where I'm mostly

Quiz
Where do I spend most of my time?

Possible answers:
a) drinking tea in a chai-shop b) learning at university c) chilling at home d) roaming around bazaars....

no

it is answer number e) in traffic jams.


Being stuck in a bus somewhere between horrenduously honking cars, overtaking with maximum speed in a taxi while there is no place at all but place is being made by the persistently shoving of the driver, or just listening to bollywood songs while "rien ne va plus"(although everyone tries to tell me that the traffic is far worse in India, I can already see the similarities of what I have heard about...).

While being stuck one starts to look closer. And I am still every time amazed on how much you can put on a car


or a bike


and where you can find additional space where there has been none before

(although most of these pictures don't show the described traffic jams, believe me, they are there!it was just easier to picture its phenomenas without the buzzing traffic around...)

honesty

Not all the things that one might discover in a new country will be pleasant. To be frank: sometimes the things were disgusting or horrifying to me. For example, when I saw here a lot more people without arms or legs than I would be used to in Europe. Or when smelling the burning of waste or people searching in there for anything eatable (well, you can see that in Europe aswell but maybe not to this extend...). Or when seeing the displays of the butchers or the animals stuffed together.


Most of the time the animals were sitting in a small cage while they could hear the screams of their fellow mates being killed above them. They must feel the fear, the death, I thought.


And it is hard sometimes to look at the hanging meat here and there when you pass through bazaar streets (maybe just for me as a vegetarian, I don't know)


But on the other hand, I feel it is much more honest. We're killing and producing animals in a massive scale in Europe, most of the time accompanied with an overproduction that we put again into the waste-bin. Here just the animals are being killed that can be sold and eaten aswell. And the people see the animals first, before they decide to take one of the head-cut off fellows with them.

I think in this regard, the dealing of this society is much more honest than in my own, as there most of the people don't have any connection between the meat on their plate and the animal that probably has never seen the light in his fabric-produced life...

Pakistani curiosities

Pakistanis love kite flying.
I had already heard about it from my Urdu teacher, when I was in Germany, but I couldn't imagine to what extend it would be.


Every now and then by looking around you'll see the kites over the roof tops of the next houses. And there's also a kite-flying-festival every year. My host always says: people get so crazy about the kites that they forget where they are. And if they should be standing on the rooftop, they will even fall down, just because they are to buisy with their kites...

The only thing that might still top the kite flying is cricket. There are young boys up to businessmen playing cricket in parks and on the greenery next to highways nearly everywhere. In times of Ramadan they install even lights at special places to encourage "night-cricket"...

Another striking thing are the henna painted beards and the hair both of older women and men. I tried to find out more, why they colour their hair in such colours varying from deep red to orange. One explanation given from a lahori friend, was that Islam tells the people to take care of themselves and to beautify them, even if they get older. (well,...different kind of taste, I guess ;-) Another more practical explanation seemed to be that the henna colour cools while the heat of pakistani summers...

Most of the kiosks look like this:

Pepsi, Coke...-advertisement (whatever american brand sponsors) decorates the outside of the shops.

Transport can come in different ways (this is the electric cable of a flatiron)...

And even the nature looks different to me...(but that's maybe just because I'm not enough knowledgeable about botanics)


And what do these guys do at every corner of the street in Rawalpindi?


They are musicians. They wait for work all day and night long, sometimes they practice, on the street. Until someone comes to hire them. Then they get in a car all together and drive off to their gig:

What are you doing here?

(this is not me...don't have dreads, don't worry ;-P )

In my experince, answers to the above mentioned question (I study here for one semester) can arouse two kinds of reactions.

Either a “wow. How did you get to that idea?“ (which is mainly intensified when the person I talk to encounters that my family is not with me in Pakistan and that I am on my own. Then my parents are praised to be brave to let me go...).

Or a “...and what is your research topic?“

The first question is easy to answer. The second one is a bit more tricky and I just found out why and what makes it so difficult for some people to understand what the hell I'm doing here.

In Europe it is a common practice to go for a semester abroad while studying a bachelor- or a master-degree. It is seen as a treat of

being open towards new experiences and some people expect it in your cv. Mostly these half year or year-experiences are organized ventures and you have to apply for them (like the European Erasmus-Programmes or the programmes of DAAD in Germany).

