Joshua Walters: On being just crazy enough | Video on TED.com

Joshua Walters: On being just crazy enough | Video on TED.com

Comedian Joshua Walters, who's bipolar talks about being mentally 'ill' and mentally 'skilled'. I've always been fascinated by societal need to label a person with a mental illness and that desire to pigeonhole and correct that disease. Our obsession with wanting to soothe these so-called sickness back to normal - then again where is that fine line that divides normality, manic and creative genius or is there? He might be right to say there's no such thing as being crazy, just that some others are more sensitive. Or that everyone is just a little bit mad. A little bit mad wouldn't be so bad. Well, this talk isn't particularly a performance (in the regular sense) but I think it sparks some thinking in me, which I wanted to share here today.

LEGO works

Rikke - Fingerspitchengfuhl. I got introduced to this video just about recently, and thought it was pretty neat. Kinda made me think that maybe LEGO might be helpful in depicting the conflict of the Nuba Mountains - it will be all in one colour though, sandy and brown. By the way, does LEGO have folks in brown or black? Enjoy.

I left a piece of my heart here

I am sitting here in Khartoum in a small guesthouse smoking a light Bringi. My thoughts are somewhere else in a place I recently learnt to call a home - Kadugli. It wasn't a place I was born in or grew up with. I have no affiliation to the place and I don't understand it sometimes. Even if I have lived there for almost nine months. This posting is my own reflection and what it simply means to me.

Never a place has affected me like this, a place I never knew about until I set foot in October last year. I came to Kadugli on what I called a 'self-imposed exile'. Even that term is borrowed. From a friend back home. I knew nothing of this place or the intricacies of Southern Kordofan state. I swear. 

But I fell in love with it, in ways I don't know how and in spots I still don't comprehend. The landscape is nearly barren and the air sometimes dry, hot and dusty. Right now, I recalled my first steps out of the UN flight and wondering what in the blue world brought me there. Seriously, what the hell man? Broken-hearted and one went off to Kadugli, the middle of where again?

And yet, I grew to love the place. It just sort of glided. Nice and easy. Like a satisfaction when you found that obscure piece in the 1000 piece puzzle. I felt like I found my place.And in that time, my world seems bigger and more possible than I thought I knew. The faces I see in the souk, and the very human souls that made me a lot more human. People who are real and whose spirit speaks in a language that can only come from years of resilience, patience and kindness to others. And friends whose warmth, jokes and laughter I must be thankful for. I will be forever grateful for this place.

This place - Kadugli - is now in crisis. The very people I know or see on the streets, the tea ladies garbed in their brightest colours, the guys at Nadus or Amwaj asking me how everything is, the men in their white jellabiyahs on Fridays walking toward the mosque to pray, TCC's yellow house, Joe's rooftop, the hills saying 'Allahu Akbar' and much much more. So much more. Nothing could possibly describe the scenes on the street or the lives around me. The roads I walked on, people I greet 'Assalamua-alaikum' and whose generosity surpassed anything else. And just sadly this place is now being shredded into pieces. Like a note we tossed aside. 

It's easy to think of a conflict far far away, something that you never think could affect you. It's much much harder when it's so nearby and somewhere you have stepped foot on. It changes your life in ways you never thought it could. I still don't know why and how Kadugli affects me, or why I think about it pretty much all the time. What does the souk looked like now? How does it look like or will be like when it rains soon enough? Where are those people I see around the corner at the garage or that fat boy who would constantly ask me the same question every time I passed by - "where you from?"

I don't profess to know what it takes to make it all right or what humanity can do. I only know what's going on isn't right and that lives, just as important as yours or mine, are at stake. Lives. Hearts that beat, the same fear we all face, the same blood that bleed. Red. No different from yours or mine. It infuriates me thinking that my organisation and others sitting in their comfy offices who just DON'T GET the severity of the situation. I keep asking why oh why?

