I do not like writing one day after the other but last night I heard an epic story. So interesting it was that I who had accepted the invitation of a gorgeous English man to go check up Chinese New Year celebrations in town stayed behind to hear the story of a 76 year old lady. Wow, and how worth it was.

They say in Brazil that life begins when you are forty. The sentence could not have been truer than for Carley, the Australian lady I checked in about a week ago. Until last night all I knew from her was that she had spent lots of time in Kashmir, that she read voraciously the newspaper and that she was very friendly.

Where to even start?

“I arrived in Kashmir in the 80’s. After crossing India, I arrived at the lake. I arrived in the house boat, and as I got out of the shikara I looked up. There was Kadir. I took one look and thought ‘ There you are. I was looking for you for my whole life. And I did not even know it.”

Kadir, a Muslim Cashmere married man. Kadir who lived in a place that was about to be set in turmoil, war, killings in the eternal struggle of the Kashmere valley.

But that is not where the story starts. The story starts with a girl in Australia who got pregnant and married very early. A girl who spent a life in academia, in a loveless marriage and then became a political activist. A woman who is part of the group who set all legislation that till this day protects the forests of New South Wales and the rivers of Tasmania. By her forties her husband changed political activism for Rajneesh, also know as Osho. That was it for Carley.

Carley left the world of academia and learned to be a nurse, a practical work that could ensure her work anytime, anywhere. And so it was that she left at forty for the first time to see the world. She never stopped since then. She first went to China.

“I went in as a socialist, came back as an avid supporter of democracy.”

Back to Australia to work a bit more and off she went to India. Met by the unscrupulous heat of India she immediately realized she needed to go up to the mountains. How to do it? At the time traveling through these roads was not so easy as they were mainly for the military. She met an Indian devotee of Gandhi and followed him to Manali. From Manali she went to Kashmir on her own carrying with her a bottle of Cointreau .

For those of you who know the very famous book Shataram Carley spent the first three nights of her Kashmir stay drinking with Kadir and Gregory David Roberts. Wishing him to disappear and leave her to be alone with Kadir. And so it happened that they started an affair that would change both of their lives forever.

Kadir’s wife was sent away and Carley stayed. She became close to his kids. She did not fully understand at first the impact she had had in that poor woman’s life. When she met Kadir he was suicidal. Unhappily married in an arrange wedding. He was unhappy in Kashmir having lost his older son and having left two daughters. In some parts of the world that is a true disaster. Carley was herself recovering from her own traumas. They helped each other.

For the next years she went back to Kashmir. She brought tourists. She paid for schooling and doctors and everything that was needed for his family. Always going back to work as a nurse. She was then able to get him a visa to come to Australia and so he worked every Cashmere winter of the following 10 years in Australia.

Carley suddenly realized she wanted to see more of the world. She could not just keep going to Kashmir. In the middle of the 80 she traveled alone through all the Stan countries (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan etc ), Azerbaijan, Armenia in winter seeing first hand starvation and what the Soviet Union was doing to the place. As she arrived in Turkey and saw piles of Tomatoes and fruits all around she knew the Soviet Union would collapse very soon.

She loved Istanbul, but tired of the cold went south to Egypt. Loved Cairo hated how she was treated. After having seen the beauty of Islamic architecture all over she found Egypt was all about building big things. She missed Kadir and wanted to go back to India. In Egypt they would not give her a visa, she went to Jordan, they also refused it, she took a bus to Damascus only to arrive in the middle of Palestinian uprising because of the killing of someone I do not remember the name of.

She was eventually able to go back to Kashmir. By this time the violence had restarted. The army would round up man and make one Cashmere pick three militants or else that man would be killed. The women many times would come and surround men and army. Then violence escalated with children being shot in shikaras and even inside mosques.

She was furious. She was too outspoken.

“There was it. I had to either pick up weapons or leave. I was putting my family in danger for being so outspoken. The girls were growing up and I was a huge scandal there. His children needed their mother. I paid for her to have an operation to no longer have babies. I made a mess in that lady’s life. By then I started understanding the real dimensions of my arrival in their life. I had to go.”

“When was this Carley?”

“2003. I left.”

“Have you been back?”

“No.”

