I wrote a piece for work for industry publication American Shipper, which you can read here, under “Trade Forecast 2010″ (requires registration but is free.) I’m pretty proud of it.

Years ago (10th grade), I had a wonderful Honors World Cultures teacher, Mrs.Vera  Bej (pronounced Bey.)  She was from Soviet Czechoslovakia, and she blew my mind.

Raised in suburbia, secluded from any type of ethnic, religious, or racial minority, I felt on my own as a Russian Jew with mainly American friends. Adriano Celentano was my favorite singer,

Lagaan was my favorite movie, and my parents would have hour-long blab sessions with their friends about how Putin was going to be bad for Russia.  And I couldn’t talk about any of it with my friends because they thought I was weird enough already.  Why couldn’t I just listen to Blink-182 and talk about what was going on at the mall on Friday?

But Mrs. Bej opened my eyes to so many new and exciting things, and I always felt that she “got” me because she was from Eastern Europe, too.  And she was hard as hell.  Lots and lots of people failed her class because she handled the room the way a Soviet teacher would and didn’t fall back on crappy U.S. teaching methods.  We had to “internalize, then synthesize” everything, write 8-page-long papers, memorize all of the countries on the continent of Africa and read lots and lots of books.  Midterms and finals were a nightmare and I stayed up until 2 am studying for her exams which always included at least two essays.

I loved and excelled in World Cultures, but man, was it hard.  One of the hardest parts for me was when she divided the class and we had to take viewpoints opposing our own.  I was a Palestinian arguing for land rights.  Since I hadn’t been exposed to much bilateral discussion of  Israel at  home, it was insanely tough.

We had four divisions: Russia and Eastern Europe, The Middle East, China and Japan, and the Modern World. Among the things Mrs. Bej introduced me to that I still reference today were two of my summer reading books Guests of the Sheik (which we read before the United States invaded Iraq) and The Good Earth.

For our field trip in the spring, we went to Washington, D.C. and visited the Saudi Embassy, the Islamic Center of Washington, the Smithsonian Sackler Gallery, and the Hillwood Estate (which Mr. B and I actually went to last year again.)

I was in love.  I couldn’t believe there was so much going on in one city, and so many exotic things.  I’d never seen or thought about Muslims in my life before until we went to the Islamic Center and all the girls had to wear headscarves.  My classmate, Arthi, almost got into an argument with the mullah who answered her questions about why women had to wear headscarves.

The highlight of the trip was dinner at a Moroccan restaurant that night, Marrakesh.  I had never been to one and had my eyes open wide the whole time as I ate with my hands and sat on the floor.  At the end, the belly dancer came out and Mrs. Bej danced right along with her and our class clapped and she laughed.   It is probably the only field trip I still remember from high school or middle school.

What caused me to remember this?  This recent article about the Saudi Arabian Embassy and Saudi Arabia’s recent relationship with Washington, which, it seems has cooled down quite a bit

The Saudi Embassy is covered in snow, and U.S. Foreign Service officers on their lunch breaks in Foggy Bottom skid by and giggle. Washington is notoriously incapable of digging itself out from under, and almost a year into the Obama administration, it seems the Saudis are having the same problem.

The Saudi-American relationship has traditionally been managed from the Saudi embassy, especially during the heyday of U.S.-Saudi comity presided over by Prince Bandar, a high-spirited Dallas Cowboys fan affectionately known to members of two recent administrations as Bandar Bush. “Bandar used to have strong ties with everyone in town,” explained Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a Washington-based journalist with Kuwait’s Al-Rai newspaper. The prince, who once bought a Jaguar for the wife of his long-time tennis partner, Colin Powell, and was shown war plans for Iraq, was far and away Washington’s preeminent diplomat.

While I was reading the story, I reminisced about our trip to the Saudi Embassy-huge and glittery and expensive and was amazed at how something I was taught so long ago continues to be relevant in my life today as I’ve grown out of the awkward weird foreign kid phase and now live in that city that amazed me before.  It really is true that some teachers can have a big impact on the direction your life goes, and Mrs. Bej was it for me.

Related on the blog:

The Sands of Saudi
Another person who wasn’t a big fan of high school

This Saturday, when the weather decided to become more clement (see chart of weather clement-ness below,) Mr. B and I went horseback riding in Virginia.  My friend Christina is an avid rider and in the process of purchasing a horse, and she wanted to go see it this weekend, so I asked if we could tag along.

We’d been riding before, once in the Golan Heights at Vered HaGalil and once in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and we liked it a lot, so we were really excited to go to JAS Stables where we actually got to learn how to brush horses and do horse-related things like try to feed them candy which they love, unless apparently they are being fed by one of us.

However, for some reason, I had a sense of foreboding that would, I thought, lead to imminent death, mostly because I was afraid I’d end up like Christopher Reeve.

