i ordered this t-shirt the other day:

The American Traveler International Apology Shirt

image via Monkey Media Report.

needless to say, i don't think i will wear it in uzbekistan next september.

i finished the warrior's honor just now. its nonfiction, a collection of 5 essays about ethnic violence and ethics in international affairs. each essay had a different focus, but the overall idea was an exploration of whether and how ethics can be a basis for international policy. one of my favorite essay was "the narcissism of minor differences," an attempt to explain how things that can seem like minor unimportant characteristics in a multi-ethnic society (e.g. whether one is a serb or a croat in tito's yugoslavia) can, within a matter of only a few years, turn into the basis for slaughtering each other. my other favorite was the title track, an essay entitled "the warrior's honor," an essay about the international red cross. its limited mandate (treat the sick and wounded, regardless of whether it inadvertently aids the aggressor in the conflict or even genocide) and the ethic paradoxes such a limited mandate creates. (the chapter before that is a similar analysis of the u.n.)

what really struck me about the book was how much it is a product of a era that has passed. it was written in 1997, when questions of whether the west should intervene in a place were regularly argued with ethical language (e.g. bosnia, rwanda, burundi, the never quite created cambodian war crimes tribunal, etc) rather than the black and white language of "terrorists" or "preemptive strikes" (implying self-defense rather than a goal of stopping injustice) we hear today. i was not always in favor if the earlier ethics-based interventions, but i miss the time when what the end result of our intervention would look like was at least taken seriously as part of the debate.

my next read will be the corrections by jonathan franzen, a book that everyone else read about a year and a half ago. i tend to avoid books when they first come out and everyone is talking about them. first, all the publicity turns me off, although i often will seek out the book when things calm down later. also, and more importantly, i am too cheap to buy the hardback.

i think this is the first time i have blogged thrice in a single day. this will probably be the last time. we're having friends over for dinner and game-playing tonight. until next time...

as you can probably tell from my 6/15/03 post (does anyone know how to make that a jump-to link to the appropriate entry in my blog?), i like to travel to out of the way places. at least whenever i get the chance to sneak off from the world of lawyering. my next trip will be to uzbekistan, the only place i have ever tried but failed to get to (maybe i will tell that story some other time).

anyway, because of my interest in uzbekistan, i have been paying particular attention to sean-paul of agonist fame in his current travelogue, the silkroad journal. his trip is much more ambitious than anything i have time to do, he's going from istanbul to bombay over the course of two months. he arrived in uzbekistan earlier this week, and so i'm paying particular attention to what he is posting these days.

uzbekistan borders afghanistan, a place where the u.s. still has a sizeable number of troops, but has entirely fallen off the media map these days. many blogs have complained how, after the president declared victory in iraq, news of the daily casualties from iraq have disappeared from the front pages of american newspapers and been relegated to smaller stories farther into the paper. as much as the press is downplaying the quietly building iraqi body-count, news from afghanistan has been pushed even more to the margins of the daily news, if it is even mentioned at all. how many of us noticed the recent casualties in afghanistan from just two days ago? if nothing else, everyone should read about sean-paul's encounter with some american soldiers in tashkent, to get a rare first hand account of at least some soldiers on the ground in afghanistan and their view the situation there.

the bush administration is proposing a rule change which would effectively eliminate the overtime of 8 million employees in the u.s. essentially the rule change would make it easier for employees who would otherwise be entitled to overtime pay under the fair labor standards act to be classified as an exempt employee from the federal overtime rules. if an employee is exempt, the law does not require any additional pay for overtime work. its a technical change in the regulations interpreting the law that is getting virtually no coverage, but will effect the take home pay of a lot of people if it goes into effect. this is the type of thing that could easily be used to embarass the administration into changing. if anyone notices, that is.

on a related note, cathy stumbled upon the perfect metaphor for what it feels like to live in america under this administration

i just finished reading the full text of Lawrence v. Texas, the case that overruled Bowers v. Hardwick. several months ago, i predicted that lawrence would go the other way. then, after speaking to another lawyer friend, he convinced me that the court would strike down the texas anti-sodomy law and but avoid overruling bowers by using the equal protection clause, rather than the due process clause. wrong again, the court relied on the due process clause and overruled bowers (only o'conner went the equal protection route). its nice to be wrong

i just redid the template. still not all that i wanted, but its better than the big yellow titles on my old sidebar. none of the blogger templates do much for me, but this one seems okay, at least until i'm sick of it, or until my html improves enough to really do what i want.

