Alternate Vision

I couldn't take anymore conference paper editing. LCA homework was about done. M calls and offers me food, beverage and nomadic company in exchange for the services of the hookah. Two hours later we're all savoring the apple flavor and exchanging travel tales. C is getting ready to embark on a new journey. She has to decide between Arabic school in Yemen and working at the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul. She has mentally prepared for the latter and will begin in two weeks and then end up in Yemen somehow. Journey will start in Bangkok with a tattoo to commemorate the occasion. The plan is to make it to Calcutta and travel by road to Kabul before beginning work with Rory.

Rory Stewart was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Malaysia. He served briefly as an officer in the British Army (the Black Watch), studied history and philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford and then joined the British Diplomatic Service. He worked in the British Embassy in Indonesia and then, in the wake of the Kosovo campaign, as the British Representative in Montenegro. In 2000 he took two years off and began walking from Turkey to Bangladesh. He covered 6000 miles on foot alone across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal -- a journey described in The Places in Between.

In 2003, he became the coalition Deputy Governor of Maysan and Dhi Qar -- two provinces in the Marsh Arab region of Southern Iraq. He has written for a range of publications including the New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times and Granta. In 2004, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire and became a Fellow of the Carr Centre at Harvard University. He now lives in Kabul, where he is the Chief Executive of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation.

6000 miles on foot. Istanbul to Dakka. I need to get a hold of any of his books. Soon. Prince of the Marhses would be top on the list.

In August 2003, at the age of thirty, Rory Stewart took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad. A Farsi-speaking British diplomat who had recently completed an epic walk from Turkey to Bangladesh, he was soon appointed deputy governor of Amarah and then Nasiriyah, provinces in the remote, impoverished marsh regions of southern Iraq. He spent the next eleven months negotiating hostage releases, holding elections, and splicing together some semblance of an infrastructure for a population of millions teetering on the brink of civil war.

The Prince of the Marshes tells the story of Stewart's year. As a participant he takes us inside the occupation and beyond the Green Zone, introducing us to a colorful cast of Iraqis and revealing the complexity and fragility of a society we struggle to understand. By turns funny and harrowing, moving and incisive, it amounts to a unique portrait of heroism and the tragedy that intervention inevitably courts in the modern age.