heavy cold.. holiday ahead..

Don't know how I got this heavy cold, and it was getting worse after two days slight symptoms. I called mum and dad yesterday to finally tell them that i went to Iraq.

"ok." that was their only reply.
"Yeah, I was wondering a little bit why you didn't call me last Friday. Is iraq good?"
It was me this time to become silent..
They do become tougher because their crazy daughter.

China is freezingly cold these days, and it's even snowing in the south, with no heating system. Here, the tempreture is only now lower than 10, and we are using heater everywhere. Strange.

Holiday's coming on Friday. Finally :)

Great Robert

Heh heh, Nobel is assessed and awarded by human, so when we feel helpless, desperate, it shows in the award too. It's also a product of the era, isn't it? So now this Nobel Peace will be remembered togehter with our ere. That's somehow interesting to me.

I don't know what can be called real "peace", but I have to say in this hectic and disordered time, someone like Obama could peace me a little bit, leaving aside the whole world.

But materialists, I do respect and appreciate your existence :)
To to frank, I know quite a little about politics or foreign poliby, although I am doing lots of reading now!

Was watching AlJazeera this morning, on which a words from Robert Fisk depuzzled me a bit. He said, "Obama is not a bad guy. He is a good guy. But the government is not about good guy or bad guy. I am sorry. The government is about power. It's about how to use the power ***ly." (Look, I don't remember the most key word. Otherwise, I am still happy thinking Obama is an amazing guy:)

I just felt Fisk is something extrodinary. Then here we go.

Having been based in Beirut for 30 more years, Robert Fisk is 63 years old now, and reported:
Northern Ireland troubles in the 1970s,
the Portuguese Revolution in 1974,
the Lebanese Civil War, the Iranian revolution in 1979,
the Soviet war in Afghanistan,
the Iran–Iraq War,
the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

A vernacular Arabic speaker, he is one of few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden, three times between 1994 and 1997.

Once in a interview with Bin Ladin,
Bin Ladin said, "Mr Robert, one of our brothers had a dream. He dreamed ... that you were a spiritual person ... this means you are a true Muslim."
Fisk replied, "Sheikh Osama, I am not a Muslim ... I am a journalist."

Bellow is his commonts on The Independent, reads like it just lied in his mind and he picked them in one minute.
Hope I can visit him when going to Beirut.
Take care gramp. Cheers!

"Robert Fisk: Obama, man of peace? No, just a Nobel prize of a mistake”
Sunday, 11 October 2009

His Middle East policy is collapsing. The Israelis have taunted him by ignoring his demand for an end to settlement-building and by continuing to build their colonies on Arab land. His special envoy is bluntly told by the Israelis that an Arab-Israel peace will take "many years". Now he wants the Palestinians to talk peace to Israel without conditions. He put pressure on the Palestinian leader to throw away the opportunity of international scrutiny of UN Judge Goldstone's damning indictment of Israeli war crimes in Gaza while his Assistant Secretary of State said that the Goldstone report was "seriously flawed". After breaking his pre-election promise to call the 1915 Armenian massacres by Ottoman Turkey a genocide, he has urged the Armenians to sign a treaty with Turkey, again "without pre-conditions". His army is still facing an insurgency in Iraq. He cannot decide how to win "his" war in Afghanistan. I shall not mention Iran.


And now President Barack Obama has just won the Nobel Peace Prize. After only eight months in office. Not bad. No wonder he said he was "humbled" when told the news. He should have felt humiliated. But perhaps weakness becomes a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Shimon Peres won it, too, and he never won an Israeli election. Yasser Arafat won it. And look what happened to him. For the first time in history, the Norwegian Nobel committee awarded its peace prize to a man who has achieved nothing – in the faint hope that he will do something good in the future. That's how bad things are. That's how explosive the Middle East has become.