In Pakistan something like this doesn't exist. Not only, that there aren't students normally coming from other countries to study here (an exception might be the International Islamic University in Islamabad), but also that it pakistani students don't go for a semester abroad. If they should go abroad, then it is because they'll study all of their university career in another country (most likely in the UK).

International students might come to Pakistan mainly for research and fieldwork and not for a semester (as it is not a Barcelona-erasmusparty semester that you will study here). The reaction of my fellow students when encountering me, was mainly, to ask me, if I was a new professor at their institute.

The second kind of reaction (what my research topis is) is

likely to be accompanied by the thought, that I must be specialised in something. „Pakistan is so diverse, how can you come here and just learn about „Pakistan“? You must be specialised in the Baluchi way of marriage or in the women in the Skardu region or in a special language? You just want to learn Urdu? Why not a smaller language or Pashto or Punjabi?“.

In these moments I have to explain my background and to tell them that I'm first of all here to get aquainted with all of these differences and that to an average european citizen, Pakistan in general is already a quite unusual specialisation.

So, what am I doing here? Every day life anthropology. Learning by living.

renting a place

What do you do, when you want to live in another society, when you don't just want to pass through, seeing the hotel rooms or camping spaces, but actually plan to stay for longer? How does it function in Pakistan to rent a room? What kind of papers do you need for it and how do you find out about your different options?

After struggling in Berlin to rent a flat, I was prepared to look for internet-annonces, present various identity-proofs and go through personal interviews. But Berlin isn't Islamabad.

How do the people live here? What's an average rent? How do students live? Do they share flats as european students do and party all weekend long in their own space?

First of all: most students that come from further away live in hostels, that are either on the university campus or nearby. The hostels are segregated by gender and boys don't have access to the girl's hostel vice versa. Students who have their family or a relative in the city they study in, live with them.

As I didn't feel like moving into the girl's hostel, I decided to search for a pakistani family.

It is quite common for foreigners, who stay longer and who don't have the priviledge of coming together with an organisation that already provides them with a place, to stay as a paying guest with a family. As a single woman it is better viewed to live with a family and not to live alone. But how to find a reliable family that wants to house a girl from abroad that is studying in Pakistan for one semester?

You ask your pakistani friends.

Pakistan is a society, which is still greatly influenced by the treat of being a face-to-face society. Most of the things are being solved by knowing someone, who knows someone, who can help. Looking in the internet or in a newspaper for an appartment or a room is not seen as being safe. „How can you know that the family is a respectable one? They will charge you a higher price, when you go there as a foreigner than if I speak with them as a pakistani first!“ a friend of mine told me. Ok. I waited.

After two weeks and several researches by different friends, a family was found: my new pakistani family! Consisting of two woman (and a child and the people who help in their household), who are running an artschool in Rawalpindi.

I met them, they showed me the room, we drank tea together and I moved in three days later. No paper work, no financial security to be proven, just a good talk and trusting in the ones that have aquainted us and in the friendship that runs over two corners and extends to me, who is now part of a new family. My pakistani one.

Walking.Biking.Dancing

Sometimes cultural difference can rather be seen in the small than in the big scale. Sometimes it's not found in human rights, ideals or ideas of a nation, but in the day to day life: things that we are used to and that we start to miss.

Walking. Biking. Dancing.

These are the things that I really miss, when you would ask me (next to some bread and cheese, to be honest ;-)

Walking. For everything the car is being taken. Even though it should just be 500 metres to another spot. I like to walk on my campus in the morning, although the walk might be half an hour (I told you, the campus is big!). Astonished professors asked me later, if everything was ok with me, as I didn't take a bus or a cap for the distance. I enjoy the morning sun over the green hills, but I think they already marked me as a weird european for being so stupid not to take a car...

Biking. You'll see a lot of Pakistanis riding their bikes in the crazyness of 'pindi's traffic. But when I say Pakistanis, I mean male Pakistanis. Since my arrival in Pakistan, two months ago, I haven't seen a single female person riding a bike. Not that there is a written law against it. But law is not always written down. Law can be encoded in social taboos, and a woman riding a bike in Pakistan is simply a no-go. Nevertheless I couldn't stand it and borought once a bike from european friends, who had come all the way from the czeck republik to Pakistan by bike. It felt like having a little piece of Berlin in my pocket when riding along the pakistani highway. Just for some minutes.But it was enough to give me some part of home.

