The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Geckos & Guns: The Pakistan Years by Sharon Bazant

Episode Date: October 24, 2021

Geckos & Guns: The Pakistan Years by Sharon Bazant Geckos & Guns: The Pakistan Years is the latest installment of Sharon Bazant's riveting travel memoirs. Following on the heels of her 2019, Nine Years in Bangkok: Lessons Learned, this new title Geckos & Guns tells of the time before Bangkok. It is a prequel that follows the first impulses of the Bazant family to break out of the mold, to leave their comfortable Canada home. With two teens in tow, they took a "hardship" posting for the United Nations in Islamabad. The book opens with Sharon and the kids joining Wayne in January 1991 and chronicles their five year stay there. Bazant brings her gift for detail to the story and paints a beautiful backdrop with her words. Where Nine Years in Bangkok is a tale of Bazant's personal soul journey, the focus of Geckos & Guns is the Bazant family's time in Pakistan-a time of adjusting to new and different surroundings, of embracing cultural differences, and of recognizing imminent danger. In the five years the Bazant family spent in Pakistan, they learned to love the temperate climate and the stark beauty of the countryside, the spicy curries and the exotic weddings, but they also learned to negotiate constant power cuts, flash floods, trips into opium country, bombings, a family emergency and more. Bazant says, "I see each one of us clearly-our 'selves' of the past. I think about our experiences, some awe-inspiring, some traumatic, and the decisions we made that forged our future paths. We were younger more optimistic versions of ourselves. Did we make mistakes? Yes. Did we take some wrong turns? Yes. Did some of this form our future selves? Yes. The big question is: Would I do things differently if given the chance? I don't know. We all did the best we could at the time."

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss bye folks response here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with a great podcast who knew we'd do it again today we have an amazing guest on the show. She's going to be talking to us about her amazing book. Her name is Sharon Bazant, and she has written a book that just came out February 1st, 2021 of this year. It's called Geckos and Guns, the Pakistan years. She's going to be talking to us about her book. But in the meantime, go to, let's see, goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss. See everything we're reading or reviewing over there go to youtube.com for chest chris voss if you want to see the video version of this also go to all of our groups on facebook linkedin twitter instagram tiktok all those places the

cool kids are playing today and she is joining us today we're going to be talking about her amazing book she's a retired teacher living in the Fraser Valley near Vancouver, Canada. Geckos and Guns is her second memoir. She has donned a variety of professional and personal hats as a seasoned world traveler and long-term expatriate. Some of her greatest adventures occurred during her years in Pakistan and Thailand. And now she's on our latest adventure. She's here with us today. Sharon, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here.

Happy to have you as well. Give us your plugs, your dot coms where people can find you on the interwebs. Yes, I'm on Twitter at AuthorBizant. Instagram, my Instagram name is Sharon Perrin, double R's in both cases. I have a website, which is thebizantblog.com. And I have an author Facebook page, which is Sharon Bizant Author. There you go. So what motivated you to write this second book? Actually, a lot of people have asked me why I didn't write the second book first, because it's what happened to us first. In about 1990, my husband was asked by his boss, he was working for the Alberta Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Commission in Alberta.

We're originally from Alberta in Canada. And I was teaching and we had teenage children, young teenage children. And he was asked by his boss who had been overseas on a conference, would you like to show this job opportunity to some of the people that work? At that time, my husband had a good job. He's working in the administration there. And so he came home and he said to me, what do you think about me applying for this job?

And it was a job with the United Nations hosted in Pakistan. And I've always been the adventurous type. So I said, that sounds great. And my husband had reached a glass ceiling with his job. So he was thinking he wanted to get out and do more and so on. And he applied for it. And it took us about a year of negotiations because he wanted to make sure that everything was settled and so on. And long story short, in 1991, it was off to Pakistan. However, it wasn't quite as easy as all of that. We had taken our children out of school. We had sold the house. We put things in storage. We each had two suitcases. That was it. Wow. The cars, everything, finished our jobs and so on. And we were staying in a motel, getting ready to go.

