senduQ in Maltese

11 July, 2008 | 5 comments | Category: I.dentity

Doing a google search, the quirkiest thing came up- Senduq is a word in Maltese which means ‘Chest’, a box for safe keeping. In Dire lingo it is used to describe the cupboards, storage boxes, coca cola racks …basically any storage container with a rectangular form.

Who could have thought that a google search vaguely connected to Dire Dawa’s multicultural lingo lands smack where the Italian and Arabic languages fuse to give Maltese? Malta is the 30th smallest country in the world located across the largest desert and the Mediterranean Sea away from Dire… an island which has a total population of 400,000 (about the size of Dire’s population) and interestingly, not everyone IN Malta speaks Maltese!

Well, well…ok maybe I’m making it sound an itty bit more like an Indiana Jones investigation than it actually is. It appears that Maltese is one of the many semetic languages which may have variations of the word ‘senduq’. I don’t speak all these languages so I wouldn’t know…

wiki says: “Maltese is generally accepted to be descended from Siculo-Arabic, the Arabic dialects that developed in Sicily and the rest of Southern Italy, with substantial borrowing from Sicilian Italian and Italian. It is the only Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet in its standard form.” (more…)

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Hand-tied: pulse of the horn

13 June, 2008 | 7 comments | Category: peace & conflict, thinking...

and the list goes on…

I feel completely hand-tied sometimes! Like that time there was this group activity thingie where everyone had their eyes blinded or hands tied to test drive a disability.

Sometimes I feel rage, this bubbling anger at the brutality people allow for their luxurious, ridiculous pleasures. I want to screammm, yell at them! Harass them into submission! Something!

Sometimes the corners of my eyes sparkle with unshed tears, my heart so freaking heavy and jaws clenched that it hurts below my ears… some other time I just can’t help it and I chuckle at the heartbreaking predictability and absurdness of the events in the horn!

The horn of Africa is in flames (ha!…who knew keratin could be so flammable? hu?! lol) the Horn is an incomprehensible, unfathomable mess beyond all limits I knew! It is such a hot, smoking mess that it mad sitting and contemplating it, especially chatting along with others about ‘ohhh this freaking government!!’ or some other forsaken issue we try to solve…! (more…)

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brothers who are enemies

19 May, 2008 | No comments | Category: book snip, peace & conflict

And then there are incredible stories that knock u right out of your daily conundrum!

Have you ever heard the bizarre idea about creativity being the most potent weapon individuals have against war?? I thought it was a bit too ‘happily optimistic’ at first…until closer consideration… Ever heard the saying “necessity is the mother of innovation.”? Well, Wednesday’s news made me say: “heck ya!”

The quirky reflection that came to my mind reading the news goes…

“”It is in creativity, in the fashioning of self and world, that people find their most potent weapon against war.”

…1st, meandering to a tiny bit of intro….I first stumbled upon this bizarre concept in Carolyn Nordstrom’s “A different kind of war story” on her experience in the devastating 16-year-long civil war of Mozambique. As an anthropologist, she reflects on the messy nitty-gritties of war, civil society intricacies and the trajectories of individual lives within a land that is plagued with strife and struggle, where people are migrating between refugee camps and daily fearful for their lives…

she says “……ultimately, war victims have taught me, violence is about the destruction of culture and identity in a bid to control/crush political will.” She saw human condition at its ‘lowest’, when people were helpless, vicious, greedy, desperate and deeply disturbed. According to her “It is often in what we relegate to the margins of life process and theory [violence and the unspeakable] that speaks most fundamentally about core aspects of human existence.”

i think it’s real; in times of war, strife and struggle people have very few choices. when they are caught in the most devastating corner of all, they either create ways to survive, maintain/revivie their humanities and fight back…or get sucked in to becoming helpless puppets which push the gears of a viscous ‘war [insert other term] industry’.

According to the book, some resistance tools toward survival, restoring humanity & peace include the care and love in communities, creative expression and non-violence… (more…)

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zxantila vibes: under umbrella

13 February, 2008 | 2 comments | Category: I.dentity, i.mmigration, love.of.words!, nostalgia.personal, prose.tales

around 30 minutes past the hour she strut-walks out, a little bounce to her steps and a content little smirk playing across her cafe-latte face. it is drizzling. the black-as-charcoal shiny ground mirrors white, yellow and orange car lights with blurry imprecision. ‘how pretty’, she thinks.

its work day over her head bobs in complete abandon to beats of tunes causing a pleasant ruckus where a zillion buzzy thoughts were whizzing few instants earlier. Her smirk widening, she makes her way through a tall metropolitan jungle of concrete, glass and cleanliness formidable and contrasting the urban metropolis of a sub-Saharan country she hails from.