today i had oral surgery. it only lasted about an hour and the bottom half of my face is still numb. being conscious for surgery on one's face is an odd experience. i guess almost all of us have been there, but that's what i spent the last hour thinking about so, like it or not, that's the blather for today.

they numbed me up, then started working away. i couldn't feel anything, except for the occasional tug of my head in one direction or the other. but the dentist and his assistant spent the whole time talking about the state of my mouth, which i couldn't see, of course, but it kept me wondering if things were going okay. they never seemed to get too excited, which i took to be a good sign.

i would also occasionally catch a glimpse of a red-tinged metallic instrument, which i assumed was some kind of knife oozing with bloody remains of what used to be my gums. there were also occasional flashes of red reflected in the glass above me. or maybe i imagined it. did i mention i didn't have my glasses on? i knew it was almost over when they started sewing. i saw the red thread go in and out of my mouth and my head was pushed back and forth with each stroke. then they stopped and realized that the dental hygienists forgot the bandages so she ran off to find them. i guess my mouth was bleeding a lot, because the dental surgeon was left holding my head, applying pressure to that senseless area around my lower lip. and so i lay there, a strange dentist cradling my head and occasionally dabbling what i assumed to be blood from my lips. i felt like i was in a cheesy war movie and had the sudden urge to give a melodramatic speech. luckily there was so much crap in my mouth, i couldn't talk.

so now i probably can't eat normally for another week and i'm not sure how good of a shape i will be in after the numbness wears off. i have a legal conference tomorrow in trenton. (did i mention to whoever reads this and doesn't know my secret identity that i am a lawyer? or that i don't live in trenton?) hopefully, i will be able to do more than sit there and drool blood (on the other hand, that could intimidate the other side)

because i probably can't do much, i think i'm gonna spend a lot of my time in the next few days reading. i started a warrior's honor by michael ignatieff. hopefully, the fact that i can't do much else will also mean i will work on my arabic more.

i'm in no mood for political rants. maybe it will become an every other post thing. plenty of outrageous things are going on though. like this and this and this. there's more too, but go find them yourself.

do i have to do everything around here?

arabic was canceled last night, so i spent the evening reading the life of pi. i was really hooked. i stayed up until i finished it. i guess the rest of the world was reading harry potter

i've decided i hate my blog template. one of these days i gotta mess with it some more.

it was nice to see that krugman has the same sense of irony as i do.

so that's apparently what happens when i blog after reading the sunday paper.

meanwhile, it looks like some other people are also mentioning the exaggerated saddam-osama connection. like retired general wesley clark's appearance on meet the press where he stated that the bush administration contacted him on the morning of september 11, 2001 and tried to get him to say the 9-11 attacks were connected with iraq. nevertheless, it seems clark's statements about white house pressure weren't mentioned by many other news sources. cursor also pointed me to this and this. the latter is an a report from september 2002 concerning the lack of evidence of a iraq-al-qaeda connection. more surprisingly, last january bush even admitted that he "cannot make [the] claim" that saddam and al-qaeda were linked. of course, that didn't stop him from citing a connection to al-qaeda at virtually every public pronouncement both before and after that date, including his march 17, 2003 speech that explained the reasons for invading iraq. (ya gotta love the irony of the heading in that last link, which is from the white house's own web site: "Iraq Denial and Deception"). will anyone even ask bush about his contradictory statements?

finally, for an overall summary of the selling of the war in iraq there's this

the new york times this morning is wondering whether the president lied. in the print edition, the headline for the continuation of the article is "is exaggerating the same as lying?" the answer is, of course not. but the president's critics are not saying he's exaggerating. they say he's lying.

the times article only discusses bush's pre-war statements about weapons of mass destruction and his mis-statements about who gets the benefits of the recently passed tax cut. notably absent is any reference to several other reports suggesting the administration's deception, most recently the report earlier this week that the white house removed information about global warming from an e.p.a. report, or earlier reports that cheney's visits to the c.i.a. may have influenced the agency's analysis of iraq. the latter two involve actions of the bush administration in general, whereas this sunday's times article focuses only on the president as an individual. by ignoring the administration's overall conduct. this allows the times article to conclude that the president did not "lie" because "there is no evidence the president did not believe what he was saying." in other words, it's not a lie so long as the administration deceives not only the public, but also the president.