Dancing. The most normal thing, when you are a young european: you go dancing on fridays or saturdays, sometimes combined with an alcoholic drink. Not in Pakistan. At least not in the official society (as I know that there are possibilities to go out dancing where a normal restaurant or a private space suddenly transforms into a dance-nightclub, if you know where to go and on which door to knock). But normally, dancing in public is forbidden and there don't exist things like discos (maybe aswell because this would be a mingling of the different sexes, which isn't accepted in a mostly gender-segregating society as Pakistan). Maybe this is also a reason why marriages are so huge and long celebrated (4-6 days), as they give a good reason to celebrate and dance.

My campus is a jungle

(I promise to take some good pictures of what I am describing as soon as I can. I couldn't do it so far due to higher security measurements at my university. But I try to do it in the next days)

The Quaid-I-Azam university, which I have chosen to stay for several months, is a bit out of the Islamabad city. When driving there, you get to a crossroads where you can either decide to go in direction of Bari Imam (a local shrine) or through a big portal onto the campus of the uni

.

The first time I entered the uni campus, I was literally not able to shut my mouth out of astonishment. It is huge, it it wild, you even need taxis to drive you from one institute to the next. Some smaller rivers make their way through the hilly terrain, hidden by long grass. Huge old trees stand as posts next to the driveways. It goes the rumor that they wanted to make the campus nice and neat some time ago, but that the Quaidians (so are the students of Quaid-I-Azam called) protested against it.

There is a general administration block, where the busses stop in the morning and from where they leave two times in the afternoon/evening. Big blue busses with the „Quaid-I-Azam“ writings on them. Which bus is yours? You can find t out by looking at the handwritten Urdu-table in the administration block.

And you should! Because they change the bus numbers every now and then. Suddenly it's not number 17 anymore that brings you to Rawalpindi, but number 3. Better you find out before you hop on the bus...

On time of arrival or leaving, they are crammed full with students, not leaving any space (although they are still sitting gender-ordered: male students in the back, female students in front. And it is astonishing that there are always more female students in the busses. Are there more female students at uni? Or just more taking the bus?).

The part of the campus with my institute is quite far out from the other institutes. It is jokingly referred to as the “Bangladesh-campus“ (after the eastern part of Pakistan, which was “lost“ 1971 in a war with India and gained its independence, today known as “Bangladesh“). When going with a taxi to uni (because I didn't want to stand up in the early morning at 6 to get the bus or my courses are later), I have to argue nearly every time with the driver that this is still a part of the university and that I'm not gonna pay more.

The institute, which stands with the institute of psychology and the regional studies of africa and southamerica, feels a bit like a small island, in the safari-park like far stretching campus-site. A good thing of being in Pakistan and not in an african country is in this respect that the animals you might meet aren't tigers but rather cows that are strolling by....

How to prepare a semester abroad in Pakistan

just my way (as there are thousands of ways)

1.Decide that you want to go to Pakistan. It is a fascinating country with a lot of culture, warmhearted people and a lot of contradictions that you will never fully understand when you're just reading the news or deciding for a two weeks holiday trip to Lahore.

2.Decide where you want to go. The cities have got different faces and there are numerous good universities to be found (LUMS and Punjab-University in Lahore, Jamaia Karachi University or IBA in Karachi, International Islamic Univrsity and the Quaid-I-Azam University in Islamabad...just to mention some of them). Read about it, gather information.

3.Find a source to supply yourself with money. Either your bankaccount, which you have filled in advance through your own work or other means, a scholarship or your parents who support you.

4.Get in touch with professors at the university you favor. Ask all the questions you want to know (although most of them will be left unanswered). Don't be shy to phone them after a first mailcontact (keep in mind the different timezone in Pakistan).

5.Get your papers ready at your own homeuni (telling them you'll be away for half a year), tell your family about it (make the destinction of Pakistan and Afghanstan clear on the map and show that you are prepared in up to date knowledge about the country)

6. Don't expect to get credit points for your studies at home. Expect credit points for your personal experience on your life-account!

6. Be prepared that it will be different from all that you expected it to be. Leave your fear at home. You can pick it up later, when you come back (just joking, I know it'll be in your handluggage...).

6.Go

fine line

There are days when I don't know if I want to go on. Days where I feel I don't have the strenght or where I surrender. Why did I choose this path? What did me make to go that way? What will I find here? Should I give up and leave?

