Step-Stones for the Summer Semester

University is inching closer and closer: the summer semester formally resumes on Monday. In preparation, I've signed up for my classes online. So far I've received no response to my application for helping with the student parliament elections. But I've been reviewing elementary Greek grammar exercises, hoping to build a stronger foundation for the next semester. In that sense, my preparations are complete, although a few castles-in-the-air that I had last semester — e.g. reading Spanish literature, reviewing Greek history, finishing the essay about a Spanish playwright in comparison with Molière, and/or reading Isaac Babel about Odessa — would have been a good idea to round out the curriculum...

In the meantime, this evening I went to a volunteer get-together for an organization that supplies refugee housing centres with locals willing to lead sports, sewing or art activities, help with homework, and organize outings.

The get-together was near Tempelhofer Feld. I was a little antsy riding my bicycle toward this area because my stereotype of Neukölln is that nobody obeys the laws of traffic and everyone (being in a great hurry) has a lead foot on the gas/bicycle pedal. The streets, often being older, are also often narrower. Needless to say, all my stereotypes were confirmed. Due to my blundering I also managed to take two wrong turns before realizing and correcting my mistakes. Anyway, at the event we gathered at will at different tables of five to six people, sipping lemonades, water, beer, and wine that the organizers had made available. Then we cooked Mediterranean-style dips, salads, a vegetable and rice stir-fry, garlic flatbread, rice with lentils, and muffins together, which took about three hours. At the end we sat down and ate.

It was, predictably, a friendly and diverse group of volunteers and organizers: others mentioned that they were, for instance, from Argentina, Hungary, Italy, India, Paraguay, Syria, and Ukraine. One or two children and a dog (it was as large as a collie, and I thought moderately but not bumptiously sociable) roamed around amongst us young adults/adults. There were a few glitches in food safety that both horrified and amused me, but while I've already told my family the details I don't think I'll go into them here.

In 2-4 weeks my police certificate of good conduct should (hopefully) have been printed and sent back by the authorities, proving that I'm safe company. Then I'll be tutoring, accompanying refugees to bureaucratic appointments, or both. Likely on Mondays, when it looks like I won't have any classes this semester, and/or on Saturdays. I've been soul-searching about my past volunteering and have come to the conclusion that it's more helpful for organizers if I really treat volunteering like a job, carefully arriving on time etc. (instead of being late, as I've been many a time for clothes-sorting or food sorting...).

A volunteer coordinator gave me advice about being a volunteer, when I asked her:

1. Do communicate to the coordinator, letting them know of problems. It's better than worrying about being a bother or assuming that things are supposed to be dysfunctional ... and letting problems escalate. But being independent is good at the same time.

2. Don't expect adult refugees to be full of energy and enthusiasm for new activities; they're often exhausted and struggling to adjust to living a life that they never expected.

3. If you start dreading going to volunteering appointments or start being unhappy in general, recognize your limits and stop what you're doing.

It seems like good advice, so I've noted it for later.

Fish and Chips, and More Spring

Last night we passed into Daylight Savings Time (I'd prefer to keep winter time, especially as I am not an early bird), but I still woke up early.

T. rang the doorbell for the weekly weekend journey to a bouldering gym with the siblings. The last weeks I hadn't gone because I felt too sleepy.

We went to a gym in the bowels of a post-war building, past a glass door and an Edeka. It was fairly empty. So we didn't need to wait for other boulderers before we could begin. Soon Gi. — who had been delayed by road closures due to the Berlin Half Marathon — joined us, too. My siblings can do difficulty level 4 and 5 courses, but after doing two difficulty level 1 course and one level 3, I ran out of steam. My hands felt too painful to keep going; because since I haven't bouldered lately the skin isn't hardened enough, even if I apply a lot of chalk. That said, regularly cooking and washing dishes by hand for at least 2 months has serendipitously strengthened my arm muscles.

In the meantime, our mother has impulsively ridden the train off to her hometown to meet for coffee with some of our uncles and aunts. She'll be back tomorrow, and so far the journey seems to have been a nice slice of family and early spring flowers in the German countryside.

The past week has been a change from routine in more ways, too.

*

Yesterday, I took photographs and notes on a protest about American politics, and saw part of the Berlin Half Marathon festivities as well as a pro-Palestinian protest on the way.

