Friday, June 23, 2006
Notes From A Visit to One of Many Villages
Ten miles to my left and some more to my right lay fields of wheat, golden and still in the hot desert-like province. The sun here rises harsh into the sky while the local townspeople hide away in their homes, the temperature rising to the hundreds, immeasurably suffocating. Every home is made of stone and mud-plaster, held together and built by the same hands that live in them. Outside is a horse and a small white donkey, a dozen chickens, some plants and flowers and buckets for milking the cows. In each home, as in the home that I visit with a friend, are basic chairs; a table, perhaps a bed or rolled up blankets, a small kitchen; and the wives and young children of the family. The men here work in the blistering heat, often wearing straw hats- bent over in the fields- and come home with toughened skin, blackened by the unrelenting sunlight and a silent demeanor passed onto them by their fathers.
Life here moves continually, but slowly, suddenly flashing memories of the Old West in films back home. I can almost see the tumbleweed. The husband talking in a low voice (in monotones) to his wife, asking her to bring some refreshments- cherry sorbet water with ice- seems awfully slow but curt and fresh (as if they are used to guests and we are just another one of many). He asks about America with a curious smile, about the country, what I do there, who I live with (he does not understand how I live by myself and lets it go at that); she asks how old I am, where I stay, what I am doing in the town, who I stay with and then tells me that she has a son, a small shop owner in the city, smiling wide with twinkling blue-green eyes and I smile back.
This is the world that I don’t forget, wherever I go back home, when I type out my essays, buy my coffee, pay my bills. It seems disconnected to the modern reality of life, the economy, the weather in Bangkok and the stocks in NYSE, or the new cars recently imported into the country. They are utterly independent of the world, alone in their sheltered homes with a small Koran, reading the pages every night and early morning, making breakfast, feeding the livestock, herding the cows, tending to the fields, and then a light one course meal at home before an early retirement to bed.
Surprisingly, though, these people vote too, and change the course of a country (in their sluggish habits), lending a powerful tool to those politicians who can manipulate their simplistic sense of society and economy. “I will return morality, religion, and money to our people!” is the barking campaign of a politician whose words are powerful to these poor people, like Manna was to the Israelites. A message from God, a miracle, a true epiphany of goodwill and mercy from above is the message of the politician who reaches the ears of these masses. What matters most is not that these villagers, or farmers who live out in the country vote for these politicians (because they are few), what matters is that they are the ideological and fundamental backbone of many children who grew up in those mud/stone homes and moved to the cities decades ago. The whitewashed backbone of men and women who gave rise to millions of youth in cities like Tehran -that because of state-sanctioned censorship, and those same politicians, have not seen any other world, any other ideology or system. They have been promised youth, money, and education in the messages of people like Khatami, but the system fails them simply because of their ties to the past, to the modern “traditionalism” that like the great hammer of Thor splits the skies but does comparatively little good for that “opportunity, money, and education” promised them.
Now, we can unravel that mystery, little by little. When we understand that the world of traditional values/cultural mores has been transmogrified into a modern cityscape, modernized into the year 2006 and compressed, congealed, confused into obscurity; when we understand, we can respond to its problems.
Understand the culture of the home (and what constructs it), the school (and how it teaches), the relationship of a 25-year-old woman to her mother (who gave birth to her and before the girl could breathe- independence- was given to her husband), the loyalty to a prophet one thousand years dead but who speaks through the mouths of mortal men, and the businessmen that the youth become (with no obligations to the community, no return for the poor, no civic duties). There is not much responsibility for the land, for the natural resources- there is little grassroots, community involvement. A small town does not enforce values and laws that are learned by the children and later reflected by the nation because they have very few. Their cultural upbringing did not teach them to gather their trash and throw it into the trash bins (recyclables in one, trash in the other), but the modern world of 2006 taught them to consume, to buy into the world of money and material goods.
Understand that the year 2006 has books too; it has scholars to teach what is in the books; teachers to help train what the scholars read out; and parents to enforce a sense of responsibility, and education. The year 2006 has very few rules on what type of chips, soda, and ice cream you should eat but it has many rules on how to throw them away once you’re done choosing. What we should understand is that life is demanding, this new generation -nearly half of the population being under the age of 30- holds the future of this country in its hands and we would be fools to believe that they can lead that future. Life is demanding, and it requires that we learn how to appease those demands. These youth should ask how to create a cultural responsibility for throwing trash into separate bins, and how to collect, reuse, and better the environment as well as the community with their policies. If we are examples of our childhood, and the nation is the image of all our children, they had better start now. There’s no more room for mud/stone houses in 2006.
