I have some friends to thank for it. Ayesha Gamiet, that lovely young thing that took me out to tea, spread the word for me, alhamdu lillah. I also suspect the wonderful people from the Islamic school I visited on Monday also put in a good word. I think I might have asked them to, too,  but I can’t remember. Monday feels like a year ago!

It’s all wonderful, but unfortunate.

No way will I be able to fit in all the schools who are interested in one day.

I just tentatively booked a school whose teacher emailed me from my website for Monday morning, alhamdu lillah.

At this point it really is a first come, first served basis.

But it didn’t have to be that way.

I prepared well for this trip! I did some research for goodness sakes!

I googled all the Islamic schools in London and figured out the head teacher’s email or I sent it to the info or the administrator, what have you. I gave them my best pitch, and with all that effort on my part, going through dozens of entries, I only got one reply. And as soon as I said I charged, I never heard back from him!

I’m supposed to be sleeping right now. I’m writing this from my hotel room in Coventry and it’s almost midnight.

I have to be up and at ‘em in less than seven hours. But I can’t sleep because I keep thinking what a shame it is, and how it reflects on the Muslim mindset.

As a community, we don’t think outside the box.

Non Muslims will often see the value in something before we, ourselves will. And yes, I’m including myself in that, because if I were one of those teachers who’d received my email and my attempts at outreach, I doubt I would have behaved any differently.

Yesterday I got into Bradford. Someone had told me it would be depressing because it’s so full of unemployment etc.

It was anything but.

I did three whirl wind presentations for the reception kids at a school called Thornbury where many of the kids were Muslim. By the way ‘reception’ is what we’d call kindergarten.

They were so cute!

In their blue uniforms, little four and five year olds with somber looks on their faces, much too young and naive to take school in any way but seriously!

I was telling them RULER OF THE COURTYARD and at one point I asked the kids what would happen if a poisonous snake bites you.

One little kid flung up his hand and announced, “You’d BLEEED.” That’s the way he said it. He stressed the ‘e’s in the middle just like that. Well wouldn’t you know that set them all off! The next kid said, “BLOOD!” But he said it with a Bradford accent, which sounds very different from a London accent. Kind of like blud, (where the u sounds like ‘oo’ in book). And soon we were up to our ears in ‘blud’.

It was all I could do not to crack up laughing!

Then the real kicker was later on someone commented on how THICK my Canadian accent was!!!

LOL.

Oh they were such dears!

Then later on that night I did a presentation for the parents. I’m always worried about evening turnouts. It took YEARS for Toronto parents to know I was worth coming out to hear on a cold November night.

Many times in Toronto and the vicinity, when I’m doing literacy nights, I’ll actually get a decent audience, at least forty to fifty parents. But I knew that would be a stretch in Bradford where word of mouth hadn’t had a chance to trickle through the community at all!

And that made me nervous for the organizers. I was wondering if they’d be disappointed, and if they wouldn’t be thinking they shouldn’t have bothered with the evening program.

I live in perpetual fear that the people who’ve invited me, who’ve devoted such precious funds and resources towards hosting me, will secretly regret bothering.

I needn’t have worried. We got an audience of about twenty people and the librarian who’d invited me reassured me that it wasn’t bad at all.

And when that happens all I can say is alhamdu lillah! These were the people who were MEANT to be here, who were MEANT to hear me, and I gave them the same quality presentation I would give an auditorium full of 200.

It was interesting.

I started at 6 pm and went for about an hour, as I was supposed to. But then with their eager questions, I went for another forty minutes that inluded so many of them coming up to me to purchase my books!

And this was after I was told that my books are really expensive by UK standards!

And this was also after I was told by the same librarian that it was unlikely anyone would purchase my books because it is an economically depressed area.

I expressed my chagrin about the small (but eager audience) to the librarian who’d invited me and he reassured me that it was fine.

You see he explained that you have to try with these kinds of programs. He doesn’t often get people coming out, but you have to try.

And I just thought, wow. He really gets it! And he really cares.

I told him that the Muslim community is often insular. They’re not used to thinking that a program like this could really apply to them, could be *relevant* to their existence, basically they’re not used to being *included* in terms of consideration from the rest of mainstream society.

From what I understand both of the communities: Bradford and here in Coventry, invited me because they saw this as an opportunity to have their large Muslim student populations meet an author who ‘represented’ them.

It’s a kind of ‘tokenism’ if you think about it, and yet that sounds like such a negative.

I don’t see it as a negative at all.

It has been the natural progression of my career.

When I first started out in 1998, the only schools who ever invited me to present were schools in the ghettos of Toronto with large Muslim populations.

Muslims always seem to gravitate to the ghettos, or at least they start there as immigrants and then move out as they gain traction.