The weather was too cold and windy for (probably) any of us to enjoy standing for over an hour, although I was pleased that my hands weren't too chilly to operate my pen or smartphone.

To go on a tangent: I'm a bit surprised that more American expatriates aren't protesting. It's true that having worked for a US company I understand the concern that political activity can kill a career if one nosy person complains. Yet I don't see the efficacy of sitting at home on one's rear end, if one wants a change. Admittedly I think this skepticism is stronger because I have the chance to see that action is effective firsthand in my amateur journalism: it's not possible to raise awareness of points of view or of how strongly they're held if I have no people and no signs to photograph in public, whereas from the moment people and signs appear in public, the nucleus of a blog post or social media post exists. Passersby respond in real time, too.

Besides I think there's a basic logic to political activity. The more people stay quiet, the easier it remains to retaliate against employees for holding political opinions in their personal lives. It may get worse and worse indefinitely. But if everyone were to firmly state their (reasoned) opinions, employers would have no replacements left to hire.

                                                                                    

Regardless, on Saturday the American protest's organizers struck a cautious note about demonstrating being effective. 'This isn't activism,' a speaker in her fifties told the audience, 'this is just for community. We need to go out and do more after this.' Voting, writing letters to Congresspeople, donating, and repeating all of the above, was what she and others advised. But the speakers' outlook on the efficacy of voting was also pessimistic, because the SAVE Act could undo any hope of voting from abroad. Privately I'm wondering if even a general strike would make any difference to improving civic life in the United States; I suspect that workers' rights in general and labour unions in particular are a lot weaker now than they were during the 1960s, for example, so employers could easily throw people out of work. Do I think, on a personal level, that it's sad and angering that US citizens seem to be reduced to begging for democratic rights, which we've been told for decades were practically copyrighted by the States? — Yes.

The speaker did strike a note of optimism when she recounted the story of Mary Manning, the Irish store clerk whose refusal to handle produce from apartheid South Africa ended up playing a large role in the economic boycotts of the 1980s.

*

Returning to personal life, the other departures from routine were, for example, our trip to an Irish pub last weekend. The pub: exposed brick walls in a pre-war residential building with peeling plaster, English Premier League games on the 'telly' and loud whoops from the audience, and bubbling table surfaces that seemed to be made from orange laminate that doesn't take well to acidic cleaning liquids. One of the waitstaff was Irish, judging by the stereotypical lilt, and she called something 'grand' when she was pleased. The restaurant outing was a reward after a bicycle outing to the Drachenberg, a hill in the southwest of the city that was also teeming with other Berliners out for exercise and a panoramic view of the city. We all ordered fish and chips, except for T., who had a chicken burger.

The weather was and is still kind of grim, the trees largely still ashen as they were in winter. But in addition to all the other flowers I've mentioned in past weeks, the intense blue hyacinth blossoms are also out, as well as sparkling golden maple tree blossoms. The green hazel foliage and lilac leaf buds, too, are more intense.

An Ordinary Day in Springtime

Pursuant to the freewheeling university holidays, I woke up well after 11 a.m. today to find the sun shining. The daffodil and tulip leaves on my windowsill are flourishing, and only one set of arugula sprouts has wilted in my egg carton seedling garden.

In the early afternoon (after a dutiful, if uncharacteristic, round of housework) I went shopping at the zero-waste store, and came back with potatoes, flour, an apple, two clementine oranges, and — for Easter — gummy worms. Over the past year or so I've grown sick and tired of cramming plastic packages into the recycling during Christmas and Easter. So this year I've assembled fruit gummies and chocolates in jars and English tea tins to serve as a base for our Easter brunch. Returning to the regular groceries, it's apparently still too early for rhubarb and asparagus in Germany. (Although you can get 500 grams of asparagus for over 9€, from Greece.) But lamb's lettuce and miner's lettuce (Postelein) are abundant.

On the way home I admired the plum blossoms that are appearing in the neighbourhood, and the blazing yellow forsythia bushes. The earliest wrinkly green leaves are brightening the hazel bushes, and more daffodil blossoms emerge every day. Even the first early red-and-yellow tulip has budded. Meanwhile the squills, snowdrops, winter aconites, and crocuses are hanging on despite the warmer temperatures.

Yesterday I'd checked the street water pump: sadly it is not yet functional. But rain is forecast again for tomorrow.

