Excruciating Pain in Beautiful Places

excruciating pain in beautiful places.
‘P
orters? Ha! I’ve never had a porter in my life!’ The man behind the desk repeated himself: for my trip up the 17,057 feet of Mt. Kenya, I would have three porters, along with a guide. Porters; I couldn’t get over it. It sounded so colonial, so Out of Africa. Half the ‘fun’ of climbing up a mountain was knowing that you’d ‘earned it,’ and part of earning it surely included carrying your own stuff, unassisted. Send one home, I told him. I can carry my own backpack. ‘No problem,’ he said, and with a ten second phone call, it was done.
About five minutes later, I came to my senses. I pictured myself later that afternoon, sweaty, tired, and struggling, cursing my heroics. Perhaps I was being a little too hasty about the whole porter concept. Who was I to hurt the local economy for the sake of my pride? If I had to be humble, so be it. I had paid for the damned porters already, so I might as well let them do their job. ‘Excuse me, sir?’ I asked. ‘I’ve changed my mind. Three porters will be fine.’ Well, he said, I’ve already informed them. ‘Ok, ok, no problem,’ I said, ‘two will be fine,’ not wanting to make a fuss.
About ten minutes after that, I realized just how much I was already missing that third porter I’d never met. I found the guy behind the desk in a shed across the gravel parking lot from the office, loading kerosene from a drum into a small plastic jerry can with the man who was to be my guide. ‘Excuse me, um, hi. Me again. Sorry to bother you. But if you don’t mind, I’d like you to call them back and have them arrange for that third porter.’ No problem, he assured me with a smile, undoubtedly glad that he would remain behind the desk while the guide shepherded this miserable git up the mountain for the next three days.
A
nd so we were off, my guide, my three porters and I, to conquer Mt. Kenya. Well, not exactly. Since I only had a total of 3 and a half days before I had to get back on an airplane, I didn’t have enough time to summit. The last part of the climb was also ‘technical,’ involving helmets and crampons and ice axes and all kinds of macho climbing equipment that appears great in photos but, in my experience, is not as fun as it looks. So I was content with the lesser of the 3 peaks of Mt. Kenya at 4,900 meters, point Lanana. Though I liked the idea of some kind of climax to the climb, I wasn’t obsessed with the idea of a summit, really I wasn’t; just happy to get out and do a bit of hiking.
From the lodge we took an olive green land rover that was held together with duct tape and bits of string. It had the delightful ‘vibration effect’ that all old land rovers get after 500,000 kilometers, whereby the whole contraption shakes violently over every pebble and emits squeaks from every one of its thousand joints and you feel like your teeth are going to shake right out of your head. On every steep uphill climb toward the base camp this particular vehicle insouciantly emitted exhaust directly into the cab, an effect which was judged to be somewhat less in the back seat, where I, the honored leader of our expedition, was given a seat.
After an hour long climb up a rutted dirt road through a lush forest we arrived at the gates of the national park, where I was requested, as chief of party, to sign the five of us in. After another half hour we arrived at ‘Meti,’ the first base camp, so called because it is a 100 meters away from a Kenyan national meteorological observatory. A few bushback, a sort of russet-colored forest deer, munched on the grass amongst the wood frame huts, while several dozen black Sykes monkeys roamed all over the camp’s green lawns, languidly munching on some non descript monkey food, leaping from the stands of bamboo to the roofs of the huts, and looking disinterestedly in our general direction to see if we’d dropped anything edible yet.
A
fter a little while I took off up the hill with one of the porters, named James, who asked me with a smile to call him, ‘Jimmy.’ When I found out that my name could only come from his mouth as ‘Elik,’ I decided to go for a hip sobriquet too, and asked him to call me ‘EJ.’ I had to remind him to call me EJ and not Elik just about every time he used my name, and after about fifteen minutes I gave up. Elik it was. Any attempt at conversation, in fact, proved to be agonizing. Every time he didn’t understand something I said (things like, ‘You find it difficult to understand me, don’t you?’), he would stop walking, turn around, cock his head to the side like a cocker spaniel who knows the sounds mean something, he just doesn’t know what, and say, ‘huh?’ Our ‘hiking’ was ten steps, followed by a pause to clear up our misunderstanding, followed by another ten, and so on.
That night, back in the hut, they brought in the food; rice and beans, fried fish, mushroom soup, and cut fruit for dessert, along with tea and warmed milk. It felt strange to be sleeping in a 10 bed hut by myself, eating alone at the table, while the rest of the guys ate by themselves. Near the end of the meal the 40ish guide Richard came in, and we chatted a bit about the trip. He wanted to make sure that I wasn’t expecting too much out of our summit bid, that we might just make a run for the top and then head straight down, and not the ‘circumnavigation of the main peaks’ that was advertised in the brochure. You may be too tired, he said. I assured him that I had learned my lesson with the porter debacle, and wasn’t planning to be a hero. That agreed, he said good night and we all went to bed.
A
t seven the following morning Richard and I walked up the same path that Jimmy and I had started the previous afternoon. The first hour and a half were through a fairly dense forest, and despite being well above the 10,000 feet of Meti camp, there wasn’t much to see beyond thick forest on either side and more path in front of us, as steep in most places as a flight of stairs. As it turned out I had been wise to accept the third porter; they were only there to carry our food, and I was expected to carry my own pack. Richard pointed out the numerous piles of buffalo shit and the one pile of elephant shit on the trail, and we talked about all the animals he’d seen over the years, and about the time several years ago when a lion had chomped on a guy’s leg while he was sleeping in a tent and dragged both him and the tent a good long way, crushing the guy’s femur before giving up and going away hungry. It took them a full three days to find that lion before they killed him, Richard said. Then we talked about the Masai for a while, and he told me what a no-good bunch of cattle rustling, trouble making, uneducated thieves they were, whom I nevertheless found endlessly more fascinating than the far more westernized and pacific Kikuyu.
W
e hiked for another half hour before we got above the first tree line and the sky opened up. There were broad meadows of yellow grass studded with rocky outcroppings and black succulent trees not unlike the Joshua trees of the southwest. The views were stunning. Though there were clouds in the valley we could still glimpse the dark outline of another low, nameless mountain chain on the other side.
By then I could feel the air growing thin. We had started that morning at 10,000 feet, and it was clear, to me at least, that oxygen was not as copious as one would have liked. The legs were willing, but the heart was weak. We’d pause to rest and catch our breath, but then five minutes after we started my heart would be pounding as if I was in full sprint. It was about ten in the morning and the sun was so strong that I couldn’t raise my eyes much further beyond Richard’s shoes in front of me. I took a long-sleeved shirt from my pack and tied the sleeves loosely around my head so that the collar was like a hat brim, and found that it kept the sun off of my head and I could actually see. Richard had a smartly tight pack with all the loose dangly straps neatly stowed away, nice hiking pants, and tight-fitting gators around his ankles. I looked like an idiot. When I turned around I could see the shadow of my pack, with about twenty loose straps swinging in as many directions with every step, and I had a shirt on my head. But what the hell. It was comfortable. And who was I trying to impress?
The farther ridgeline turned out to be a mirage, and just gave on to another, and another. The Joshua trees thinned out and we passed though an area of low scrub and more rocks, a few of which we had to grab on to with one hand and skirt our way around, but nothing too difficult. At one point the summit came into view over the near horizon where the trail disappeared over a ridge; three giant fingers of black rock jutting into the sky, crusted in snow and swathed in cloud. We hiked a bit more, and it disappeared again behind another ridge.
W
e had been hiking for about three hours when my head first started to ache. It wasn’t bad at first, but I knew it was the thinning air. I’m smart like that, having heard about it on National Geographic and having puked my guts out on a mountain once before. I drank as much as water as I could, but I knew that a headache setting in already at 12,500 feet was a bad sign. ‘It’s 10:45, now,’ I said, ‘and we started at 7:30. What time to do we arrive at Mackinder’s camp?’ I asked. ‘About two more hours,’ they said. Uh oh.
We continued on. After a little while the porters hiked on past us and it was just Richard and I, taking turns with the lead. We eventually left the sight of the towns in the valley behind us. We could see three bare, rising ridgelines; one across a valley to our right, another across the valley to our left, and the one we now snaked along, following a high trail just below the crest of the ridge, gradually gaining altitude. Each of these high ridges was bare of trees, just a carpet of dry grass a shade lighter than rust and black rock outcroppings. At some point we turned a corner into another, higher valley, and the summit was visible at the end of the sloping valley, a huge bowl of scree topped by the black rock ridge of the three snow-covered black fingers of the summit at the far left side. The landscape had changed at once. There were strange succulents everywhere, rosettes of spiny leaves curved upward to catch the dew at their base, some with tall, geometrically prickly cones shooting three or four feet from their centers, and several other odd-looking high altitude plants, including a six foot tall stalk covered in what looked like a thousand shaggy green dreadlocks. And there were innumerable Joshua trees, spaced far enough apart that you could see each one, both on our side of the valley as well as the far side, but so many in number as to make the mere idea of counting them inspire dizziness. Or perhaps that was just me.
B
ecause at this point, the air was really starting to get to me. My head was pounding. If the frequency of my rests was making Richard grow impatient, he didn’t show it, though I was getting fairly annoyed with myself. My legs were fine; they wanted nothing more than to continue moving. It was more like a total failure of my body’s central energy system. No force of will could make my head stop pounding, my ears stop ringing, or my heart stop screaming out for rest or ritual suicide. After a half hour along the rising ridgeline trail of this, the last of the valleys before the summit, we could see the lodge. The long zinc roof caught the sun, still at least two kilometers away at the top of a small hill at the bottom of the bowl of scree, impossibly far away at the bottom of the opposite side of the valley.
