Suffer the Little Children

...and now for a (rebuttal) guest post in response to my Worst Valentine's Day post written by the subject, himself...

Greetings from Macedonia! What better way to celebrate Valentines Day than scratching old scars? Despite my own experience, I am pleased to know that HRH, Gremlin and others are carrying on this fine tradition, at least until "Facebook" reduces the virtue of such childhood kindnesses to just “virtual”. Actual human contact is so 20^th century.

Your telling of my experience is accurate, but I should mention that my most vivid memory is the look of horror from the teacher when she realized her error. As teacher, she was accepted by all as an ageless elder of secret wisdom, the same presumption that makes kids freeze in confusion when they encounter their teachers doing something mundanely human, like driving or food shopping.

In reality, my teacher was probably 20 years old and unsure of herself. As her Charlie Brown grew up, I realized that the trauma she experienced was probably, by far, the worst of the day. I am pleased to affirm your assertion that I am not now and never have been, a serial killer, but I am not so sure about that 20 year old teacher.

I’ve often wondered what has become of the hopeful young teacher scarred by my childish trauma. Does she spend Feb 14^th getting high sniffing mimeograph (born after 1970? Google it…) fluid before kidnapping a greeting card executive and forcing him to clap erasers until he chokes to death, then disposing of the body using the construction paper guillotine only big kids were allowed to operate? Is she the TV special voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher, so drunk from trying to drown out the trauma that she cannot speak a coherent sentence?

Despite my worst dreams of my teacher, it is probably a blessing that childhood traumas have greater effect on adults than they do on children. Today I visited the Skopje dump and found that many Roma children spend their days digging through the untended garbage heaps for any scrap they can sell. Their faces covered by thin scarves as a simple guard against the smell and fumes of the burning garbage they lit to keep themselves warm while they work. They were their yesterday, I am sure they will be there today, and back again on Valentine’s Day and the day after, etc.

Hopefully, as they grow older, things will improve, and the trauma of such childhood experiences will be less than that of the adults watching them work, helpless at the time to do anything to make things better, except for counting on the resilience of children while waiting for something to change.

That puts my schoolboy Valentine’s Day trauma into new perspective. Suffer the children and their teachers. They are all doing the best they can with what they’ve been given.

Sincerely,

Charlie (David) Brown

Thank you, David.

xoxo

Where it Sounds Like the Beginning of a Letter to Penthouse..But it's Not

...Jordan’s Furniture Delivery Guy arrives at front door to be greeted by Manic Mommy, looking like a million bucks in grey t-shirt and pink pajama bottoms, hair back in a headband. She did put a bra on...


If you'd like to read more and from the beginning, I've got a post up over here today.

I say it oh-so-casually. Like I'm constantly being asked to guest blog for Parents, or Cosmopolitan, or Field and Stream, or Merlot Mom. OMG! Sharp, witty, pretty, funny, Merlot Mom (!) asked me to guest post while she and her family take a little jaunt over to Japan.

Do me proud, friends. Head over there and leave a little comment or seven so I can hold my head high in the company of my friend, Fran (waves to Tokyo) and her esteemed guest bloggers. And if it's a Friday before a holiday weekend like I used to have at work, head over and pay a little visit to their sites as well.

Y'know. After going to Merlot Mom's.

Am I making myself clear?

First Merlot Mom. Then these guys:

A Mom Two Boys
Okay, Fine, Dammit
Nanny Goats in Panties
Motherscribe
The Sphors are Multiplying
The Newborn Identity

Namaste. And thanks.