And the people who serve these communities are conscientious enough to realize that booking me is a good thing.

I’ve often done my best work in ghettos. And it’s all good.

It’s obviously MEANT for them to hear what I have to say.

Unfortunately Muslim schools have a woeful track record when it comes to Arts education, which is precisely why I’ve always told them ‘pay what you can’.

But maybe the word’s gone out and they’re starting to realize that they might miss out on an opportunity.

Alhamdu lillah.

First come, first served.

Ya’ snooze, ya’ lose.

Problem is I do it so infrequently that each time I put together the web album, I have to relearn the process of posting it!

Argh! In some ways it would be so much easier to just hand all the website maintenance over to my webmaster. But I had to decide to take on the maintenance of it myself!

Anyway, they’re finally up!

Today I spent many hours putting up four web albums!

You can view them on my photo gallery page.

This one’s for the Charlotte Zolotow award. Here I had tons of photos to choose from! Mine including the ones that the official photographer Jo Matzner was kind enough to send me. As promised, I credited all of Ms. Matzner’s photos.

http://www.rukhsanakhan.com/photogallery/TheCharlotteZolotowAward/

The next photo album is much smaller! It’s my Golden Kite photo album. Problem is I tend to take relatively few pictures even with my digital camera. When I went up on stage to accept my award I asked one of the reps to take the pictures for me. She was such a nice lady but I just can’t remember her name!

I must have put the settings on the camera weird, or maybe it was just because it was one of those huge conference halls where the lighting is kind of particular, but the pictures on my camera didn’t come out well at all! They’re mostly dark. So I lifted some photos off the SCBWI blog. It’s a team blog and they were wonderful! You can check out their blog, the ling is on the right of this page, in my blog roll.

But anyway, here’s the photo album for the Golden Kite award:

http://www.rukhsanakhan.com/photogallery/TheGoldenKiteAward2011/

Earlier this year my nephew, niece and some of my nephew’s friends got together to form a charitable foundation. The first project we did (I think I’m some kind of consultant on the board or something) was for a Native school here in Toronto.

This is their website: http://ilfcharity.com/

It was up to me to find a needy Native school to do this project in.

(It was kind of going to be like my Orphanages in Afghanistan Library project only for Native libraries here in Canada)

But it turned out to be harder than I thought it would be to find a Native school to help!

It’s not like they’re listed in the directory under ‘n’ for needy native schools!

First thing I did was contact the Native school in Toronto, it’s down on Dundas St. I told them I was looking for a school that needed help with augmenting their library.

I thought they might be able to help me find a needy school.

But they said, “We’re needy!”

Without even checking into it, I told them fine, we’d help them out too.

I should have known that since they were part of the Toronto District School Board, they couldn’t be *that* needy!

The kids were definitely needy but the library, though small, looked fine to me.

What we ended up doing was providing novel sets they could use in the classroom to get these reluctant readers to read.

They were needy in terms of other schools but that’s just because they had lower numbers. Only 65-80 kids from grades k – 8.

My contribution was going to be a day of presentations and a set of my books–a total value of about $900. My nephew, niece and their friends contributed about $1500 worth of books.

When I got there though, it was surprising to see a smart board in the library!

After this experience we tried to find another Native school who could use some help augmenting their library. I made a lot of calls, but was surprised to find my inquiries were met with a lot of suspicion.

I’m not sure why. If it was after they knew I was Muslim, I’d have chalked it up to that, but it was often before. And the thing is I sound very Canadian on the phone!

I finally got hold of an excellent librarian from Gananoque, up near Cornwall, but she was honest enough to tell me that her school was probably similar to the Toronto one in terms of ‘neediness’. I really appreciated her honesty!

I’d still like to do this project in another Native school. Hopefully somewhere up north where they really don’t have much in terms of facilities. So if anyone knows of any really needy Native schools, please email me and we’ll see what we can do. I’m sure my nephew and niece would like to help. That’s just the kind of kids they are!

But anyway, here are the pics from that project:

http://www.rukhsanakhan.com/photogallery/NativeSchoolLibraryproject2010/

And last but not least, here are the photos of the tour that I did in 2009 when I attended Wordfest in Calgary and the Vancouver Writer’s Festival.

http://www.rukhsanakhan.com/photogallery/CalgaryVancouverandPrinceRupert2009/

It looks like I’ll probably be going to London, England for the Muslim Writer’s Award ceremony on Nov. 22nd. How could I miss such an honour?!

If any schools in London would like to book me for a school visit, please email me and we’ll work something out.

Can’t say when I’ll be in that neck of the woods again!

Me gathered with millions of others, sending my thoughts and prayers up to our Lord and Creator.