My husband had already gone. He had left. And we were to follow. And he was going first to New York for orientation, then to Vienna for orientation, because he was working for the, it was called UNDCP then. Now it's called UNODC, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. So he was off to New York and the kids and I were ready to get on the plane. We were just about to leave the motel and the phone rang through and it was him. And I'm like,

what are you calling for? We're ready to leave for the airport. It was January 15th, 1991. And I remember the day very well. He said, Sharon, the Gulf War has started. Oh, wow. And the United Nations has canceled your flight. Oh. And I'm like, okay, what are we supposed to do? Because how long does a war last? It was the first Gulf War. Some people don't remember maybe that there were two Gulf Wars. This was the first one. And so we just kept in touch with each other. And he

moved from New York to Vienna, into Pakistan, all the time talking with us. I didn't go back to work, but I rented a car. And I stayed in the motel and I put my kids with friends. They were 13 and 15 at that point. And they, I put them back in school, much to their chagrin. They were horrified because they'd had send-offs. They'd had an assembly. Oh, yeah. Oh, they did.

A t-shirt and everything. They were mortified to go back to school. Oh, they did. They put on a T-shirt and everything. They were mortified to go back to school. Oh, wow. And even though they were in denial about moving to Pakistan, they were mortified about going back to school. So, and they were kind of there and not there. It was a very strange time. And I kept saying to my husband as we were, you know, in touch with each other,

should I go back to work or shall I rent a house? How long is this and finally the call came through that we could go it was about took about six weeks we flew the last week of the gulf war oh wow thank god that one was over quick if it would have been the second one you would have been 20 years yeah exactly that was kind of longer but the thing is that my husband had hounded them they didn't want want us. It was pretty dangerous there. There was a lot of, you know, riots and their ill will towards the West. And a lot of people have been evacuated. And, but he just badgered them. I'm sure the guy that was the head of the UN there was really sick of him because he just kept saying,

I want my family here. Maybe I should just go back to Canada and work from there. So finally they caved in, and I think we're the only people in the world flying towards Pakistan in the last week of the Gulf War. That's wild. That's wild. Here you've sold everything. You put your stuff in storage.

You're leaving, and then they're like, I don't know about all that. That's like really messed up. So you go on the adventure, you finally get over it. What's it like adjusting to a new culture, a new environment? And one that's a little probably less stable, I would guess. Yes, the whole first part of my book is about that. Because we were literally absolutely green Canadians.

The only trip I think at that point we had taken outside of Canada, I think we'd been to Hawaii once and we went to Mexico on a Christmas vacation, which back in the 80s was considered a really big deal thing to do. So that was about as far as we'd ever gone. We traveled a bit around Canada and the UN did not, I don't know for what reason, but we didn't get any orientation. My husband, Wayne, got work orientation. The family got no orientation about what to expect. Oh, serious. They just throw you right in there.

And by this time, the kids had, I think they were 14 and 16 by the time we got there. Just at the age, teenagers, you can imagine. And they were like, I always, I used to say to my friends, I'm surprised that first few months they didn't kill us in our sleep because they were just horrified. And they started school, but most of the school had been evacuated. Many American, it was an American international school, and many had been evacuated. Many American, it was an American international school, and many had been evacuated.

They were only key essential people, right? So the international people were still there, like people from other countries, but a lot of the American kids were gone. And they also had a very skeleton staff. Plus the school was outside of Islamabad and it was considered not safe. So they put them in houses. They were in houses in town of some of the people that had been evacuated. So it was not exactly regular school.

