Still the newbie

Ok, so for all you readers out there, I should warn you that the postings on this blog can be rather random and may appear uncoordinated at times. For that, I apologise ahead of time.

In any case, I'm at the end of the work day on day 2 here. Suffice to say that it was a crazy day with meetings on projects and proposals etc. and I am completely overwhelmed!! Not really sure how to proceed next. I do know that the coming weeks will be even more insane with almost 1 1/2 weeks of travel back-to-back; visiting project sites in Sindh & Punjab provinces, as well as those in Afghanistan and also the HQ in Karachi as well as the offices in Lahore and Kabul. During the course of these visits, there are deadlines to meet...Oy!! But this is what I signed up for and I'm looking forward to it. I just hope I still have my head above the water and don't drown in the meantime!

I had my security briefing today. Surprisingly, I wasn't as freaked out as I thought I would be at the end of it. There's a long list of restricted areas in Greater Islamabad. The list includes the neighboring city of Rawalpindi and also sections of Islamabad including Karachi Company, Melody, Peshawar More, Golra Sharif etc. Needless to say that none of these names mean anything to me at this point as I am still trying to get my bearings straight. Being picked up from home and dropped off at the office, which are really close by doesn't help me get to know the city any better. I have gone to the nearby market/bazaar, which is across the main road from where I live but that's about it (of course, not forgetting my brief drive-by around the city with a colleague on Saturday).

There are places we are allowed to go but it's limited to a select few areas of the city. Unfortunately for me, all the usual things that I would do in terms of moving around, i.e using public transport etc. are off-limits - no riding buses van minibuses, flagging taxis on the road (though using Radio Cabs is fine but I need to get clearance first). Otherwise, the drivers from my office are available to take us to most of where we want to go; we just need to give them a bit of advanced notice. This is all going to take a lot of getting-used to, considering that I had unrestricted access to everywhere I wanted to go previously in Malaysia and also in the US. Now, Kenya came with some limitations but I managed to get around them eventually. Having said that, I'm not overly concerned about this.

Islamabad is not really a conventional city. It appears to me to be more of a collection of self-contained suburbs that are its respective Sectors. It reminds me of the federal administrative centre of Malaysia - Putrajaya. Putrajaya is a planned city constructed in the 1990s and has most ammenities that its residents need. However, apart from the government offices that are based there, the city has no life, compared to Kuala Lumpur (KL) and its rapidly expanding suburbs and twin cities. Islamabad is a similarly planned city, though done much earlier in the 1960s, after the then capital, Karachi began to get too congested. Now people from Karachi and Lahore tell me that they consider ISB to be a "dead city". Now there is certainly more life here in ISB than in Putrajaya, but Islamabad certainly lacks the conventional nightlife to which I have become accustomed in other cities across the globe - KL, Singapore, Boston, New York, Hong Kong, Nairobi etc.

One of the issues facing Pakistan is an apparent scarcity in electricity supply (though most people seem to think it's just a political ploy). Load-shedding (the scheduled interruption of power supply for a set period of time) is a daily occurrence here. In Islamabad, it happens about 2-3 times a day for an hour each time. In some other cities like Lahore and Karachi, it happens more frequently. Still in some other areas it can happen for up to 12-hours at a time, which is simply mind-boggling. Interestingly enough, the government is asking businesses to close at 8 or 9 pm to conserve energy. This is absolutely ridiculous from my point of view as it stifles the economy and interrupts people's lives significantly. An obvious alternative is for the government to increase the power supply to meet the demand of its people. There are a wide range of sources - solar comes to mind given the amount of sunlight Pakistan receives. Granted that this is an expensive method, but like most countries, I don't think that there is a shortage of money. The resources just need to be channeled appropriately and leakages (read: corruption) plugged. But the other consideration here is that a majority of this country's resources and money is channeled towards the military. The Military in Pakistan is the country's leviathan and the most established institution - larger and more powerful than the government itself. I will visit this topic later.

Well that's all I have for this round. So till the next time, I bid you Khuda Haafiz...

Arrived at destination

Ok folks, just a quick update to note that I have finally arrived at my destination - Islamabad, my new home for the next 1-3 years. I arrived on Friday evening (23rd April 2010) just a little after 10 pm and am now settled in my new apartment, which I'm sharing with 2 other colleagues in what is known as Staff House 2.

Islamabad is an interesting place. I'm impressed with the roads - wide boulevards and highways. Traffic isn't as chaotic as I expected it to be. The houses that I've seen in this city so far are MASSIVE. The streets are relatively clean and the views of the Margala Hills are just magnificent. I have however, been told that Islamabad is not representative of Pakistan at all and is a rather "fake" city. Islamabad's twin city, Rawalpindi, which is located about 15-20 km away is quite the opposite, or so I'm told.

From what I gather, Islamabad is a planned city that was built some time in the 1960s. The city is divided into "Sectors" and each sector is self-contained with its own markets/bazaars. One thing that I do like about this place is that there are hardly any shopping malls here. Coming from Malaysia where almost everything is located in one shopping mall or another, it is nice to see smaller businesses thrive in an urban environment.

I will write more on this subject later as I have to leave the office now. Till the next post, khuda haafiz.

In Transit

Ok.... so I've been putting off creating a blog for the longest time but I think it's time I went ahead and did it. So, as I sit here in the CIP Lounge at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi International Airport, I finally bit the bullet and signed up for an account on blogger and created this page.

Alas, I can't really update it too much as I have to leave the comforts of this little slice of heaven to go catch my connecting flight to Islamabad where I will begin my new adventure as a humanitarian aid worker.

With that stated, I will end this for now and get back to it later once I've settled in to my new "home" in "Isloo" as what I understand the locals call their capital city.

Cheers for now!