When I arrived back home, for dinner I made potato scones with flecks of fresh parsley. For 'dessert' there was a mid-20th-century granola recipe: it ended up very crumbly and tasted incongruously like popcorn, but everyone liked it.

And, as a treat after my last grocery shopping trip of the day, I bought myself the latest paper issue of the Tagesspiegel and read a few pages. I've already read the free neighbourhood magazines for February and March, which are obligingly laid out at the local grocery stores, so I figured that this extra reading would not be too overwhelming.

Lastly, in the evening, some of us watched the news together: the classic line-up of Berlin news from 7:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., and then the Tagesschau from 8 to 8:15 p.m.

Saturday Brunch and a Few Minutes with Antifa

This morning I met up with one of my aunts, who's visiting Berlin, in the northeast of the city. Going there on my bicycle, it wasn't exactly fun to ride streets seemingly designed for narrow 18th-century carriage traffic, with cobblestones and dangerous tram tracks, large delivery vans and car drivers with a need for speed, from a road safety perspective. But on the whole I enjoyed the journey, since I don't otherwise get out to that neighbourhood much anymore and of course I was looking forward to the meet-up.

The two of us had tea, quiche and cake together and talked. And then we strolled out for an ice cream. The streets were peaceful considering that the area is a hipster mecca; we did not have to wait in line with fifty (I exaggerate slightly) families for our gelato, which is often enough the case in Berlin. The cloudy weather likely explained it!

It is a relief that rain is forecast again, because the winter has not been as wet as it should have been. I use an app that tracks Berlin's city trees. Since it's geared up again at the beginning of March (when the trees awake from hibernation) it shows that the past month's rainfall has been ~15.5% of what it should be. That said, the street water pump in the neighbourhood was not yet spouting out any water when I checked it earlier this week, so I haven't been able to start supplying 'my' trees with groundwater again. I could use water left over from rinsing vegetables at home, but since tree roots apparently grow deeper and better if given at least 40 litres at once, I think it would take a week (and a lot of forbearance on my mother's side) to gather the right amount.

I was caught up in an anti-fascist protest on my way home. A huge contingent of police vans had been dispersed in flotillas around the general area. Riot police officers had even been shipped in from Bavaria (their black uniforms had the telltale abbreviation "BY" on the backs) to help the Berlin authorities deal with a plethora of demonstrations. The counter-protest I was caught up in was inspired by a march of a neo-Nazi party. Judging by the speaker whose message was being amplified from a vehicle at the rear of the neo-Nazis, the marchers felt that their freedom of speech was being infringed upon and that the mainstream political parties were no good. I wasn't sure if this allegation of censorship was a reference to the government recently shutting down a publishing house that reprinted the 'greatest hits' of the Nazi era without context or comment.

Riot police on foot and the police vans didn't just surround the march. Eventually one group of officers put on their helmets (generally an indication that things are getting heated) while others performed an uncomfortable trot to keep up with the moving crowd of counter-protestors.

These counter-protestors were mostly, I judged, at least a decade younger than me, so not unlike my classmates at university. One held out a black Antifa flag with logo where the neo-Nazis would see it at the front of the crowd, but most carried neither signs nor flags. Many others clapped their hands, raised their arms, and chanted 'Siamo tutti antifascisti!' To vary the programme, they sometimes chanted "Nazis raus!", and two or three at the front of the crowd silently held up both middle fingers, while another tooted a horn to try to drown out the rightwing protest's messages. A few had muffled their mouths with scarves, a few wore black FFP2 face masks, and one young person wore a keffiyeh around their neck. As a protestor came to stand on the bollard right beside me, I presumed that nobody minded my incongruous presence in a business-casual wool skirt, tights, baby-blue knit sweater, and flowered pink silk scarf.

Eventually the police blocked the counter-protest's progress entirely, perhaps because the street narrowed past this point? The fun was essentially over. I went up to the front of the crowd, explained that I lived in street X, and asked if there'd be any way of getting through within the next 10 minutes. An officer answered, through her face shield, 'Vorerst geht nichts mehr.'

So I took a detour home, feeling a little guilty that I'd enjoyed myself so much when the subject matter of the protests had been serious.

Fortunately the rest of the journey was uneventful. The evening news mentioned that, like other protests in Berlin today, these protests' turnout had been lower than projected. There were no gruesome tales to be told.

