How To Learn Urdu

September 12, 2014
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  1. Get a good teacher. A good teacher ought to encourage you, praise your faltering efforts to master the language, and not laugh at you too much when you confuse the word for “stomach” with the word for “buttocks”.
  2. Set aside two years of your life, at a minimum, to study it full-time.
  3. Move to Pakistan. It makes sense to learn Urdu in the country where it is spoken. On the downside, you will find yourself studying in 40 degree heat with frequent power cuts.  On the upside, you get to eat parathas.
  4. Try not to be put off by the fact that Urdu script has three different characters for “s”, four for “z”, three for “t” (two of which are minutely different), and a special character which doesn’t make a sound but which tells you to exhale slightly as you say it. When you first try to do so, you will be laughed at (see above).
  5. Also try not to be put off by the fact that when you use the wrong kind of “s” when spelling a word, people will laugh at you. It doesn’t matter that it’s pronounced the same, nor that the two letters are effectively interchangeable, you are still wrong.

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 If you can deal with all of these, you will reach the majestic point at which you can easily navigate the bazaar, chat to all and sundry, and be met with the glorious compliment: “Mashallah, you speak Urdu very well!”.

Why Pakistan Gives Me Hope

September 10, 2014
Pakistan, Travel
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When we spent time in the UK recently I was surprised by how negative Pakistan’s reputation was.  We bounced back full of exciting stories about Pakistan, photos of its stunning beauty, anecdotes of the hospitality of its people, and nobody could believe us.

“You mean it’s not just a desert?”.

“You mean people are actually friendly?”.

“You mean there are parks, and pizza restaurants, and literary festivals?”.

If you subscribe to similar notions then permit me to educate you: Pakistan is, at times, a completely wonderful place.  It is exotic, vibrant, and beautiful.  The food is fantastic.  The people are warm, friendly, unfailingly polite.  I have not once encountered hostility from anyone even though I am a foreigner and a Christian.  The young people here are intelligent, well-informed, enthusiastic, eager to learn, full of ideas.  The elderly still subscribe to old-fashioned notions such as courtesy and etiquette, such as standing when a lady enters the room.  Everyone offers you tea.

Perhaps oddly, the beauty and potential of Pakistan can be heartbreaking too.  The scenery here is stunning, easily the equal of Switzerland or Western Canada, but where are the tourists who would bring money and support jobs?  Young Pakistani entrepreneurs are some of the most vibrant in the world, so why are their efforts choked by official corruption?  Most painfully for me, why are such marvellously kind people viewed with such scorn by the outside world?

They deserve better.  Pakistan deserves better.  This is a land of immense potential.  May that potential be fulfilled, and soon.

Why Pakistan Breaks My Heart (1)

September 9, 2014
God, Pakistan
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It is emotionally difficult to live in Pakistan.  The three years we have spent here have been characterised by emotional turbulence more than anything else. 

There are many reasons for this.  Firstly, because life anywhere in the developing world is difficult.  Westerners like me have grown accustomed to having it easy: good healthcare, reliable electricity, smooth roads, trustworthy police.  Life in the developing world is less easy.  We have power cuts all the time.  The roads are often pitted and broken.  People die for reasons that would be unthinkable in the West: malnutrition, cholera, medical incompetence.  People in the West take comfort for granted, seeing it almost as a birthright, and the thought of life being uncomfortable or difficult is foreign.  Over here, for many people, life is a constant struggle, a trail of sweat and labour and sorrow and danger and uncertainty.  Many people do not know where the next day’s food is coming from.   Can you imagine looking into the faces of your children and not being able to assure them that there will be breakfast in the morning?

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It breaks my heart every single day to see people struggling with everyday life.  In the Bible Jesus wrote that “I have come that people may have life, and have it in all its abundance”.  And yet even now, two thousand years after Jesus walked the earth, billions of people, perhaps the majority of people on the planet, spend their years in difficulty and pain.  There must be more to life than this.

My heart breaks every time a thin-faced beggar knocks on the car window asking for money, every time I see a grandmother toiling down the road with a load of firewood piled on her back, every time I see children as young as 4 or 5 sifting through piles of stinking garbage to find bottles or rags that they might be able to sell for a few rupees.  God did not create people so that they might spend their days in such rancid poverty.  There must be more to life than this.  There must be a way to bring wholeness to Pakistan.

Barbed Wire and Bougainvillea

September 8, 2014
Pakistan, Snippets
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Bougainvillea plants are found everywhere in Pakistan.  They grow prolifically, clambering up walls and hedges like enthusiastic children, their green shoots reaching upwards and eventually exploding in a cascade of paper-thin flowers.  In the midst of the dust and grime of Pakistani streets their exuberant colours come as a relief, a reminder of freshness and vitality in otherwise drab places.

