2013-05-19T12:27:43-04:00 Amy Dawson http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=amy-dawson Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Amy Dawson Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1290166 2012-02-21T05:27:37-05:00 2012-04-22T05:12:01-04:00

Amy Dawson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-dawson/
I'd seen Bikram as the workout of choice for lithe women with juice machines and honey-highlighted locks-the kind I half hope (and half fear) that I might magically morph into one morning. Plus, I'd seen a 20 days for 20 quid deal and it was so frosty outside that I was debating whether I could incorporate a balaclava into my officewear - the idea of a bit of warm and cosy stretching was pretty enticing.

So I rocked up after work one night with my litre bottle of water and my two large towels, and stripped down to a vest and leggings. Looking around the crammed room it was immediately, and somewhat thankfully, obvious that for every Jennifer Anniston type on the front row there was a hairy-backed tubby just behind. Two minutes into the session, while we were still just doing the loud wheezy breathing bit, I started to long to be in my pants. In fact, I was about one centigrade away from being as naked in public as I've been just three times in my life; at birth, taking on a dare on a school trip to the Outer Hebrides and on a Croatian nudist beach (where my friend and I lasted about ten minutes, before fretting that our bits might burn.)

Bikram is not a place for the body conscious-or perhaps conversely it's the best place for them, because it's pretty hard to hold onto any hangups about the mottled texture of your thighs when you're doing your damnest to drive your forehead into your shin, and everything's so sweaty that it feels like a toenail might slip off in a moment and bob across the floor like an untethered buoy.

That said, mine is a pretty private stomach. People can see it when it's stretched out like a mangled sheet, preferably after a skipped meal, and it just about has a nice little sickle of shadow under the lower ribs. I'd love to take it out dancing in a crop top, for example, but there's always the worry that it would look a bit like uncooked pizza dough being spun around by a drunken Italian chef.

So, having accidentally pitched my mat next to a fairly attractive, sinewy and very serious looking young man, I felt paranoid that my sideways bends were producing some kind of accordian of slippery flesh down one side of my body. However I stopped caring about what he thought when he proceeded to do a massive fart. In fact, for the rest of the session I was subjected to what amounted to a noxious trumpet concerto. Then, while attempting to focus on a point in front so as not to keel over during tree pose, I realised that the woman ahead of me had a fairly large hole in the seat of her leggings. And she wasn't wearing any pants.

So, Bikram was proving to be fairly traumatic, and not quite the glamorous experience I had envisaged. I hobbled home afterwards feeling fairly violated, and looking like I'd dunked my puce head into a bucket. But then-something happened. I felt a kind of lovely rush, a sense of total relaxation combined with reinvigoration. Everything ached, but in a satisfying way. Essentially I was smacked out on endorphins and probably delirious with mild dehydration, but I liked it.

I went back for another 90 minutes, then another, then another. I even bought myself a bloody mat. But my deal's over now, and it just lolls against the telly and eyes me forlornly as I toxify myself with barbeque sauce and glasses of wine. Still, I feel sure that we'll share some sweet, sweaty moments again soon
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Amy Dawson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-dawson/ Katie Piper, after a jealous boyfriend arranged for a cup of acid to be thrown straight into her face. So eager, in fact, that I accidentally turn up his office a full 24 hours early one frosty morning. He expresses benign surprise at seeing me so soon, but nevertheless bustles about fixing me a warming cup of coffee, and we begin to talk.

While he's not a household name just yet, many would recognise Jawad's cuddly but commanding presence from his appearance in the Chanel 4 documentary Katie Piper: My Beautiful Face. Some 3.3 million people watched the programme tracing the early stages of the former model's recovery when it aired in 2009, and countless thousands more have watched the shocking but inspirational hour since. Now, the forthcoming Oscar-nominated documentary Saving Facetrails Jawad as he returns to Pakistan, the country of his birth, to help victims of acid violence. The film is directed by Daniel Junge and Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, the first Pakistani to win an Oscar nod.