Even though Jon, one of the owners of the stables, is awesome and extremely safety-conscious, I am always paranoid in that I, like Shalom Auslander, think God is trying to kill me just when I am happy and mostly unawares.  This is why I never go to weddings where there is lots of alcohol.  Based on this fact, Mr. B and I had the following 20-minute conversation before AND after we went:

Me: What if I fall off a horse and become paralyzed from the waist down, like Christopher Reeve?
Mr. B: You won’t.  *turns on the Tennis Channel*
Me: But what if I do and then you have to feed me through a spoon for sixty-plus years until I give in and beg you for a swift and merciful death?
Mr. B: *not hearing me because he is busy watching Nadal v. Federer on a hard surface*
Me: Well??
Mr. B: What? *turns away from his man crush*
Me: What if I fall off a horse and become a parapalegic?
Mr. B: I’m pretty sure Christopher Reeve was drunk when he fell off his horse.  It’s a little-known fact.
Me: I don’t think so.  I think he was sober and so am I.
Mr. B: *back in tennis land*
Me: *muttering under breath* I hope you like pushing wheelchairs.

What was most amazing in the two hours that we spent there is how quickly you get used to being on a horse  and start getting a feel for how it works.  Of course, my horse, Hoover, sucked.  Well, not that he sucked, but mostly I sucked because he’s a show horse and I couldn’t cue him the right way, so he would stop and start like a 1986 Chevy that hasn’t had a state inspection in a decade.  But after a while I started feeling a lot better about it and even broke into a slight (terrifying) trot.

Trotting is insanely hard if you’ve never done it before because you can’t just sit on the horse-you have to find the rhythm and balance that will allow you to absorb the shock.  It’s the same if you’re walking, as well.  You have to move your hips and torso and keep your body upright with the up and down paces of the horse.  It’s pretty tricky.

And as I was holding on for dear life and bracing myself for a fall on my spinal cord, I started to get the hang of it.  If  I just made sure to feel Hoover’s movements and adjust to them, I could get into a kind of steady rhythm.  He trusted me, and I trusted him.

And, in a way, that’s how I think blogging is, too.  You don’t always have the rhythm.  Sometimes you’re on, sometimes you’re off.  Sometimes I write posts that are too politically and economically heavy but that are important for me to write, sometimes I write really silly posts that are equally part of the fun for blogging for me.  It’s always difficult for me to keep a balance between personal and professional on the blog, but I keep trying.   You keep writing and soon enough, you’ll find your balance and rhythm.  Hopefully, after a year of blogging,  I’m on my way to finding mine.

Related on the blog:

My first-ever post on the blog

UPDATE: Via Alanna Shaikh, here’s a list of tips when donating to Haiti.

I will never be able to understand or even process what people in Haiti are going through right now.  Every piece of news coming from there seems so crazy and far away and I seem stupider and stupider sitting on my couch and watching dead bodies being shoveled with a plow.  Everything people do for Haiti seems jaded and somehow very inefficient,  which is why I think events like the Hot Chocolate for Haiti fundraiser that our condo community pulled together on Saturday are a bit ridiculous (although  well-meaning).  Really, it all depends on where the money goes.

Julie Minevich has a nice write-up of why you should be critical of aid organizations giving to Haiti right now, based on  my tweet:

I stumbled across this post on Reddit which details all the ways that the Red Cross is not helpful and organizations like Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) are.

source.

I just finished The Places in  Between, a book by Briton Rory Stewart about his walk through Afghanistan in the winter of 2002, right after the invasion of Afghanistan by the Northern Alliance and the capture of the Taliban. This is probably one of the most amazing things I have ever read about.

Stewart, originally a career diplomat with the British Foreign Service, felt something missing in his life, quit his prominent career, and decided to walk around the world.  Unfortunately, he only got as far as walking through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. Bummer.  In the book,  he chronicles how he walked the 400 or so miles from Herat to Kabul in about a month by heading through the unknown central lands of Afghanistan without carrying a detailed map because “it made him look like a spy.”

There are some people who are not content to live normal lives, eat breakfast with a paper, go to work, and catch up with friends at Starbucks. In the tradition of those like Lawrence, who throw off the warm, routine comforts of the West, Rory Stewart is one of these people.  However, this intensely strong part of his character is not completely evident in the book, where he tries to distance the reader as much from him as possible to focus on describing Afghanistan as it was after the fall of the Taliban just as his predecessor, the Mughal emperor Babur did when he took the same route centuries ago. I learned oodles about Afghanistan that I didn’t know before from my precursory reading of The Kite Runner, The Bookseller of Kabul, watching the movie Osama, and loading up on old Soviet films of the invasion of Afghanistan.

If I could, I would give this book a standing ovation for the worlds it opened for me as much as for the author’s bravery and cultural sensitivity, as well as recommendations of how aid agencies should handle Afghanistan.

As he walks, he describes the landscape of Afghanistan, the cultural history of the country, and the simple village people who have no concept of what the World Trade Center towers were and how they impact the fighting in their country.  It is such a fascinating read, simply because we will never have access to that world, to Afghanistan, where everything comes to a crux between three continents over millennia, and we will never be able to just pick up and go across a warzone with just a pack on our backs, particularly not with the ease of a man who has few attachments and little to lose.  I strongly suspect that the author was on heavy self-administered doses of crack cocaine when he decided to undertake this trip.  After his stint in Asia, Stewart also was a governor of a province in Iraq for a year after the American invasion.

Source.

Having completed his stints in the hippest new vacation spots for the American army, Stewart started a foundation to revive the Old City of Kabul and became immediately in demand as an analyst of the situation on the ground for Afghanistan. There are some who critique him for his current role in the resurrection of Afghanistan, but I will most definitely take his advice over others’, given his experience in the mountains of central Afghanistan in the winter.

Related on the blog:
The Women of Kabul
Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan
I Have Wanderlust for Yemen