Yesterday I took one of my daughters and her children down to visit my parents. It was my first post Hajj visit, and my mom went all out, making my favourite chicken korma and pilau in my honour!

Oh it was heavenly! She really outdid herself, even though she gets tired so easily with her knee replacement.

And on the way down my daughter gave me her feedback on my Hajj posts. We have a unique relationship, my daughters and I. We are some of our most critical critics, and yet we seek each others’ opinions out because we know we’ll be honest and not spiteful.

They’re always asking me what I think of their artwork and especially when I was starting out, I’ve always asked them what they thought of my writing.

And according to two of my daughters and one of their husbands (the one who’s been reading the blog consistently) the impression that came across from my Hajj posts was a mostly negative experience.

It would be terrible if all people came away with from my detailed description was how hard it was and how silly I was on that night in Muzdalifa.

I felt I needed to really correct that impression, problem is, it involves getting into the nitty gritty of spirituality that I mostly avoid when writing about religion.

I mean how do you talk about how you felt when you’re pouring out your heart to your Creator without making it sound preachy and mushy and sentimental?

And it’s so intensely personal. And talking about it makes you sound so …oh I don’t know, righteous?

During one of his speeches Obama said that he didn’t believe in wearing his spirituality in public or something like that. I could understand that.

It’s like the feeling you get when you’d watch Tammy Faye’s mascara running down her cheeks during the height of her evangelical experience.

I couldn’t help thinking that how can she be experiencing that with all those cameras on her???

It looks fake.

That’s one of the reasons why, when talking about my Hajj experience I avoided getting too personal into the spiritual connection.

I still won’t go into it too much. Some things really are too personal, it would be like relating an intimate conversation.

But I will say this much. There is a difference between the conversations I have both internally and through prayer with God in the comfort of my home, and the conversations I had with God on those sacred sites.

Being in the state of ihram heightens your awareness of every single thing that you do. Maybe I talked so much about the little annoyances in my posts because while I was in ihram, I didn’t express them in any other way.

It also made me appreciate that the reason I felt the privations so keenly was because I am so accustomed to North American standards. I am spoiled in that regard. The standards there were more typical of global conditions.

It was also interesting that while I was on Hajj, I often dreamed of buying new homes or babysitting, and other silly things, but as soon as I left, even while spending those five days in Dubai with my nephew, I couldn’t stop dreaming of Hajj. Of Mecca, of Mina, of circling the Kaaba.

The first night I got home was uncanny.

I was exhausted of course, and sleeping in my bed was luxurious, but when I got up to go to the bathroom in the night, I had absolutely no idea of where I was.

I was sure I was still on Hajj.

Every night for ten days, I dreamed of Hajj.

And the weirdest thing was that the time I was there, in Mecca, in Mina, in Muzdalifa, I thought very little of my life back here. I didn’t think of my writing. In fact THAT felt like THE REALITY, and this life I lead here, in Canada, felt like the illusion.

I only really felt like I returned on Wednesday. That was the first day I had to go do school presentations. Three of them, in fact, at a school in Markham.

I got up, went to Tim Horton’s and bought a coffee, and the familiarity of the routine grounded me.

I thought I was the only one that couldn’t stop dreaming of Hajj, but when I went to see my Hajj sisters at that mosque across town, it seems all of them had the same experience.

It really is a journey of a lifetime, and all the minor inconveniences have faded into proper perspective.

It was a FABULOUS experience and I hope and I pray that I can go again one day.

Oh, and when I told my mom about that incident in Muzdalifa, she suggested I pay for a sheep to be sacrificed in a poor country where the meat will be distributed to the poor. I’ve chosen Somalia.

When you do a sin, cover it up with a good deed. It’ll help wipe it out.

Nov. 6th, 2010

Yesterday I did something I’m quite ashamed of.

Maybe it was because I was tired.

I’d gotten up for Fajr and prayed on the roof of the haram! What a sight to behold! The sun beginning to rise over the hills of Mecca. Birds wheeling in the open space above the Kaaba, making their own tawaf, only going clockwise instead of counter-clockwise, and below the throngs circumambulating the Kaaba, each person reduced to a speck, mostly black and white, but other colours too.

I found a spot beside another woman. A little sea of ladies surrounded by a barrage of men. We were right by the balustrade, so when we stood up we could see the Kaaba.

It’s not fair. There are certain areas designated for women in the mosque, and there is a set of Zamzam taps that is designated for women, but men freely violate that.

We women were huddled up to the balustrade, catching glimpses of our beloved Kaaba and then a man wearing a Saudi type uniform came by yelling, “Hajji, Hajji, Yulla! Yulla!” Telling us to move out from among the men.

That was to be expected. No way we’d get to keep that coveted spot.