Acid attacks are a form of violent assault in which acid is thrown into the face and on the body of a person, typically young and female. Girls are often targeted by men after rejecting sexual advances or offers of marriage; or by their families for bringing them into perceived dishonour. Dissolved bones, vicious scarring and blindness are among the frequent consequences. Jawad, who has over 11,000 hours of operating experience, told me: "The intention is to cause grievous bodily harm, to murder or kill-except they bloody don't die. Instead they are disfigured and destroyed, when they're still young with their whole life in front of them."

The phenomenon is most common in Cambodia, Afghanistan and Southern Asia. Official figures state that there are 100 cases of acid violence in Pakistan every year, although it's been estimated that the actual figure is far, far higher. Jawad has been performing humanitarian surgery in the country since he led a team to help victims of the 2005 Kashmir earthquake. I asked him what drew him back to his homeland, and how Saving Face came about:

"The feeling was good, to be doing some good in my own backyard-and it meant I had the chance to go home and annoy my mother. And then came Katie Piper: My Beautiful Face in November 2009, and I was interviewed by channels from all over the world. Daniel Junge heard the BBC World Service asking me about the Pakistan earthquake, contacted me through various routes and proposed a documentary on my acid victim work in Pakistan. We made some films and we identified a few patients and took this recording back to HBO in the US, who were very excited and funded it."

Acid attacks are said to be chronically under-reported in the country, and Jawad hopes that the exposure given to the issue by the film might address this.

He said: "This is a story of hope and courage. The real heroes of course are these two patients we feature, who've been so forthcoming in such a conservative society to take it on the neck and say: 'this cannot carry on.' In a way this was about me saving my own face, and owning up to my responsibility to the country of my origin."]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1223117 2012-01-23T07:55:14-05:00 2012-03-24T05:12:01-04:00

Amy Dawson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-dawson/
Every summer holiday as a child was spent in the beautiful but otherworldly Outer Hebrides, side-stepping sheep decomposing in bogs and huddling behind wind-breakers to eat baps filled in almost equal measure with tuna, mango chutney and sand. I wouldn't have had it any other way and, although we never camped, I think it made me a sturdy little creature. My favourite ever school trip involved being left on an island to sleep in a cave and boil whelks for supper, and I relished the one-step-from-hysteria camaraderie of D of E (despite an incident in which I set the entrance of a tent on fire while my friend was reading a magazine inside.) During university I spent my summers merrily lugging a tent around Greece and Croatia, sleeping off obscene volumes of coke and red wine mixture on roll-mats spattered with dirt and thrice-melted bars of Milka.

Yet something happened, namely living in London and working in the media, which turned me into a mattress-needy hothouse pansy. Nowadays I can't drop off unless I'm wearing an aeroplane mask with wax stoppers in my ears, and camping is yet another former skill which I seem to have lost forever, like the ability to do backbend walkover flips or to parallel park. A few years ago I skipped off to Bestival, an autumn festival on the Isle of Wight, with essentially the same bag I'd returned from Ibiza with a few days before. I had the choice of three types of head-garland and a clutch of glittery eyeliners, but spent my nights tying spare leggings under my chin like a bonnet, with the simple aim of not dying on my way to the chemical toilet.

Thus when I went to stay with a big group of old friends at a wooden hut in a Welsh valley, I parked myself straight into one of the few beds available, grinning like a self-contended bed-grub while most of the rest piled into a huge tent outside. However the next morning a girl crept into my room with the kind of nervous, rictus smile that can only ever mean someone's done something that they know will send you batshit in about 30 seconds time.

"You know you forgot your bag and left in the entrance of the tent? Well, it was unzipped..."

Oh no. Had everything got soaked?

"No, no...well not quite. I was quite drunk and I may have poked my head out in the middle of the night and...done a little sick in it."

Quite a lot of sick, as it turned out. So there I was, in a wooden hut, with no hot water and no clothes that weren't embellished with little nuggets of bile except some M&S polar bear pajamas circa 1995. And so, my love for four stone walls became entrenched.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1191627 2012-01-08T19:00:00-05:00 2012-03-09T05:12:01-05:00

Amy Dawson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-dawson/
It's because amidst the glut of documentaries, exhibitions and adaptations currently being devoted to the author, I've come to realise that I've clearly wasted what amounts to several days, or even weeks, of my life reading Dickens novels that I no longer remember at all.