After an infinite number of rests and footsteps that went one, two, one, two, we went down one side of the valley, across a four-log footbridge over a small rushing stream, and up the other side. At the first rocky outcropping there were a bunch of hyrax, small innocuous brown animals that look like giant guinea pigs and are said to be the closest living relative of the elephant. Like the monkeys at Meti they were almost totally unafraid of humans, and only slightly more curious. They were fascinating little creatures, and I couldn’t give a damn. I was wasted. I collapsed on the grass in front of them. More hyrax emerged, until there were 7 or 8, nibbling at invisible little morsels, sniffing my scent on the wind, and looking at me with half hearted curiosity. Somehow the presence of these disinterested, overgrown guinea pigs only seemed to heighten the absurdity of my situation. A sign said, ‘Mackinder’s Camp 200 Meters.’ I think the last two hundred meters took me a half hour.
When I arrived Richard was waiting with a cup of hot tea. All I could say was ‘bed.’ My head felt like it was in a vise, but that my nameless torturer hadn’t thought that sufficient, so he decided to insert several invisible wood screws at strategic intervals in my temples and forehead, which he drove further in with a quarter turn of each screw, every ten minutes. I was nauseous. I was shaking. There was no denying it; I had altitude sickness.
On the way in to the lodge I had briefly glimpsed the summit; stunningly beautiful, incredibly close. The whole place was magical, otherworldly, as summits always are; utterly rare, like a place on another planet. Though the features of the landscape were in enormous disproportion to the scale of everyday life, their size was commensurate to their sparsity. It was a space as empty as a desert, where every feature stood out in stark relief, as if the image of every boulder and crest had the volume turned up. A single black bird of prey circling on the updrafts was the epitome of solitude. Broad waves of scree rolled down the sides of the peaks, and a single white cloud jealously caressed the tallest finger; while the other peaks on the bowl ridge were cloudless, the white tuft endlessly changed shaped in the wind, but never left its place.
At least, that’s what it looked like in retrospect. At the time, my thoughts ran closer to, ‘Look at – ow – that – ow – peak, it’s so – shit that hurts – beautiful – the way the – goddamn my ears are ringing – sunlight falls on the – oh my dear god this can’t be for real – surface of the – ow, ow, ow – summit.’ I went inside and crawled into bed and proceeded to get a fever. With chills.
A
little while later I heard a young Australian woman talking cheerfully with her guide. She complained about the cold, saying that she had every single item of clothing on. I came out to find that she was in fact doing her best impersonation of an Eskimo, wearing a scarf, hat, and parka indoors, trying to write in a notebook with gloved hands. Still, she was nowhere near the agony that I was in, and I hated her for it. She wished me well as I sat down to eat my dinner. ‘I hope you feel better,’ she said, ‘it’s no fun.’ Indeed.
I ate a bit, and I managed to keep it down. I conferred with Richard. If I felt this bad in the morning, there would be no Point Lanana for me. Any thought of edema, brain hemorrhage, or stroke aside, this simply wasn’t any fun. If the gods of the mountains were kind enough to endow me with a clear head in the morning, as they had after a previous bout of altitude sickness in the California Sierras many years ago, I would say a prayer of thanks and march my way up the last 700 meters to the Point. But if not, I would head straight down. Anything to take that vise and those screws off my head.
I was lucky enough to find a sleeping pill that I had left in my bag, which I swallowed after dinner for some a good three hours of sleep, from 8 pm till about 11:00. Then I tossed and turned, shaking and sweating on fever dreams until Richard came in at 2:00 in the morning to ask if I wanted to make the moonlight ascent. Alas, I had fallen out of favor with the gods. I told him that we would head down to Meti after breakfast, and he looked pleased and said that he would go back to bed.
I slept a total of two hours after that, at intervals. One of the particularly evil things about altitude sickness is that it won’t let you sleep. At six the first light crept through the window, and I decided that I could take it no longer. I struggled to sit up like a man with the worst hangover in the world, packed my bag, got some water outside for my parched mouth, found Richard in his bed and told him I was heading down. Now. He could catch up with me on the way. I loaded my bag, walked bout 150 meters, and puked all the water I had just drank, then dry heaved and spat for about five minutes, and continued, one foot after another. I turned around and snapped a few pictures of the summit. Needless to say, the summit at sunrise was absolutely breathtaking.
W
hat’s the deal with climbing mountains, anyway? Though it’s a rare person who would call altitude sickness fun, most of us who enjoy higher mountains have had it at least once or twice in our ego-driven quest for more peaks. But even without altitude sickness, anyone who has been at the top of a mountain will tell you that a summit is rarely a pleasant place to be. The wind is generally howling, and you are usually the coldest you will be all day. Yes, the views are amazing. But so are the views of sunset out the window of a 757. And you can see that with a bloody mary in your hand. Heck, I had already seen the summit of Mt. Kenya through the window of a plane, on my way up country on an earlier trip. So there was no mystery. And while I stay in fairly good shape, I have yet to come down from a high climb feeling anything other than wretchedly tired, aching in every muscle. Yet I still crave them. Even the most gut-wrenching climbs I’ve made still stir something in my memory; I rarely remember how painful they were, only the views, the ascents, the last steps onto the top. Is it all just an ego trip? For some, I suppose. But I don’t claim to be a serious climber, and will promptly shut my mouth in the presence of one. I’m just someone who likes to climb whenever I get the chance, and the memory of a good hike will often sustain me for months to come.
S
o I was more than a little dejected. They caught up with me after an hour. After another hour we stopped to rest and without meaning to I actually fell asleep for a few minutes. They woke me and I felt worlds better. Though the vise was still on, my tormenter had actually turned the screws in the opposite direction. We continued down, and in a four and half hours we were at Meti.
I met the caretaker of Meti at the bottom, and we fell to talking while I waited for them to make my breakfast. For once, I was confident about being able to keep it down. He told me that in addition to being caretaker, he was a guide, too. He said that he had led 11 Japanese up the mountain, just last week.
‘Eleven Japanese? That’s a lot of Japanese.’
‘Eleven? Oh no. Not for Japanese. I’ve led twenty, even thirty Japanese. They always come in great number.’
‘How many porters for eleven Japanese?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘How many made it to the top?’
‘All of them. Japanese always make it to the top.’
‘Oh.’
‘Japanese are very deter-mined. They always go all the way to the top.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Even if he is vomiting, sick, his friends will push him, push him! Very… deter-mined.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Very deter-mined.’
‘Me, I get sick, I come down.’
‘Yes! Much better. Could be serious! You should come down. Is better. Edema, anything. Dangerous. You can get very sick.’
‘Yeah. And besides, if it’s not even fun anymore, then what’s the point?’
‘Yes. Exactly. If it’s not fun anymore, if you are sick, why keep going?’
Naro Moro River Lodge, Kenya
15 March, 2006

After the quake

Pakistan
T
he city looks like it has been leveled with a nuclear bomb. Only comparisons to Hiroshima or perhaps Nuremburg can convey how completely this city of 25,000 was annihilated just six weeks ago. But the impact on Balakot, Pakistan, came from the earth itself, a 7.6 magnitude quake that reduced the entire city to rubble in sixty seconds. I arrived at the city from the main road that winds up one side of the mountain valley, crossing the river that cuts through the valley over a bridge at the city’s center before switch-backing up the opposite side of the valley. From there I could see the remains of the entire city, up into the suburbs on the distant ridges. The scene of the destruction was impossibly vast, with demolished buildings stretching from one end of the horizon to the other; it was impossible to fit into the camera’s frame. I have seen the capital of Sierra Leone after it was ransacked and burned to the ground, the West Bank city of Jenin after it was leveled by Israeli missiles and bulldozers, the shores of Sri Lanka after the tsunami. I have never seen anything like Balakot. We had arrived there on our third day in North West Paksistan after we had already heard countless horror stories and seen thousands of demolished and damaged homes spread out across the mountainsides. But when I saw Balakot, the tears came without warning.
From the roadside vantage point up the far side of the valley I could hear the scrape and crunch of the few bulldozers at work clearing the remains, absurdly dwarfed by the enormity of the ruins around them. Down the hillside to the edge of the river, and across the other side and up the opposite side of the valley, I saw hundreds if not thousands of tents dotted here and there in the spaces between the collapsed buildings. Some of them are higher quality than others, and many bear the name of the donating country; China, UAE, ‘Gift of the American People.’ A cold wind blasted down the valley, shaking the flaps of the thousands of tents that had sprung up here and there around the demolished buildings. On the road behind me a half dozen men prayed outside on top of the ruins of their demolished mosque, while in front of me an older man and woman sifted through a pile of donated clothes dumped by the roadside, looking for something worth keeping. The flimsy tarpaulin behind them looked hopeless against the cold.
Kashmir made an easier story for western journalists already struggling to keep the Pakistan earthquake in the public imagination, because it could be tied to a recurrent news story about Indian and Pakistani fighting over the disputed territory. Because some of the militant groups in Kashmir are Islamist, some journalists could even tied the earthquake story, indirectly, to Al Quaeda, and from there to the Global War on Terrorism. The worst stories wrapped the story in an ironic, bittersweet package that western journalists seem to love best; ‘amongst the wreckage, hope for peace in Kashmir.’ But the quake’s fault line ran from Indian-held Kashmir, through the Pakistani side, and onward to North West Frontier Province, where Balakot and thousands of smaller towns and villages suffered just as much damage, yet received none of the headlines. Many in the west have now heard of the Pakistani town of Muzaffarabad, yet despite what happened there, almost none have heard of Balakot.
It has been estimated that 70 percent of the town’s population died, though to stare down at the wreckage I couldn’t believe that even 30 percent had survived. Of the hundreds of structures once standing, only a few dozen remain. Nearly all of those that collapsed have collapsed completely, two and three story buildings that now stand like stacks of concrete pancakes five feet off the ground flanked by twisted fingers of iron poking at the sky.
In addition to the thousands of blue and white tents that punctuate the hillsides adjacent to destroyed homes, hundreds of larger, more organized tent camps – or tent cities, as the Pakistani military is calling them – line the sides of the road that snake up through the valley. On subsequent days we drove up the road for 6 hours, about a third of the way to China on a route still used by smugglers. It was hard to reconcile the utter hopelessness of the humanitarian situation with the breathtaking beauty of the scenery; through valleys and over ridges the road wound past golden brown, geometrically terraced hillsides, tall pine forests, and rushing turquoise rivers against the backdrop of the distant snow-capped Himalayas.