So we had to pack up and vacate. Later on in the day, my sister in law and I decided to make the preparations to do another umrah. So we caught a bus to Masjid Aisha–the closest Meeqat.

We didn’t leave much time to catch Zuhr at the haram and coming back, the streets were packed with pilgrims making their way to the Kaaba.

My sister in law was determined to make the prayer so she ran off ahead. I thought I was too tired and only wanted to go pick up the laundry but at the last minute I changed my mind.

There was an entrance to the Kaaba clearly marked ladies, so I headed for it.

There were some Saudi guards at the door sitting on chairs doing crowd control. It was clear that every spot inside that part of the haram was packed toe to toe with ladies and still women kept stepping past the women who’d planted themselves in the courtyard outside the entrance and were trying to get in.

The guards turned them away, which was the right thing to do.

There was such a nice cool breeze coming from the interior and a smidge of shade so I planted msyelf down to wait for the call to prayer. I couldn’t help noticing the men who were also sitting in the coveted shade, some of them side by side with women.

And it irked me that the gurads didn’t shoo them away! “Hajji, Hajji, Yulla! Yulla!” (This situation would come to impact something I did later that I came to regret.)

What can I say? There definitely is a double standard here.

And in the ten minutes I sat there in that smidge of shade, waiting for the prayer time to arrive, the sunlight moved. The shade vanished and I was at the mercy of the searing Arabian sun.

That was enough to make me very cranky, and when a lady stepped through the back of the crowd, over prayer mats spread out and insisted there was enough room beside me for her to sit, I was in no mood to oblige.

There really didn’t seem to be any room.

I was hot, I was bothered and I was crowded. I told her not to sit down, but she did anyway.

Soon after that I felt a tentaive tap on my shoulder Another lady, hunched over, with a wrinkled face, was gesturing to sit down.

Of course I should have let her.

I don’t know what possessed me to turn her away. I really thought there was no room.

She ambled away and I heard some other ladies make room for her, feeling quite the heel.

Then the worst thing was, when the adhan rang out and we stood to form the lines, there was plenty of room, on both sides of me. I hope God will forgive me for turning that old lady away.

Nov. 6th (cont’d)

We were going to sleep for a while, wake up at 1 am and then go, when hopefully the crowd would have thinned, but 11:00 pm rolled around and I didnt’ want to disturb my sleep so we decided to go over then. After doing the 7 rounds of tawaf on the roof that morning, my feet were too sore to try it again. So we decided to brave the Kaaba’s packed courtyard.

My son in law had warned me about the African men who often locked arms and jogged through the crowd oblivious of those in their way. My son in law had warned me to just avoid them, stay out of their way!

So I did. But oh the jostling and the pushing, no way did I even try to touch or kiss the hajar aswad, black stone.

(The black stone is said to be from heaven. It is lodged in one corner of the Kaaba, and is the spot from which each round of tawaf begins. If you can, you’re supposed to kiss it or touch it, but usually the crowd is too prohibitive. It’s enough to just raise your hand and kind of salute it, say Bismillah, Allahu Akbar (In the name of God, God is Great.) and begin your tawaf.)

When the Africans came around again, I got an idea.

I slipped in behind as them as they pased. Wonderfully there was a tiny little hollow vacuum behind the wedge of Africans, like a still spot, an eye of the storm, and for a while I jogged along happily behind them while they cleaved through the crowd, just like a plow!

It couldn’t last though.

Pretty soon others filled the vacuum and I was separated from them.

(Maybe it was a mistake to do that third umrah. I might have ruined it by inadvertently lying at the end of it. At each entrance of the haram there are ladies head to toe in black who check women’s bags for cameras. You’re not allowed to bring cameras into the haram. People do anyway, and they really can’t prevent all the cell phones but they do their best.

Earlier I had been checked, then came in through another entrance and a lady wanted to check me again and I had waved her off saying I’d already been checked. I didn’t have a camera that time, but this time, for this umrah, somehow I’d brought one. As I was finishing up sa’ee I walked by one of those ladies and instinctively I told her that I’d already been checked, and then remembered that I had not. I had slipped past the lady at the entrance while she was busy checking others. I had lied. Not sure if that nullifies my umrah. I was still in ihram at that point because I hadn’t clipped my hair.)

During one of our information sessions the subject of beggars came up. I had been approached only twice so far. Once on the road when trying to buy some lunch.

A lady held out her hand and it was clear she wanted money to eat, or so she said. Problem was she was dressed better than many of the pilgrims I’d seen. I gave her 2 riyals, no more. Later while waiting for juma prayer to start, a tall lady, also dressed well, but with a deformed arm came collecting through the rows. She’d lift her kimar (long head covering) revealing the stumpy arm, then tap it and hold out her hand.