actually, while others may disagree, i think the focus on the missing weapons of mass destruction is misguided. i'm happy that the bush administrations post-911 honeymoon may finally be ending and the press is finally bothering to question the veracity of what they say, albeit 3 to 4 months late. but putting that aside, we all know the bush administration did not sell the war on the american public with the theory that iraq had weapons of mass destruction. they sold the war by conflating iraq with al-qaeda and saddam hussein with osama bin laden. that's where the real lie was.

earlier this year several polls indicated that a large number of americans believed and probably still believe, erroneously, that some of the 9-11 hijackers were iraqi, or that saddam had been the mastermind of the 9-11 plot. the administration never made such claims, but they did everything short of saying so to create that impression. they floated all kinds of theories to create a saddam-osama connection. for example, the administration claimed mohammed atta met an iraqi agent in prague just prior to september 11th, even after report that was thoroughly debunked when both the f.b.i. determined that atta was not in prague at the date of the meeting and czech intelligence announced that such a meeting never took place.

the bush administration also argued that intelligence reports that abu musab zarqawi, an al-qaeda associate, was present in baghdad somehow proved that saddam was cooperating with al-qaeda. the administration continued to push this theory even after c.i.a. director george tenet testified that there was no evidence that zarqawi was "under control of" the iraqi government. indeed, if the mere presence of an al-qaeda agent in a country equals that country's alliance with al-qaeda, then iraq should have been the least of our worries. al-qaeda cells have existed in britain, france, germany, pakistan, indonesia, canada, and yes, even the united states. by the same logic george bush would be in cahoots with al-qaeda. as far as I am aware, no major american news source pointed out this simple flaw in the administration's logic.

the administration also claimed that saddam and al-qaeda were linked because ansar al-islam, a militant kurdish group, was based in northern iraq and was possibly linked to al-qaeda. never mind that the kurdish region where the small patch of territory that ansar controlled was located was outside of the control of the hussein regime, there was no evidence of any connection between saddam's government and the group, and that ansar itself was hostile to saddam hussein and publicly denied any connection to saddam's government existed.

finally, when colin powell testified before congress to state the administration's reason to justify a war on iraq, he cited a recording by bin laden as proof that al-qaeda and iraq were allies. the recording itself, however, referred to saddam's regime as "the hypocrites of iraq" and (referencing that the secular socialist ideology of the baath party) referenced al-qaeda's "belief in the infidelity of socialists." in other words, while the recording did seek to encourage bin laden's followers to hold their nose and fight the u.s. in iraq, it did not establish any close relation between saddam's government and al-qaeda. indeed, it suggested precisely the opposite of what the administration claimed it says. isn't that a lie?

on top of all of that, the administration never mentioned any of the evidence suggesting that iraq and al-qaeda were not cooperating with each other. for example: the fact that the baath party is secular and openly hostile to political islamic movements like al-qaeda; bin laden's repeated public denunciations of secular arab regimes, including the iraqi baath party; the fact that any al-qaeda adherent would have been arrested in saddam's iraq for broadcasting any bin laden speech under iraq's tough policies against political islam; and the fact that iraq refused to recognize the taliban as the government in afghanistan ("allies" in the war against terror saudi arabia, the u.a.e., and pakistan had no such qualms). on the other hand, the major media outlets in the u.s didn't bother to point out these problems with the bush administration's theories either.

weapons of mass destruction was the legal hook the administration used in its attempt to convince the nations of the world and the u.n. that an attack on iraq was justified. it was the al-qaeda connection that, in my opinion, explains the war's support among the american public. while bush spoke often about iraq's dangerous weapons program in the days leading up to the war, he always found a way to work in a reference to al-qaeda, the world trade center, or 9-11. even now, american troops in iraq cite the al-qaeda connection as their motivation for being there this is the result of the misinformation campaign we should be paying attention to.

ironically, post-war iraq is turning into what bush claimed it was under saddam. bush argued that saddam allowed terrorists to operate freely in iraq and there was a danger that iraq would allow terrorists to get weapons of mass destruction. in fact, the baathist regime did not tolerate any such organizations that could pose a threat to saddam's rule, and thus the miliary wings of terrorists organizations could not operate freely in areas in saddam's iraq. similarly, iraq jealously guarded its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons capabilities, making it unlikely that any of those weapons (if they existed) could fall into the hands of terrorists). american occupying forces have been less zealous about guarding anything other than oil facilities in iraq. if anything, the u.s. has given al-qaeda the opportunity to take root in iraq, an opportunity that it did not have when saddam was in charge. why isn't anyone demanding an inquiry into that?

its a raining raining raining, which is completely fine with me.