With 25,000 inhabitants Balakot was the largest city in North West Frontier Province directly on the fault line, yet due to the number of villages affected, the scale of the devastation is impossible to comprehend; over 73,000 persons killed, and three and a half million persons were rendered homeless, in a mere 60 seconds. Hundreds of villages are scattered across the mountains, and not one we saw had escaped without damage; many had been completely flattened. Hour after hour on the road revealed hillsides peppered with hundreds of villages and small hamlets perched halfway up the hillsides and nestled in the valleys, each with dozens of blue or white tents scattered around the buildings. With line of sight access to the main road, these villages were among the luckier ones, more accessible to the Pakistani army and the international aid organizations. The outlying villages, many of them accessible only by helicopter, have not been so lucky. Though snow was not far away and the earthquake had struck over seven weeks ago, many were still receiving tents for the first time. The army simply didn’t have enough helicopters to reach them all.
I had come to Pakistan on behalf of the non-government organization I work for to monitor the local NGO we were funding. On my delegation were a local politician, as well as a member of Parliament and his videographer, both of whom were there to raise more funds for the earthquake survivors. I was happy to find that the organization we had been funding was, indeed, highly professional, and though there were a few emerging problems to address in their camp, the conditions there were among the best I saw; the tents were properly spaced; the number of latrines – 1 per 20 persons – conformed to international standards; channels had been dug to quickly drain rain water, and the trash was being disposed of properly.
Other camps I saw were not so well maintained. Hundreds of smaller and inexperienced organizations flooded the region when the earthquake struck, many of them armed only with a bit of funding and good intentions. Some of the Islamic and jihadist parties have also pitched in to establish camps, and while some of them have been offering the region services like health care for years, most of them have no experience managing large camps for displaced persons. The difference between the good and the bad organizations will be measured in dead children.
I saw one camp where three hundred tightly packed tents shared three latrines, far below the number required by international standards; I doubt that this camp was unexceptional. Such camps will breed disease, and the first to suffer what aid professionals refer to as ‘morbidity and mortality,’ or sickness and death, will be children under five. Unicef has reported that measles outbreaks have already claimed the lives of some children south of Muzaffarabad, a disease that can also cause blindness if left untreated. In the unsanitary, tightly packed conditions of the more poorly run camps, public health-related diseases will spread more quickly. This earthquake has already been dubbed ‘the one that killed the children’ because a disproportionate number of the dead were killed in schools while many of their parents were outside working the land. It is a tragic reality that as the winter comes, the snow begins to fall, and both aid agency funding and conditions in the camps will undoubtedly deteriorate, the children will again be among the first to pay.
It is difficult to determine if the survivors in the camps – the vast majority of whom have lost everything – are worse off than those that remain in their villages. Road access to many of the hundreds of villages scattered across these provinces was difficult in the best of circumstances; now it is impossible. Landslides have covered many of the major roads, and the backcountry roads may not be cleared by bulldozers for years. Aftershocks and landslides occur with such regularity that they have ceased making headlines. A 5.5 quake struck while I was attending an outdoor meeting in a camp at the bottom of one hillside, and the ground beneath our feet vibrated like a trampoline. Everyone fell silent and looked nervously looked to each other for reassurance, and a few moments later the meeting resumed without comment. But many people are still afraid, especially the children.
Snow will further complicating access to villages, many of whom are not accessible all winter. I attended a food distribution for one village that was completely inaccessible by road; the residents had to carry their 40 kg bags of wheat and two 10 liter cans of oil two and a half kilometers from the distribution point. On the sunny, cloudless day that the distribution took place – the first food assistance these people had received in the six weeks since the quake hit – they reported that last year at the time the first snow had already fallen. By the height of winter, it was seven feet deep. I asked the aid agency doing the distribution how they planned to continue reaching this village through the winter, and they didn’t yet know. Some of the villagers were old, crippled, blind or widows, and needed help to carry their supply to their tents; I shuddered to think how – or if – they will survive the winter.
All of the villages are still heavily reliant on air assistance overseen by the Pakistani military, with the assistance of some UN and NATO helicopters. The logistical challenges imposed by an airlift to hundreds of villages through the five to six months of winter have led them to encourage the residents of the higher villages to come down to the camps, but many are reluctant to do so. Many have livestock that they cannot take with them, and many others are emotionally tied to their land and their homes, and for whatever reason, they do not want to leave.
On the day of the food distribution, two days after we’d seen Balakot, the local politician on our delegation had a breakdown. Of Pakistani background, he spoke fluent Urdu, and he was helping some of the disabled residents navigate the distribution process. When he said that the suffering of these people was getting to be just too much for him, I told him to take a walk by himself and try to shake it off. A half hour later I saw him wandering around in a nearby field, crying wildly. I saw a farmer approach and lead him by the hand into his compound, and I followed them in.
When I arrived he was still crying uncontrollably. He turned to me and through lines of spittle hanging from his lips, confessed that he didn’t want to go, that he wanted to stay and help. The family – a married couple, an old man and woman, and several children – looked on bewildered. I told him that these people were much stronger than he realized. I told him that he was right to want to help, and he shouldn’t forget how this experience made him feel. He said later that the only thing that stopped him from staying was the knowledge that there was not much that he could do to help them. The family made us cups of sweet tea before showing us the missing walls, the fractures splitting the mud ceilings, the piles of rubble. I dutifully took pictures. The politician eventually pulled it together, giving his winter coat to the grandmother before he left.
But I wondered what will happen to them, or to the three million other displaced persons that warrant barely a mention in the latter pages of the international sections of the larger newspapers, a scant 2 months since the quake hit. International donors’ memories are only slightly longer than those of the media and the general public, and when the next large catastrophe hits, Pakistan will likely be forgotten altogether. Though the story may never be written, tens of thousands more will likely die.
On the roadside hilltop in Balakot I met a man and his daughter, living in a tent on the roof of their demolished house, now just a few feet off the ground. They showed me the three holes that the father and their neighbors had pounded in the concrete roof to rescue the daughter from inside. The girl had been home with her mother when the earthquake hit, and both had survived, trapped by the rubble. They spoke to each other during the nine hours that they waited to be rescued. Just a few minutes before the girl was pulled out, her mother uttered a prayer and died. Show him, the father said, climb in the hole and show him how we pulled you out. I begged him not to make her go down there, and he relented.

Colombo

‘For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them illuminate them, own them, and make them a conscious part of our spirit and our writing.’ -Orhan Pamuk
colombo
There are trips where I find it impossible to write. This is not one of them.
17 May 2007
When I punctured my ear drum in on a beach in Kenya a few weeks ago I got something from the pharmacy to help me sleep. I was afraid that the pain might keep me awake. The doctor said he was out of the valium that I asked for, so he offered something else; Rohypnol. I had neither seen nor heard of it before, and I took it only that night. I was out like a light; I didn’t feel the pain, and had a perfect, dreamless sleep.
Yesterday I was on my last leg of the flight to Colombo, having started in Copenhagen that morning with transfers in Munich and Doha, Qatar. It was to be six hours until Colombo, and I was arriving at 7 am local time. I figured that I had better try to get some sleep if I was going to do any work at all that day, so I took a couple of the Rohypnol, just as I had the night my ear drum burst. That stuff could have knocked out a horse. I arrived in Colombo before I knew it. When I got there, I was still nearly unconscious. I managed to make it through baggage claim and customs and find my driver outside, but I don’t remember it very well. Nor do I remember much of the ride from the airport to the office, as I slept almost the whole way. After the office they dropped me at the apartment of a colleague who was out of town, and I crashed again until 2 in the afternoon.
Even when awake I wandered in a space somewhere on the edge of consciousness. The tube of Colgate shaving cream that I had purchased in Beirut was a dead ringer for tooth paste, and sitting on the edge of the sink I made the mistake not once, but twice, and the soapy taste lingered in my mouth long after I had tried to correct the mistake with the correct tube of aqua fresh. The second time was worse; my mouth’s memory was faster to resurrect that awful taste. Stupid enough not to have moved the tube after the first time, I put it into my dob kit and haven’t shaved since.
It’s hot, but not crazy hot. I had been told to anticipate a wall of heat and humidity – that’s how everyone I spoke to put it, without exception: a wall – that would slam into me the moment that the door of the plane opened. It was humid, and it was warm, but not uncomfortably so. I remember getting off the helicopter in Sierra Leone and feeling the sweat instantly bursting from every pore, rolling down one’s back, and the prickly heat erupting in my hair follicles. This is nothing like that. There is a breeze here, and the air is humid, but not impossibly close. I am told that it is rainy season, and low, puffy white clouds are low against a pale blue sky, but it has yet to rain since I’ve arrived.
I spent a few short hours at the office. The driver picked me up and we got some rice on the street. The driver, Mohan, bought it from a woman on the street in neat little packages. When I opened it on the desk in the office it was in a wrapped paper stamped with in small letters with the word, ‘red,’ itself wrapped in a plastic shopping bag. It contained a generous heap of rice, some dried fish, small pieces of plantain, some unidentified vegetables, and more hot pepper than a reasonable man could tolerate. It took me four glasses of water to get through the meal.
In the evening I dropped my stuff off at Carsten’s empty apartment and went looking for food. It’s an odd place, the tallest building on Duplication road, so called because it duplicates, or runs parallel to, Galle road, the other main drag in this part of town. There is a DeliFrance fast food café with café lattés, brie, and stuff like that on the ground floor facing the street, and inside the atrium of the building are the remains of what used to be, or the empty shell of what is going to be, a shopping center; it’s unclear. The whole place is gutted, a construction zone, and the only thing finished is the escalator running up through the empty floors. Passing through a passage to the left, and another unfinished hallway underneath fluorescent lights, and you emerge into the only finished part of the ground floor, a small foyer with two elevators. There the finished part of the building begins, and the sixth floor apartment is spotless: cold tile floors, air conditioners in every room.