There was something too calculted about it. I didn’t give her anything.

So that night at the information session, our group leader said that begging was big business in Mecca. Then he said that if you wanted to give some charity, the cleaners who were constantly cleaning the haram were paid very very little. They were deserving of charity.

The next day, armed with ten riyal notes, I went to the haram. I was surprised how willingly the first cleaner took the money. I approached another and another, then they started approaching me.

Squeegies and mops at rest, they didn’t hold out their hands, they just came and stood near so I could see them. Their silence and dignity was surprising and yet felt quite desperate.

It brought tears to my eyes. My ten riyal notes were disappearing too quickly and I wondered how much money I had left.

Finally I said, “Khalas, Bus”–meaning ‘the end’ and they dispersed. And I couldn’t help but feel quite silly and humbled. How quickly had I closed my purse. And yet God gives without measure. The more we ask, holding out our hands, begging, the more He gives, and it says in the Quran that He is Al- Ghani, the Wealthy, and He never tires of giving.

to be continued…

This is not a commercial for Al Jazeera, but rather a lament at what CNN has become and a further lament to the lack of depth in most North American media.

When CNN is still dithering over the miners, milking the ratings for all their worth, Al Jazeera updates on them quickly and moves on to the other things going on in the world like the mega typhoon that is set to hit the Phillipines!

Al Jazeera tells real news! And it’s SO refreshing!

I remember speaking to a journalist a while back, I think she was from the CBC and she was sure that some story she was working on was sure to be the next day’s water cooler talk.

That’s what CNN and most news channels seem to have boiled down to.

Instead of telling us what’s going on around the world, the newscasters seem to be trying to provide endless trivia that people can show off with at the water coolers of their workplaces, in the hopes of looking informed.

It reminds me of that scene in Bridget Jones’ Diary when Bridget is trying to impress Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant’s character) with her worldy knowledge by bringing up the plight of Chechnya. And Daniel Cleaver casually says, “I don’t give a …. about Chechnya.”  And Bridget kind of laughs, because it’s clear that she actually doesn’t either.

I have to admit the first time I watched the movie that scene just skimmed right past me. Maybe it was because I was so caught up in rooting for Bridget that I didn’t see what was really being said.

Then I thought, wait a minute! The Chechnyans, they’re Muslim. If they don’t give a …. about them, I should. And it put the whole movie in a very different, much more nasty context.

And then I thought how very racist that I was! In that it seemed I was telling myself I should care just because they are Muslim, and I chastised myself for that!

I should be caring because they’re people, and they’re suffering.

And yet the movie never deals with that. Even that pathetic attempt at depth when she interviews the Mark Darcy character focuses on the love affair between the British woman who’s, (yet again! Oh Lord!) saved the foreigner (Kurdish freedom fighter in this case).

These are scenes that makes white people feel better about themselves. So they can tell themselves, “Oh look! How wonderful we are! We’re giving this man asylum!”

And yes, western countries often do, do wonderful things like that.

Unfortunately the citizens in western countries don’t dwell on the ways their governments undermine the stability of other nations. The average citizen in North America has no idea that part of their standard of living is because of the exorbitant interest of third world debts that were acquired by unscrupulous political leaders on behalf of third world countries who could not afford them. Leaders who received kickbacks in the process and who have, as a result, impoverished the countries who are stuck with the bill and will be for umpteen more generations because they are still trying to pay off the capital of those debts!  

Some of this came to light with Haiti, when it was found that it, being the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, is still paying France off for the privilege of leaving them to rule themselves and no longer be a colony.

Some people said that Haiti’s debt should be forgiven.

When Jean Chretien, the former prime minister of Canada, was ready to leave office, he said something that gave me tremendous respect for him. He said that it was time that first world countries should stop living on the backs of the poor and all third world debt should be forgiven, so that these countries could start taking that money and instead using it to build schools and infrastructure for their own populations.

The Western countries are famous for the billions they give in aid. But what if they instead, were to let the debts go.

I think that would be true generosity.

And it would give those countries a real chance to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

And why should we care?

Well because the world is a smaller place now. There is no place you can’t reach within a day or two of travel. And when we prop up dictators and injustice overseas, we can no longer be sure that our petty favourtism won’t come back to haunt our shores in the form of terrorism.

But that’s not the real reason we should care.

We should care because it’s the right thing to do.

And we should care because they’re human.

And caring begins with being informed.

And when informing ourselves, look for real news! Not water cooler discussions!

And yet it troubles me that I can break my fast while others, my own ‘country men’ cannot. They suffer under the disaster of the flooding in Pakistan.