This one is doing its best to climb across a roll of barbed wire.  The juxtaposition of the beauty of the flower and the harsh reminder of the lawlessness of Pakistan struck me as I walked around our house, reminding me that beauty is possible even in the middle of difficulty.

Teatime Theology

September 7, 2014
God, Parenthood
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We were sitting down to dinner (shepherd’s pie and guava crumble, since even we can’t eat Pakistani food every single meal) and had just said grace.  Thanking God for the food feels particularly important in a country where so many have so little.  Our three-year-old daughter said “Amen” and looked up at me with a smile.

“I love God” she said.  “He’s nice”.

Our four-year-old son looked thoughtful, wrinkling his nose as he does when tussling with a particularly difficult topic.

“I love God sometimes, but not all the time”.

He thought for a minute.

“Sometimes my love for him is big, sometimes it’s small”.

He paused again.

“But he’s always nice”.

The Monsoon

September 6, 2014
Pakistan, Snippets
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The monsoon arrived late this year.  Since we landed in Pakistan it rained continuously for three whole days.  Being English, I am used to above-average levels of precipitation – in fact I quite like it, and usually prefer it to hot, sunny weather – but three days of rain without a single break was a bit much, even for me.

It was certainly “a bit much” for Pakistan.  The north of the country is mountainous, and local drainage systems are unable to cope with the amount of rain that fell in the last few days.  Drains overflowed, rivers swelled, and all of that water, millions and millions of gallons of it, rushed downhill.  The result was predictable: widespread flooding across the north of the country.  As of this morning over 100 people have been killed and thousands more made homeless.  In some areas entire streets are underwater, entire neighbourhoods swamped by the foaming torrent.

As always, it is the poor that suffer the most.  The areas in which they can afford to live are those most susceptible to flooding – the land there is cheap for a reason! – and so they are washed out of their homes, their livelihoods disappearing downstream.

This is a turbulent land.  

Back to Pakistan

September 3, 2014
Pakistan, Travel
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So after 2 months in the UK, 3 months in Canada, a lengthy pause in my blogging efforts, and several long-haul flights with children, we are back in Pakistan.  I had forgotten how dusty, humid, and interesting it is over here, and just how warm and kind the people are.

We have arrived at a time of political tension, with large protests in the capital and ongoing fighting in the tribal areas between the army and militants, but despite the difficulties it is genuinely wonderful to be back in our own home, driving our own car, in a country we have come to love.

I might even blog more regularly…after all, Pakistan is a remarkably interesting place, sometimes for the right reasons…

Two children, two lives

September 6, 2013
God, Pakistan, Parenthood
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Our third child, and second daughter, was born recently.  This leads me to make two observations: firstly, that three children are a LOT more work than two, and secondly, that life is unfair.

 I’ll explain.  A Pakistani friend of ours also had his third child recently.  Like us he had a boy, then a girl, and now another girl.  Like us he loves his children very much.  Like us he and his wife are devoted parents.  Like us they are delighted to have three healthy children.  But there the similarities end and the differences begin.

 Our kids have Western passports – two each, actually, since they have dual nationality.  For both of those countries the life expectancy is over 80 years.  The literacy rate is effectively 100%.  If we had to return to either of our home countries our kids would benefit from high-quality healthcare at a low cost.  Both of our home governments score highly on transparency ratings, since Western countries have largely eliminated corruption.  If we got into trouble our foreign offices would, in all probability, get us out of it.  While it’s impossible to say that our children will have trouble-free lives, their passports give them a ticket to a life of significant privilege.  They are probably among the most privileged children in the world.

 And our friends’ kids?  Pakistani life expectancy is 65 years, its literacy rate 57%.  Quality healthcare is available here, at a cost.  If you can’t pay for it, you can’t have it.  The average salary is around $3,000 a year, less than a tenth of that in the Western countries whose passports my children possess.  We went to visit our friend recently.  His new daughter, a month older than ours, weighs less now than our daughter did at birth, and she’s growing a lot more slowly.  This is partly due to the fact that she is being fed cow’s milk, since that is what the doctor recommended.  A better doctor would not recommend cow’s milk, but they can’t afford a better doctor, so their daughter’s development is suffering.

 So, to summarise, our daughters were born within a month of each other.  One is statistically likely to live 20% longer, be healthier, earn ten times more money, and is twice as likely to receive an education.

