal partners!), capitalism, mysticism, religions, literature,...

As we say goodbye some days later, his whole family hugs me, gives me presents, saying they're going to miss me, grieve on both sides. I still have no idea how to thank them for what they gave to me. “You'll always be always the missing part of our family, which came to us from the country of Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg“ he said and looked as I walked out of the door.

princess in Sindh

Have you ever wondered what it's like to be a celebrity or one of the blue blood's folk also called royal family? What is it like if the police is making a fuss and surrounds you with security and doesn't trust you to step around alone?

I had heard about the convoys that you have to travel with when you want to cross Baluchistan or Sindh by bike for example, but coming to Sindh myself visiting a friend I suddenly found myself in a hotel with a police officer infront of my room explaining to me that I can't go anywhere without him. This is „dangerous area“ and he was there for my „personal protection“.

What is so dangerous about Sindh? There are no suicide bombers (except for very rare occasions in Karachi where a lot of different ethnicities mix) and I didn't have the feeling of being in danger while drinking a chai with the people from he bus which broke down in the middle of our trip why I had to stay overnight in a hotel paying a fortune cause I was too exhausted to haggle them down. The answers about the concrete danger were: There are rarely foreigners coming to Sindh (well, if they come to Pakistan they mainly go to the bigger cities or in the north for the mountains...).

There's poverty that leads the people to stealing (not new to me, a general threat while moving around), (group)rape (well...), robbery and kidnapping. This is why the police were struggling with my existence in their province: if something happens to me, a blonde single woman travelling alone, they're responsible. I was made later on to sign papers by the family I stayed with, about me being self-responsible for my travelling in this area and being here without anyone forcing me.

The night passed, the children watched me eating in the restaurant aswell as the waiters stared and rumbled for opening doors for me. The next morning, the police chief was already waiting at the reception: massive with black glasses and a little hat. He would guide me to the bus-stand and take the number of the driver, inform the police in the town that I was going to and made sure I understood not to eat or drink something with foreigners. How did he get me to the bus station?

With his motor bike! Imagine me sitting behind the police chief with my backpack, an additional smaller bag and the whole town watching us while he drove slowly with a selfsatisfied grin in his face, greeting everyone who wanted to see him, showing that he was on his way to fullfill his duty with a blond angrezi women holding on to him. What a show :-)

I wished I had pictures, but my words have to be enough for you lately.

So, the princess of traveleidoscopia was made to go to several police stations, handed over her passport, denied that she needed security guards (but still got one infront of the house she was staying in) and is still not convinced that this makes her any safer, but feels that it draws attention that makes her unsafe. I, as the princess of traveleidoscopia decided that I rather be an unprotexted circus princess dancing on roof tops and sharing chai with bus vallas than an overprotected royal princess that cannot move around

Why does the young man stand on the chair?

„You have to come with us.“

„Why? I don't have courses today. I'm just here to get some texts copied and I need to do some reading in the library...“

„No, but it's the beginning of the semester and you are aswell new on the uni. So we, as your elder classfellows have to introduce you into uni...“

says my smiling classfellow, who is one year younger. I have already endured two years of university education. But well, here I am new, so I follow them into a classroom full of students, who giggle and look around uncertain what's gonna happen:
the first semesters.
I sit down as one of them, observing how the „older students“ who have already studied two or three semesters, call one after the next student in front. They place them on chairs (either sitting or standing on them), let them answer silly questions to introduce them or let them dance:

it's the first days of their university career, so they should have fun. At least in the beginning.

As it is my turn, I stand in front of class, I have the name „I fly, I fly away“ and have to sing a song. What? She cannot sing an Urdu song? Ok, an english one will be acceptable, too. We laugh together and after a while stroll out of the classroom to the jungle like campus. Unity and fun in the form of dancing and singing is something that's missing at least in my homeuni.
Maybe in this country sometimes aswell. So maybe they made a not so bad start with it.