Blood and Tears from Syria to India

A friend of mine witnessed a massacre in Syria on Dec 29th, 2012 and this was her comment, “We witnessed a massacre today in Tal Refaat village in Northern Aleppo. A Russian fighter jet from the Assad army dropped a TNT barrel on a number of houses, just 500 meters away from us. The impact was so strong that our windows shattered. It was the most unreal, disturbing, and horrendous thing I’ve been through in my life. Taking the life of 18 civilians and wounding tens others took a matter of seconds. What killed me most, is how the people reacted, like it was so normal. While I broke down from shock, they were the ones comforting me. They continued with their lives, with children playing & laughing in the streets. After two years of hell, it has become nothing for them, picking body pieces from the streets, and burying entire families that were once part of life in this village.
This is just one story out of hundreds happening everyday in Syria, yet the world goes on, watching from afar, and caring less everyday. I am trying to express how I feel right now, but no words can do the job. What I know for sure is that God will not leave those people alone. Their amazing faith, smiles, and bravery will crush any army… and the whole world will owe us a huge apology someday, one which we will never, ever accept.
may the martyrs of Tal Refaat, & all Syria, RIP.”

It’s different when you hear about it on the news and when someone sees the actual thing and relates it to you, even though if you think about it, it shouldn’t be different, because the end result is the same; entire families are being eradicated and there are men, women and children buried underground as people around us are trying to find tickets for the biggest New Year’s Eve parties in town.

On another front, the rape victim in India had died in Singapore. Her story had triggered violent protests in India as people demanded greater protection for women from sexual violence. As the reporter in gulfnews stated, “The tragedy has forced India to confront the reality that sexually assaulted women are often blamed for the crime, forcing them to keep quiet and discouraging them from reporting it to authorities for fear of exposing their families to ridicule.”

But the sad truth is, this problem is not just in India. This reality is present in many Arab countries, where assaulted women are forced not to report the attacks so as not to bring shame to their family. Which brings us to Jordan’s Penal Code Article 308, the terrible law I learnt about upon reading @nuramer’s blog, which allows allows rape charges to be dropped if the perpetrator agrees to marry his victim for a period of at least three years. So not only are attackers allowed to walk free, they are even rewarded by taking a wife home, this is just preposterous!

Another question I’m wondering about is; is the woman’s consent taken even taken into consideration in such cases? Personally, I don’t know.

But article 308 totally takes the ‘post’ out of the ‘post-traumatic  stress disorder’ because the trauma will be continuous as rape victims would relive the attack day-in day-out. A story of a 14-year old rape victim who was being forced to marry her perpetrator caused outrage in Jordan six months ago, but I am left to wonder how the story had ended.

So yeah, as people are trying to figure out which of the 63 new year’s eve parties to attend in Dubai, maybe they need to take a second or two to think about humanity’s downward spiral and how to somehow stop it by bringing out the best in people, spreading kindness, doing good deeds, acknowledging the good being done to us and paying it forward.

Live Blogging from yet another wedding

I am at a wedding so naturally I’m blogging since that’s what I do in weddings when I am not tweeting or whatsapping.
I had to come to this wedding “on behalf of” my mother because she couldn’t make it. The awkward part of it is when people walk up to me and say “hi” enthusiastically only for them to walk away and for me to wonder, “Who was that?” Usually my mom is around to tell me who it was, and she can be quite patient about it since I have a malfunctional face recognition system and I might ask the same question about the same person every single event.
But the interesting thing is to be surrounded by Swahili speakers in Dubai. Feels like I’m stranded in a mini-Mombasa island. Except that’s slightly inaccurate because the people around me might actually originate from Tanzania or Zanzibar for all I know.
But isn’t it cute when the young girls actually wear identical dresses without making a big deal about it? So what exactly happens to women when they grow up and suddenly they don’t want to be seen wearing the same thing as another attendee? Is it the need to stand out or to be the most talked about, hoping the uniqueness of the dress would become a useful factor?
As for me, I just search for the table at the corner and focus on my phone/food hoping nobody would embarrass me with “do you know who I am?” remembering the last time it happened in Kenya, the person was actually my dad’s half-sister. Yet another awkward moment.
P.S. Sadly my phone is running out of charge.