There was a point in the last week where I stood again with myself and I actually didn't know if I want to carry on. A university had been attacked by a suicide bomb, many students died. A bazaar was bombed. Over 150 people dead. I had been stuck in a traffic jam, which turned out to be there because of another attack just right around my area. Akbar bhai, who lives with us had seen the people who had lost arms or whose faces had been half destroyed. He, a huge man in his middle age, faded. The little girl in my family stayed home for ten days, because there had been coffins at her school. They were delivered with the warning: „you are next“.

Do I want to stay at a place, which is so unstable? Friends asked: how can you stay? Why don't you leave?

And I was honestly considering it.

But on the other hand: who am I, a priviledged european girl with all the opportunities in life, to say: „oh no, this is too dangerous for me, I leave.“ while my friends here, the family that I live in and that I started to love, while all of them have to stay? And couldn't it be as well that I leave the country and die in a traffic accident in India or with a desease on my travelling back?

Where is the personal border, the line that needs to be crossed until one person says, „it's enough, I leave“?

I think for every person this line is somewhere else. And from the outside one will never be able to tell someone else where that line should be. The line also changes. It might change when you experience a day to day life in a country which seems to be at war at the same time. Or it changes when you gain strength out of a situation.

After being unstable in and with myself, I found my line again through talking with friends, travellers and my pakistani family. It might be further out than the borders of other people, but I can see and acknowledge it (again).

Just when I had found it again, I got a message from one of my friends, whom I had been speaking with about the situation and who had given me a lot of great advices how to see the situation and what to think about.

Thank you for being always at my side.

Here is what he wrote:

Hey,

Have been thinking about you since we spoke. I know you're facing some hard choices at the moment. My normal advice for most travelling is that most threats and journeys in dangerous places are not as great as they seem with a sensible attitude and careful preparation.

But sometimes like yourself you find yourself in a changing situation with a specific threat. Chances are things WILL be fine for you, but I think in this case we are all too far away to really understand the nature of this threat. However you are still close in the hearts of all your friends and I will support whatever choice you make. I wish you wisdom to deal with fear without undue haste or stubboness.

I wish for you most of all that your dreams come true, and if some are not in reach straight away that you may let them fly knowing that they may return later and in the mean time other dreams may come.

I get down sometimes that not all my dreams came true, or the ones I am living are not being realised as quickly as I would like. But then I remember that we are blessed, you and I . In our lives we have both chased some of our biggest dreams and seen them come true. So many people dare not even imagine that their smallest dreams might one day come true.

So this dream that you are lucky to live has now a life of it's own that is in some part out of your control because you have been brave enough to give it life. For the part of this dream that is still in your hand do not strangle it by grasping to hard, or poison it with undue fear. It's up to you to find the hidden joy and lessons it is trying to bring you in return for the life you gave it.

And finally I ask you, when you spot that I am loosing the sense of my own dreams please give my ass a gentle kick and shine a little light in my direction.

love and hugs,

I hitched a dream

Pakistans streets are full of dreams. Dirty, broken, confused ones, you might think. You may think right. But there are also dreams, neatly ordered, uprising, organised ones. And then there are the colourful ones, the big ones, the ones that buzz through the streets and cheer me up when I hear their bells, their tinkling clinkling rush and away.

They roll through the country, supplying supermarkets and bazaars with goods, rumbling through the nights on highways and mountain passes and supplying me with longing thoughts of jumping on and riding off.

So I did it.

I hitchhiked one of the big trucks, that drive on the Karakorum highway. We found him on the gas-station in a small mountaineous town in Hunza and persuaded him in my broken, unpolished Urdu to take us with him. The driver of the dream shouldered our backpack and climbed onto the truck to heave it ontop of it.

Answering the question what the truck loaded, he said „alu“ (potatoe) and off we went. With approximately 10 kilometre per hour over rocky ways that seemed to mock the term „highway“, we rumbled along a breathtaking scenery of deep valleys, cut into the stone with the knife of time, water and wind.

Every truck is a composition of colours, motives and magnificent paintings. The colours are regional specific, but the trucks are like rolling pieces of art with handcoloured stickers, flags and little fabricated mirrors, broken into hundreds of little eyes to shine back some lights.