David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, Great Expectations...I read all these chunky doorstoppers once, and was happy to debate and discuss the polarised, sprawling, alternately grotesque, socio-realistic and sentimentalised Dickensian universe with the familiarity of an avid fan.

Yet so far, I only have Jilly Cooper on my new Christmas kindle, and while there's nothing I don't like about being able to fit an 800 page bonkbuster into a clutch bag, it troubles me that the only Dickens novel for which I can recall much more than a sketchy outline of events is Oliver Twist.

And that's probably just because I was coerced into playing Bill Sykes in an all-girl primary school's production of Lionel Bart's Oliver!, I'm presuming because I was tall for my age, rather than because I radiated psychopathic aggression and hyper-masculinity, but that's a whole other therapy session.

This matters to me, because I worry about the point of trying to learn anything, or better myself at all, if it's all just going to drain away. And it feels like the symptom of a much larger problem - while I used to read or paint for hours on end, I've now got a true iPod-generation attention span.

While Dickens framed and sketched the entirety of complex works like Bleak House in his head, pacing the smoggy streets of London on insomniac strolls, I sometimes feel like I can barely compose a Facebook comment without using the cut and paste function. And even then I usually get distracted and slope off to make a cup of tea, or to spend another half hour pondering "fringe? Or no fringe?" in front of the mirror, raising and lowering a fistful of hair like a drawbridge.

But really it's our personal memories; the good, the mundane and the awful, that make us who we are. So while I can still recall the scent of damp petals, or the way it feels to hoik up metallic-tasting, plum-sized blood clots during a punched-by-Rocky-esque nosebleed, I'll let it slide that I can't remember a single name from Our Mutual Friend. But that might be because I never actually got round to reading that one...]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.964922 2011-09-16T19:00:00-04:00 2011-11-16T05:12:01-05:00

Amy Dawson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-dawson/
At this point I was grateful not be getting up-close-and-personal with the pig, because it started urinating forcefully, in terror or perhaps disdain. A chicken defecated on our snapper Will's head shortly afterwards, on a day that was fast morphing into some form of farmyard waste-product roulette.

The piglet belonged to Josephina Mukakayonga, a 35-year-old farmer and a mother of four from Gasuba village in the Nyamagabe district of Southern Rwanda. She'd bought the piglet using a loan from a co-operative savings scheme, which are just one of the simple, sensible and genuinely effective self-help initiatives which Tearfund's partners Moucecore have introduced in impoverished areas throughout the country.

Josephina contributes 100 Rwandan Francs a week to the scheme, which is a big outlay for her, but is less than the 300 RF we've been paying for every small bottle of water out here. While we'd visited some of Moucecore's biggest success stories over the past few days, I knew that we were going to start visiting some increasingly poverty-stricken areas, where their community mobilisation and farm management projects had had less time to take spark.

We headed South towards the historically famine-prone Nyamagabe district, where the soil is problematically acidic and the people are some of the most deprived in the country.

Although Rwanda's GDP has more than doubled since 1994, 60% of the population still live below the poverty line, and I began to worry that my wide-eyed appreciation of the country's progress so far had been quite gallingly naive as I listened to Josephina describing the state of food insecurity that she and her family struggle to cope with on a daily basis.

I've now spoken to several dozen rural Rwandans, who all corroborate the same story-that weather patterns are becoming more and more unpredictable, and that the cost of staple foods is going up and up.

Josephina's bean plants performed less well than hoped last harvest after a period of drought, and her supply has now run out. The price increases mean that she can only afford to buy some for her family if she exchanges agricultural labour for cash, but there's fierce local competition for such jobs.

She's now having to choose between buying food for her children or getting them school supplies. As she told me that she'd already eaten her only real meal of the day, some boiled sweet potatoes, it hit me hard how unjust it was that I'd never, ever had to worry about where my food was coming from, just because of the circumstances of my birth.