Daffodils, Databases and Dates

It's beginning to be spring: the daffodil, leek, and arugula leaves on my windowsill have begun to sprout, and not only the hazel and alder catkins but also the earliest yellow Oregon grape blossoms, crocuses in yellow but also purple and blue, chionodoxa and faded-looking late white snowdrops are out. In front of City Hall, a cluster of daffodil flowers looked ready to burst out of its buds this afternoon.

I successfully finished my Excel course at university, and my holidays will thenceforth be unalloyed until April 13th! We spent the last week finishing an Excel project, which was a slog because I didn't save back-up copies properly and thus had to redo much of it once my instructor pointed out errors that I'd need to fix in order to pass the class. (It's pass/fail, so in that respect the stakes were lower.) But we also went through databases, queries, reports and data-entry forms in Access. I was quite happy that we didn't use Access for work back in my professional life, even if the reports and data-entry forms might have been useful. Because when the instructor let us take a look at the Structured Query Language (SQL) view, all the nested round brackets etc. made the syntax look pretty hairy.

***

As far as the war on Iran goes, the news feels much more bearable if one has a daily routine to immerse one's self in selfishly. Then the moment I hear of the news again, I feel plunged back into a dystopia. For what it's worth, we're hearing in the German news about German travellers who were stranded in the Middle East when airports were being shot at and missiles intercepted over hotel roofs, but also high gas and oil prices. (One Berlin company that uses trucks told the RBB Abendschau frankly that if this situation continues 6 more months, they'll be out of business because there's no way their clients will want to pay for that.) Of course the war itself is also being reported on.

I decided to go by the Iranian embassy in Berlin today to get the lay of the land during this unfortunately historic time. The embassy is on a street of large and fancy villas near the university (Berlin is generally too cramped for buildings of that size, which seem more typical of the rich Babelsberg area between us and Potsdam), not far from the Indian and Jordanian representatives. The Iranian embassy is the only one with a police booth in front. Two male cops were patrolling along the sidewalk, one of them in what looked to me like a formal dress uniform cap that I never see amongst the riot police at protests. They were chatting with each other, seeming relaxed enough, a white-and-red security fence separating them from the street.

In and on the fence of the embassy there were photographs presumably of victims of the latest war, wilted roses, flags of the Islamic Republic, and posters saying 'No War on Iran' and '160 killed on the first day' (referring to the school in Minab). At the same time, across the street, ten or so protestors were playing music and holding the sun-emblazoned flag of the monarchist movement. They have been protesting for weeks, non-stop, under the slogan "Stoppt Hinrichtungen im Iran/Solidarität mit den Bürgerprotesten im Iran."

But I didn't talk with the protestors. I was feeling hungry (no breakfast) and exhausted after my long day, and I didn't want to be a disaster tourist.

To be honest, as a private individual I also think that only one of the Pahlavis who was actually imprisoned for opposing the Shah sounds pretty compelling.

In general, I've been feeling that the war is not an amateur journalism-friendly topic, either. One reason is that the war on Iran seems so inscrutable: if I were working in foreign intelligence, I think I'd have a better grip on things. That said, I suspect that a recent report in the Guardian is the only explanation that makes sense: some American military commanders, certainly also the Ambassador to Israel, and perhaps the Secretary of Defense, are pushing this war, because this military campaign has a Biblical dimension and is linked to their conception of Armageddon.

Either way, the more closely I follow the news, the more contradictions I find. For example, when the tens of thousands of Iranian protestors were killed earlier this year, I read that Israel and Persian Gulf neighbours tried to prevent the U.S. president from attacking Iran's military and police in defense of the protestors, because the Middle Eastern countries were worried about the blowback. But then, right after the war broke out, the Prime Minister of Israel was reported as being the person who had brought up the idea of a military intervention. I've also read that Saudi Arabia's government was pushing for the war.

Another example: Governments like Germany's and Canada's seem to be in favour of the US-Israeli attacks. Yet when they're asked about sending in the military, they rule it out except in a 'defensive role.' But if the war were actually justified, and if the threat to other countries from Iran's military had been so great and time-critical, surely they'd be willing to do their part?

A third example: all of the arguments used by those who want to attack Iran would apply just as well to Russia (threat of nuclear war) or Saudi Arabia (religious extremism and misogyny, besides which I think the Trump administration wants to give them nuclear technology).

