Are we there yet?

I was at the Aga Khan
University in Karachi, organizing a writing workshop, when the call came in.

“Oh no,” whispered my colleague. 
”That’s bad. That’s terrible.”

She turned to me. “Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated. We want you to go home
 right now.”

She called for Zabair, the toughest and most experienced driver in the pool. He led me outside to a reinforced pickup truck, made sure I was belted in, and pulled out into the worst traffic in the world.

Nobody knew what to expect. Riots? Invasion by the Taliban, by India, by the U.S.? Everyone in Karachi, a city of nearly 20 million, had a single thought: get home.

Outside the university walls, the traffic wasn’t just bumper-to-bumper—it was
 door-to-door and elbow-to-elbow. A three-lane road had five lanes of 
traffic, a four-lane road had seven: small family cars, vast 
trucks painted with bright designs and verses from the Koran, taxis (some so battered they were literally shapeless, held 
together by fiberglass patching), scores of motorbikes and mopeds swarming the sidewalks and threading the gaps between car bumpers.

Traffic in Pakistan tends to be an open-faced sandwich anyway, with very 
little hidden or enclosed, and tonight this was even more true. 

Hand-carts, donkey-carts, a boy on a bicycle carrying two large wooden
 crates, two boys on a moped carrying an extension ladder and metal 
piping, a family of five squeezed into the bed of a tiny pickup along with what looked like a giant refrigerator. Another family of five on a 
motorbike. The brightly-painted buses had twenty or more people on the 
roof. Everyone looked like a refugee.



People swarmed the sidewalks, flooded into the roads. Scores of mopeds and small motorbikes raced up the sidewalks or picked their way between the larger vehicles, sometime perpendicular to the stream, sometimes in the opposite direction. It’s a wonder we didn’t see crushed pelvises on every corner.

Twice our pickup flipped the wing-mirror of a bus. Once we crunched a woman’s car as she crowded in front of our bumper. “Well, go on then!” Zabair shouted in Urdu, and she pulled into the tiny space that had opened ahead.

Night fell. The whole scene was becoming surreal. The shops had closed early, in self-protection. Tail lights and brake lights shone dimly through dust and exhaust. The traffic got steadily worse. Gas was running out: motorbikes were being pushed, cars abandoned. Eventually we reached a two-lane on-ramp to an overpass and it became clear that nothing would go any farther. People swarmed out of their cars or climbed on their roofs.

Nobody was in charge. When I’d arrived in Karachi, just five hours previously, 
every road had a soldier lounging at the corner or on a bridge. Now
 there was no sign of them, nor of police to help sort out the 
traffic.

Yet, astonishingly, there was no sense of threat. It was only later in the evening that a feeling of 
grievance would emerge here and there, tires would be burned, shots will be fired (mostly into the air), campaign billboards would be pulled down and torched, the belief in Pakistan being that everything comes down to politics, and all politics is corrupt. For now, people were standing around watching, talking, even joking. One boy of maybe nine grinned as he helped his father push their car.

In the end, Zabair backed up, bumped across a construction site under the overpass and found a detour, then another, and finally we got to my host’s home, the 25-minute journey taking more than three hours. Indoors, we stared at the TV. Still, nobody knew what would happen, but I felt I’d been granted a vision of how the world will end: not with a bang but with a final apocalypse of traffic.—Tim Brookes

Tim Brookes’ latest book is Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment.

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Don't spend it all in one place.

Here’s the first of three excerpts from Letters to Zerky, an account of Bill Raney and his wife JoAnne’s travels along with their 18-month old son Zerky (and their miniature dachshund Tarzan) across Europe and through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sikkim, Assam, Thailand, and Hong Kong in 1967 and 1968 in a VW van. Because Zerky was too young to remember his adventure, his father wrote him a series of letters along the way, while his mother kept a diary. The book, released in November, comes recommended by Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson.