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I went out in the evening and went to the first place that had been recommended to me, a place called paradise gallery just down duplication road. The place was gorgeous. Inside an open tiled courtyard was on oblong coy pond. Soft lighting revealed passageways into a bar and a restaurant, and behind me there was the gift shop that I had come looking for. Everything was beautiful, and everything was polished and perfect; pottery, stone buddhas, candles, carvings, paintings, picture frames, silk pashminas and on and on and on. But when I saw the panama hats from Ecuador and the afghan kilims, I got suspicious. This place was only slightly closer to Sri Lanka than IKEA. I stepped outside of all of that luxury so pristine it felt almost synthetic and almost stumbled over a woman and her child sitting on a piece of cardboard against a wall. They didn’t ask for any money when I passed by.
But the heat and the scent of the flowers was delicious and overwhelming. I went further down the road and ended up in another expat hangout, a British pub called the cricket club, a place devoted to a cricket theme and loaded with flat screens on every wall showing several different test matches at once. I had a few beers and a snack, and then I went back to the apartment til morning.
I ate breakfast ate a local place on Galle road. I reckoned that if I ate food that was hot enough, fresh of the stove, that any bacteria in the food would be dead. I had no idea what anything on the menu was, and I ended up with a chipati filled with egg, accompanied by three different types of sauce, which I only tasted, since they didn’t pass the ‘steaming hot’ test. I noticed a two inch long cockroach scuttling across the floor behind the stove while I was eating, and quickly finished my meal. It was a little over a dollar.
Galle road and Duplication road are lined with gem shops selling the precious rubies, sapphires, and emeralds that Sri Lanka is famous for, as well as one posh furniture store after another, as well as beggars and Tuk Tuk drivers getting by on a few bucks a day. Ask the locals if there’s any justice in this, and regardless of their social and economic status, they shrug it off with a fatalism that any muslim would easily recognize; it’s just the way god wants it. Kierkegaard might dress it up with a polysyllabic moniker – the teleological suspension of the ethical – but it is the same comforting, specious theology that makes sense of an otherwise scandalously senseless existence. When the tsunami hit the west coast, the survivors were unanimous in their analysis of the cause; their collective sin brought god’s wrath upon them. I suppose that even a guilt so overwhelming, an ignominy for unnamed and perhaps even unknown sins so awful that they could somehow, in one’s own cosmology, legitimately justify the violent death of one’s own child, even a guilt so heavy as this is less bleak than a world where that child’s death has no meaning at all.
The next night I was invited to dinner at the Regional Representative’s with her family. It’s a bit of a mixed blessing; though I don’t like to eat dinner alone, eating with people with whom I have little in common, particularly those that I work with, is only slight less – and sometimes a little bit more – tolerable. She had a two story house with a roof terrace where we started with a few beers while her 6 year old boy and her one and a half year old adopted Sri Lankan girl played alongside. Countless birds flocked to and from the trees singing dozens of unfamiliar songs until the sun sets and several species of bats silently take their place. The scent of the flowers on the air was overpowering. The house was nice but the air was as cloying as the company; when we moved downstairs they kept the windows shut and the fans did little but shift the stifling air slowly around the room. I left at the first opportunity. On the way home I asked the tuk tuk driver to stop for five minutes at the casino, which, I had been told, was full of hookers. I walked in and made a bee line for the roulette table, and threw three thousand rupees – about 30 dollars – down on the table, and got back three large stack of chips, all of which I slid over to black. The move drew oohs and ahhs from every woman around the table, but the dispassionate male gamblers didn’t even seem to notice. The croupier spun the wheel, and it came up red. I found my tuk tuk driver outside and continued home.
A few hours later and I was hungry again. I took a walk down the darkened streets without fear; the military and security forces have so saturated Colombo that street crime is virtually unknown. With a loaded Kalshnikov or two on literally every corner, no one dares. Even at 10:30 the street was still alive with shadows; the red glow of a lurking beggar’s cigarette, commuters boarding late night buses home, men and women, young and old, still moving about the city. I found another local eatery, though I was still no wiser about the menu. I asked for something fresh, and I got a hot chipati filled with some kind potato sauce concoction, and three little bags of sauce, tied up like a kid’s goldfish won at the fair. I applied the steaming hot rule and didn’t touch the sauces, but the chipati – or rotti, as now think that they are called – was tasty.
The amount of new information that I absorb just by being here, the amount of new smells and sights and sounds I’m exposed to, are too many to count, impossible to describe. The traffic is mad. The tuk tuks leave less than inches between their little vehicles and the other cars. Mufflers on buses are considered totally passé, but the louder your horn is, the better. The Karuna breakaway faction of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have now themselves split into two, which is much to the government’s liking. The east is now ‘cleared’ of tigers, and Karuna’s boys have allied themselves with the government. Not officially, but everybody knows it’s true. The Buddhists monks are some of the most rabidly violent pro-Sinhala, anti-Tamil people on the island, and many say that they take on robes just to be able to get away with murder, despite that Buddhism’s central tenet is respect for all life. There are jackfruits the size of a small child. There are monkeys on leashes being led by the side of the road. There are elephants for the riding. There is a national obsession with cricket. There is a lottery that’s run every day, and everyone knows it’s rigged, and everyone plays anyway. The Indian ocean outside of Colombo is dirty and wild and so violent that not only do people not swim, I haven’t seen a single boat on the sea outside our 4th floor office balcony. There is a white Buddhist temple on every corner. There is far, far too much to describe. To try to weave this into a coherent narrative is to recognize that it will remain nothing more than a collage of impressions, at the heart of which is failure.
I went to two meetings, one slightly pointless, the other utterly so. The first was a UNHCR protection meeting, I scanned the email distribution list on the top of the agenda and found Joanna Van Gerpen’s name, who used to be head of Unicef in Sierra Leone. There was a debrief from UNHCR on the planned resettlement of IDPs from the camps in Trincomalee and Batticaloa in the recently cleared east back to their home villages: The subtext of their debrief revealed that the resettlement is basically a coerced return in violation of the UN guiding principles on internal displacement and the spirit if not the letter of international law, and HCR was trying to whitewash it. There was a debrief from a food security assessment in the North from WFP.
The next meeting was convened by the consortium of humanitarian agencies, a coordination meeting that lacked only coordination. There were two key note speeches, one from a speaker of parliament who was evidently convinced that he had single handedly invented and given birth to micro credit, and another by a Rwandan Anglican priest who had lived through the genocide and thought that all Sri Lanka needed was a positive attitude and good round of hugs, neglecting to remember that the pivotal event that stopped the genocide in his own country was the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s military victory over Hutu power. His speech could have been subtitled, ‘what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding.’
The last rice pack was the one that killed me. That was the fatal rice pack, the one that did me in. I ate only half of it, but half was enough. Afterward I had a piece of cake, and it felt all afternoon like the cake sat like a rock in my stomach, so after I went shopping at a tourist shop I came home and stuck my finger down my throat. It helped a bit, but not much, and it still felt like I was kid who had just been punched in the stomach. Then the fever came on, and the aches all over my body, and the headache. Shortly after that, I threw up some more, and then I entered a world of pain. A trip to the bathroom was like an expedition across the desert; I conceived it a long time before it began, I prepared myself mentally and physically, I resolved to go, I ran in fear from the mere thought of going, I returned to the inevitability of the journey, I watched my body rise from the bed as if in slow motion, as if from afar, and make my way the seven meters around the bed and through the door to the toilet as if it were moving through molasses, I witnessed the exquisite agony as my guts heaved every last bit of murky brown and sour acid into the toilet, the drool dripping from my open lips to the puddle of murk in the bowl, my diaphragm exploding in involuntary paroxysms until nothing more came out. I collapsed on the cold tiles, the pale saffron sheet wrapped around my naked chest, preparing myself for the journey home, to bed.
I stayed in that terrible country for two days, wandering in and out of consciousness. I was prone for so long that my lower back developed a chronic, dull ache, while my stomach remained tightened in an ever present fist of pain. Food had no appeal whatsoever. On the second day I somehow managed to get some clothes on and I wandered outside looking for a pharmacy. I sat down on one of two chairs in the tiny place and pleaded for anything they would give me, but they gave me antibiotics without a prescription, but not the valium I was hoping for. I wanted to be able to sleep without knocking myself completely out, like the XX had done. I washed down the antibiotics with some flat sprite that I bought on the way back and collapsed on the bed until 7 pm. I woke for a few hours, then I slept a tortured night through, writhing in stomach pain, feverish and achy.
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Sometimes a fever breaks as abruptly as upon waking from a powerful nightmare; one moment you are in the grips of a monster, gasping for air as its fingers tighten around you neck, the next moment you are wide awake, thrown back into your own skin, and the monster exists only in your memory, your imagination. Other times the sickness will abate in waves, as a storm at sea gradually lulls away, the swell falling, the rain lightening, the wind dying down until finally the sun breaks through the clouds and the you find you have made it to the other side alive. On fell sick on Friday night, and on Sunday morning I watched from the deck as the bow still pitched and heaved and sent spray crashing over the deck, but I could tell that the worst was already over. I was strong enough to make it to the office, though as soon as I got there my body still felt the magnetic pull of the coach and immediately found the horizontal as surely as a spirit level. I was able to make it to the car and travel across the country to the other side of the island, though I still had no appetite for food.
We went to a village where there were Muslims, Tamils, and Singhalese Buddhists living peacefully together, a rare anomaly in a land where animosity amongst the three groups is the debt of generations, and actively encouraged by their leaders. They were dirt poor, but all is relative, I suppose. They had tile roofs, protected wells, and some even had brick houses. There was quite a bit of concrete patios here and there. There were proper roads, there was a bit of livestock. It’s either a curse or a blessing in my job that I started at the bottom, in Mali, where I saw true poverty, that it makes a place like Sri Lanka seem rich by comparison. Anywhere without mud walls and thatch roofs, in fact, can seem rich by comparison, anywhere where they eat fish more than once a week, where they can eat at least 2 meals a day. Nevertheless, these people were dirt poor, and they knew it. We talked to them about their water, sanitation, and hygiene, about the new pit latrines being dug, about the old wells that had already been dug. Their biggest problem is that they are landless; having developed enough to be able to work for a living instead of living on subsistence farming, they are now at the whims of the capital holders in the area, if there are any around. They scratch a few rupees together from day to day. They might be able to afford a few more goods than the Malians can, but if they go without work for a few weeks, they’ll have nothing to feed themselves, whereas the subsistence farmers, relatively poor by comparison, will at least be able to open his grain store, and finally eat his seed, before he needs charity to survive.