Isn't there anyone in the White House to remind Mr Obama that the Israelis have never obliged a US president who asked for an end to the building of colonies for Jews – and Jews only – on Arab land? Bill Clinton demanded this – it was written into the Oslo accords – and the Israelis ignored him. George W Bush demanded an end to the fighting in Jenin nine years ago. The Israelis ignored him. Mr Obama demands a total end to all settlement construction. "They just don't get it, do they?" an Israeli minister – apparently Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – was reported to have said when the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, reiterated her president's words. That's what Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's crackpot foreign minister – he's not as much a crackpot as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but he's getting close – said again on Thursday. "Whoever says it's possible to reach in the coming years a comprehensive agreement," he announced before meeting Mr Obama's benighted and elderly envoy George Mitchell, "... simply doesn't understand the reality."

"Petra" way of life

Have been working everyday with "western style", I get used to the western politeness - "how are you" with every hello, and asking about how the weekend/holiday was going is a must.

Though sometimes I am still a little bit skeptical about whether the people who ask these questions are actually care about the answer, I am, at the same time, trying to give an appropriate reply in an eanest but precise way.

At today's lunch time, C was talking about his no-relaxing-at-all schedual during the 6 days Eid holiday, with almost everyday waking up early and going to bed late. I said I was quite relaxed, though, staying with the moon and stars, watching the mountain and enjoying reading. Given that I was still quite happy and satisfied even I wasted the two-day visit ticket by going only one day, I am much easier now, right?

Seriously, after been to not few places, I am now more relaxed with "said-to-be amazing sight scene", and very fine with some sacrifice. When the 23-year-old engineering consultant girl did climb the hill twice, only wanting to see the Treasuty from a commanding position, I though to myself, ok, another conquer-oriented kind of traveller.

Petra is beautiful. The second day, when I was sipping my mint black tea, half lying on the couch, I was wondering what is exactly the thing that moved me. After I climb a lot under the strong sundhine, and finally arrived at the Monastry, what made my heart tempted?

Could be architechture, since I always think I like the that. Archiology? But I seldom know what's link between archiology and the huge rock in front of me.

The second morning, when I sit for long reading my "best-seller kind of modern history", with the moutain so far awy but just in front of my eyes, I guess I somehow sense the answer.

Those buildings, though unconsiderably huge, are not interupting, deserted to be one natual part of their surroundings. They tell an alien way of life living. Different from that of modern society, the viteness, over-rational, and universal arrogent, the clearly, unfinely-cut lines of those tomb and temple are dictioning love and passion. They didn't know much about the world. They lived their life bold, direct, eanest, and most touching for me, humbly frank.

The third day, J and I lied in the middle of Wadi Rum, chatting in conpletely darkness, except stars, milky way, and meteorites that so much excited us now and then. I told him, the word of civilization in Chinese language combines of two characteristics, which respectivly means "wording" and "Lightening". I understand them as to orderly record things, and digging every unknown into somewhat discovery, which may not be so useful, but enough to satisfy the desire of conquering.

I just find the way of living touching me so much.

Back and Restart

It's has been REALLY long since my last update here.

This blog was initially set up for the citizen journalism course when I was in Dikili, Turkey last summer, but to be honest, I never pay special attention to it. Shame... :(

I changed the name of this blog to "Play for me", the same but in English as the theme of my chinese blog. And seriously plan to consider it as another sweet online home.

Will do more to make here a little bit homy afterwards.

^_^

(Also starting my Flickr. happiness~)

Pakistan---Many children, Little childhood

Have been in Pakistan for then days..

Before setting off for villages, I got a old version of "The Kite Runner" in a sencond-hand book store in Boat Basin. Given the frequent power failure and the mosquitos who extremely loved me, the book did saved my day, hehe..

"There are many children in Afghanistan, but little childhood." Actually the same situation in Pakistan. As I said when talking to Mr. Fazal this morning in his car to office, I was sad to see i villages the same eye expression in the girls who are ten and the women who are thirty. They have to.

What if I was born there...

THE LITTLE PRINCE INSIDE

I like to keep things in mind through sounds.