It’s OK to be Different

So one of the things I liked about 2012 was discovering Susan Cain’s book,Quiet and Dr Martin Laney’s book, The Introvert Advantage; books that validate people like me are normal because as my friend puts it, “It’s good to know that we have a type.”
They claim that there are three extroverts to every introvert, and the world has come to value extroverts, outgoing people with charismatic personalities so that people like us are seen as just weird (at best) and psychologically ill (at worse). In reality, introverts are just different, not worse off than extroverts but different.
The idea they present is that extroverts recharge through external interactions- meeting with people, going to parties and doing all those extrovertish stuff -while the same things drain the energy out of introverts, leaving us feel overwhelmed, irritated as our brains become overstimulated.
And it is through no fault of our own, as our brains are wired differently. We can’t give quick answers because we’d rather think things through first so many of us are seen as quiet and maybe stupid, just because we delve deeper into the realms of our minds.
Our favorite pastimes don’t involve people as three becomes more than a crowd and we become overwhelmed. So we tend to recharge by sitting at home, making a hot cup of cocoa and reading. Extroverts find us boring but introverts totally understand our need for solitude.
And we communicate better in writing than through talking.
I’ve posted a couple of posts On Introverts but I felt like addressing the issue again because we still live in a society that finds it rude to turn down invitations to social gatherings not understanding that there is a limit to how many of these we can attend (I
personally limit myself to two per week-which my mother ends up organizing so don’t feel offended if I refuse an invitation, it’s just because usually my quota is already planned out for the week).
I really would like to raise awareness on the issue as I suffered a lot during my life with extrovert people trying to “mold” me into an extrovert when I cannot be one because it’s more a matter of neurological circuiting than social conditioning.
So I guess that’s it for today.
Are you an introvert or an extrovert?

#Bestof2012 Ahechoes Posts

So the year is coming to an end, and I would like to take a few minutes to thank everybody who has been visiting this blog. With all the stuff online fighting for your attention, it is an honor that you’ve been spending some time here, so thank you very much. Thank you for your comments, likes, shares and retweets. I’ve been going through some of the comments that my friends have been sending me, and there seems to be a pattern, can you find it?

Person (A) on Facebook says, “long time no talk, but recently started reading more of ur writings and they are really good. i just want to thank you that some of ur writings i find them helpful esp to tough times in life. keep up writing and think of colletcting ur blog posts and put them in a book.

Person (B) shared my stuff on twitter, with the message, “write a book someday “

Person (C) on Linkedin said, “Write something, like a novel or maybe a children’s book for starters (JK Rowling!)”

So until I get to that, I’m listing below some of the top posts for my ahechoes.wordpress.com compiled for new readers. Some of these were actually published in 2011 but they still made the “most read” list of 2012. Enjoy!

1) The Masks People Wear.

2) How to Stop Hurting Too Much.

3) Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish, Stay Curious. 

4) On Introverts. 

5) Sands of Time.

6) 9 Traits of Successful People

7) Dear Single Ladies

8) When Failure is a Success

9) The Road Less Traveled 

10) Losing Your Person

Syrian Children are Children Too

When a gunman entered the school and shot dead 26 people in Newtown, Connecticut, the breaking news was a heart-breaking news. We were all saddened by the story, parents of six year old children hugged them tighter, and people asked one question over and over again, “Why?” Why would anyone want to hurt six year old children? Innocent children who didn’t understand evil until the day they experienced it firsthand that day? To find six-year-olds with multiple shot wounds was so devastating, that the Medical Examiner commented,  “I’ve been at this for a third of a century … but this probably is the worst I have seen or the worst that I know of any of my colleagues having seen,” he said.

But in Syria every news is heart-breaking news. Yesterday, dozens of people have been killed and many more wounded in a Syrian government air strike that hit a bakery where a crowd was queuing for bread. Many of the victims were women and children. Just because there aren’t reporters lurking all over Syria, taking interviews about the children’s favorite color, hobbies, or cartoon characters doesn’t make them any less important.  Their mothers suffered the back aches associated with carrying them around for nine months. Some of them watched their children say the first words, and curl their tiny fingers around an adult hand, and smile for no particular reason. And some of them watched their children die from gun wounds and disappear under the rubble of collapsed buildings, forever gone.

And it’s not just Syria.

19 November 2012: one of the top stories from Gaza was , “Four children killed in single Israeli air strike.”

17 December 2012: 10 Afghan children killed in bomb explosion in eastern province.

And that’s just the stuff that happened in the last one and a half month.

But the thing is , in in Syria, Palestine, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, th0se children are grouped into numbers to reduce airwaves and sound bytes, and any resulting shockwaves that could reverberate across the world. We don’t get to hear their names, and their favorite holiday events, whether they liked to color with crayons or preferred paint. Some of them lose their parents and siblings in the same attacks, and so their names would just remain on the birth and death certificates, if those even existed.