We stuck our heads inside a couple of houses to look at the household water storage. They had beds, concrete floors, a few pictures on the walls, shutters and bars on the glassless windows. Is this the measure of luxury?
By the evening, when we checked into our beach front hotel, my guts had healed to the point where I was ready for a swim. We go and listen to people talk about their abject poverty all day, we listen and commiserate, we shake our heads in dismay and promise we’ll try to get more assistance, we say we’ll do the best we can. We get into our cars and drive an hour down the road, and head to a gorgeous 4 star hotel right on the beach.
The parking lot was filled with the four wheel drive vehicles of aid agencies; IFRC, FSD, CESVI, and about three or four others. A dozen white people – one of them red as a lobster – played volleyball on the beach as the sun went down over a perfectly glassy 3 mile bay, frame on either side by a twenty meter high promontory of palm-studded rocks. Neat little waves rolled slowly, ceaselessly in.
At this stage in my career, I tend not to ask too many questions any more. I wish I could say that it broke my heart. I wish I could say that I was a better person, that it really mattered to me, that the enormous, gaping hypocrisy of the aid business was what really made my stomach turn, and not just a bad rice packet from the streets of Colombo. I wish I could say that I was such a deeply committed man, but if I did I’d be lying. The fact is, my problem is not really an ethical one, nor even a moral one, it’s more of a rational problem. When the stated business of the NGOs is poverty eradication, how can we claim to stand for justice and change when we reinforce the poverty gap with every move we make? I fail to see one good reason why we couldn’t simply have pitched up in the village we’d visited, in tents if we had to, and given all the money that we spent on the hotel and the dinner to the villagers. The reason of course is our own discomfort. The four of us spent more last night than an average family will see in a year. But it’s just not the way things done. We say that we stand for redressing social inequity, but when we rock up to the hotel, we give the driver a room in the ‘driver’s quarters,’ or in a cheaper hotel in town. How can we possibly justify so much waste?
But it doesn’t break my heart. I wish it did, but it doesn’t. I don’t know if it ever did, if this cynicism is the byproduct of a career in the aid business, or if I was just never cut out for it in the first place – though in fact, it doesn’t seem to bother anybody else I work with it, all. My problem is more of a logical one. I can’t stand the hypocrisy because it just doesn’t follow its own internal logical. It’s not even consistent with itself, with the tenets inherent to its own value system. My problem is a logical one. If I move on from this job with an NGO that claims to be fighting for a revolution, I’ll likely move on to a developmental consulting firm or to the UN, where the salaries are higher and the problem is even worse. But the hypocrisy, at least, isn’t there. This is the price of sanctimony; those organizations never claim to want to change the world, only to make a profit, or to exist in it. Whether or not I am kidding myself that this will somehow be more acceptable to me or not, time will tell.
When the tsunami hit the hotel the water reached about six feet high, but by chance or the grace of god, not a single guest or staff member was lost. All of the rooms were on the first floor, and it took the staff a mere five days to clean out all of the damage and the mess from the reception and the kitchen. Then the second tsunami came in, that of the aid agencies. The hotel remained fully booked, every single room solid, for a whole year. Agencies bought blocks of rooms by the month and paid in advance. Even now they are doing a stiff business, and the Norwegian peace monitors assigned to the Trincomalee district have rented a whole wing for the year.
Ironically, there is a camp for internally displaced persons just next door. They have the same beach front view, but no AC, no buffet, no satellite TV, no ayurvedic massage. They waited in vain for a school for their children for years, but then the tsunami came, and the NGOs had so much money they didn’t know what to do with it, so soon the people who had been suffering from war for years found themselves the beneficiaries of a shiny new three story school building. Their fishing boats are just in front of the camp. They are likely to be forcibly repatriated soon, as are all of the IDPs on the recently ‘cleared’ eastern coast of the island. Every group of IDPs we visited yesterday and today had the same visits as the ones we heard about in the UNHCR protection meeting in Colombo: you’re going back ‘home,’ whether you like it or not. The time will be of our choosing, and it’s likely to be within the next two weeks. The assistance you receive upon arriving, luxuries such as food, shelter, water, etc., will be made clear to you when you arrive. Though you may have been displace as many as ten times by fighting since you left your home area as long as ten years ago, though you may have been a fisherman, returning to a fishing community with no opportunity to farm and no boat to fish with and no promise of other food, you have no choice. You go, because we say you go.
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At first I thought it was a luxury when I heard about how little under 5 mortality there was, but then I learned that the number one cause of death, bar none, is murder, and it changed my perspective a bit. The disappearances are too numerous to count. After nightfall the streets are empty, because this is when they come to take you. It could be the LTTE, it could be Karuna’s breakaway faction, the TMVP, it could be the government. Often, your family won’t know who it was that took you; popular wisdom will come with different endings to the story, none of which can be verified. It doesn’t matter really, who did it. What matters is the simple irretrievable fact of your death.
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We drive around in our air conditioned four wheel drive Toyota Prado, visiting camps and villages, talking to the people who have received wells, latrines, shelter, food, and grants from our projects. We ask them what we did wrong, what we could do better. We go through countless checkpoints, where soldiers wear four different colors of uniform, though all carry the ubiquitous Kalashnikov, courtesy of Pakistan. We arrive in a village to hold another discussion, and the downcast project officer tells us that the beneficiaries have not yet arrived, as the army camp adjacent to the village is shelling the Tiger positions not far away, and people are afraid to come. We sit and wait, and about five minutes later a round of outgoing artillery sounds a thunderous ‘boom!’ about 300 meters away. More follow. But eventually the beneficiaries trickle in anyway, and we hold our discussion group. Then we get back in the car for another, and yet another. Everywhere we go there are groups of people waiting for us, and children place hand woven leis of flowers over our heads, thick and heavy with frangipani, hibiscus, and jasmine. By the early afternoon they are piled high in the car.
At one place outside a school we talk to a women’s cooperative that has pooled their common savings into a bank account. They show us the bank book and the balance of 7,000 rupees, or about 70 dollars. Thirty women have taken several months to save less than what I spent on gift shop trinkets in Colombo in a single shopping trip. I am overcome by the futility of this enterprise. I want desperately to give them everything I have, and have to ask my colleagues to convince me not to do so. I know I shouldn’t. I know that it’s bad practice, that I will only encourage other groups to beg, that they have to earn it, that it will increase infighting, and, and, and still I have to beg them to hold me back. I don’t give them any money. Instead they give us soft drinks, which we gracefully accept in the shimmering heat, before we get back in our air conditioned Prado, put on another CD, and spend the evening in a stunning hotel overlooking a lake on the edge of the national park. Sometimes the elephants can be seen drinking at the shore. There is a cascade of water running forever down the wall behind the reception, where the ceiling reaches to twenty meters, and gives on to the lake view pool patio without the barrier of windows. There is giant coy pond in the shape of a lotus flower with an elephant-sized frangipani growing in the middle. Hindu artifacts in brass and stone pepper the walls and surfaces, and framed cases of gems are on offer for sale. There is a juice bar, and an Ayurvedic spa. We are the only guests. I go for a swim at sunset. While giving money to the women’s group was decidedly not kosher – and I knew that it wasn’t, I’ve been in the business long enough to know that I wasn’t supposed to do this, though I may have misplaced the reason why – this is somehow deemed to make sense.
We drive through village after village, checkpoint after checkpoint. The AC is comfortably chilly, and outside the car the heat is stifling. Everywhere we go, in every village and every camp, there is no shortage of barbed wire. There is barbed wire everywhere, generous, double loops of barbed wire, long straight rows of barbed wire strung just inches apart from trees and posts to create a killing wall, back by loops of barbed wire, then another wall of barbed wire parallel to the first, creating a ten meter space into which no living thing will pass. There are sandbagged machine gun posts every 500 meters or so, and the men who patrol the streets do so spread out with five meters between each of them, on either side of the street, so as to avoid being mowed down in an ambush or from a lobbed hand grenade.
The checkpoints are so numerous, and have become such a feature of the landscape, that many small businesses have sprung up around many of them, selling drinks or snacks to the people and vehicles waiting in line to pass through. At one such place I get out of the Prado and bargain briefly with a wood carver. He’s got tobacco spilling out of his lip. His ten year old son follows us around as he shows me his work. I am doubtless the first customer he’s had stop at his roadside workshop all day. The craftsmanship on his work – carved Buddhas, Ganeshas, boxes, and the odd Jesus bust in mahogany, teak, and ebony – is OK; nothing spectacular, but still I want desperately to give him every penny I have. But nobody wants to be a sucker, either. When he offers me a price two and a half times what I thought I’d have to pay, twenty five dollars for a little carving of Shiva in teak, the best piece of his I could find, I balk. I join the others in the waiting Prado, which has already negotiated the complicated permit process and is waiting for me on the other side of the checkpoint.
We pass from government held Trincomalee district into the Batticaloa area held by Karuna’s breakaway TMVP faction, the former Tamil Tigers who are now siding with the government. Their logo suddenly appears on walls and signposts here and there, and it’s strange to see the Tiger insignia leaping out without fear. One is accustomed to knowing that the Tiger eyes and ears are ever present, and yet also knowing that they will never be seen. Here the boys of the TMVP stroll in open daylight with weapons and ammunition on their shoulders over civilian clothing. We stopped at an IDP camp a few hundred meters from the sea in Batti and held a discussion group. Suddenly hundreds of people showed up, as the following day was a food distribution day, and they saw our vehicles and thought that our arrival had something to do with that. About a half hour later two young guys rolled up on a 100 cc motorbike with Kalshnikovs over their backs. A small portion of the crowd broke off and ran over to them, surrounded the boys as they handed out pink leaflets to the crowd. On the leaflets was a message in Tamil saying that any TMVP members who drink alcohol and cause problems for the community could be reported to the following telephone numbers.