on days like today i want to just sit around and read all day. but today, we will instead cram more crap into our apartment. first a new futon is being delivered at some point within the next hour and then, after the futon finally cares to show up, we will buy a few more major appliances.

meanwhile, as i sit waiting for the futon to be delivered, i probably should be memorizing the speech at the beginning of chapter 16 of al-kitaab fii ta3allum al-3arabiyya: al-juz' al-awal, but instead i'm shizzolating all of the blogs on my list to see how they come out. my favorite so far is the shizzolated version of josh corey's blog.

for the record: i still haven't decided what to do with this blog. whether to go the online diary route (like sarah or cathy) or whether i will end up dumping my occasional political rants here. i seem to be going with the former route so far, but the latter is more of what i had in mind when i first contemplated starting a blog. i have to be in the right mood, i guess.

hey, does anyone (by that i mean the 1-2 people who know about this blog) know how to type in arabic characters on this thing?

alright, my cat trick didn't work.

UPDATE: now it does. thanks again for the link advice, barry!

the cat is apparently out of the bag. thanks for the plug barry!

i've basically kept this blog secret over the past few weeks. i only told one friend about it. then i posted a comment on barry's blog yesterday and slipped in this url when i did. apparently he noticed.

now, i guess, i gotta say something here

nah

moussa has suddenly reappeared in my life.

a year and a half ago i went to mali, a country in west africa. i was there for about 2 weeks. i went alone, but, as always, quickly met many malians and fellow travellers.

one of the people i met was moussa guindo. i met him the night i arrived in mopti, a port town located at the confluence of the bani and niger rivers. as with all travel in africa, getting to mopti was more time-consuming and complicated than i originally thought and so i arrived late at night in a town where there were few street lights. i got out of the bus and wandered the muddy streets, trying to orient myself with a crude map from my guide book and a compass. the streets were empty and, to my foreign eyes, were indistinguishable from one another. the map was hard to read in the moonlight. then i heard a sound and saw a woman walking in the darkness. she was wearing a bright traditional dress with a basket balanced on her head.

by that time, i had only been in the country for about 3 days and had not spoken to any malian woman, except for in simple transactions to buy fruit from woman sellers sitting on blankets by the side of the road in bamako. male malians approached me constantly, but females never did. and the fruit sellers, i quickly learned, spoke little french, the colonial language in mali and the one language i had in common with anyone in the country. over 75% of malians are muslim, so i wasn't sure if there was a cultural taboo for me to speak to women casually.

nevertheless, when i saw that woman in mopti, i approached her and asked for directions to the "campement hotel," a hotel that seemed from my crude map to be closest to the dirt lot identified on the map as the bus station. i asked in french and the woman seemed to understand, although she did not respond verbally. she did turn slightly in the direction she walked, seemingly to lead me to the hotel. i followed her

we only went a short distance, when a young male malian rounded the corner. this was how i met moussa. he spoke to the woman in bambara (technically called bamanankan, the dominant indiginous language in mali), then she walked off and the moussa started leading me to the hotel. we talked briefly in french, but then he recognized my accent and switched to english. he was the first malian i met who spoke english. he said he had gone to a school run by the peace corps in bandiagara. moussa's breath reeked of alcohol, and i kind of resented his coming in and taking over my attempts to find the hotel. i thought i was doing an okay job without his help. also, i did not totally trust him. anytime a local goes out of his way to help me in a third world country, i wonder what strings are attached.

moussa led me straight to the hotel, woke the proprietor, and talked my way into the only vacant room in the hotel. the lock was broken, but he and i figured out how to pick open the lock from inside the room so i would not get locked in by the heavy iron door. moussa clearly was an intelligent guy. then came the pitch, he handed me his business card. he was a professional guide, and mentioned that he would drop by the next morning to talk about what services he had to offer.

mali is awash in guides. as a white person walking the streets, i had been approached constantly since i stepped off the plane by young men offering to be my guide. over the previous few days i carefully avoided committing to any guide. i really wanted to explore on my own. while i like talking to locals, a guide was not my thing. i like travelling alone because i like exploring and discovering things at my own pace. guides added more structure to my travels than i wanted.