So Syrian children are children too. They are not collateral damage. Palestinian children are children too. They are not future terrorists. In other words, Muslim children are children too. They are not a threat to anybody, especially when they’re carrying their pacifiers. So let’s not forget them.

I wanted an image of a child from Syria and many of them showed dead bodies that were too disturbing. (Image from http://theglobaljournal.net/news/world/unicef-hundreds-of-children-killed-in-syria.html)

Power of Keystone Habits

In the book, The Power of Habits, Charles Duhigg talks about the habit loop, which is like a computer code that starts with the 1)Cue, then moves to the 2)Habit and ends with the 3)Reward. Craving for the reward keeps the code running in an infinite loop, until you reprogram it or break it.

I’ve mentioned all that in a previous note, but an interesting thing the author mentions is how making significant changes in life doesn’t require conscious reprograming of dozens of habit codes. Some habits are more important than others and are called “keystone habits.” Making changes in these keystone habits initiate changes in other subroutines in your other habits code, so for non-programmers, it’s like dropping the first tile in a dominos game, causing other tiles to drop and changing habits in other areas of a person’s life.

One keystone habit is “Exercise”. Duhigg writes, “People who exercise start eating better and become more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed.”

So with experience one could learn what habits are keystone habits in their lives and focus on those primarily.

Until then I guess we should start exercising .

Dear Single ladies – part 2

A friend of mine was talking about how lonely she is for being 29 and still single in a society where you turn into a spinster by age 23. She ended her post by saying,
“Everything is in Allah’s will, I understand but I can’t run away from the lonely feelings, the need to be cared for. Am still a human, and still a woman – I can’t run away from my hopeless feelings. I just hurt- and hide behind the masked face of being empowered.”

The words were really powerful but they really made me think of people who are at the other end of the spectrum, those who got married young and have half a dozen kids to take care for. Though I do not have direct quotes, but when they speak, they speak of not having any “me” time, of how they can’t do what they like to do because of a domineering guy, of how their movements and day plans are controlled by someone other than themselves.
So while the author of castle of words says she wants to share the long walks on the beach with someone she calls her husband, what if she got someone who doesn’t even like to take a walk (let alone take a walk at the beach) because their feet keep on sinking in the sand. I’ve seen women whose personalities have been shredded because of their husbands so they can’t even recognize who they are anymore, and there are those who are just sooooo tired of things demanding their attention that they just want to crawl into a hole somewhere and disappear. There are those who are going through the pain of discovering that their beloved husbands had been sooo loving, his love encompassed more than one wife, and there are those who don’t know how to talk to their children about a separation looming around the corner, and there are those who fall victim of domestic violence and there are those who are stuck in a loveless marriage just for the children, and there are those who had to bury their children because of a madman who entered a school with a gun or a mad president who just doesn’t want to let go of his chair (Syria).
So yeah, when you start looking at things in perspective, what single women go through isn’t so bad. Single women can take the edge off the pain of loneliness with a list of achievements that sees us move forward. I learnt all that by watching my single friends who yearn companionship as much as any other girl, but know better than to sit in bed, crying in self pity over romance movies while wolfing down a gallon of Baskin Robbins; young women who launched home businesses and keep on taking it to the next level, young women who volunteer to help orphans, those taking lessons to learn new skills and languages, those taking care of elderly parents and those who utilize their time to meet new people and go new places.

Sorry for the second post today but I couldn’t help responding to Castle of Word’s post, which I can’t link right now considering that I’m posting this through my phone.

Wedding Season

So it’s the peak of the wedding season, and I was stuck in yet another wedding this weekend if you’ve been following my twitter timeline. Nowadays I started to make use of weddings as they provide me with deep insight into the social behavior of people. Besides the fact that I utilize the time to get in touch with people through whatsapp (used to be bbm before I got rid of it). So this weekend the clamor from the stereo was too loud, I refrained from communicating verbally with anybody (I was on the ‘smile and nod’ mode). The thing is, I hate having to scream over the noise to be heard, let alone screaming under the noise because chances of that occurring were pretty high.
Anyhow, so I sat around watching how people were actually ‘talking to each other’ and it was quite fascinating. It made me think, how can they even hear each other speak? Until it dawned on me; maybe they don’t hear each other speak.

I mean, think about it, most people would rather talk than listen, and this is the perfect opportunity for them to talk without having to listen to what the other was saying because it was just too noisy.

