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Sumer Sayan sumersayanjewellery — I liked Under the Tuscan Sun better, but I do love how well Mayes describes things in her writing. Whether food, people, art, or her garden, she is able to transplant the reader to be standing right there with her.

C Shi shichua — It's complicated when you dearly love a screwed-up and beautiful country that rejects you or who you are forced to leave. I understood this before reading this book based on my time in Vietnam. Though I chose to leave, part of me is still there. Well, Aslan's book perfectly captures the complexity of just this situation, and though I picked it up to prepare for a trip to Uzbekistan, this book has evoked a remarkable number of connections to the people I have known, the places I have been as an ex-pat, and current events. He paints a picture of the glorious history of the Silk Road and how, much later while part of the Soviet Union women, removed the veil and pork and vodka were added to the Uzbek diet. Meanwhile, the current government sucks the life blood out of the people through corruption causing many of the men to go to the Soviet Union and Kazakhstan for work greatly affecting the patriarchal family structure there. (No, a feminist revolution hasn't developed so far.) Enter Aslan, our narrator and volunteer for Operation Mercy, who gets a carpet workshop going based on some ancient designs from the days of the Silk Road which are exquisite, enabling him to provide a number of very decent jobs for Khiva's most vulnerable citizens, mostly women. He also lived with a local family whose fortunes he was also able to improve. Though he is very respectful of local customs and fond of the people, he maintains a rather wry sense of humor about some of his acquaintances' actions, statements, and experiences which I enjoyed immensely. Though that is all interesting, I keep thinking about the way other events in the world changed Aslan's story. In 2005, a massacre of 500-700 people in a devoutly Muslim community in SE Uzbekistan occurred. When the international community condemned these acts, Uzbekistan systematically expelled the majority of the NGO workers in the country which basically ended in Aslan's exile from his "home". Tragically, the news of the day has me thinking about Aslan and his book again. Though many of us who live overseas may have become quite cynical about ineffectual NGOs represented by either ridiculously naive volunteers or jaded, if not arrogant, development consultants who drive around in SUVS and sip cocktails under ceiling fans among the other foreigners in any given city on the backpacker circuit, the reality is that there are a number of people who are dedicated to doing what they can to make the world a better place. In Mazar-i-Sharif, the town in Afghanistan where Aslan frequently went to buy his natural dyes, 7 UN workers were just killed today on April 1st, 2011, in a riot spurned on by a wacko burning a Koran in Florida. At the same time, I mourn their loss and lament the fact that politics forced Aslan to abandon the people he was trying to help in Khiva. However, as he revealed at the end of the book he has moved on to help people in similar projects in the region. When I go to Khiva in a little over a week from now, I am going to try to find the workshop he began and tell them Aslan sent me.