rejecting the willpower to contain herself, she increases the spring in her steps and adds a bigger bounce to her walk toward the bus stop. intermittently squeaking, mumbling and bellowing out pieces of the lyric of a song in her second language she strides on, adamant about her full enjoyment of the music and the soft soothing spray of watery droplets from above.

reaching the stop she stands, facing the direction from which a bus will inevitably swoosh down. inevitably- buses like water slide down slopes… Her eyes distractedly dance along the charcoal-black slope only partially seeing. she is swept away in the sounds and words, the volume cranked up high, the music soars with her senses failing to arrest only one: her vision. several many moments pass.

tapping along, hip-twitching along, humming and mumbling along…and then she starts a little wiggle -fully oblivious of her surroundings. for a couple more minutes…jamming…jamming. bouncing. vibing with the music….

she sighs. stopping. smiling.

Then…she notices there were no fresh water droplets on her coat….

how could that…….(!!!)

abruptly, she turns around and her heart JUMPS- threatening to leap right up her throat!

“Oh my God!” ….exhale…

There is another human being right behind her!

…a human inordinately close, discomfortingly…breathing down her neck!! … she saw papery white skin crinkling up into a grimace. decidedly- almost contentedly, the old lady was holding up an umbrella above them both! The lady was wearing layers and layers of what looked like a red tent and a flowery sash with a big floppy maroon hat covering half her face. The other hand was holding a large white handbag with disproportionately huge crafty pink flowers blotched onto it…this was She. This was the old lady she had seen at this stop before. The lady’s voice had withered and trembled when it had tried to be projected, what the lady had said escapes her memory.

exhale…”Oh sorry!! I didn’t see you there!!”

silence.

the wrinkly eyelids twitch as the old lady acknowledges that she had heard; the faint grimace still tugging the corners of her thin lips…

more silence.

“uh….thank ….you……. (?)” with a question mark. she steps forward away from the old lady, toward the slope.

Maybe it was her quirky imagination but it seemed the old lady made a tiny step closer with the umbrella, seemingly to proclaim: ‘no more water droplets are claiming territory on your coat if I have anything to do with! I say no! not on my watch!’

‘hmmm?….so they share umbrellas in this country too? .smile. ‘interesting…’

‘is funny…’ almost unconsciously and abruptly she takes another instinct-inspired step forward.

‘ha! the irony! guess who’s more conscious of personal space…?’

“…mhhmmhm…” she starts to hum again fighting to reclaim her obliviousness until the bus comes…

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nonchalant I

17 December, 2007 | No comments | Category: i.mmigration, peace & conflict, thinking...

“nonchhaalant…!”

she proclaimed, as she described one of those criss-crossy-sweater-wearing ‘so what?’ types to me…

…the type that oversleeps an international conference call and emails out a casually-put “ehhh” email scoffing at the fact that he was not even jet-lagged. The type that collects obese benefit packages and flexible hours to lounge on government/investment money; because he played the game right. He knew the right people, fit the right profile or once in some past he has been through a prestigious college~graduate school.

…excuse my intonations but nonchOllaaant, i feel! …like this dude, and frankly, it’s quite pathetic!

whether i have the same access to power~money as dude’s type, is another issue… |maybe perceived helplessness excuses indifference? for sanity’s sake?|

this blooming nonchalance reminds me of 3:

During a heated discussion about what a friend saw as a grotesque lack of activism and a fascination with the commercial glitz of america …she asks “Do the African students on campus not care what is happening in their countries?!”

During a class period, a professor (an Africanist, a white woman from the ‘American’ mid-west) went ahead and asked the question painful for the ears: “Is an African’s life worth least in this world?”.

During one incarnation of a discussion on Africa…a southern african asks “why do you northerners always fight???”

phew… anyway, i need to change my news sources and find a new perspective. cos boy this world is getting uncompromisingly predictable!! its like the world is on the looping setting, playing the same scene over and over and…! and that’s drenching flaming passion in blah! it is disconcerting…

c’mon, you can go ahead and say it!!: “duh, where have you been your whole life? venus?” …lol …Ask me again!

“Ethiopia denies Somalia bombing

Ethiopia has denied involvement in an mortar attack that killed at least 17 people in the main market in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, on Thursday. More gunfire and explosions were heard near Bakara market on Friday morning, but there are no details of casualties.…”

Zimbabwe’s precarious survival/ Starving in Harare
With the Zimbabwean economy in ruins, it is the people leaving the country who are helping those who have remained to survive.

Bread queues
A couple of hours later, as dawn breaks over the capital, many people – the mothers and unemployed – start forming long, silent queues that wind around entire blocks of the city. There is a rumour that bread could be arriving in the city today. (more…)

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