We stopped several times. To help other trucks that were broken down, to put stones aside or to eat in a small hut where the other truckers ate. A safe place to eat, if I can rely on a friends' comment, who stated that truckers need to eat good food as they are hours and hours on the road and can't bear one of the main asian tourists attractions (diarrhoea).

The men who took us with them were originally from Swat, the area which became well known in western media through words as „Talibanisation“, „imposing of the Shari'a“ and „military offensives“. Formerly the Swat-valley was one of the most frequently visited tourist spots in Pakistan and most of the locals I meet still sigh about the recent development in the area.

After hours and hours we exchanged more little details with the two men (one driver and one person who helps the driver, jumps out and clears the way for the truck). How many brothers, sisters, children, married or still in search...familychat. At some point they asked us, what we'd pay for a night in the hotel in Gilgit where we were heading towards. Some time after telling them, they put 200rupees in our lap: for the hotel. No persuading words, no giving or throwing back of money could help. They refused to take it back, raised their hands, pointing to the coloured roof of the driving cabin and said: allah. We had to take the present.

What would have taken us three hours took us nine. We arrived in the middle of the night in the dead-empty Gilgit, where the only persons on the street to talk to, were military guards. As they couldn't drive us into the city, they called a Taxi for us, waiting patiently until it came. From the backwindow in the Taxi I could see them riding off: in my beautiful potato-truck-dream.

problems of measurement

„Where are you right now?“ asked a friend on skype

I looked around: „in an internet cafe with some travellers and a milk tea“

„No, where you are geographically...?“

„Ah! In the north of Pakistan.“

„Isn't there fighting everywhere right now?“

„No, I can just see autumn coloured trees outside, to be honest.“

One of the fact that hit me the hardest when coming to Pakistan, is the scale of the country that can just be misinterpreted when seen from the west. Before I came here, I had seen maps of the countries, political analysis and of course the way the media presented Pakistan in Germany (which I take as a general example for our inovative and well informing

european media....grr...).

I was worried as the military was launching an offensive against the Taliban in the northwestern border region to Afghanistan and it seem to be very close to Islamabad, the place that I had selected to go for studying. It looked too close not to be effected by streams of refugees and by military action.

When being in Pakistan, the situation looks quite different. The country is bigger than you would imagine and even when I say, I go for a holiday trip into the north, it doesn't mean that I travel into mountaineous areas where there's just fireing of guns, blasting cars and terrorists who hide in caves.

In a two weeks trip we (some friends and I) went up north along the Karakorum Highway.

First to Naran with beautiful lakes and a breathtaking mountain scenery.

Then it took us further, to Gilgit, the provincial capital of the north, and all along until the valley of Hunza, in which you can see coloured trees like a canadian dream piled along steep mountains and deep cut in rivers flowing by.

No terrorists to be found, sorry to say, that I just had a lovely holiday trip.

Normality and madness

„What kind of hobbies do you have?“

„I like to relax, watch pakistani dramas on TV or go for a picknick with my friends. But did you hear about the bomb blast this morning?“

The blue university bus just overtook a smaller cab as the talk with that girl next to me took an unexpected turn.

„No. what has happened?“

I had been attending university classes, copying the readings and chatting away with class fellows over a tea and a samosa (delicious pakistani food). A bomb blast was new to me.

„I think it was at F.7. But I don't know more about it.“

Islamabad is parted in sectors. As it is a planned city, which was just made to be the new capital for Pakistan in the 60s, every sector has a distinct look. The F-sectors are said to be quite expensive compared to others. They house people with some money and also some offices, like the UN-office, which was attacked by a suicide bomber, how I learned later on that day from the TV. Five people had died. Others were injured.

The streets looked like nothing had happened. Taxis made their way, people walked next to old beautiful trees, normality was joking on the news that seemed so far away. Even here, in the same city. The lives of the people went on. I cared for my university texts and was just starttled on the casuality that the people acted on as if nothing had happened.

One day later, I met a friend for a tea as he had just come back from the kashmiri-region where he had a job-interview. We talked about the interview and about his chances of getting the job. Then he asked me if I had heard about the attack. Indeed, I had.

A friend of him was working in that office. Normally this friend would have been in the office the morning of that attack. He just decided in the early morning to accompany my friend to his interview. This is why he survived. And his collegues died.

Sometimes it is so close. Normality and madness.