Letter From Ghazni, Afghanistan, November 29, 1967

Dear Zerky,

Your mom has a lot of class. This morning as we were getting ready to leave Kandahar for Kabul, we remembered that we didn’t have any Afghan money. Unable to find a bank in Kandahar, your mother decided to try to change money at the hotel where we were camped. “But they just won’t let us do that,” I told her. “We haven’t even rented a room, and we look like a busload of hippies.”  “I’ll take care of it,” she replied.

She spent the next hour getting all dolled up. Both of us have brought along one set of good clothes, “just in case.” Prior to arriving in the wilds of Afghanistan, neither of us has worn them. Your mom put on her white blouse and her brown suit.

“Why not wear that cute little Tyrolean costume instead,” I badgered, “the one that makes your boobs look like they’re hanging out.”  “Sure, that would be perfect for a Moslem country,” she countered. Next came the nylons, then the high heels, then half an hour of doing her hair, nails and makeup. “You look like a million bucks,” I told her, begrudgingly.  “That’s the idea,” she replied, as she marched off to battle.

Fifteen minutes later she was back with a big wad of weird-looking bills. “How did you talk them into it?” I asked.

Your mother then explained to me, as if to a child, that she hadn’t talked them into anything—she just didn’t give them the opportunity to say no. She had come to Afghanistan on business, she told the hotel manager. She explained that she was in the motion picture business in San Francisco. “San Francisco is near Hollywood, California. You’ve heard of Hollywood, California, haven’t you?” Indeed he had. Then she explained that the price of making movies in Hollywood, California is exorbitant. “The cost of making movies in Afghanistan must be very reasonable in comparison, “don’t you think?” He did.

“And what with all your colorful tribesmen, beautiful deserts, and spectacular mountains,” she larded it on, “I’m sure American audiences would love to see your faraway beautiful land.”

Had he read the recent best-seller, James Michener’s Caravans? she asked innocently. “It’s all about Afghanistan.” He didn’t read English, of course. “Everybody’s reading it in America,” she went on. Finally she explained how she had arrived in Afghanistan only yesterday, and had not yet had the opportunity to exchange her American dollars. “Are there many such grand hotels as this in Afghanistan?” she flattered.

“Did you offer him the starring role?” I interjected.

“How much would you like to exchange?”  he asked her.

There’s no business like show business. —Bill and JoAnne Walker Raney

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Fulla, the Muslim Barbie.

After spending five anxious days in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, hanging out in a Bedouin tent with an international fugitive who’s wanted as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist”—a character who figured prominently in a story I was reporting about a Muslim charity in southern Oregon with purported links to al Qaeda—I was relieved to finally be en route to Portland, albeit standing at the tail end of a line that was advancing glacially toward a distant security checkpoint at Frankfurt Main Airport.

As the final boarding call for my connecting flight home echoed through the cavernous hall, I thrust the shopping bag that I’d been lugging onto the conveyor, and waited anxiously at the end of the X-ray machine for my bag, growing increasingly agitated the longer it failed to appear. The scanner technician motioned for his superior, and then a security guard, toting my bag, asked me to follow him into another room, where he asked me to empty the contents of the bag onto a table. First I pulled out a silk black abaya and boshiya (traditional Saudi dress and veil) for my six-year-old daughter, then a white thobe and red checkered ghutra (robe and headdress) for my eight-year-old son.

No problem there. Then I remembered the toys.

On the way to King Khalid International Airport, my Saudi host made a detour at a toy store, and had picked out two dolls for my kids that he insisted were all the rage in Riyadh. So out came “Fulla,” the Saudi version of Barbie, robed and veiled in black, accessorized with a prayer rug. The guard pressed the button on Fulla’s back and looked at me quizzically when the doll called out to Allah, praying in Arabic. He stiffened when I presented him with a Saudi G.I. Joe, a bearded, chamo-clad airborne ranger toting an automatic rifle, bandolier, grenades and dagger. “Fur die kinder!” I said lamely, as the guard, registering his disapproval, swabbed the toys and ran the sample through a mobile mass spectrometer.