May God have mercy on them. My neighbour came back from Pakistan just before Ramadan and said the situation was horrible! He was supposed to go up to Peshawar but they weren’t letting anyone through because of the damage.

I need to get my donation together for it.

But I did come across some good news about a situation that has been troubling me for years.

I guess it just shows the resiliency of a people, that no matter how bad it gets, they find a way to survive.

I’m talking about Gaza.

I often peruse different news sources and that includes Al-Jazeera. What I like about Al-Jazeera is that it’ll often carry news that other sources don’t touch.

Like the story in Germany of the Muslim woman who was killed in court by a racist who’d been harassing her family for a long time. He stabbed her in front of the guards and everything.

She died a martyr, and when her husband was trying to come to her aid, the authorities held him back, somehow thinking that he was the attacker (because he was Muslim I guess!).

Usually the news is bad, but this piece of news was good.

You can read it here: http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/08/20108975319492772.html

I found it chilling that the Israeli authorities have been calculating the exact amount of food to let in so that the people are not officially malnourished.

“A key white paper, entitled Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip – Red Lines, meticulously details the minimum caloric intake required, based on age and sex, to keep Gazans hovering just above malnutrition levels, and specifies the corresponding grams and calories of each type of food allowed into Gaza.

The existence of the so-called Red Lines document has been known for several years, but was only confirmed by Israel during recent court proceedings.

The blockade policy is overseen by a unit of Israel’s defence ministry, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT).

The policy slogan, which has been repeated at several COGAT meetings attended by Israeli journalists, states: “No prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis.”

Wow!

That people would actually go to the trouble of calculating the precise amount of food per person to let in so that no one can accuse them of starving a people.

It boggles the mind.

And yet, the story is one of hope.

The Gazans have shown ingenuity under the circumstances, going organic and turning inward.

The old phrase, “Necessity is the mother of invention” has never been more apt!

I pray for them, and I pray for the victims of the mudslides in China, and for the fourteen million affected by the floods in Pakistan.

May God have mercy on them, may God relieve them of the burdens of their suffering.

And may He give us the means to help them.

Ameen.

When I began this blog I vowed never to blog nonsense.

I was just so relieved to see so many projects like the travel grant and other various applications completed and neatly piled in a set of oversize envelopes that I succumbed to talking when I felt I had nothing important to say.

I was also exhausted. Emotionally, physically, mentally, you name it. Ploughing through last week’s one hundred and nine applications really took a toll on me. Maybe I didn’t realize I was spouting nonsense.

And since I had promised myself I would blog every day and not be like those who start out strong and fizzle, I went ahead and blogged even when I could hardly keep my eyes open.

I won’t make that mistake again. When I have nothing constructive to say, I’ll say nothing. There’s nothing more annoying than mindless chatter!

Today I visited a school I hadn’t been to before. The teacher librarian said that she’d been seeing my brochure every year and she saw the evolution of my package from flyer to full colour insert on Big Red Lollipop.

I didn’t tell her that my publisher Viking paid for the full colour one!

I’m such a terrible marketer.

I think most very creative people are.

It takes one set of mind skills to be able to create, creatively and it seems it takes another to be able to market creatively, and never the twain shall meet.

I know a brilliant guy, he can do things with video editing and shooting that boggles my mind, and yet for years he was barely scraping by with the odd assignment here and there.

He’s the ideal candidate for government grants but when I first approached him, he’d assumed that grants were only given to good ole’ boys.

And yet I’ve also met ‘artists’, I hesitate to even use the word, who are so dependent on grants that it amounts to a sort of artistic ‘welfare’.

One of them, and incredibly bright, articulate, attractive lady, talked about how it wasn’t ever necessary for her ‘artwork’ to ever get published because she received $60,000 a year in grant money, regularly. She bragged that she was an expert at writing grant proposals! Where was the incentive to actually have people ‘consume’ her art?

I was shocked at her blase attitude. And my respect for her was diminished.

I actually believe in the old stereotype of the ‘starving artist’. When people are that desperate, they work harder to pull out something that’s truly original and creative from deep within themselves. In the early years, without my husband’s ‘patronage’ there was no way I would have survived as an artist.

Perhaps it was that coupled with the idea that I wanted to contribute to the public dialogue, I wanted to insert a different, Muslim perspective, to the social consciousness, that made me so hungry to get published that I weathered all the slings and arrows and persevered when others fell by the wayside.

What if I had just settled for suckling at the teat of Government arts grants?

I’m sure it could have been lucrative.

If I could learn to write books, surely I could learn to write good grants.

So many times I applied in order to go somewhere to do research but was inevitably turned down.

I kind of gave up on grants. I figured the time it took to write a good grant, and the amount of creative energy involved, could be better used to write a good book that would give me an additional publishing credit and hopefully a nice advance that would provide the cash for research I needed anyway.