Plus we were moving them in the middle of school year. It was February. Do they still talk to you? No, I'm just kidding. Hello? I said, do your kids still talk to you no i'm just kidding hello i said do your do your kids still talk to you oh yes they consider it the best thing that ever happened to them this is this is an initial thing but but yeah they made friends at school but they had a lot of adjusting to do because oh yeah it was completely different for starters they were in a very unusual situation. They were having to adjust halfway through the year. And my husband walked into a situation with

his work that was unbelievable. He had to figure out how to have an office and hire staff and everything else. And I was tasked with doing the household things, which you may think was easy, but it took us a while to find a place to live and their houses are huge. So we ended up living in a 7,000 square foot house. Wow. The house is like a character in the book, really. We loved that house.

We came to love it. It was overwhelming at first and I had to hire staff. They called them servants, really, they did. A lot of it was like from the British colonial times. There's a lot of that left. At that time, there was. I don't know what it's like now. But I had to hire people to work for me, and not just one or two, seven, eight, nine people. Because they have, they say they don't, but really there's a caste system. So only this kind of people did that kind of work. And Christians did the most menial jobs. And then women could only do certain things.

And mostly it was men. So because they didn't, women didn't go out to work generally. So basically I really wasn't very good. First staff I hired, I ended up having to fire all of them. They were just useless. I didn't know what I was doing. And I didn't have people who work for the embassies and the school and things like that have the benefit of people telling them what to do,

or they get staff from the last people that were in that posting or they learned from other people that have been there for a while we didn't know anybody anything it was the gulf war we couldn't even go outside of our house barely we were very restricted so i winged it and didn't do a very good job but i always say i thought felt like the first cook was trying to poison us because we were really ill. I don't think it was on purpose, of course, but he wasn't practicing hygiene. I didn't realize it. And we were really ill, all of us.

This sounds like a hell of an adventure. You go there, you're Canadian, you're like, where's the ice hockey, the poutine, and the Timbits, eh? And, like, you guys are completely out of your element. They don't, they do have snow in the mountains there, I think. But that's crazy, man. That's quite the adventure.

Yeah. Yeah. It was, and my husband had all kinds of adventures with his work too. There was a lot of, a lot of corruption in the government and so on. And we tried to get air conditioners and the guy that was in charge of that was supposed to be facilitating.

And what he did, he kept accusing us of trying to buy air conditioners so we could resell them because everybody who worked for the United Nations was crooks. I don't know. This guy was like, I really had trouble keeping my calm around him. And he kept doing all this stuff and saying we couldn't have them. And it was for heat and air conditioning, and we really needed both. Yeah, you really needed both yeah you kind of air conditioning over there right yeah the winters get bone chilly chilling because it's so moist and rainy and the summers are searingly hot so he kept saying you're just this or that finally we realized that he wanted back sheesh, which is under the table payment, which is what everybody gets. But we were too,

we didn't know that's what everybody expected. So he gave us a really hard time till we finally figured out that he wanted under the table payment. So there was that. And then my husband got this office and office of Pakistani people, different Pakistani offices. And he got his office set up. He got a great staff. And he had just, they said, okay, you're going to have to share the telephone with everybody in the building. And he's like, okay, I'll put up with that. You have to share the telephone?

Oh, yeah. That's not the worst of it. Then his staff went to work. They'd been there maybe, I don't know, just a few weeks. His staff went to work one day and the entire office had been cleaned out. They took all the chairs, all the desks, all the computers, everything. They left, I think, one telephone on the floor. The rest of the Pakistanis in the building decided that this was their stuff. Wow. That is crazy.

So my husband went to the UN official and said, look, I want my own office. This is ridiculous. So eventually he got his own. He got a house, basically, which had different offices for his staff and everything and got settled in. But we all faced our own set of culture shock. And there's a lot. The whole first part of the book talks about going to the markets and what we're faced with there with the outdoor markets and how to clean the food, which was a huge process, and boil the water. Remember, this was 1991. We don't have, we're not doing bottled water and stuff like that. And that would be suspect anyway. Yeah. because who knows if they don't refill them.