the next morning, i got up early and left the hotel to explore mopti before moussa had managed to reappear. i met and befriended a guy named zakari. mopti, however, is not that big of a place. early in the day, moussa found me and zakari and moussa accompanied us as we wandered around mopti. moussa patiently spent the day with me and zakari. i think he sensed that i was not interested in the guide pitch yet, so he let me choose what to do. later we all sat in the "bozo bar" by the side of the fish market watching the black-water niger swirl into the green-water bani and waiting out the mid-day heat, moussa finally made his pitch. he pulled out a photo album showing him with other foreigners over the previous 10 years. in the early photos, moussa was just a child--he started being a guide quite early. more recently, he showed me photos of him travelling with michael palin.

what can i say? i fell for it. over the course of the day, moussa had slowly won my heart. he was no longer the drunk scam artist i suspected he was the night before. also, my next destination after mopti was dogon country, and according to both giudebooks i had with me, you really needed a dogon guide in dogon country if you want much access to real village life. moussa was dogon. once i broached the subject, we started a long process of negotiation. unfortunately, as a solo traveller, my guidebook warned i would have to pay a higher price for a guide. still, i set a maximum price in my mind and i would not move when we reached that number. moussa was still demanding 5000 c.f.a. more than i was willing to pay (it was about 750 c.f.a. to a dollar at that time). to break the stalemate, moussa suggested that he would meet my price, but i would agree to send him a present from the u.s. when i got home. that sounded interesting enough to me (even though, i knew, anything good would cost more than 5000 c.f.a. to buy and ship), so we agreed.

i then spent four days-three nights hiking through dogon territory with moussa. we hiked from village to village along the escarpment. we did about 2 villages a day--stopping at one in mid-day to have lunch and wait out the mid-day heat, and a second one before night fall where we had dinner, i slept on someone's roof flat roof (this is an example of dogon architecture with the flat roof houses), and then ate breakfast before setting out to the next village. moussa was generally a good guide--he would always tell me how many kola nuts (a mild narcotic, i am told, and my price to visit the various villages) i should give to the chief of each village. when we visited ende, moussa's home village, the cost in kola nuts miraculously doubled. plus, i had to give several to his grandmother, not just the chief. still, i was admitted to village life more there than anywhere else. i met many of moussa's relatives (although he was probably related to the entire village in some way), and watched them carve the wooden figures that make the dogon famous. also, we timed our visit to coincide with a festival. this festival is celebrated in ende only once a year and is part-religious ritual and part wrestling tournament. it was really amazing to be there. this was no show for the tourist, i think i was the only one in the village. the wrestling was almost like a dance. each match lasted about 30 seconds, with the rest of the time the wrestlers circling each other in the firelight to the beat of drums. the rest of the village around the wrestling match was one huge party. it went all night and the drum beats crept into my dreams when i finally slept that night.

my time in dogon country were probably the highlight of my trip. i left the u.s. 3 weeks after september 11th. 3 weeks that i, like most of the country, had become a news junky. when i left, the u.s. was gearing up for war in afghanistan, and the first case of anthrax had been discovered in florida. the morning i left philadelphia was the first time they floated the idea that the women in a hospital in florida could be the first victim of a terrorist attack. the whole country seemed panicked and a little crazy. in less than a week, i was in a place with no electricity, sleeping on mud houses under more stars than i had ever seen in my life. i felt far far away from the craziness i left behind in the u.s. and i had no idea what was going on in afghanistan. my visit to dogon country was a wonderful break from all of that. i felt like, at least partially, i owed moussa for that break.

on the other hand, moussa could be frustrating. he sometimes would just leave me abruptly. when we got back to mopti after the dogon excursion, we decided to go out on the town together to celebrate our successful trip. we went to this bar for dinner and i bought moussa a beer. before we ordered, moussa got up and walked away without explanation. i thought he went to the bathroom or something, but he took the beer. i waited for about 45 minutes, then ordered without him and ate alone. 3 hours later, he knocked on the door of my hotel room asking why i left without him. he did things like this several times over the course of our visit to dogon, but this last time in mopti really pissed me off more than before.

meanwhile, moussa started making the pitch for me to retain him as a guide after we finished with dogon territory. i had mentioned that i intended to visit djenne after the dogon trek finished and he repeatedly tried to talk me into being my guide to that city. unlike dogon, it was clear that i could get to djenne and see the famous great mosque without his help.

i just flipped through my journal from my mali trip. on october 12, 2001, while still in dogon country, i wrote the following:

"Moussa is trying to convince me to retain him as a guide for Djenne. So far, I'm inclined not to. I like him, but part of me is anxious to go alone again. Then again, if he makes sure I can get there & back [in time] to catch the plane to Timbuktu, maybe it would be worth it. We have not discussed the price."