I’ve used many an advance to pay for the research of another book.

And now, I almost find the fact that I didn’t get good at writing grant applications comforting after meeting that professional grant artist.

I have received Writer’s Reserve grants. These are small amounts, $1500, that allow you to work on a project. A publisher recommends you for them. I’ve received a number of them and with the last one I went to South Dakota to do some research on Lakota history and my hero, Crazy Horse.

The grant  wasn’t quite enough to cover my expenses, but it sure helped. When I went to Jordan, after going on the mini-pilgrimage to Mecca (umrah) it was to research a historical novel I’ve been dreaming about for thirty-two years. I paid for the trip from the advance for Coming to Canada/A New Life.

Right now Canada is being ruled by a bunch of rubes out of the prairies who really look down their noses at us artistic types. They don’t seem to get art and culture and if they had their druthers would cancel all the Arts grants completely.

In a way I can understand why, but at the same time…I shiver at the thought.

Grants are necessary for some artists to survive. The ‘pure’ kind of artists, if there is such a thing.

 The only Canada Council grants I’ve ever received was a travel grant to South Africa to present at the IBBY congress. That one event really opened doors for me! In fact it was directly responsible for getting me invited to the American Library Association convention in New Orleans.

I guess grants can be investments into the artists that can pay dividends in the future, as long as they’re not used as a sort of Artistic welfare.

But making sure they’re not abused…ay, there’s the rub.

It was one of the most gruelling weeks I’ve ever had and now that it’s over I can say what I was doing going downtown everyday, 9:30 – 5 pm in a board room.

I was on the Ontario Arts Council Artists in Education jury.

I was sworn to secrecy before, but the information will be published soon so it’s okay for me to say it now. I can’t talk about anything that went on in the meetings, that’s confidential, but I will say that I have a lot of respect for the director of the jury and for my fellow jurors.

And seeing the process that the applications go through, they really try their utmost to be fair.

I think I’m lucky, living in Canada, we have a lot of programs in both the Canada Arts Council  and the Ontario Arts Council.

The councils exist to help artists make a living and explore their craft. The jury that I was on, Artists in Education, is specifically designed to subsidize the cost of professional artists working in the schools to bring top notch arts’ education to the students.

The quality of the applications was phenomenal.

Having applied, and been turned down, for grant applications in the past, I always felt kind of bitter, and I never believed the letter they sent that said how they’d received so many applications but because of limited funds, they couldn’t fund them all.

But after seeing the process, I really can understand it.

I’m absolutely wrung out, but I learned so much this week.

There’s an art to writing grant applications.

They have to be every bit as clear and intelligible as the best writing you do.

And be concise! Say what you mean, answer the questions precisely. And keep in mind that an arts council is looking for ‘artistic’ merit, even though that’s very hard to define.

Many years ago, I applied for this same Artist in Education grant. It’s a pretty good program if you’re just starting out. Basically you develop an in-depth artistic project that lasts 25 hours that you can conduct in a school setting. The grant amount was for $6300 to conduct up to six 25 hour projects in six different schools (one of which had to be outside the city of Toronto).

Basically it must be a plan that will get students to think creatively and learn an art discipline.

Then you offer the program to schools and they have to contribute the remainder of the fee, a minimum of $150 for the twenty-five hour program–which is nothing for 25 hours to schools! Some artists charge more than that though, and after a while I was one of them.

Back when I applied I received the grant four out of five years, or something like that.

I stopped doing it because of one experience that really soured me.

I’ve always had a soft spot for poor schools and when I was booking a school, that happened to be in Aurora, they told me they didn’t have the funds to pay more than the minimum, so I assumed they were a needy school. I didn’t know that Aurora is one of the poshest suburbs of Toronto!

I got there and this was the richest school I’d ever visited at the time.

When I told them that they needed to pay the higher normal rate, they said they didn’t have the money. I had no choice. The end of the year was coming up and I needed to use up my Artist in Education funds or I’d have had to pay them back, so I did the program. I did it  properly too, no sense in shortchanging the kids, and at one point the librarian was so excited by the project she said, “Oh maybe we can have you back to visit!” I just gave her a look that said, “You guys will have to pay through the teeth if you want me back here!”

Since then, I don’t do the Artist in Education programs any more. They actually don’t pay a going rate, and I find it easier to just charge my normal fee for my normal presentations.

But that said, spending twenty-five hours with a set of learners in an intensive, in-depth workshop is a real opportunity!

And I encourage any author/storyteller/visual artist out there to apply to the program. It can be very rewarding!

