DAY 4 and 5 PAKISTAN-MICRODRIP IRRIGATION FARM

Hello friends and family,

Thanks again for the responses! Keep them coming! It makes my day every time I open up my email and have messages waiting for me with your responses! Once again, it’s 1am here and forgive my ramblings…We have to wake up in 4.5 hours as we’re catching a flight (courtesy once again of Ali) to Lahore to meet with different well respected newspaper editors to learn more about Pakistan, and low income housing project managers to see more American/Pakistani partnerships.

Haven’t had a second to write an email since we’ve been on the go for the last few days so I’m putting Day 4 and 5 together….

So yesterday, met again with Sharmeen, the well known documentary director/producer, and she gave us a tour of her office where she and a team of women are working on capturing the history of Pakistan via audio stories accompanied by black and white photos–it’s a free public museum to teach Pakistanis about their past and to show them that the nation was built on the ideal of what the country’s name stood for–purity. PakistanPakistan is the only one that has a symbolic meaning…

means “land of the pure.”…Unlike all other middle eastern countries like “Afghanistan”–”land of the afghans” or “Uzbekistan”–”land of the Uzbeks” where the country’s name relates to its people,

Sharmeen’s project, while ambitious, is so cool because so many Pakistanis are illiterate so by creating audio stories, they can go to the museum, put on a set of headphones and learn about their history without having to read about it…

In any case, we had another very productive on-camera discussion about American foreign policy from a Pakistani perspective…again many contradictions were brought up but it made me like Sharmeen more in a sense because she could make distinctions between the government of the US and the people of the US and had both positives and negatives to highlight…She mentioned an interesting thing: She said that what she missed about her time in America when she went to college and that she hoped to someday bring to Pakistan were our passtimes–sports–baseball, basketball, football, games (kickball, dodgeball etc.) our placement of importance on family holidays like Thanksgiving and July 4th and how they cross all religions and political parties..

Speaking of holidays, we are staying an extra day in Karachi to celebrate Eid, “the festival of sacrifice” with Ali’s family where they sacrifice an animal and share it with their friends, family and distribute it to the poor members of the community. (commemoration of the willingness of Ibrahim to sacrifice his son to God according to the Quran)  It’s a big celebration and should be a very memorable experience (especially with Ali’s family!)

In Pakistan, as a side note, the main social gatherings are weddings and in the months of november/december/january, people are going to weddings 4 nights a week (pretty much every night is game to hold your wedding other than Monday)…Ali’s family sometimes go to four weddings/functions in one night! At Ali’s brother’s wedding (his name is also Ali), there were 3000 people that attended. Three thousand people! It took the bride and groom five hours to greet everyone and thank the guests for coming, and the bride, Syra, had a 30 pound dress on! They certainly know how to celebrate here…

That night we met a well known TV personality for dinner–he hosts a daily news show for Dawn News Station–Dawn News is the equivalent of the New York Times, and the newspaper expanded to a TV channel…He was yet another incredibly eloquent guy, 30, who really cared about Pakistan. He is currently producing a documentary about the Pakistani military and is being embedded with them in the coming weeks. Zach and I were amazed at how knowledgeable, interested in world affairs and thoughtful he was and we realized that we don’t have these kinds of discussions at parties with our friends because it doesn’t really affect our way of life. In the middle east, people care because every day is a battle. He went to Michigan…another product of American education. Pretty amazing what comes out of the American University system. I felt proud.

(side note: while we were at dinner, an american tourist came over and asked Zach if he was Roger Daltry from The Who…)

So today, we visited a micro-drip farm in the Thar desert, a stone’s throw from the Indian border and a seven hour drive east of Karachi. Again, Ali graciously set the whole thing up and we were once again sandwiched between two SUV’s filled with guards and police (twelve total) with machine guns as they escorted us all the way to the farm. We went through so many different little towns, passed by dozens of little farms, saw cattle, camels, buffalo, chicken, goats, donkeys all milling about along the streets and women in saris and men in shalwars on their hands and knees working on the farm. Life is so hard here. 90 million Pakistanis live under 2 dollars per day. It’s scary. The towns were dirty and the roads were bumpy and unkempt, trash littered the towns as well…I had the driver open the sun roof of the car and I filmed from out of the sun roof the countryside and the little towns we passed…I can’t wait to share all the footage with you!

We picked up the Dawn Newspaper for the long drive and the entire front page was about suicide bombers, and attacks and more deaths. This was top page news EVERY DAY in Pakistan. We thought to ourselves, “what would it be like if that were the front page of the New York Times every day?”

We finally got to the micro drip farm where our translator and the farmer greeted us. Among the sandy dunes were all sorts of vegetables being growns! Huge ripe eggplants, chilli peppers, wheat, lentils, and dozens of other crops grew from what was once dessert…Micro drip tubes lined the crops where drops of water would be enough to feed the plant and minimize the amount of water per plant being used..we went to see where the water was coming from and it was a completely sustainable set up! Solar panels created the energy to suck the water from the well into a holding tank where the water was purified (you could drink from it) and from there they dug trenches under ground where the water traveled and was distributed through the micro drip tubes. The Acumen Fund, an American organization, provided the micro drip tubes while the Pakistani vendors provided the solar panels…Another great example of America and Pakistan working together…As a result of the micro drip farm, the farmer no longer had to travel each season with his entire family, leading an uncomfortable nomadic life and could now settle on this farm and focus on sending his children to school which he hopes to do next year. (they are four and six years old). Amazing how agriculture takes away the nomadic lifestyle ultimately allowing for innovation to take place as people have more time to think about other stuff and less time on trying to live.

When we asked the farmer what he thought of democracy in Pakistan, the translator replied, “He doens’t know what democracy means. He is illiterate.” which made me realize that only the fortunate could even sit around and discuss foreign policy, geopolitics, democracy etc. while 70 percent of Pakistan were just focusing on getting by and didn’t even care about what democracy meant, and who they were fighting politically. It also made me realize the power land owners had on these people and how they could strong arm them to vote for them (get all the farmers on buses, shuttle them to a polling station and force them to vote for them)..That that was the “democracy” we were supposedly bringing as most government officials were also the major landowners in Pakistan…hey, but everyone got a vote right? I felt very naive.

Anyway, so much more to write but it’s now 2:40 am and I’m going to get three hours of sleep.

Look forward to your responses! Again, thanks for reading my ramblings!

Love rads