dispatches from here

A motorcycle ride from the Syrian Security Forces...Read on for more details!

I’ve been getting a little bit of flak for not updating the blog in the past week or so, and I apologize.  But it wasn’t my fault, blame it on Bashar al-Assad.  And this (long) post is being written from the relative safety of Beirut!

A little bit of background.  Syria is a police state, but not a very good one.  Everything here is logged and asked about.  Want to get a hotel room? Passport please.  Want to use the internet? Passport please.  Want to get on a long distance bus?  Passport, occupation, father’s name, and mother’s name, please.  Arriving in Dier-Az Zur? Passport please.  Come this way, have a seat, get comfortable and answer these 10 questions.  At first it’s a bit scary, but it very quickly becomes annoying and time consuming.

And where does all this information go?  In dusty beat up binders in piles on the floor.  They aren’t indexed or organized in any particular fashion, and each time my info is jotted down in the officer’s sloppy Arabic handwriting, they spell name differently.  They have to transliterate from English and each person has their own way of doing.  And I don’t understand how it makes anyone safer or my less threatening if they know my father’s name…I could make up a different one each time and they’d never be able to figure it out.

Imagine this: someone decides to find me or where I’ve been. They have to call all of the thousands of police checkpoints across the country and have them look through their piles of binders for some guy whose name they spell differently each time. This is supposed to scare me? In America, while not a police state (yet), we’re tracked much better and more accurately.  If someone wanted to, they could figure out where I’ve been for every  second of every day for the past 10 years just based on my cell phone and credit card charges.

(continue reading…)

The satellite view of the Eastern Syrian Desert. There's basically lots and lots of sand and rocks, and the green strip bisecting it is the Euphrates river. Seen from above, you can really appreciate how important it has been throughout antiquity and how it was able to sustain civilization for thousands of years.

On our way to the eastern Syrian town of Hassake, we stopped over in a small town on the Euphrates River called Dier as-Zur for the night.  This has got to be one of the dustiest places I have ever been, with a fresh daily 3mm coat of dust on everything in sight once the sun sets and the winds pick up. It actually hurts to breathe in the evenings and visibility is minimal.

During the day we wandered down to the banks of the Euphrates River and had a chance to see one of the two rivers that defined Mesopotamia and gave birth to the ‘fertile crescent’ and the first civilizations of the ancient Near East.

I came across a group of local kids swimming in the river and couldn’t pass up an opportunity for a baptism in the Euphrates.  Relatively clean water, cool and crisp, wide and slow moving.  A swim in the Euphrates is definitely an unforgettable experience.

The Euphrates at Dier Az Zur. This used to be an old Assyrian village many generations ago (the name means 'Small Church'), but there aren't any left there now. In the 1990's it turned in a boom town when oil was found nearby. Local kids were jumping off the bridge into the river, a temptation I was able to avoid. Those splashed in the river are me...swimming against the slow current.

Swimming with the local kids in the Euphrates!

Bedouin tents and families are sparsely scattered across the Syrian desert.  Although no longer living as traders and nomads, their homes and dress haven’t changed much and you’ll still see an occasional camel.

Bedouin tent in the desert, just off the side of the ruins in Palmyra

After a week and half of non-stop interviewing, filming, photographing, editing and translating, the project is nearly complete. In addition to the photodocumentary project I came here to do, I’ve joined forces with Adam Teale to wrap the photos in a short documentary film format. With the bulk of the work behind us, a first draft of the video completed and reviewed, we decided to leave Damascus and continue exploring Syria. Damascus definitely has a different feel and atmosphere from the rest of Syria. It’s a harsh, mean city where everything you try to do is a serious chafe and it seems everyone is out to get you. It didn’t help that I was living in the refugee camp, which is even worse than the rest of Damascus. After my fourth week there, I’m pretty excited to get out.

I’ve been pretty busy in Damascus with project related work. Aside from the refugee health project, I’ve also been working on my MD thesis, which is the physician workforce distribution and health policy research I did in the year between my third and fourth years of med school. The refugee health project is nearly complete, I just submitted the final version of my thesis (from Damascus and before the deadline!), and now I feel hugely relieved and free to travel.

Our first stop was Palmyra, about 4 hours by bus from Damascus and one of the most impressive archaeological sites in Syria. Although its mentioned in Assyrian texts from Mari dating to the 2nd millennium BCE, it was incorporated into the Seleucid Empire in the second century AD, and later grew in prosperity under Roman rule.

Riding through four hours of flat, barren desert to Palmyra. Eastern Syria really looks like the photos that the Mars Rovers send back.

Sunset in the desert

The Temple of Bel! The god after whom I was named...I wasn't sure if I should pray here, or wait and be prayed to...so I just took pictures instead.