Warren Weinstein: A Gracious Host, Immersed in Pakistani Life
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Version 0 of 1. When I got to Warren Weinstein’s house in Lahore, Pakistan, in the summer of 2005, he had a case of beer and a crate of mangoes waiting. He was deeply worried about my comfort, and turned the aging air-conditioners in his house up full blast. Warren’s daughter Alisa, my friend and graduate school classmate, was spending the summer with her father. At an age when most men are contemplating retirement, he was working tirelessly on an economic development project funded by the United States Agency for International Development that focused on local industries such as dairy and gemstones. He was an intense man, with powerful appetites for food and intellectual stimulation. He was always chatting up random strangers, probing and questioning, to understand the place and the culture better. Warren avoided foreigner hangouts in Lahore; he saw an unnecessary risk of terrorist attack and distraction from his work. Instead of living ensconced in a foreigner bubble, he tried hard to cultivate Pakistani friends, learned Urdu and sought to immerse himself in local life. A former Peace Corps volunteer, Warren, 73, dedicated his life to development work in Africa and South Asia. He saw himself as a peaceful alternative to American influence at a time when United States power is more commonly projected with troops and weapons like the drone that accidentally killed him and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian aid worker also held by Al Qaeda, in January. After a few days in Lahore with her father, Alisa and I left to travel north. With Pakistani friends of her father’s we drove to Islamabad, Peshawar and Chitral. Warren seemed little concerned about sending his daughter off on a road trip across the country, near some of its least governed areas, confident that his friends would watch after us. And they did. He stayed behind, however, unwilling to take even a few days off from his work. He visited me a while later in Hong Kong, where I was working. He told me he was happy to be in a place where he could visit a synagogue and openly practice his Jewish faith. I was eager to repay the hospitality he had shown me in Lahore, and took him and his Pakistani colleagues to the best restaurant I could afford, a nouveau Chinese place overlooking Hong Kong’s harbor. Warren was annoyed with the artifice and expense. He asked me where normal people ate. The next day we trekked to a Sichuan restaurant in a food court in Hung Hom. We ate smoked duck and fried green beans and he loved it. |