But nobody I spoke to took the leaflets at face value, and everyone agreed that anyone who would call such a number would be courting death. One of the young men who rushed to grab a leaflet tore it by accident. The boy on the motorbike thought that the man was tearing the leaflet on purpose. ‘I’ll be coming for you tonight,’ the boy on the motorbike said. Should he call the number and complain?
On the way from village to village I hear innumerable stories of disappearances, murders, attacks, and battles, whole epochs of history in this long and forgotten war, too many to keep track of, so that in the end only the stories of murder which are either iconic or bizarre remain in memory, like the story of elephant pass, where a notorious government army base was torturing the surrounding Tamil community for months on end. The surrounding Tigers gained strength, and gained ground, and were able to cut the army base off, leave them surrounded. Unable to mount an assault on the base, they simply cut off the water, and over a thousand of the soldiers died of dehydration in a matter of days. Or Rajiv Ghandi’s assassination by a Tamil Tiger in India, the 20th anniversary of which was yesterday, when a female suicide bomber approached him to place a flower lei over his head, before killing them both.
The island is shaped roughly like a teardrop. The rebels have long held the narrow, northern part of the tear, as well as a narrow band on the eastern edge, which was held until a few months ago by Karuna’s wing of the LTTE. Now it is the recently ‘cleared’ east – cleared of the LTTE, the Tamil Tigers – and the government has started to forcefully resettle IDPs. In one case they dumped the returnees off, people who had fled from their villages years before and were returning to nothing, and then brought the journalists in, encouraged the people to line the streets to see the president arrive and welcome them home. He bent down to kiss a child, and this moment, of the president kissing the child, was on the front page of the newspaper the next morning. The journalist made his deadline. What the caption of the photograph did not report was that the child’s father was murdered that night in his home, after the president had gone. In this case public opinion was unanimous; it was the LTTE. They killed the boy’s father as retribution for his having let his son be kissed by the enemy, to show that they hadn’t been ‘cleared,’ after all. They killed him to have the last word. I wonder about that little boy, yet another tragedy who has indelibly entered the collective memory through the ephemeral front page of the newspaper and the notorious story of the murder that followed and who, in receiving the kiss, through sheer fate and circumstance has become the instrument of his father’s own death. It is a reality which will likely change the course of his life. The loss of his father will forever loom in massive disproportion to the act that bore it – how could he have known? The impossible, hopeless yearning to take it back. The seed of his understanding of that morning, of that kiss, and its relationship to his father’s death, will only grow as he does.
How did they know which man was the boy’s father? How many eyes had they in the crowd, that day? They have a thousand eyes. They are quite literally everywhere. Who, you may ask, are ‘they?’ It is a question I posed myself today. It is an oddity of the Tamil language that when Tamil speakers translate their thoughts to English, the placeholder for the third person plural gets lost; Tamils are often recounting the story of ‘them’ attacking or ‘them’ being abducted, and you have no idea who they are talking about. But on the other hand, it doesn’t really matter; they are vicious murderers, everyone. And everyone has spies, and everyone has two identities, or more, and no one has the courage to speak. To discuss the war, or the various factions or their interests, in public, is dangerous. When they do, people will always, always, turn and look around to see who is within earshot, and lower their voices before continuing. And often, people are listening, though you’ll never know if it’s from dumb curiosity or an ulterior motive. A woman may show up at your door and say that she is LTTE, and she is hungry, so please feed her. Terrified to offend a Tiger, you shuffle to the kitchen to fetch her a plate of rice. When you return, she tells you that in fact she is a representative of the government Security Task Force, and who are you, giving aid to LTTE?
The answer to every questions leads to a long and convoluted narrative, with many tangents and subplots, so that the answer itself is always incomplete, and you are left to wonder what image was left outside of the frame. I wanted to record everything. I wanted to be able to say, that’s the way it was. But in the end I am reconciled to the knowledge that these are pictures without captions.
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It was called Ceylon by the Portuguese but the ruling party changed the name to Sri Lanka, a Singhalese word, upon independence. According to the Tamils, this was done expressly to piss them off and marginalize them, and make them aware of the fact that now that the British were gone, the positions of power in the civil administration that they had been disproportionately rewarded would soon be taken from them, along with everything else. The Hindu and Christian Tamils make up 17 percent of the population, a minority of just enough size to be problematic for generations to come. The Muslims make up another 7 percent, and though they speak Tamil, having originally migrated from the neighboring Indian state of Tamil Nadu (as did all the Tamils, originally) in the seventeenth century, they nevertheless intermarried with the Singhalese upon arrival, and therefore typically identify with the Singhalese majority. The Singhala are Buddhist, and though Buddhism is supposed to have non-violence and respect for all life, as well as meditation and a life of contemplative awareness, at its core where it’s practiced elsewhere, here they have no problem with a very violent version of the philosophy. They even have a party of extreme nationalist, extremely violent Buddhists, the JVP, who have sometimes called for the extermination of all Tamils. The ruling Singhalese government doesn’t usually go that far, content to assert the simple fact that Sri Lanka is a nation of the Singhala, by the Singhala, and for the Singhala, and therefore the Tamils really have not right to be there, and should all migrate to India, despite having been in Sri Lanka for over a thousand years.
There were a number of different Tamil movements in the early 70’s, but the LTTE quickly took out the competition and its leader, Prabaharan, established his rule through a cult of personality that was both effective and ruthless. It is a well disciplined movement, and Tamil women living in LTTE areas have in some ways less to fear than in government controlled ones, as there is no fear of rape or robbery in the Tiger villages.
While the government security forces – there must be at least 10 different organizations, including the army, navy, air force, police, and the notorious Special Task Force – can boast a standing force of at least 350,000, as well as MiGs and ten or so helicopter gunships, the Tigers are generally believed to have about three to five thousand. And yet with this ragtag, poorly trained, vastly outnumbered band of guerilla conscripts, Prabaharan has managed to hold the entire country hostage for over thirty years. Public opinion is near unanimous; the government is clearly in the wrong, and because they treat all Tamils as second-class citizens and potential Tigers can make no claim to being a country for all of its citizens. And the Tigers are about the worst band of bloodthirsty, merciless, power hungry mercenaries you will ever come across. They practically invented suicide bombing, and still boast the highest number of successful suicide bombings anywhere around the world. They kill without question, and without mercy. They have used child soldiers in various degrees over the years, typically releasing them all every few years in a general amnesty, only to turn around and recruit new ones a year or so later.
Most Tamils are therefore caught between the government, that wants them dead, and the Tigers, who claim to fight on their behalf, but in reality only tax and terrorize their own people. The LTTE long had the support of India, as the neighboring Indian state of Tamil Nadu is composed one hundred percent of ethnic Tamils, but then they assassinated Rajiv Ghandi after he made some remarks about possible reconciliation with the Sri Lankan government, and they have hated them ever since. While the government of Sri Lanka gets nearly all of its military materiel from Pakistan, the LTTE is financed entirely through taxing, looting, and a phenomenally successful program of collecting from the Tamil diaspora abroad. Tamils continue to fund the LTTE either because they remain ignorant of just how badly they are victimizing their own people in Sri Lanka, or because they don’t want to be seen as not supporting ‘the cause,’ despite the knowledge that the cause and the LTTE have long ago ceased to be the same thing, or out of simple fear. A classic LTTE fundraising strategy is to strike up conversation with a Tamil in Canada or Europe outside a Hindu temple, where they often make fundraising drives. After finding out the person’s name and home village, they will then ask for money. The person in question will then give for fear that their relatives back home will be murdered if they don’t. And that fear is very well founded.
Our driver is Singhala, specifically recruited because of his ethnicity in order to help us negotiate the nastier of the checkpoints, where Tamils are routinely harassed and interminably questioned, while Dharshini, our programme officer, is Tamil, as are the beneficiaries of most of our programs. They occupy the Eastern and Northern parts of the country, and so after decades of marginalization and murder by the army, had the bad luck to be amongst those hardest hit by the tsunami that rammed Sri Lanka’s eastern shore. Dharshini is the one who runs most of the focus group discussions, the only one able to communicate with the vast majority of non-English speaking Tamils.
We wander into yet another discussion in yet another camp, this one like so many others: a flat, sandy patch of ground filled with row upon row of identical white tents, and not a tree in sight. This one, though, happens to be in a cemetery, and the grave stones can still be seen punctuated the landscape here and there between the tents and pit latrines. We make our way to the large, open air structure near the camp’s entrance, eager to find some shade from the penetrating sun in the near 100 percent humidity. It’s made of waist-high rattan walls and wooden poles holding up a roof made of standard issue blue plastic sheeting, stamped with the ubiquitous UNHCR logo of two hands forming a steeple over a person. Dharshini makes her way through question after question of the interview guide, and a member of the partner staff who speaks English translates for me simultaneously. She asks each question in rapid-fire Tamil, a language in which it is necessary to produce dozens of syllables per second while barely moving one’s mouth, and the IDPs answer in turn, each speaking at length. The translations, though, are short and concise, and at first I wondered if he was just summarizing or omitting. But I realized that this occurs no matter who is translating, and after many tortured questions with my translators and pleas not to leave anything out I am left to conclude that it takes a long time to say simple things in Tamil. There is much repetition.
In Sierre Leone they have a proverb: ‘Black man sorry na laugh,’ or, when the black man is sorry, he laughs. It is used to describe the peculiar phenomenon of hearing stories of horrible atrocities recounted with a smile, or even a chuckle. The same phenomenon occurs here, and I always know when we get to the question about the leading causes of death in the camp, as it always sends a ripple of laughter – genuine, mirthful laughter – across the crowd: only an outsider would ask such an absurd question. Why, the number one cause of death, for all age groups, is murder, silly! After our first night in TVMP-controlled Batticaloa – which turns into a ghost town at 8:30 pm, as all the killings occur at night – I ask the discussion group when the last killing was: a young guy breaks into a smile, and says that his uncle was shot two weeks ago. I express my condolences, and ask him if he knows why. This sends a riotous giggle across the whole group, and the kid just shrugs his shoulders. I learn later from Dharshini that his wife, who witnessed the killing, knows exactly who did it, but she refuses to speak, knowing that if she did it will likely mean her own death as well as that of several other members of her family.