And getting a good cook was really important because he was in charge of your health. His sanitation was super important. I saw a TikTok the other day of this guy who was just sitting and he's covered in filth and he's in one of these third world countries and he's making he's a street vendor making food you can see him just wiping his hands on his shirt and then he's grabbing food with his hands and some guy from the back is handing him food through his hands and then he just hands it to people and this looks really good and you're just like i wouldn't eat that i'd starve first we see we were warned about eating straight food although there were things that we did eat at the beginning that i don't think had

an effect on us there were these carts that went around there were really intriguing things too that were happening there was this cart that went around and the guy had like corn it was like popcorn but it was corn and he had this little heater and he would, it didn't make popcorn, but it just roasted the corn into a snack and then put a bunch of salt on it. And we used to eat that. We would eat that. We loved that. It was really good. But if you have something really hot, it's been sterilized. So you're okay. But you certainly wouldn't, you'd have to be pretty careful about people handling things and all of that. We didn't, in Pakistan, we really didn't eat food from the street.

And you had to be careful, even at people's houses, you had to know that you could trust the cook. Because he washes hands. Yeah. And we, yeah, not just that, though. They use night soil human feces for fertilizer so when you that's common in some countries and so basically when you clean the food you have to use a disinfectant we one of the stages of cleaning the food was soaking it in bleach what yes and then the vegetables and fruit and then rinsing it

with filtered water and then drying it all off and putting it in the fridge. That's one of the reasons that I needed to have staff. It was just really a lot of time consuming work to clean all the food, to clean the house. The floors had to be disinfected because you had to be really careful about what came in off the street. So it was, and eventually the next fall I ended up teaching. I got a job at the school. So I really didn't have time for looking after a 7,000 square foot house and disinfecting the floors and cleaning all the food every day, right? Yeah, it seems like there's a lot of disinfecting that should go on.

I'd just be, I don't know, bathing like 20 times a day or something and then gargling with bleach. This sounds like what I was doing or being in a coronavirus where I was washing all my groceries, spraying them down. Yeah. The thing is, I think that that's what I thought of when we were doing this during the pandemic. I thought, oh, now everybody is getting to understand what you have to do when you go to a country where the standards of cleanliness and so on are different from where you live.

Right. I've heard of when you travel, you've got to get the dysentery shot and different things and all the shots you have to have when you travel. But yeah. Wow, that's crazy. Isn't that the way Ebola gets transferred is by human feces in the water? I think so. I'm not 100% sure. I try, I would very much. That's like really freaky.

Hey, just soak the bees, bananas and bleach. That's always. Bananas have a skin on them. Hey, just soak the beans, bananas, and bleach. That's always, wow. Bananas have a skin on them. Yeah, yeah, so you're okay. But you have to clean the skin on the outside in case you don't want it. But things with a skin on them, it's not such a problem. And what we did was we put all the meat in the freezer immediately. And so we learned how to, we eventually got, our first cook that we got after the really bad one was Harry.

And he was a Christian. It makes a difference in that country because Christians are at the bottom of the pile hierarchy. And because it's a Muslim country. And Christians were, a lot of Christians were originally the untouchable caste. And becauseistan was part of india and no pakistan nor india likes to talk about that but they were originally part of india and so they say the caste system doesn't exist but of course it does and we had so we got harry who was fantastic he was an older man and he'd worked for the Cuban embassy, I believe,

and he'd worked in Dubai for a long time. And he was coming to the end of his career, but he had worked all these fantastic places. So he would give one of the first dinners he put on for us, he made a ship out of spun sugar for the middle of the table. Oh, wow. Yeah. And he would do all kinds of... one time, I think he put the

potatoes in the shape of a bunny rabbit. My kids were really like, I don't know if we want to eat that. That was like the mashed potatoes. And they would have my recipe books and they would also cook Pakistani food too. And so he was fantastic. And it's in the, unfortunately, Harry died. It was very sad for us and i had to get another cook and he was absolutely fantastic as well he was amazing he made everything from scratch including bread and spring roll dough and everything he was it was amazing wow that's crazy yeah so life got once you get established and you learn how to deal with things, life got better and better. And Pakistan has beautiful, stunning scenery.

