This post is by Rich

It's 8:43pm on Wednesday, August 1, and we returned to the Guest House a few minutes ago. Today was another day of adventure exploring Karachi. Today Group Two, my group, visited Old Karachi, the Shri Laxmi Naryan Hindu Temple, and Frere Hall. After exploring, we returned to The School of Writing for writing and sharing, and the facilitators planned for tomorrow's work.

While riding along in the bus between sites, Mohsin and I invited Annie to join the 2019 ABL Teacher cohort, and she said she was excited to do so. We quickly began making plans for an ABL-TSW conference in 2020, with student and teacher programs in Karachi and Lahore, and a professional development sessions for faculty at Habib University. The work has just begun!

The sharing session this afternoon was a real breakthrough. Every single student shared a piece of writing. Some shared in English, some in Urdu. They supported each other. They used specific sensory details. When a student read in Urdu, I didn't know exactly what they were saying, but I *felt* it. Today, I feel like our student participants really understand what we're trying to do here. And just in time. Tomorrow, Thursday, is a busy work day, at The School of Writing. We will curate photographs, edit writing, and divide into two groups. One group will work with Amtul and Julia to develop a theater performance, and the other will work with Alan to develop a musical performance. It's all leading up to our big show, a public exhibition at T2F (a.k.a. "The Second Floor"), a community arts space, on Friday afternoon.

This evening, Annie took several of us shopping for jewelry at the markets. I selected two gold necklaces with matching earrings, and Annie did the bargaining. The original asking from was Rs. 1800 each. By the time Annie got done, I paid Rs. 2500 for both - about $22 US. She is indeed an expert shopper. Dinner was a quick stop at Mr. Burger, Karachi's fledgling competition for the Burger Kings of the world. I can report with authority that the chicken sandwich at Mr. Burger is far superior to anything US fast food has to offer.

While my group was exploring those three places, Group One went to the three places we went to yesterday. And yes, both Alan and Julia rode camels on Karachi's Sea View beach. Some things you don't know are on your bucket list until you do them.

Our first stop today was Old Karachi, the city's oldest commercial district. We walked down the street, observing the shops and people, and I learned how to cross a busy city street like a Pakistani. It resembles the old American video game "Frogger." The roads are packed with motorbikes, rickshaws, cars, pedestrians, an the occasional animal cart. You look for openings and you go.

Having been raised in a family hardware store, I was excited to see a real Karachi hardware store:

 As we walked, we passed by the New Menom Masjid Mosque, the largest mosque in Karachi, with capacity for 10,000 people. Devout Muslims pray five times a day, and men are encouraged to do so at a mosque. Women are generally expected to pray at home, or if they do visit the mosque, there is a separate praying area for them. Mohsin asked, and to our surprise, we were given permission, to enter the mosque. Annie was with us, and she had to remain in the ladies' area while Mohsin, Brendan and I explored the mosque. 

I spoke with Annie later about the irony of two white Irish-Catholic men from Boston being allowed to explore the mosque while a Pakistani woman who has lived her her whole life is not allowed. To our further surprise, we were allowed to enter the madrasa that was connected to the mosque. Think of it like a parochial school connected to a church in the Christian tradition. At a madrasa, the Koran is the primary text, although students also student other subjects such as math and science. In the madrasa, students and teachers sit on the floor in small groups, studying their lessons. One goal of the madrasa it to memorize the entire Koran. It usually takes at least three years to do so, and is considered a great accomplishment. One who does can then take the name Hafez. One of the teachers at the school spoke proudly of a student who had memorized the Koran in seven months, eleven days - a record for this madrasa.

The New Memon Masjid mosque was built in 1949, just after the partition that split India in two, and created Pakistan as a majority-Muslim country. At the time of partition, many Hindus who were living in the area moved away, into India, while many Muslims in what is now India moved into Pakistan.

Our second stop was the Shri Laxmi Naryan Hindu Temple, on the waterfront. To me, the location seemed odd. It was right on the water front, part of the port. You go under a bridge to get to it, and the shipping docks are nearby, as well as two water-front office buildings under construction. The Temple is located on the waterfront, which is important for ritual. Our students were enraptured with the displays of Hindu gods.

Our third and final stop of today's tour was Frere Hall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frere_Hall
 It's surprising to me to realize that Karachi is a such a young city. It was basically a small fishing village before the British East India Tea Company arrived with a gun boat in 1839 and colonized it, turning Karachi into a shipping port for goods from the Pakistani interior. The indigenous folks opposed colonization, and there was a major rebellion in 1857. The British government then sent the army, and occupied Karachi with the military for decades. During this time, they also built what are now some of the most famous places in Karachi, including Frere Hall. It's a lovely old building that dates from 1865. It was originally built to be city hall, and has had a variety of other purposes. Today it houses a library on the first floor (quintessentially dusty, with a complete set of Shakespeare dating from 1893). The second floor (or, first flood, as they say here), is a museum.  The famous Pakistani artist Sadequain  was halfway done painting a mural on the ceiling when he died in 1987. The museum now hosts a collection of his work.

While were at Frere Hall, we stumbled into a film crew from "I am Karachi," an organization seeking to document life in Karachi and to promote the country. They invited our students to form an impromptu chorus and sing the Pakistani national anthem, and they agreed to do so. Its a beautiful song - to my ear much prettier than the US anthem.

On the way up to the second (first) floor of Frere Hall, I encountered this wall text:

It's hard to read this image, but basically it says that this building was erected in honor of Sir Henry Bartle Frere in commemoration of his "nearly nine years" of service as colonial administrator of the Sindh province, and the great esteem in which the people held him. I call bullshit. Sir Henry Bartle Frere was the colonial adminstrator at the time of the 1857 rebellion, and was knighted for helping to crush the rebellion. He does not seem like an admirable figure. Eventually he was discredited for service in East Africa, but not before Frere Hall was built in his honor.

And so I am left with some perplexing questions. Empress Market and Frere Hall were both designed and  built by British colonizers. Actually, I feel certain that the Brits didn't do much of the building - local people probably did. They are symbols of a brutal, racist, violent, colonizing era. And yet, today they are quintessentially Karachi, used by Pakistanis for commerce and culture, celebrating Karachi and its way of life. What do we make of such spaces? of such places? Are they legacies of colonialism, or are they the heart of Karachi? Or both?  In light of the movement in the US to remove Confederate statues, or to rename the ALA's Children's Book award away from Laura Ingalls Wilder because of the racist content of her books, and the ongoing campaign to change the racist name of professional sports teams in the US, it's got me thinking.

Thanks for reading,
Rich