An Iraqi Ann Frank? A poignant blog from the other side of the world

My daughter discovered The Diary of Ann Frank last year, in fifth grade. Fortunately she had an exceptional teacher (a DSEA member, imagine that!) who taught not only the Holocaust but the context of the entire Nazi period.

For awhile, she was very much into finding diaries, but this interest fell off when she discovered that random diaries in normal times are not half so riveting.

Then I found HNK's blog, the diary of a young Iraqi woman currently attending pharmacy college in Mosul.

The war is in the background, of course, but not the foreground. That's reserved for the struggles of a remarkable young woman trying to find her way in a traditional society as the wheels fall off.

Some excerpts:

Salaam,

First, I am in a very bad mood right now, so if you are looking for joy, don’t waste your time.

Well, College, isn’t it what I was seeking, what I was looking for? Of course yes. And If they return me back to the past and ask me again what college I want to go, I will chose Pharmacy over and over again but I am really tired of studying and dissection frog and returning back home with no power to open my eyes and moving my leg.

I tired of not having a friend, a real friend. Why having a faithful friends became something impossible in this time? I missed my old friends who recently became perfect.

Leave “m” and “z” aside and talk about my fool behavior.

1- I make a fool of my self when I scream in the middle of physiology lab after the frog jump from my hand while I was trying to pithing it. The whole students looked at me and laughed* I was so close to cry that moment*

2- I made a mistake when I told the professor that there is a student who is not wearing the dressing for lab after he asked who did’t.

3- I make a joke of myself when I said my opinion about what are human’s right in peace, when I began my talking with coughing.

4- I make myself the most unwell come friend when I answer the questions ,the professor of physiology was asking, as the result, he like me, thinks that I am good in English pronunciation and he ask me my name. But in the other hand, most of the students began hating me.

5- I discover that I led myself to one of the colleges where geniuses are assembling to compete with each other’s. And I am now, feel so much fool and stupid.

I am so much not like myself today, so much UN friend with it, really not satisfied because I did’t study hard and not doing anything important for several of days.

I am feeling helpless.

Pray for me, please

During this month,

I thought a lot of me and who is really me!! And I decided that I need more time to spend with me and so I will work hard this year for me. Me, is the one that I am really don’t know, I don’t know what color she prefer? What desert she love? Which stories she like? And who is really she…

She, maybe the girl that survive,

The one that always be a live

Maybe the victim of this war,

The one who is really looking for

Maybe the rain that falling down,

The one who never want to get down

Maybe the weakest girl in world,

But not the weakest letter in these words

For the sake of me and my dreams, for the sake of that smile which was given to non but me, for the sake of my grandpa and for the sake of my country and for the sake of my religion and my God, I will be better person this year. I will find me.

There are people on the other side of the world.

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

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