Of course it worries me to feel that governments are being so dishonest. I'm also worried that this war will radicalize people.

In the meantime, Ramadan goes on. The current routine in my neighbourhood is: people in a good mood when I go shopping, crescent moon decorations in the restaurant beneath my family's apartment, dates and water bottles and bread baskets set out on tables for the breaking of the fast, the call of the muezzin at dusk, and families eating al fresco at the tables on the sidewalk.

Turning of the Times

On Saturday morning I woke up incredibly early (by my standards; it was before 6:30 a.m.) and took one of the few bus lines that wasn't affected by the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe strikes to the district Moabit, to volunteer at the Berlin charity that gathers and redistributes leftover food from grocery stores.

It was going quite well. First the reddish sunrise at the Beusselstraße station overlooking the shipping containers, train tracks, and GDR architecture, then arriving early at the warehouse and having a coffee before setting off for a drive. I was accompanying a driver who was doing a tour of grocery stores and a bakery shop in Wedding and Prenzlauer Berg to transfer produce and other food into crates, pack the crates into the charity's van, and then bring everything back to the charity's warehouse. There was little traffic early in the day, and as the driver considerately waved tentative pedestrians across the streets, everyone was relaxed and smiling. Hopping out at the stores, checking in with the cashier or going straight to the fruit & vegetable section to find the earpiece'd employee in charge of sorting out donations, etc. went well too.

Two or so hours later, admittedly, the traffic began to thicken and the sunny temperatures to rise. I began to feel hungry for the snacks I'd packed as the driver lowered the windows for fresh air. But I still felt a sense of adventure and achievement, and enjoyed the sunshine.

Then the local radio channel that was playing pop hits from the 80s and 90s switched to a news break, and the rest of the day was ruined... 'The situation in the Middle East has escalated further as the US and Israel have begun attacking Iran,' said the announcer in German. Then the music resumed.

The energy drained out of me, and I've felt pretty weepy. It's worse because Germany, the UK, and even France's governments have reacted in my view weakly; the solidarity and moral clarity that we saw during the invasion of Ukraine isn't there as a comfort. It enrages me to think of the Israeli government plane sitting on the tarmac of Berlin's airport after being evacuated from the Mediterranean for its safety, as missiles hit Israeli residents who are evidently not being treated with the same care by their government. As for the Canadian government's reaction, let's not even go there.

It's not like I care all that much what happened to the Ayatollah, but I don't think that democracy and safety for Iranians will be instilled into Tehran one bomblet at a time. And besides I have such a low opinion of Trump that I think, given the chance to liberate a Nazi concentration camp, he'd only have done so in order to build a McDonald's (or an outlet of his favourite US corporation du jour) there and use the camp survivors as cheap labour. Hopefully I'm not trivializing the Holocaust by making this comparison. To put it more reasonably, I distrust his motives — the presence of the Energy and Treasury secretaries in the White House situation room as the war began also suggests to me that a primary post-invasion aim is to annex Iran's oil — and I think that shoddy motives lead to shoddy outcomes.

The strikes on the northern coast of the Strait of Hormuz, where the girls' elementary school was hit and over a hundred people died according to the local prosecutor, are I think explained though not excused by this New York Times report. The report says that until 2016 the building was part of a naval base, but since then a wall has separated it off from the base. Satellite surveillance would surely have shown small people regularly drifting in and out before and at the end of the usual school hours? During the Clinton administrations I'm quite sure the president would have been asked to resign by multiple newspaper editorials, and likely leading Republican congresspeople, if he had started a war with this kind of gross error.

Besides it's very disconcerting even from a selfish perspective to have a president in power in the US who seems to start wars as often as, if not more often than, he sneezes. What will happen to Cuba (I think the oil embargo is already extremely cruel), Greenland, Canada, and other countries?

All in all I think the last time I felt this badly, and this depressed, about world events was after September 11th. As the ripples of this new war spread and spread, it seems to suck the joy out of life.

At the same time I have to acknowledge that this war doesn't make civilians in the Gaza Strip or Sudan or Ukraine less dead; there are also other wars going on that are no less terrible.

And, finally, not having lived in Iran myself, I also have to acknowledge that the opinions of people who have lived — and do live — there, matter more than my assessment.