And I suspect that if the act of buying a ham sandwich was an inconceivable prospect, I might have acted less pathetically when faced with a live, tiny pig. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.965666 2011-09-16T05:21:07-04:00 2011-11-16T05:12:01-05:00

Amy Dawson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-dawson/
In Kitare, we visited another farming community that's benefited from the encouragement and training of Moucecore and Tearfund, this time through the introduction of a mushroom growing initiative. Although volcanic soil means the area is richly fertile, it's particularly densely populated, but mushrooms can prove a very productive crop even on the smallest land-holdings. Their growth is also unaffected by unpredictable weather, and they don't need any manure. The members of the Caeg Umugende cooperative tried their best to explain every stage of the mushrooms' growth to us through our translator, though I'm not sure I truly understood the full nature of what seemed a pretty complicated process, involving various stages of sterilisation.

Luckily, Will used to work in a bong shop, and was on hand to give me some handy heads up.

We met a woman called Angelina Uwimana, who, although I hate to come over all Oprah, couldn't be called anything other than an inspiration. Half a decade ago, she and her dependents survived on one meal a day, sometimes going without any food at all when times got truly grim. Today her impressive farm management means she produces enough mushrooms and other crops to have extra left-over to sell, and she's determined that her children will be educated to university level. It's been particularly great, in fact, to see how many women in Rwanda seem totally confident to talk to us and to show us around their homes, whether or not their husbands are present. Women make up 56% of Rwanda's parliamentarians, and the country's levels of female empowerment are often held up as an aspirational exemplar for Africa as a whole.

As with every country in the world, there's a long way to go before legislation is matched with true gender equality, but long may the process continue.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.960618 2011-09-13T19:00:00-04:00 2011-11-13T05:12:02-05:00

Amy Dawson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-dawson/
As my plane first touched down to the city in darkness, my phone honked with a message from Tearfund's Emanuel Murangira, who immediately endeared himself by texting: "I am a heavy set person wearing a Mississippi t-shirt." When questioned by passport control about where I was staying in Kigali, I vaguely informed them that I was about to meet "a man," whereupon they decided that this clueless white girl needed a personal escort into Emanuel's (very safe) hands. I felt like an idiot when I met up with my travelling companion from Tearfund's London office, Esther Williams, who gently reminded me that the name of the guesthouse and various contact details had been written on the Safety In Travel form....which I'd thrown straight into my bag reaching a mention of grenade attacks (though these were rare and isolated incidents.)

The next morning, we travelled to a banana-growing community in the Ngoma district of Eastern Uganda, driving through lush, rolling green hills on roads stained a rich Murram brown. Though utterly gorgeous, Rwanda's scenery is perhaps a bit trickily deceptive, because the land is becoming fragile from over-use in this small and densely populated country. Around 90% of Rwanda's 10.2m population are subsistence farmers living in rural communities. In recent years, the huge hike in global food prices means that if crops perform less well than hoped, it's extremely difficult for Rwandans to afford the extra food they need to feed their families.

At a banana plantation, I met a farmer called Jean Damascene Iyamuremye, a man with a warm-eyed smile. Jean and his wife married in a Tanzanian refugee camp, in exile after the genocide, and now have six children. In collaboration with Moucecore, Tearfund's biggest partner in Rwanda, the two have worked themselves up from a basis of absolute zero. They can now not only feed their entire family with ease, but can sell enough surplus to educate their children. Lining up outside their house to wave goodbye, Jean's family offered just one example of the peace and positivity that truly seems to abound in Rwanda nowadays. In fact, it's unnervingly difficult to square the upbeat, unguarded friendliness of almost everyone I meet with the knowledge that they have probably experienced a scale of carnage that I can't begin to even contemplate, or in some cases committed unspeakable atrocities themselves. But self-perpetuating hate can only ever snap at its own tail, and from what I've seen Rwanda seems to make a pretty incredible case for choosing progress, truth and reconciliation instead.]]>