“ Are you going to see him again ?”

“In another life I am sure. I am certain if there are other lives we have met many times before.”

“Do you feel guilt?”

“Yes. I feel some guilt for what I caused to that woman’s life.”

But her face lifts up.

“Do you want to know something incredible? My daughter was in India last year and she wrote me to ask whether she could go visit Kadir. She loved him. He was a charming man who enchanted my whole family. I agreed and was very clear that it was of outmost importance that she should be respectful to his wife. And so she went and I saw a million pictures of them together. His wife hugging my daughter! And then she told me that Kadir told her that neither him nor his wife will have anything to do with the decision of who his daughters will marry. It will be their own choice. I was shocked. I was shocked. I felt happy beyond belief. This is the most important thing now. They must have good weddings.”

As I hear the story in details. Ask every single question in the world. Go through the feelings myself. The complexity of humanity. The coexistence of a multiplicity of feelings. As I imagine in my mind the places I have visited being in war, being destroyed I feel an eerie feeling. I am so moved. I know these mosques, these boats, these shikaras she talks about. I even know Kadir. How many Kadirs have I met along the way in a mixture of gentleness with old traditions. People who we imagine so different but are always willing to go to different places than the ones they have been to.

“Carley, Thank You. This is an amazing story. I am so thankful to have heard.”

“Thank You. It is just a life!”

Two years ago I came to Mut Mee for the first time. At the time although I had studied a lot about Middle Eastern politics I had never been there, nor had I really had any personal encounters with middle easterners. It was at Mut Mee that I met the first Israeli that challenged my black and white thoughts about the Palestinian Israeli situation. From then on it has been as most of you who have been in this list long enough quite a deep dive in the political, academic, personal, emotional, rational, visceral, crazy world of that conflict.

It is somehow surreal how much in one way or another I always get caught up in it. It does not matter where I am Palestinians and Israelis always find me. And when they do I am now a bridge between these worlds to these individuals. Something incredibly surreal for a non Jewish, non Arab Brazilian citizen who has been crossing borders for as long as she remembers.

But back to two years ago, after I met the first Israeli who challenged me I met an older couple here. I wrote about them at the time. They had left Israel as a political statement. They were activist. She was a journalist. They moved to an island in the border of Thailand and Cambodia and here she changed topics of writing. Instead of writing about subversive topics she wrote the first ever written Thai food book in Hebrew.

I traveled Thailand at the time mainly with Israelis and once I went back my dissertation of my masters ended up being about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. From my masters I went into my PhD, I visited both Israel and Palestine, became friends with people in both sides of the wall. I cried in front of that wall and left feeling defeated.

I remember going to a human rights festival and watching the documentary Budrus which documents the struggle of Palestinians, Israelis and international activists to change the wall of separation that was at the time circumventing Budrus, a Palestinian village. I was deeply moved by the film. Not only because of the absurdity of a wall surrounding some villages and making it impossible for people to reach other parts of Palestine, but because of the power of people to unite in the face of absurdity to challenge injustice. The people gave me hope. Hope that humanity could go beyond ideologies.

I watched the film in London, found out it was made by a Brazilian friend of a friend of mine, and the people who gathered together came from everywhere in the world. The people protesting in the film came as well. As the filmmaker was present we were able to learn a lot about the 6 years of that protest. We learned about the Israelis who crossed illegally the wall to go to the protest to minimise the violence towards the Palestinians. We learned about the Israelis who slept in the house of Palestinians, about the soldiers who once released from the IDF changed sides and started to protest. We heard about the Palestinians who in turn protected the Israeli activists when the new order was to arrest Israeli activists for being illegally in Palestine. They did not care about the “imagined communities” they belonged to. They cared about what plain absurd. I cried the whole film. First out of anger then of emotion for human capacity to unite. As I watched the film I saw the man I had once met here. He was there, on a little clip of the news. I could not understand what he had said. It was not translated but I could see he was supporting the protest. I was so moved. I knew him. Even though I did not even know his Israeli name (but only his Thai one) I knew him and I knew what he stood for.

So it is that I am here not doing much when suddenly I see him and his wife in the garden. I am so excited. I run towards their table barely containing my emotion.