Greetings from Afghanistan

A good friend of mine works in international development and is usually a half step behind the Army in arriving in war-torn countries. Right now, it's Afghanistan. He dropped an email to a bunch of us recently that really puts it into personal perspective. I thought you might like enjoy benefit from hearing a first hand account:

Greetings from Afghanistan ! It’s been a long time since a wrote anything about my travels lately, mostly because I prefer to not spend what little off time there is out here recalling the days events. In comparison to Iraq , Afghanistan has sometimes been called the “forgotten war” but I find it decidedly difficult to forget, so I am much less inclined to dedicate even more time to remembering it. However, I have been particularly bad about keeping up with my email in recent months or even just keeping up, so I thought it would be timely to at least let you know that I am still on this planet, albeit on the other side of it. Perhaps I feel a bit guilty about falling so out of touch, but mostly I am writing because I am looking forward to getting home.

Over the past few months, my program here has grown to nearly $100 million. Given that the US is presently spending $12 billion/month in Iraq , that jump may not seem like much in the bigger picture, but it is a giant leap if your job is based on aiding rather than invading. When I leave, sometime near the end of the month, we will have nearly hundreds of employees on staff in numerous offices all around Afghanistan with a complex array of politics and partners working in some of the most remote areas of Afghanistan. We are building and repairing schools and health clinics, building roads and bridges, and in one case, even teaching motorcycle repair courses. We have such a wide array of possible projects, the largest thing we’ve been asked to do is build an airport and probably the smallest thing we’ve been asked to do is fund a puppet show (we declined the former and obliged the latter).

It’s been a giant nightmarish mess since it all started, but it is now starting to take some shape, even if the shape keeps changing. In January, I didn’t know if we would be able to spend all the money budgeted for this project. Now, I don’t think we will have enough! A big part of the frustration in trying to manage development projects in places where development is just a marketing tool is that very little can be deliberate and measured. As much as you may hear, or just want to hear differently, Afghanistan is still a war zone. War and development, particularly in an election year, make very strange bedfellows, but here we are trying to tuck them in together and pretend that we’ll all get a good night’s sleep for it. It doesn’t really work that way, even if you pull the sheets all the way up.

On the bright side, our staff recently negotiated a bridge placement among conflicting communities. Old war wounds, tribal disputes, etc. resulted in requests for nearly 10 different bridges to be built across the same river. After much negotiation and settling – our team got agreement for one bridge to be used by all the villages. Because of this, we can make it big enough for carts and small vehicles so that people can actually bring more than they can hand-carry to and from nearby markets. Amazing!

Now that sounds like development! However, around the same time, we were advised into a lock down because of intelligence reports of suicide bombers targeting Kabul over a few days. We try to make the best of such situations, and some of our ex-military staff members got lucky enough to be on the base when a shipment of Corona arrived. We got perhaps more than our fair share, had a cookout, and climbed to the roof of one of our secured buildings in Kabul . All in all, not a bad way to wait out a lock-down in Kabul .

What we didn’t know at the time is that the security threat was actually an 11-year-old boy, who quite assuredly didn’t even know he was a security threat. Some people strapped him with explosives and told him to walk over to one of the Kabul district police stations. Then they blew him up by remote control, killing three and wounding five. How many bridges and puppet shows does it take to get to the bottom of that kind of malice? I don’t really know, but I suppose the answer is as many as you can do. So that’s what we shoot for, even if it doesn’t seem like enough.

After all the money and time put invested in rebuilding Afghanistan it appears that its major industry seems to be centered on being the world’s leading producer of irony. Too bad Toyota can’t make a hybrid that runs on irony. That way at least there would be some payback for funding a war that nobody wants to finish because of another war that shouldn’t have been allowed to start. Perhaps then there would be something to show for the past 8 years other than $4.00 per gallon prices. George W. would be a hero, and that alone would eliminate our dependence on foreign irony for the next millennium.

In the mean time, we can rely on Afghanistan to pump out all the irony we can consume. As a case in point, I have attached a video clip that is the quintessential example of people coming together in Afghanistan as we hope (and pay) for, to produce a result that exemplifies the foreign policy directions of the past 8 years.

Enjoy this real slice of Afghanistan life. Chances are that you paid for that truck anyway.