We came to do an evaluation of our program, but it quickly emerges that the only thing to do is fiddle with minor details in implementation, while the major concern that defines every waking and sleeping moment of life for people in the middle of a war zone is something that we are powerless to address. In one village where we’d built replacement housing after the tsunami the beneficiaries complained that concrete foundations of their homes were cracking due to the concussions from the outgoing artillery of the nearby army camp, shelling Tiger positions in the jungle a few kilometers away. This strikes me at once as perfectly hopeless, as well as a perfect metaphor for the situation these people find themselves in; struggling to raise families and lead normal lives while artillery shatters the foundations on a daily basis.
In Batti we stay in a dump. Here I have no guilt over the accommodation standard, and would actually have preferred to pitch tent at the beach side IDP camp, if it had been possible, and safe. It’s called the Green Garden because to the acres of concrete have been painted green, and not because it in any way resembles an actual garden. The room is so full of mosquitoes that they line the doors and windows clamoring to get out to a place where it’s less crowded. The water smells so sulfurous that a shower is like dousing one’s body in rotten eggs. (Isn’t that how Milton described hell – the overpowering stench of sulfur?) There is no mobile coverage, as the army shut down the network when it found out that some of its senior commanders were in mobile contact with the LTTE, who through prior arrangement were relaying the coordinates of the wrong positions while the shelling was going on to ensure that they wouldn’t be hit. The municipal power supply isn’t strong enough to power the air conditioners, so at eleven thirty when they turn off the generator they turned into low-powered fans, and the green concrete cell of a room with the tiny window turns into an oven. This was the place for which I was instructed to bring my own sheets, as the beds are known to be full of bedbugs.
We stay there two nights before moving south to Ampara, before heading inland again, over the central highlands, back to Colombo. On our way back there is a bombing in Colombo; one soldier is killed, three wounded, as are three civilians. It’s not possible for the army to determine at first if its was a suicide bomb or a motorcycle bomb, as three bikes were completely obliterated. If it weren’t for the phone call from headquarters, it would be easy not to hear about the bombing; such an event doesn’t pass for major news here. The same day there is an assault by half a dozen fishing boats of the ‘Sea Tigers’ on a naval base in Jaffna, but the only thing clear from the media reports, which claim that the government successfully repelled an amphibious assault, is that the body count – of 40 plus Tigers killed – is vastly inflated.
Our last night is in Kandy, at another gorgeous resort with a fabulous buffet, a great view, a massive swimming pool, and an Ayurvedic spa where I get a massage the morning of our departure. We come back to the capital with a handful of conclusions about the program and the partners, a few dozen modest recommendations about how to be more effective, but nothing earth-shattering. It feels absolutely mad; there’s nothing to be done here, of any meaning. The only thing that matters is put an end to the war, and that is not going to happen in the foreseeable future. We are totally unable to address the number one consequence for the population, what we call in our terminology, ‘protection activities,’ which is a polite term for our response to organized murder. Everyone reckons that the government will continue its campaign of hatred against the Tamils indefinitely, and the rebel movement will continue for as long as Prabaharan does, a crazed, unseen sixty year-old man holed up in a deep underground bunker somewhere in the north. Though the army has succeeded in ‘clearing,’ the east, there are several isolated pockets of Tigers hiding in the jungles. It’s widely speculated that when the armed forces turn their attention to the north these groups will resurface and make hit and run attacks on smaller garrisons and police stations, and slowly retake the east, inch by inch, as the army pulls back into more heavily manned positions. Even if they don’t, the east is still in the grips of the TMVP, who are just as heavily armed as they ever were, and the streets are still thick with a generation of young men who have grown up with guns in their hands. In Trinco the streets are still empty by 8 pm every night, even though the rebels have been ‘cleared;’ whoever’s been ‘cleared,’ the murders continue.

Open Air Prison

An open-air prison. No one I know has been to the Gaza strip since the Hamas takeover, and I admit that I’m a bit scared. I lived in Jerusalem during the worst part of the second intifada and I have dodged my share of bullets, but I’ve never been to Gaza. The kidnapping of BBC journalist Alan Johnston is still fresh in the collective memory. But I am going, both to monitor the cash distribution that my organization has funded, and to see what else we can do to help the community cope since the Israelis closed off the strip since Hamas took over.
The night before I leave I put my glasses in my laptop bag. I reckon that if I’m kidnapped, I’ll need them when my contact lenses dry out. I try to remember what I once read about hostage survival: never speak unless spoken to. Do not joke with your captor. Eat whatever is given to you. Always face your captor. Learn a method to tell the time. Do not lose hope.
I send the official entry request to the civil liaison of the Israeli military from Denmark several weeks before we arrive, including a copy of my passport and the reasons for the trip. A couple days later I verify on the phone that my request is approved, and then I speak with the Major in charge the day before I arrive, and again a third time the morning of my departure for Israel, just to make sure.
When I arrive in Israel it’s almost impossible to find the Eretz crossing checkpoint, as there are almost no road signs to indicate the direction of the Gaza strip; though I’m just a few kilometers away it’s as if the place doesn’t exist. And despite my preparations, when I arrive, none of the Israeli guards has heard of me.
The Eretz crossing into Gaza has recently been rebuilt from a low shabby building into an enormous futuristic hangar, a sleek modern structure that could rival many a small international airport, and indeed, is meant to look and act like one.
My taxi leaves me at the small parking lot, and I approach the first guard post on foot. The young woman in civilian clothing behind the glass looks briefly at my passport and asks why I am going to Gaza – ‘to visit the Council of Churches, they run health clinics’ – and lets me through the gate. Once inside the hangar I enter a glass-paneled room with a 40 foot ceiling. High up two brown sparrows dart two and fro amongst the steel beams that support an arching corrugated steel roof.
A man in uniform waves me through a pair of glass doors toward a long row of bulletproof, glass-enclosed vestibules like the immigration counter at an airport. There are about 10 of them, though there could be more on the other side of the glass partition; it’s too far away to see through to the other side clearly. What is clear is that this massive structure, designed to herd thousands of Palestinians through the gates to and from Israel every day, is completely and utterly empty. The only other people there are a dozen or so Israeli security officers. Some are in uniform, some are not, but they’re all armed. It’s a bit spooky.
I enter the enclosed space in front of the vestibule and give my passport for inspection to a chubby, olive-skinned girl in uniform on the other side of tinted bullet proof glass. I notice her cell phone on the empty desktop, a bright pink Nokia adorned with a tiny stuffed animal hanging from a chain. She asks us why I am going to Gaza and then tells me to step back outside the door again, refusing to listen either to my assertion that I’m approved by the civil liaison, or to the Israeli Major I reach on my cell phone and try to pass to her under the slot. I go back into the main room and wait.
After about twenty minutes journalists of various nationalities start to arrive in groups of twos and threes carrying professional video cameras. I learn that they have been invited by Hamas to attend a press conference, a good will gesture to demonstrate, amongst other things, that Alan Johnston’s kidnapping was an anomaly: they are now all safe and welcome.
For me, this is a godsend. If Hamas has invited so many foreigners, they surely won’t let any come to harm that day. And since the Israelis know that the journalists are there en masse, it would be a particularly bad day for any attacks or incursions. I reckon I’ll be safe, for sure.
A short, young, unshaven Israeli in uniform with a short-barrel M16 slung over his shoulder shows up from nowhere and approaches me where I’m sitting behind a little desk in the middle of the room. He asks me who I am looking so official, and when I retort with: ‘show me your papers!’ I find myself returning his high five while he laughs at my joke. I explain that I’m approved, but can’t get across. He promises to help, and then disappears.
He returns after a while with a stamped and signed Hebrew document. I get his name – Leo – and his mobile number so that I can inform him when I return to Israel. The guys at the UN radio room recommended that I do this so that the Israelis don’t shoot as I approach the crossing. I go through a number of additional security doors and one-way turnstiles until I emerge from the hangar into a long open-air tunnel of steel mesh. I walk for about 500 meters in the steamy air before I enter another dimly lit steel room that ends in a gate. There are no instructions where to go or what to do, and no Israeli personnel anywhere in sight. Only a camera in the far corner lets me know they’re watching. After a few moments I find a small intercom on the wall. I push the button and ask them to open the door, and after a few minutes, the big gate swings open automatically: I am now in Gaza.
I walk another five hundred meters on a gutted gravel road. An urban wasteland of bombed out buildings is on my right, several acres of gutted concrete buildings bearing the scars of war that give way to some low hills in the near distance. To my left there’s a broad valley of dry scrub, a former orange grove bulldozed by the Israelis to clear the are before the massive concrete wall, topped with machine gun towers, that seals off the strip. A large white observation blimp hovers a few hundred feet overhead.
At the end of the gravel track a flock of taxis waits for the journalists. I find the ambulance of our own partner organization waiting and I’m soon zooming through the northern outskirts of Gaza city. It looks like any other Mediterranean city in this part of the Arab world; 4 and 5 story concrete and white stone apartment blocks covered with Arabic graffiti at street level, punctuated with a smattering of trees on the sidewalks and medians. Everywhere we go billboards, posters, and signs show pictures of the ‘martyrs,’ a term that refers to anyone killed by the Israelis. Many of them hold weapons in the photographs and paintings, though some appear unarmed and in civilian clothes. They all wear the same placid, resolute expression.
The Gaza strip is among the most densely populated land on the planet, yet there aren’t many people on the street, and it’s unusually quiet. We pass under neon yellow banners hanging over the street that read ‘No Threat To Foreigners Or Journalists. All Are Welcome!’ in Arabic and English. Hamas has no doubt prepared them for the journalists arriving today as part of their attempt at PR damage control after the release of the kidnapped journalist Alan Johnston, unaware of the implicit irony of such a message.