For a few tense seconds that ticked like minutes, I wondered if I’d been set up by my host. Then the explosives detector spat out its reading: Negative. And I was on my way. My daughter has never played with Fulla, whose muffled prayers sometimes sound when she’s jostled in her resting place at the bottom of the toybox. But that plastic Saudi warrior stands at attention on a prominent shelf in my son’s room. A gift that traveled all the way from Arabia.

He calls it his “Jihad Joe.” —Ted Katauskas is a former magazine writer currently based in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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Here’s the 2nd of three tales from Greg Dobbs, an Emmy-winning producer and correspondent for 23 years with ABC, taken from his new book, Life in the Wrong Lane - Why Journalists Go In When Everyone Else Wants Out.

[From the chapter CHAMPAGNE FROM A STYROFOAM CUP, on covering the revolution in Iran]

The Ayatollah’s aides—the president destined to be exiled, the foreign minister destined to be executed—had promised me an interview with Khomeini. So I went with a crew and a translator—Behray Taidi, an out of work English-speaking Iranian TV cameraman whom we had hired to work with us—to the elementary school in Tehran that had been Khomeini’s headquarters since he returned in triumph.

The schoolyard, surrounded by a chain link fence, was packed with people. Khomeini’s entourage had announced that he would hold a public audience. What that meant was, he’d stand at a window and weakly wave his hand at the masses.

We pushed our way in. The pictures would be great.

Bad decision. Once we were in, we couldn’t get back out. And with more people pushing in, neither could anyone else. It wasn’t like squeezing ten pounds into a five-pound bag. It was like squeezing a hundred pounds into the bag.

By the time we were near the Ayatollah, we couldn’t move. Not under our own power anyway. The crush was so tight that we, like everyone else, got picked up and carried by the human tide. If your arm was down at your side, you couldn’t lift it. If it was up in the air, you couldn’t bring it down.

Behray had a Rolex wristwatch. It came off. There was nothing he could do. To try to reach for it on the ground would have doomed him to death by crushing. Several people did die that day in the schoolyard.

Ironically, we have the Ayatollah himself to thank for our lives. Standing at the corner window, weakly waving his hand at his subjects who were pinned in too tight to wave back, he saw us in the crush and signaled to his aides. They nudged Khomeini away from the window and reached out for us, pulling us one by one across the windowsill and into the room. Ayatollah Khomeini. What a guy. —Greg Dobbs

To buy Dobbs’ new book, ‘LIFE IN THE WRONG LANE’ (iUniverse), click here.

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Do you feel lucky punk? Well, do ya?

Ever wonder what it’s like to be a far-flung correspondent for T.V. news? Let’s just say it’s no walk in the park. This week Greg Dobbs, an Emmy-winning producer and correspondent for 23 years with ABC and currently a correspondent for HDNet TV, shares a few priceless tales of woe from his new book, Life in the Wrong Lane - Why Journalists Go In When Everyone Else Wants Out. Here’s the first of three. Thanks Greg. I hope you enjoy his misfortunes as much as I do. — Ed.

[Note: the following is from a chapter about Dobbs covering the Indian occupation of Wounded Knee.]

The first sign was maybe a hundred yards ahead of us, at the top of a hill, silhouetted in the dark night. A lone figure, erect, like a statue at the top of a treeless slope, the barrel of his rifle standing out against the night sky. He seemed to be peering right down at us. If he was a fed, he was just waiting to clamp on the cuffs.

We stopped short and whispered to each other. Fed, or Indian, or angry rancher? No way to know. But it didn’t really matter. Whoever he was, he wasn’t acting real friendly.

We could cut fast to the left or right and hope to outrun him. We were weighted down with tens of thousands of dollars in camera equipment, but who knows? Maybe in this deep snow, we could move just as fast as he could.

And maybe we couldn’t. Furthermore, outrunning him might not be our biggest challenge. What if he shoots at us? Could we outrun the bullet? (more…)

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