So anyhow, this wedding was perfect because by 10.30 pm we were out the door (actually, to be more accurate, “We were out the tent flap.” )People who organize weddings in this part of the world need to do that more often; release people by 10.30 by feeding them earlier. Some weddings go all the way to midnight, and organizers need to consider that people still need to drive for 30 minutes to 2 hours if they live in another emirate. Plus they also need to think about how difficult it is to find parking at night. What saves us sometimes is that we live next to a hotel that has parking space, so we could get parking space that was emptied at about the same time by someone who was attending (yet another) wedding in that hotel.

Some people might say, “But it’s just one night when you’re going to reach home late.”

But this ‘just one night’ would get translated to a 100 nights per year considering how complex our society’s connections are. In some cultures, wedding attendees go up to 200. In our culture, it goes upto a 1000 because friends of family, family of friends, neighbors of family, family of neighbors, and just about any combination of “friends, family and neighbors” you can possibly think of. Plus we run in a lot of circles that are not only limited to Kemenies but can extend to Yemenis and Emiratis.

Fa khudlak.

If you’ve been following this blog for long enough you probably would know that I am not a big fan of weddings. Being an introvert, I hate the crowd, the noise, and just about everything about it. I feel people put so much attention into the details of the wedding, they stop focusing on the marriage itself.

I wonder what the results would be if somebody conducted a study to know how much people waste annually to attend and arrange for weddings, by considering the cost of dresses that would be worn only once, the time wasted driving to and from the place, the food that would go to waste…among other things.

That’s it for today

Lesson Learnt from a Bicycle Rider on a Highway

source: istockphoto.com

So the other day, I was watching the cars passing by on the main street under our house – a strange pastime of mine – and I saw a guy riding a bicycle on the highway. Cars kept on appearing from view and disappearing as they rounded the corner, and the guy was cycling at a very leisurely pace. I wondered how he felt moving at a snail’s pace in the dust  comparison with cars passing by at 100 kph at least.

But then again, can you compare the legpower of an average male with the horsepower of an engine? This guy made me see that sometimes in life, we really need to stop comparing ourselves to the people around us. Some may be prettier, smarter, have better jobs, or more friends, and we might be inclined to do preposterous things in an attempt to compete with them. But we need to remember that each one of us has a unique set of talents and qualities that makes us who we are.

Some might claim that comparing ourselves with others can be quite motivating, and it could be true to some extent, but at some point or another, frustration begins to set in, because wherever you are in life, someone will always be in a better position, and for every ounce of motivation we might get, we risk the chance of getting a pound of frustration, helplessness and worse of all, ingratitude and envy.

So sometimes it’s best for someone to make an inventory of their strengths and weaknesses, work hard to compete with himself, and be better than they were yesterday.

Hadeeth of the Day

عن أبي هريرة رضي الله عنه قال: قال رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم : ”انظروا إلى من هو أسفل منكم. ولا تنظروا إلى من هو فوقكم؛ فهو أجدر أن لا تَزْدروا نعمة الله عليكم” متفق عليه.

Abu Hurayra reported that the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, “Look at those who are lower than you and do not look at those who are higher than you. That is more likely to prevent you underestimating the blessing of Allah on you.” [Agreed upon]

Hadeeth translation source: http://www.sunnipath.com/library/Hadith/H0004P0055.aspx

You gave me false hope

This is the response to a writing exercise; to write something negative about something that is usually positive(hope), thought of sharing….

“It took me a while to figure it out but I realized what was bothering me about you. You gave me hope and walked away. Not walked away. Dropped everything and ran away, forgetting the door open.
And the only thing left was the false hope in my heart. Some people claim that there is no such thing as false hope but only hope. Too bad I don’t believe that, because there is false hope and it’s been clinging onto me for so long it seems like an extra layer of skin perpetually attached.
So yeah, you gave me false hope and ruined my life, made me think that people like me can change, that people like descant reach out for something better than they have, but then you left. You left me hanging, you left me waiting, you left me reaching out for a mirage while the rest of my life was falling apart.
So maybe next time I should have read your actions more than your words. You gave up on my changing and you disappeared without uttering a word. Maybe you were afraid of hurting me or maybe you were afraid of getting hurt yourself but you didn’t care about what would happen to me. You let hope hang on for longer than it was welcomed when you forgot to close the door.
So maybe next time remember to close the door behind you. Remember to close the door behind you when you are deceiving someone else, since I definitely wouldn’t reopen the door for you.”