“Hi! You might not remember me. I know you so well. I heard you speak about your activism, and your book, and your experiences in the war, and I saw you in Budrus and and and and and” There was so much to tell. How could I explain to them how much they had changed me, affected me, how that one encounter had meant so much to me. How could I say it in one sentence all that happened since I had met them.

They looked at me surprised

“I remember you. You sing”

I sat and was able to vomit out some of what had happened to me in between now and then. They were of course very surprised. Now I could relate to almost all they talked about. I was astonished to find out they set up Uri Avenery, the Israeli 86 year old activist, website Gush Shalom. I really admire Uri Avnery’s writings. As I sat looking the Mekong I learned they too had moved here to Nong Khai. I learned their party had really grown. Their activism was still very active.

How strange is the world I thought. I am at Mut Mee. Julian, my friend and the owner, is half Palestinian. One of the new rooms and nicest rooms in the new building has a Star of David on the wall. It is a very syncretic star mixed in Buddhist and Hindu imagery. Julian had explained to me when I first arrived that the room was designed for his very good friend Carol who is Jewish Iraqi. “She is like me, cant go back to her family home, she is of the Diaspora”. Julian like, the Israeli couple does not think of nationalities, and groups he thinks of people. How many times have I heard him say “We are the same people.”

As I seat hearing the couple I feel an uncontained joy for being able to always encounter the nicest people. At night I don’t even want to waste time telling my Israeli friend about the terrible incident that happened two nights in a roll. I want to tell about this couple. I want to introduce them after all my friend is coming all the way here to visit me. I feel so happy.

As I seat looking at the Mekong I remember Uri’s words which are not new to me. As the couple tells me I have to share my experiences with the world I think I will post it. I will write once again about these people going around and changing the world. Changing perceptions in spite of ideologies. As we seat there I remember the words of Uri Avnery. They are not new but they are however important words:

“Nationalism is a relatively recent historical phenomenon. When a community decides to become a nation, it has to reinvent itself. That means inventing a national past, reshuffling historical facts (and non-facts) in order to create a coherent picture of a nation existing since antiquity. Hermann the Cherusker, member of a Germanic tribe who betrayed his Roman employers, became a “national” hero. Religious refugees who landed in America and destroyed the native population became a “nation”. Members of an ethnic-religious Diaspora formed themselves into a “Jewish nation”. Many others did more or less the same.

Indeed, Newt would profit from reading a book by a Tel Aviv University professor, Shlomo Sand, a kosher Jew, whose Hebrew title speaks for itself: “When and How the Jewish People was Invented?”

Who are these Palestinians? About a hundred years ago, two young students in Istanbul, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the future Prime Minister and President (respectively) of Israel, wrote a treatise about the Palestinians. The population of this country, they said, has never changed. Only small elites were sometimes deported. The towns and villages never moved, as their names prove. Canaanites became Israelites, then Jews and Samaritans, then Christian Byzantines. With the Arab conquest, they slowly adopted the religion of Islam and the Arabic Culture. These are today’s Palestinians. I tend to agree with them.”

As I seat by the Mekong with my old new friends I realise how much what people say changes us. Their words some two years ago had changed me. They in certain way stirred me along the way. Their words led me to go see the Middle East. To find out who these people really are. Couple weeks ago I got an email from an Israeli I met last time I was in Israel. He wrote me to tell me he had for the first time been to Palestine without a weapon. “I went and I walked with no fear. I met the people you talked about. Not the ones I had heard about.” He was not the first friend who had crossed that wall after meeting me. I never tell them to. I just tell stories. The stories of the people I encounter. Encountering the Israeli couple here again made me realise how powerful stories are. They changed my path .

29.Jordanian Women and Lina

Tuckeh, Tuckeh screams the enormous gecko. I cannot see it but I know it must be huge by the sound I hear. I still remember the first time I heard them sing. At that time I was in a little village in the middle of nowhere. I was curiously listening to that weird noise, trying to communicate with the Thai little girl in my house. She kept saying it was a Tuckeh and I kept imagining a Tuckeh to be a bird. When she finally took me by the hand to show me a huge looking- like- iguana gecko I was shocked. At the time I pondered for the first time how it was that legends came about.