I spend the morning drinking cup after cup of Arabic coffee, discussing the humanitarian situation in Gaza and the medical program implemented by our partner organization, the Church Council. My counterparts at the Church Council are all men, mostly doctors and medical administrators in their 50’s, all well-traveled and fluent in English. We talk about the conflict and the state of Gaza after Hamas routed Fatah, and about the humanitarian situation and the prospects for the future. The closure is heavy on their minds. I am the first foreigner to visit them since Hamas took over. Attending a medical training in Jerusalem used to entail applying for Israeli permits weeks in advance and crossing one’s fingers; now they can’t leave at all, stuck in an open air prison for the foreseeable future.
They tell me that public services have not yet deteriorated significantly, even though most of the international community and Israel have agreed on a policy of economic strangulation of the government. But after a general tax amnesty following Fatah’s ouster, it’s not quite clear how revenue will be collected for the payment of public services. While armed Hamas policemen in blue fatigues direct traffic in an orderly fashion, some of the official stamps required to authenticate certain official documents can now be obtained only with a fee; they fear that problems are looming.
We step outside the Church Council offices to witness the cash distribution. About 50 men sit sullenly waiting on plastic chairs on a covered patio. Handing out cash is not as crazy as it sounds. Humanitarian relief organizations, historically reliant on food distributions, are increasingly distributing cash. In Gaza the problem is not yet a lack of food, but of the money to buy it; with no imports of raw materials, all construction, manufacturing, and industry have ground to a halt. With no imports of fertilizers and seeds, all new planting has stopped. With no exports of agricultural produce, the vast quantities of fruits and vegetables normally sold in Israel can only be sold in Gaza, and there’s almost no work. While Fatah used to communicate with the Israelis, Hamas considers them the enemy, and refuses to talk to them at all. Consequently, the trickle of food currently being allowed in, the doctors tell me, ‘is a bit like feeding time at the zoo. They open the gate, drive in the food, then drive out, and close the gate. Then the lions come.’
They walk me through the system they’ve devised to avoid fraud and we watch the men go one by one into another room for an interview. A number of Islamists stand out with their long beards, and I ask the staff if they think these families will give the usual 2.5 percent contribution to the Hamas. Hamas has enough money from the Gulf and Iran, they say, not to request two dollar contributions from their own needy families.
On the drive to visit the medical clinics I notice that nearly all the shops are closed due to lack of business. The clinic is small, clean, well organized and well stocked. A generator roars in the courtyard to make up for the lack of municipal power. The patients have all gone home for the afternoon, and the clinic staffs are catching up on paperwork.
Gaza is not only among the mostly densely populated places on earth, it also has an age distribution that is a demographer’s nightmare; 19 percent of the population is under the age of five, meaning that the population is set to double in about twenty years. The focus at the clinics is therefore on maternal and child health.
I talk to the doctor and head nurse over the cacophony of the generator. They say that anemia is over 60% for children under 5, and the number of moderately malnourished children is around 5 percent. The causes of the malnourishment are political; Israeli children just a few kilometers on the other side of the wall live in relative luxury. What’s more worrying is the length of time required to restore a child from moderately malnourished back to normal; up to a year. For a child under the age of two, this means that stunting and other irreversible developmental problems will already have kicked in, and have left their effects for the rest of the child’s life.
But the Church Council simply doesn’t have the resources to distribute food to all the children that need it. Since Israel and the international community have agreed to ‘starve’ the Hamas government in order to undermine its public support, the situation is likely to get worse. The bottom line for the average family living in Gaza is simple; no work, no money, and therefore less food. If the Israelis and the Quartet (Russia, the EU, the US, and France) are right, and this undermines public support for Hamas, it will be the first time in history that such a tactic has resulted in strengthening the moderates. In Gaza such tactics have typically served to foment extremism; Hamas only grew to significant power during the massive Israeli incursions that started after the Intifada in 2001 and 2002. But for a stunted child with life long developmental disabilities, whether the strategy works in the end, or not, is a moot point.
From the clinic we meet more doctors for lunch at a seaside restaurant. Children play in the waves crashing on the beach outside the Gaza port, and it’s a bit hard to enjoy the feast of dishes laid out for us after our visit to the clinic. One of the doctors arrives from the main hospital in Gaza city, where a feud has been going on all morning between the two hospital directors; one has been appointed by Fatah, another by Hamas. They are arguing and trashing each other’s offices, he reports, each man asserting his right as the legitimate director.
After lunch we head back to the office to develop a plan to address the household food security and the malnourished children. On the way back we stop at a souvenir store stocked with flags, key chains, plates, T-shirts, hats, pens, and other souvenirs, all of them political. There are hundreds of different items with many logos and parties, including the Iranian president Ahmedinejad, Arafat, and Hamas president Haniyah. For kicks I buy a Yassir Arafat coffee mug and a green Hamas baseball cap.
At 5 o’clock it’s time for us to leave Gaza. I call Leo to let him know that we are making our way toward Eretz. He tells me that several hundred of the Palestinians who have been trapped for weeks in Egypt are crossing through Eretz today, and no one else is allowed to cross. We talk on the phone several times over the next two and a half hours before he tells me to come to the crossing.
Our ambulance arrives at the concrete road block where I’ve been picked up that morning to a crowd of a hundred or so Palestinians waiting to receive their relatives as well as a handful of armed Hamas policemen in blue camouflage fatigues trying to keep them from approaching the wall to Israel. I say goodbye to my hosts in the ambulance and walk 200 meters or so towards two massive Israeli Merkava tanks parked on the road. With their turrets pointed in my direction I have no idea if they can see me, no idea if they will allow me to cross just because I look, hopefully, like a foreigner and not a Palestinian. The sound of the tanks’ engines is deafening. But with no other choice I simply walk toward them with my hands in plain sight, and then continue walking past them toward the tunnel.
I enter and make my way back toward the gate, where we meet three Reuters journalists waiting smoking cigarettes waiting for the gate to open. A bright white light shines overhead to illuminate the space for a camera on the wall. We wait in vain, showing our passports to the camera, and shouting hopelessly to the empty tunnel. I call Leo, who fails to answer his phone for the first time all day. We wait a while longer before a Palestinian being pushed along in a wheelchair approaches from the other side. When the gate opens to let him out we go in.
At the end of the tunnel are five sliding steel doors, an overhead camera, and an intercom. I push the button and ask them to please open the door. After about five minutes a female voice asks if we are all internationals. Yes, that’s right, I say, three journalists and myself from a non government organization. ‘No Palestinians?’ she asks. ‘No,’ I say. We wait a couple more minutes before the light above one of the doors turns from red to green, and we pass through one by one into the hangar.
We emerge into another room, this one with five identical steel doors in a steel-walled room; no intercom, just an overhead camera. The air conditioners are on full blast. After waiting here for a few minutes, a light turns from red to green above one of the doors and it slides open and we enter another room. This one is smaller, and there are four glass doors set in a glass wall, but the ceiling is open so that we can see, from a distance, a set of offices in a block about fifteen meters up hanging from the ceiling. There are half a dozen men and women in uniforms and civilian clothes sitting at computers, watching us through the windows, but no staff whatsoever on the ground floor.
A voice over a loud speaker announces in heavily accented English that we should go through the doors one by one. The doors open onto a small area where we encounter the first, and only human, a gruff, mustachioed Palestinian in an orange jumpsuit who instructs us to empty our bags into large white bins and load them on a conveyor for X-ray. The lack of any human contact until now, the absence of any instructions on how to proceed whatsoever, of being herded through this futuristic machine by lights and intercoms and cameras, has been surreal and utterly dehumanizing, like being body-cavity searched by a robot. This first contact with a person is less than reassuring.
From there we each go through another glass door leading to a small cubicle. ‘What do you have in your pockets?’ the voice says over the speaker, and now I can see him, a brown-haired guy in his twenties, standing watching me from the high glass office overhead. ‘Coins,’ I say, ‘my passport, and my wallet,’ my voice picked up by an invisible microphone. ‘Show me,’ he says, and so I show him, emptying my pockets and holding the items above my head. He orders me through.
We enter a smaller area, the only exit from which is a single glass cylinder in the center of the wall, not unlike a small revolving door. One of the journalists enters before me, and it’s clear that she’s receiving commands from a microphone inside the cylinder after the door closes behind her: she spreads her legs to place her feet on two white footprints painted on the ground, and raises her hands high above her head. After a few moments the door opens on the other side and she exits, and now it’s my turn. I do exactly as she did without any prompting, stepping into the glass tube while the door closes behind me, spreading my legs and raising my hands as I hear a whirring, rotating device spin 360 degrees around me on both sides. It’s more than a little bit creepy. Then the doors only slide open and I exit to the other side.
In the next chamber we wait for some time. We can see the staff through the overhead windows watching us and talking. I start to worry about my seemingly innocuous souvenirs. Will the Israelis take an Arafat coffee mug and a Hamas baseball cap for the kitsch that I do, or as threats to national security? I mentally rehearse my explanation that they’re just gag souvenirs. We wait for about fifteen minutes. I grow increasingly nervous as I imagine them going through my stuff. After a while the light turns from red to green above a one way steel turnstile on the far side of the room, and we go through without any prompting from the loud speaker.
On the other side two women are swabbing our bags and the items inside them with little black plastic wands fastened with tissue. They go through everything. One is an Ethiopian and the other is a black-haired white girl, and both are under 25. The black-haired girl takes out my Arafat mug and shows it to her colleague, who just shrugs her shoulders and shakes her head. Then she slides her hand down the side pocket of my laptop bag to where the Hamas hat is, and I cannot bear to look.
About fifteen minutes later they tell us to gather our bags and go. Once again we pass through the glass vestibules that we entered that morning, and once again a young girl in uniform asks me who I am, who I work for, and why did I go to Gaza.
A wall of moist warm air heavy with the smell of manure slams into me as I walk through the door of the hangar; I am back in Israel. The bright orange moon hangs enormous above the edge of the horizon. I find my taxi driver, who’s been waiting for two hours. He asks me with eager curiosity, as do all the Palestinians I talk with in the coming days: ‘How is Gaza?’