They are all amazing people who I interviewed yesterday. I always enjoy the interview in which the person beside or in front of me is more like talking to himself, and for me, being a listener is already a lot...



THE LITTLE PRINCE INSIDE

China earthquake brings faulty school design to the fore

China earthquake brings faulty school design to the fore
By Andrew C. Revkin

The enormous loss of life in collapsed schools around China's quake-stricken Sichuan Province could have been significantly reduced using known methods for designing or retrofitting structures in earthquake zones, several experts on global hazards said.

But China is just one of many countries with known earthquake vulnerability that has been slow to transform schools - a keystone of any community - from potential death traps into havens, these experts and some community campaigners for school safety said.

Hundreds of students are thought to have perished in schools during the earthquake.

Experts on earthquake dangers have warned for years that tens of millions of students in thousands of schools, from Asia to the Americas, face similar risks, yet programs to reinforce existing schools or require that new ones be built to extra-sturdy standards are inconsistent, slow and inadequately financed.

While earthquakes can sometimes exact a far wider toll on other public buildings, school collapses are particularly wrenching, development officials and experts say, because students are often what propel a struggling nation from poverty to prosperity.

In 2004, the 30-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a study, "Keeping Schools Safe in Earthquakes," concluding that schools "routinely" collapsed in earthquakes around the world because of avoidable design or construction errors, or because existing laws and building codes were not enforced.

"Unless action is taken immediately to address this problem, much greater loss of life and property will occur," the report says.

The risks are growing, experts say, as populations in poor regions continue to rise and the world, rich and poor, shifts ever more toward urban centers, many with well-charted seismic threats.

In recent years, there have been deadly school collapses after earthquakes in Italy, Algeria, Morocco and Turkey. Most notably, in Pakistan on Oct. 8, 2005, at least 17,000 children died as more than 7,000 schools collapsed after a powerful jolt shook a mountainous region near the Indian border.

Similar risks, and delays in reducing them, exist in countries rich and poor from the Americas across Europe and Asia.

In 2006, Brian Tucker, an earthquake specialist who runs a private group, GeoHazards International, presented a study on schools to the Economic Cooperation Organization, a group of 10 countries in Europe and Asia. The analysis found that 180 million people, including 40 million school-age children, faced "an earthquake risk equal to that of northern Pakistan." Tucker also was a co-author of the 2004 OECD report.



Delays in addressing such threats sometimes result less from financing and engineering than from societal inertia, given competing problems and the unpredictable nature of earthquakes, said Ben Wisner, a former geography professor at California State University, Long Beach, and a founder of the Coalition for Global School Safety.

Often, money and technology are not the issue, he said, so much as access to basic information about risks and simple ways to bolster buildings.

"On the whole, the cost of designing and building a school, say, a three-story junior high school in Mexico City, is only about 5 percent higher," Wisner said. "You don't necessarily design a building to avoid collapse, but design so that it's a survivable collapse. You want large voids so they can be accessed by rescuers."

There have been some successful efforts to reinforce schools, in places including Katmandu, Nepal, and parts of Turkey, he said.

Progress often is a result of persistent pressure by a particular engineer or safety campaigner.

The successes are far outnumbered by places that still face calamity on the scale of that seen in Sichuan, he and others said.

And the risks are not limited to poor or emerging countries. In Vancouver, British Columbia, parents' groups have been agitating to accelerate a decades-long program aimed at bringing schools up to modern earthquake standards.

While there is no reliable global tally of unsafe schools in quake zones, regional snapshots are chillingly clear. A report being presented at an international conference on school safety, coincidentally beginning on Wednesday in Islamabad, says that more than 80 percent of schools in Pakistan are unprotected from shocks like the one in October 2005.

The inertia is one result of a range of factors, including deep poverty in some places and political immobility in others.

"It's so disappointing to see these things happening again and again - little kids caught in a collapsed school building," aid Thomas Parsons, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California.

Around Sichuan, the earthquake may well have raised the danger level on nearby faults, Parsons said, noting a 2007 paper mapping the region's unstable underpinnings.