In 2006 I spent two months in Gilgit, Pakistan working for an NGO on a small hydro project. While there I received an e-mail from another white man of similar heritage and small town Manitoba origins. He signed his e-mail something like: take care, Mennonite boy. And I looked at the salutation in surprise wondering to whom he could possibly be referring. Outside that context, I had subconsciously slipped into a new-old identity, the one I wore as a child growing up in Pakistan where my father worked as a medical doctor in a mission hospital and then in a community health project in villages in the Himalayan foothills. Although I look Germanic with blue eyes, blonde hair and white skin, I’ve spent my life more at home wandering the world than in any one place.
How is it that I’ve ended up in Manchester enrolled in a Master’s degree in International Development for 2010-2011? These are the facts: After graduating from Murree Christian School in Pakistan and saying good-bye to my 17 classmates (representing 10 different nationalities), I moved to the wide open prairie of central Canada and studied mechanical engineering. Two years into the program I thought I might have picked the wrong one. But I finished it and spent 4 years working in Winnipeg designing brackets (oops, I mean buses) before taking 4 months out to work in Gilgit with the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme. On that same trip I met up with one of my 17 classmates (she of English and Finnish extraction) in Kabul and a little less than two years later we were married. At that time I had already started applying to Master’s programmes in the UK and she was finishing an MA from a university in Finland. In August we moved here to a small flat in central Manchester.
I should mention that while studying engineering at the University of Manitoba I met another white man of similarly ambiguous identity – he just arrived from Kenya. And two weeks ago I found myself playing Lego with his son and then talking long into the night about why we still want to save the world, how we plan to self-publish our experiences this year for the edification of our many readers, and how we’ll handle the book deal offers that are sure to come in response to these excellent tales of graduate studies in Green Energy and International Development at Waterloo and Manchester respectively.
Jordan (Manchester)