when we got back to mopti, moussa brought up the issue again. by then i had decided to go alone. moussa said that he would come with me to djenne as a friend, not as a guide. we were going to djenne on market day, a big draw for foreigners, so i think that moussa thought that going to djenne would increase his chances of finding new clients.

in djenne, however, moussa really drove me crazy. he continued to disappear unexpectedly--sometimes returning with alcohol on his breath. the october 15, 2001 entry of my journal begins:

"I'm sitting alone in a cafe having been abandonned by Moussa once again. He's really starting to piss me off. Oops, he's back. More later."

i was only in djenne for the day and moussa did not seem to find any new people to guide. he again started pitching guiding me to wherever i was planning to go next. luckily, my next stop was timbuktu and i was planning to go there by plane. there was no question that i would not buy him a plane ticket, so that got him to ultimately give up on his guide pitches

i arrived back in mopti from djenne later in the day than i had planned. i wanted to buy a ticket that evening for a flight leaving first thing the next morning. when we arrived in mopti, the air mali office was closed, so i thought my dreams of timbuktu would have to be delayed at least a day. moussa, however, sprung into action. he flagged down a bunch of youths riding motor cycles through the streets of mopti. they fanned out across the town asking where the air mali representative lived. then they came back, picked up me and moussa and drove us to his house. when we banged on the representative's door, he invited me in and i asked to buy a ticket. he could not sell me one (it turned out, you don't need pre-bought tickets to fly air mali. you just pay as you enter the plane), but he guaranteed me a seat. moussa had managed to save my timbuktu trip. so, in my last hours with him, i really was happy to have had him as my guide. i gave him a big tip when we said goodbye, promised to send him the present from the u.s. as soon as i got home per our earlier agreement, and told him that i would recommend him as a guide to anyone i met heading to dogon country. we said goodbye.

the next morning, somewhat unexpectedly, moussa showed up at the airport to see me off. i was really touched. he also brought a list of malian music that we had listened to together. during the week or so i spent with moussa, he always was playing some kind of malian pop music. after a while, i really grew to like it and started pointing out what songs i liked. moussa had put together a list of the names of each song i mentioned, the artist, and what album it was on, so that i could track down that music later. thanked him again and told him to let me know if he ever needed any favor from me as i boarded my plane. that was the last time i saw moussa.

then last week, moussa sent me an email. it was quite a surprise. he said he was in bamako, the capital, and wanted to know how i was. i wrote back. then he wrote back again with a pitch: his sister wanted to attend the folklife festival at the smithsonian in washington d.c. (this year features artists from mali) and he needed help getting his sister's visa. he wanted me to fax a "letter of invitation" and "carte de hebergement" to mali. over the past week we emailed back and forth as i tried to figure out what type of letter he wanted me to write and what he meant by a "carte de hebergement" (the spelling of which varied from email to email, making it even harder for me to figure out what he wanted). eventually, i faxed an invitation letter saying little more than that i invite moussa's sister to the u.s. to attend the folklife festival. i still wasn't clear if that was what he wanted, but we had wasted a week emailing back and forth. meanwhile, the folklife festival begins late this month and his sister's visa was apparently contingent on my letter.

yesterday, i got an email from karen, an american friend of moussa's in mali, who explained that what moussa wanted was a letter saying that moussa's sister would stay with me in the u.s. and that i would be financially responsible for her during her entire stay here. karen also explained that moussa needed a letter from my boss saying how much i made a year to guarantee that i could support her.

i was kind of afraid that this was what moussa wanted me to write. i know that such letters are legally binding and there are cases where visitors to the u.s. have overstayed their visa and gone on public assistance; the state then sued the author of the letter promising support to force the letter writer to repay thousands of dollars of welfare payments to the state. while moussa's sister might not do that to me, i am simply not willing to take that risk.

i wrote back to karen and explained my concerns. she said she would try to explain my position to moussa. then this morning i got 5 messages from moussa, pleading with me to write the letter. he says that his sister has money for a hotel and living expenses, but she just needs the letter as a formality to get the visa, and time is running out. i feel crappy about it, but i just won't do it. i haven't responded to any of moussa's messages yet.

so now i'm sitting at my computer, listening to adama yalomba, one of the c.d.s i later bought based on moussa's recommendation and reflecting on the limits of my "let me know if you ever need a favor" promise i made while boarding a plane to timbuktu.

still no blather. am i doing any more than cyber-squatting on this hot blogspot url?

fixed links. got that "email me" thingy to work. now what?

testing again...

if there are no posts, is it still a blog?