Back from Oblivion

It's been a while since I've written anything, don't really know why, partly because I’ve been lazy, actually completely because I’ve been lazy. But so much has happened in the past 5 weeks that I’ll be writing about it for a long time to come. On the 15th of May mike came back from his trip to India and told me that I was heading to Pakistan for a couple of weeks and access whether NWI (non-profit that I work for) can start a project in Pakistan. On the 17th I flew out to Pakistan. It had been 2.5 years since I’d been to the motherland. I was hoping to see it in a way that I had never seen it before. I were to go around the country and identify an area where we could start a health based, poverty reduction or social justice project. Mike had left everything up to me so I could do anything and I could do it the way I wanted.

The trip turned out to be a lot more than I had ever imagined it to be. I saw Pakistan in a way that I can only be grateful for. To me Pakistan was what I saw growing up primarily in Islamabad and Lahore, where i went to nice private schools, hung out with kids in souped up cars and an array of servants at their beck and call. I wasn't oblivious to the fact that there was poverty and despair among the majority of people but it was never to close to feel so it never hit me. It was something you read in the paper or heard on the news but never came into contact with yourself. This time around it was different. I was a different person when i returned back to Pakistan and i attribute that a lot to my experiences with ICROSS in Kenya.

I traveled through the southern Sind and the western Baluchistan province and on the way stopped over in the 3 major cities of Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. Met with lots of amazing people, ranging from devoted doctors working in a small town hospital for a lot less than what they could get in a big city, to government officials who really want to see their town, city and country progress and are doing their part towards achieving that. I saw pessimism in the cities when sitting amongst rich privileged kids and i saw immense optimism in the small towns and villages.

Was surprised by the work and reaction of some of my old friends. Most of them turned out as I thought, not bad in anyway but just oblivious to what is being done for development in Pakistan, but very critical of what is being done while sitting in their air-conditioned homes sippin on Rum n Coke but there were some that pleasantly surprised me and I will write about one of them pretty soon.

Pakistan at this moment in time is a very exciting place to be in. There is development going on everywhere, people in cities and villages are more politically aware than ever, there is debate going on all over the 20 private tele channels, in villages people are asking questions, questions like "Why don't I have enough electricity? Why can't my daughter go to school? Its this optimism that I took from the place, not the fact that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court being sacked is a sign that things are deteriorating in Pakistan but that the amount of debate and criticism that the Government has received because of that was never imaginable before.

I will write more soon, love to hear anyone’s comments regarding this.

Love Ali