And yet I am helpless in this cause. It breaks my heart literally thinking about what's going on in Kadugli, the massacre, the lives and families being torn apart because one side of politics didn't fit into the puzzle. I know these lives aren't a puzzle  but to me, Kadugli is made of of these mosaic pieces fitting in together, all genuinely trying to fit into a coherent picture of humanness. Different shapes yes, different colours totally... but all fitting in, synchronized and harmonized. Picture perfection if one may say. 

I have slept many nights in the last few weeks with a heavy heart and tonight is no different. Tomorrow and the day after I go through my life easy. But a small, tiny part part of me has been taken away for reasons I can never understand and it will stay in Southern Kordofan. It will never be the same. Kadugli and me.

Tonight, I am remembering my first ever mission and thinking of the women in Al Dar, sitting in the open land they proudly call theirs and telling small stories about their lives. The multi-coloured scarfs fluttering under the bluest skies and that one boy with sores on his feet sitting right in front me. His eyes white forever etched in my memory. I remember his face so clearly now.

In Mad Times II

In my last post "In Mad Times", I wrote with hope that the Nuba Mountains might find some peace, well at least some sort of stability to keep its sons and daughters safe and sound. In the past three weeks, I have been combing through the daily news and would read anything and everything that mentioned 'Kadugli' and 'Southern Kordofan'. What I read doesn't make me feel any better.

Widespread atrocities are taking place again in Southern Kordofan - a state on the  edge of the North-South borders. This is more than the just the claim on border issues or oil. The Nubas and their rights are at the heart of this conflict. Just Muslims and Christians wanting to live and co-exist peacefully as they did before. Christians, Blacks, Muslims, the different tribes have live together for many years and repeatedly have been denied their basic social and economical rights. But now they are targets of the Khartoum's government. Too many reports and sources have indicated that the military forces are deliberately targeting Nubas or basically suspected of aligning with the opposition forces, the SPLM. And the blatant fact is that this horror has happened before in the 1990s and which was later formally brought to a close with the signing of the CPA in 2005.

I was there in May when state election results was released and while there was some sense of tension, what happened subsequently was perhaps beyond our immediate imagination. Kadugli has always been safe for me, and I've never come across anyone who's been there, passing through or lived there who felt threatened. Without wanting to sound wishy-washy, I've always thought there's an unspoken sense of charm and protection the Nuba Mountains bestow upon it guests.

So really what's really going out there?

There's certainly deliberate targeting of ethnic groups - the darker and blacker, the more at risk they are. Door-to-door round-up of Nubas have been reported and the air strip in Kauda (critical for transporting essential humanitarian aid) completely destructed leaving the region virtually cut off from relief supplies. Aid agencies offices have been looted and humanitarian aid presently limited on the ground. Further to that, the UN peacekeeping forces have been reportedly inefficient, ill-informed and in my honest opinion, is just reacting too slow and a tad too late. Some reports indicated summary executions right smack in front of the UN compound. How the UN can let that happened is beyond me.

I'm no expert on legal terms or how best to describe the violence and what all this means. But logic tells me this is not right and something ought to be done to stop the fighting. I'm not sure how one can help but I certainly think the situation in Southern Kordofan deserves more mention and coverage beyond a 30 second glimpse, somewhere tossed between Libya and Yemen and the rest. This is a conflict one hardly talks about and sometimes I asked with silent desperation for an answer or a solution if we are really letting this happen all under our watch. Are we?

What would it take for the world to sit up and take notice?

In Mad Times

Was watching the film "Blow" about the drug trafficker George Jung or "Boston George" - had a pretty quote by Johnny Depp there and it goes like this, "May the wind will always be on your back and the sun upon your face and may the winds of destiny carry you aloft to dance with the stars."

Interestingly, there's also an Irish quote that says, "May the road rise up to meet you, may the wind be always at your back, may the sun shine warm upon your face, and the rain fall soft upon your fields, and until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand."

And mine reads like this:
"In mad times today, put down your weapons, stop this drunkenness
Your madness is killing everything. Hush, quieten down. Let your body and soul rest
In hopes and prayers, let the madness stop."

Thats's for the Nuba Mountains today.