The Karakoram Mountains and it's just beautiful. Lots of gorgeous areas to visit. Although many people haven't because Pakistan is not being considered very open for tourism. But there's some amazing places to visit, and they have fantastic weddings. Weddings are the biggest party of their lives, just like the Indian weddings, a really big thing around weddings and the Mendi parties and all of that. And, yeah, we loved so many. There were many things that we got to really love.

Even the call to prayer, which could came from the speakers all over town early in the morning and five times a day. But eventually it's the Muzin sort of that he's chanting and it gets to be a way of life for you. And you're like, oh, that's an interesting thing. But there was a lot to adjust to at first, a lot. There's a million stories, really. And that's what's great about the book is you've got them all in the book. People can see what that sort of adventure is like and stuff. Would you recommend anybody to do it in the future

or do it now? You mean visit Pakistan? Yeah. I don't know what it's like now. I still do have some friends there. A teacher that I taught do have some friends there. The teacher that I taught with when we were there has been living there all these years, and she's the superintendent of the school now.

I don't think it's recommended for people to go there and tour around, but I think if you're very adventurous, you might find a way to do that. It's hard to know because things go up and down, right? So I can speak to what it was like in the 90s. If somebody told me they wanted to go to Pakistan, I would ask the people that I know that live there. I tried to get different people that were there when we were there and also that live there now and so on, to read advanced copies of my manuscript. I wanted to make sure.

I talk a lot about all kinds of different things. I talk about the political climate and how that changed over time. I talk about terrorism. When we were there, it was the beginnings of the Taliban and the very beginnings of that. And a lot of people don't realize that Taliban actually started in Pakistan. And I remember how I felt about that at the time and the talks at the Canadian club about that. And there were all sorts of, and I talk about

foreign women marrying Pakistani men and what I observed with that happening. And I talk about the various cultural and religious things that happen around Islam. And I wanted to make sure I got it all right. We had a good friend that we had friends that did different things. One of them worked for the DEA. And I wanted to make sure that I got all the things right about the political and the terrorism and so on, and asked him to read it. And another person, another different people, my husband had somebody, the people that worked for him that were Pakistani Muslims. So I had, that was Muslim, read the book so that I made sure I got all that. It sounds like you guys had quite the adventures. Anything more you want to tease out in the book before we go? No, time has gone so fast.

I just really hope that everybody would read it and enjoy it. I presented to a book club about a week ago, and they were very focused on the negative elements, what they considered the negative elements, some of the things you and I have been talking about here. But I said, you know, what I really want people to realize is you can go and live anywhere and become very comfortable there. We loved living there in the end. Pakistani people were very welcoming in the markets. They were very trusting. They'd say, take the rug home for three weeks and try it out.

And if you don't like it, bring it back and we can give you another one, sell you another one. They knew where you lived. Islamabad wasn't a really big place, but lots of Afghan people lived there. We got to know lots of Afghan people as well. I would just say that it's interesting for people to understand and know that you can live anywhere and become accustomed to that and actually enjoy it and get the best out of it. Yeah, it's a good insight to other cultures and the way other people live. I always have this

fantasy of wanting to be like Anthony Bourdain, going different places, eating different food and trying different cultures and stuff. To me, it's always interesting. Of course, that's probably why I run the podcast. It's interesting to be people's life paths and the things they choose and what they do and what they do with their time. And you're like, why did you go down that road? And a lot of people have this really stuck sort of vision of you must be a certain way.