On the one  hand you have Gaza which is slowly being strangled to death because they had the chutzpah to elect people we didn’t approve of, nobody makes a peep out of that, then you have Haiti which definitely suffered an enormous earthquake catastrophe, where the whole world rallied around them, and then Chile suffered an even bigger one and the news fizzles out after a few days.

I don’t get it.

What makes people decide to care? Was it that Haiti was so poor in the first place? Was it the number of people who died? Do we care in proportion to the number of those killed?

Compared to Haiti, Chile is relatively modern and progressive. But devastation is devastation, isn’t it? Why isn’t there more of an outcry to help?

I wish there was a more measured approach to natural calamities. I wish we could push aside political differences and see suffering for what it is.

When the Jews suffered the pograms under the Czar of Russia, the whole world looked the other way. When the soldiers of the Czar would cull men from the Jewish ghettoes, forcibly march them, as is shown in Carol Matas’ book Sworn Enemies  and force them to convert to Christianity, did anybody in the West care?

True, they might not have known about it. But somehow, I suspect, that even if they had known, many would have thought, ‘well, they’re turning them into Christians. Isn’t that a good thing?’

It’s the same mentality that led to the Canadian government forcibly removing native children from the reservations during the 1950′s and moving them to the residential schools where the children would be punished if they spoke in any other language but English.

I do believe that the Canadian authorities had the best of intentions. They did not see themselves as oppressors.

They were apalled that these natives hadn’t assimilated, hadn’t left their ‘backward’ ways to mingle with the whites. Why hadn’t they adopted the Canadian dream? Why hadn’t they moved off their reservations, stopped speaking that ‘gibberish’ language and taken full advantage of all the opportunities they were being offered?

Basically, why weren’t they more like them???

This generation was lost. They should focus on the next generation. They’d take them away, and teach them to be white, and wouldn’t they thank them for it?

The native community is still suffering the repercussions of that horrible policy.

I think the mistake that the Holocaust Remembrance society makes is that they fail to understand how a society like the Germans could have come to a point where they could rationalize the extermination of the Jews. They just think they were crazy, like we think that psychopaths and sociopaths are crazy. And yet how can a whole society be crazy?

You just can’t paint a whole society as evil and warped. No matter how bad what they’ve done is, they must have had some sort of logic, some sort of reasoning behind it, and isn’t it dangerous if we don’t look at that, and learn from that?

Personally I think that any society can talk itself into committing the most heinous of crimes, if the right sort of logic is used.

Logic is usually considered such a benign beneficial tamper-proof sort of way of thinking. Many people seem to think that it’s not like religion, it’s not ‘corruptible’. I think they are mistaken.

I think Hitler was able, by twisting the whole idea of ‘survival of the fittest’, evolution and the superiority of the Aryan race, to logically show the Germans who followed him that it was a good thing to remove the Jews. His diabolical genius lied in the way he did it. He didn’t start with the Jews.

He started with the physically handicapped and the  mentally ill.

It was not hard for him to argue that the gene pool was better off without them.

Then he used the underlying anti-Semitism that existed in the society and fed it by showing that Jews were inherently and genetically inferior. He did this when they discovered that Jewish people, as a group, were genetically prone to Tay Sachs disease–just as blacks are often genetically prone to hemophilia. (By the way, there’s a reason for blacks being prone to hemophilia. When not full blown, hemophilia helped protect them from malaria.)

Once German scientists discovered this connection between Jews and this disease, it was easy to make the leap to suggest that in their quest to create a ‘pure society’ that they would do well to exterminate the Jews. Wasn’t the race inferior since they were prone to this? Heaven forbid there should be intermingling, intermarrying and their gene pool should be thus polluted.

It’s funny how people always accuse religions of causing the most death and destruction.

Two of the biggest wars: World War I and II were not religiously motivated in the least. You could argue they were motivated by ‘evolution’.  But nobody ever talks about that!

And now, America is on a crusade (didn’t George W. let the term slip when talking about the war on terror?) to bring democracy to all the poor wretches who are suffering under dictatorship.

Lessons not learned are doomed to be repeated.

It was arrogance on the part of the Bush administration to allow Hamas a spot on the ballot in the elections in Gaza.

Nobody would vote for Hamas! How could they? They were terrorists! So what if Fatah (Arafat’s group was corrupt.) So what if Hamas provided badly needed social services. The west did not approve of them.

And yet when Gaza voted, they chose Hamas. I think they considered them the lesser of two evils. And for that they have been brutally punished. Collectively.

And the Egyptians are in on it, closing the border at Rafah.

Why should we care?

You make the choice and you choose the consequences, right?

Right.

And yet, the children suffer.

Out of the spotlight of international scrutiny, the children suffer for something they never played a part in.

And we cry and sing “We are the World” for Haiti, but nobody sheds a tear for Gaza.