 May God have mercy on a world in which, even at birth, the paths of childrens’ lives are so unjustly laid out.

Who needs gas when you can push?

September 5, 2013
Pakistan, Snippets, Travel
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A while ago it became necessary, for various reasons, to make a trip to a town some hours to the north of Rawalpindi.  As this was before we purchased a car we had to make the trip by bus.  You might think that would be a hardship, public transport being generally regarded as less preferable to private, but Pakistan is blessed with the Daewoo bus company.  This company – Korean, I think – has brand-new, air-conditioned buses which run to time, which have TVs, and whose staff even go to the trouble of handing out free snacks and cold drinks during the journey.  It’s an excellent way to travel.

             Anyway, I digress.  We hopped in a taxi and started to make our way to the Daewoo terminal.  It was a spectacularly bad choice of vehicle: run-down, clunky, and in remarkably bad condition, even by Pakistani standards.  The rear windscreen was a piece of clingfilm.  It rattled and banged like a loose door in a strong wind.  The driver was intent on stopping to fill up with CNG (compressed natural gas, the same LPG that some people use in the UK).  We insisted that we were in a hurry, so he grudgingly agreed to get us there and fill up afterwards.

 “Do you have enough gas to get us there?” we asked, more than a little anxiously.

 “Oh yes, no problem.  Don’t worry” he assured us.

             Well, he didn’t.  About three hundred yards from the terminal the car gave one last, sickening rattle and the engine died.  Coasting to the terminal was out of the question since Mehrans have a top speed roughly equivalent to that of a sloth with a sprained ankle.  We came to a halt by the side of the road – a four lane road, with cars weaving in and out at high speed, I might add.  He jumped out and started to push.  I jumped out and started to help.  Jodie stayed in the car and started to pray.

             Pushing a car down a Pakistani highway is the kind of thing life insurance companies don’t cover you for.  If you read the list of exclusions it’s in there somewhere, between “training to be a lion tamer” and “flying metal-tipped kites during thunderstorms”.  Cars blared their horns as they swerved around us.  Buses screeched their brakes in anger as they narrowly avoided slamming into us.  And the driver and I plodded stolidly on.  We came to a junction where two more lanes of cars joined our road, meaning that even more cars were desperately trying to avoid hitting us.  It really was quite terrifying.

             And then it was over; we pushed the car to the side of the road, paid the driver, took our bags, and dashed to the bus station, only to find that instead of being five minutes late, as we had thought, we were actually forty-five minutes early, which gave us plenty of time to thank God for his protection and to vow never again to stop a taxi driver filling up with CNG.

Why Yoda was probably Pakistani

September 4, 2013
Pakistan, Snippets
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When you learn Urdu one of the things that will mess with your head is the word order.  It’s hard for a foreigner, especially an English-speaking one, to come to terms with it.  You have to forget the way that you’ve been taught to speak, to construct sentences, because in Urdu it just doesn’t work that way.  To give you an example, here is an English dialogue and its literal Urdu translation.

 – Good morning, how are you?

– I am fine thanks.  What is your name?

– My name is Imran.  Where are you going?

– I am going to the bazaar to buy bread.  After that I will go online to read the Sweaty Pilgrims blog.

– Ah yes, that is my favourite.  Such wonderful insight into Pakistani life!

– I find his treatment of Pakistani social customs to be most interesting.  Most foreigners have a bad impression of Pakistan.

– But then, dear brother, most foreigners form their opinions of Pakistan without having visited it.

– This is true.  The media has a most pernicious influence on the minds of Westerners.

 And in Urdu:

 – Peace, respectfully.  Your what condition is?

– I okay am.  Your name what is?

– My name Imran is.  You where going are?

– I bazaar going am, bread buy for.  This afterwards I internet on will go, Sweaty Pilgrims blog to read for.

– Ah yes, this my favourite is.  Such wonderful insight Pakistani life into!

– When Pakistani social customs about he writes, it very interesting is.  Almost all foreigners opinion is this, that Pakistani a bad country is.

– Yes, my brother, but most foreigners their own opinions Pakistan of make Pakistan to visit without.

– This true thing is.  Media’s influence Western minds on very bad is.

 And so on.  If you want to learn Urdu you have to make a mental shift.  No longer should you follow the rules of English grammar in an attempt to sound intellectual and correct; in order to fit in you need to accept that you’re going to end up sounding like Yoda, the little green wise man from Star Wars who is famed for saying things like “Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you” and “Patience you must have, young padawan”.

 Come to think of it, when you’re learning Urdu, “patience you must have” is pretty good advice too…

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