No, man, life's an adventure, and there's so many different things. And just the food element, I'm getting hungry talking about it. But I imagine there's a lot of great food stories in the book about their culture and what to eat. When you're not bleaching the food. So there's that. But I hear the, if you get that bleach that has that rosy smell to it, the pink bleach, it kind of adds a nice, beautiful scent to your oranges. It's really interesting because when kids said all kinds of interesting things when we first moved there, one of them said to me, I thought bleach was bad for you.

And I said, here it isn't. Well, it depends on which president is her office in America. Anyway, all the bleach does come off when you rinse it all with filtered water. But yeah, it's a way of disinfecting the food. It's crazy the amount of people you had to hire to support it. I had a 4,000 square foot house

at one time over the canyon. That was a lot of work to clean. I had two maids to help me not live in. They had to come once a week and clean up all my messes but 7 000 square feet that's a lot of room to yeah be vacuuming and cleaning and of course you live in a sand you live in the desert some sand coming in and yeah it's really interesting there were there's lots of things we didn't talk about today. We had our son got into an accident, and we were there the whole middle part of the book,

kinds of deals with the blood money thing that went on around that. Oh, really? Yeah. I'm not going to say too much about that because it's revealed in the book, but it was a very tense and difficult time for us. There's a nice piece out. Another time I accompanied my husband up into the mountains where they grow the poppies. And I went into a house, a tribal house in the mountains and visited with the woman there. Two different languages.

Felt like we were living in two different eras. And that was an amazing trip, too. Wow. Yeah, that's got to be wild with all the poppies, the heroin growth. Or is it heroin or cocaine? Heroin. Heroin. Yeah.

With all the heroin growth that's there and everything going on, my understanding is in Afghanistan they're trying to clean up the drug issues there and people that are really addicted to the stuff they grow. Well, that was what my husband was working on in pakistan we uh he was in he's in prevention and treatment in that side of it so he was drug demand reduction type of thing yeah yeah it's gotten i guess it's gotten really out of hand over there but yeah learning about other cultures and all that good stuff that's definitely something more people should be aware of and stuff. They should embrace one of the interesting parts.

There are downsides to living everywhere. I live in Utah for the coronavirus. I moved up to Utah from Las Vegas where my family is to take care of them. And it's a hellhole here. Pakistan sounds like fun compared to what goes on here. So, you know, you can find something wrong with every place you want to live, especially if you have to put up with your family. So there's that.

One thing I do want to say is when we left, we were five years in Pakistan and my husband got posted to Bangkok, Thailand then. And we thought Thailand is going to be really easy after Pakistan was what we were thinking was. And materially, that's, I mean, they have shopping centers and coffee shops and all of that. We only had to hire one person to look after us and all of that. But in terms of mental and emotional stress, and we both got caught up in toxic work environments. And it ended up, in fact, after I wrote my book on Pakistan I'd written a Thailand book first mostly because when we first came back to Canada it was like fresh in my mind but when after I wrote the Pakistan book I turned to my husband and I said maybe we should have

stayed there wow so then and that's the first book you wrote was on Thailand, correct? Yes. I wrote my books, you might say, backwards because we moved back to Canada in 2005. We had spent nine years in Thailand and there were a lot of things I needed to get out. I just wrote for catharsis really in the beginning. And so that's why that book was written first. Wow. Okay. Yeah, that's, I got to read the second book so I can find out what the heck's going on there with that. There you go.

All right. Well, thanks for coming on. We certainly appreciate you coming by the show today and spending the time with us. Give us your plug so people can go see the book and find out more about you guys. Yes. My book is available at all major online retailers, including Amazon, my publisher, booklocker.com. And also, if you go to my website, thebizantblog.com, both books are on there and all the links to purchase are there as well. Yep. All right. So thank you very much, Sharon.

It's been wonderful to have you on and continue having fun. And Ken, are you going to move anyplace anytime soon? No, we've retired here. I think our children are around and now we've got grandchildren. We're good. Afghanistan is probably going to open up soon. That sounds like a fun place to be. Yeah, my husband's been to Afghanistan, so I know quite a bit about that too.

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