It happen again in Kashmir when I in the middle of the track heard from inside my tent the strange noises of birds and sheep who seemed to be fantasy creatures. I had never imagined those sounds featured in nature. People from the city are like that… We find sirens, horns, and huge agglomerations natural and are totally shocked by the real sounds of animals. The Gecko sings, the mosquitoes bite over whatever it is that I am wearing, the Thai drink and talk behind me. I probably should go to bed.

I was in a mellow mood a couple days ago. Too many goodbyes. It should not be surprising to one that has decided to travel, then to temporarily work and live in a guesthouse… But today mellowness has left, probably temporarily, but it is now gone. Today I am greeted by the sun bathing parts of the garden, parts of the Mekong. The wind is chilly on my face. Prokofiev plays. Unknown faces have their breakfast. Soon the usual Mut Mee crowd will be here. Soon Nong Khai victims will appear and tell stories, and we will laugh about something geeky. I should write about them sometime.

I left the Gaia, bar boat that floats on the Mekong, earlier then usual last night. I was fascinated by Lina the 25 year old chinese girl who was there drinking beer but too tired to stay longer.

Lina can speak little english. She laughs a lot, but in a discrete small way that makes her look like a doll. Every word in English is difficult for her but I am too curious as it is not so common to see a chinese single traveler. No one knows she is here. Not her family, not her friends.

” Luckily my parents are concerned about my sister”

A sister? I am puzzled. How about the one child policy.  ” oh i come from the village not the city”

I wonder how many people actually live in China. I wonder how is life there.

“I am old for China. 25 I should be married and have a baby. But I don’t want to marry and I don’t like babies” and she laughs a bit more.

She apologises for her poor english. She works as a make up artist for weddings. I am impressed at how much we can tell each other with so little language.

As this lovely girl laughs half drunk half confused with a foreign language I keep wondering what makes her cross to vietnam, cambodia, thailand, laos in secret. What does she think and feel as she is going around alone barely speaking to anyone.

San, who Roxana calls the toothless homeless Thai guy is also there. I never understand him to well. He is always so friendly. He seems to be in love. Claire, the sweetest Irish girl I have ever met, watches with me their conversation. it seems incredible that Lina and San can actually communicate. Lina does not speak english that well, and san neither. But somehow they do.

As I seat alone writing these words I wonder why is it that I cross these borders? What is it that we search? I am still not entirely certain of what it is but encountering the young chinese girl makes me realise that this search is quite universal. Whenever people tell you we are so different we should be suspicious.

These days Julian gave me a book to read. The book was the true story of a Jordanian catholic woman. I started reading the book and as i turned the pages I kept thinking ” this is impossible!” the way she described jordanians was so surreal. As if men in jordan were completely inhuman. I kept telling Julian that that could not be true. it seemed like the perfect book to legitimise an occupation in any muslim country. He begged me to read on. So i did it.

It was story of two friends. A muslim girl and a catholic one who had to manipulate all men in their lives to be able to get what they wanted. Simple pleasures. In the end of the book her friend gets killed in an honour killing. The author runs away promising to avenge the death of her best friend. In the end of the book there was even addresses to whom you could write to help. The book disturbed me a lot. How could that possibly be that they were soooo different. As I finished it, Julian encouraged me to google the author. It turned out it was a hoax. She had been born in Jordan but grew up in the U.S. that story which she sold as real had never happened.

I could not believe it. or better i could. I was so shocked how even I who have Palestinian and Jordanian friends was by the end of the book questioning whether this lady was right. Whether all the niceness i had experienced. All the similarity was a product of my own mind. After all she was born and raised there. So when i found it was a fake I was both relieved and furious. That was such a criminal book. One that sells the idea that people can be completely different… To the point they seem inhuman.

So as I watch Lina and San engage in what is quite universal …a man flirting with a girl. As i ponder why she crosses borders I know this is quite universal. In all societies there are those who want to see the other side of the border. In all societies there are those who know that in the other side lies difference, but also enormous similarity. We might not know what we are looking for but in this journey we encounter each other. People who come from different culture systems, philosophies, languages, customs, practices, beliefs etc and when we meet we realise that books that preach sooo much difference cant be that real.