afghandiary

2006-09-01T12:20:00.000+04:30

Jacob has a chat with his friend Claire

Preparing to leave Afghanistan

2005-11-02T09:20:00.000+04:30

The time has suddenly come for us to start organising our departure from Afghanistan. Ed and I would both love to travel back overland, but we will have to see how forthcoming Afghanistan’s chippy neighbours will be in issuing us with visas. The most obvious route would be through Iran, which we both travelled to in 2001 and loved, but we were told yesterday at the Iranian Embassy in Kabul that there is a “special procedure” for American and British citizens only. Needless to say, given the current political climate, this procedure is anything but special – other than in the sense of longer, more complicated and more expensive.
I pored over the map yesterday plotting alternative routes, but they all involve a huge number of countries (and thus visas), especially if we try to avoid going through Uzbekistan again. One example: we cross from Afghanistan into Tajikistan, drive across Tajikistan over the mountains and eastwards into Kyrgyzstan, traverse the whole of Kyrgyzstan northwards, again across high mountains, up to the Kazakh border. We would then traverse the whole of southern Kazakhstan westwards, a massive trek across the proverbial hungry steppe of Central Asia. From Kazakhstan we would pass briefly into the Russian Federation, go through Volgograd and into Ukraine. Having been granted entrance to the Ukraine, it would then be a simple matter of crossing Hungary and Austria, before taking the night train from Vienna to Venice.
Having contemplated that route, this morning we decided to go back to the Iranian Embassy and submit our application. We took a deep breath and paid 240 dollars for the chance of receiving a 7 day transit visa within two weeks.
In the queue for the Iranian Embassy, I met a small Afghan lady who was also hoping to be allowed to enter Iran. She told me, in hesitant English, that she was a graduate of the Faculty of Law who had remained in Kabul throughout all the years of the war. Her husband and brother had been martyred, and she had no money, but she had heard that it was possible to apply for study grants from the Ministry of Martyrs and Maimed Veterans (that may not be its the exact title).
She told me she has never once left her country, but that she very much wants to, and that she wants to continue her studies. She gazed up at me in a supplicating manner as she spoke, and smiled so that the corners of her light brown eyes crinkled, but I could think of nothing to say.
Already that same morning I had shrugged away two requests for help – while Ed was in the British Embassy having a meeting, I waited in the car with the driver. We talked about boxing – he is a keen boxer and would love us to buy him a proper pair of gloves in England. The gloves to be found here are no good – the label might say they are made in America or England or Russia, but in fact they are all from Pakistan. He showed me his various boxing scars, and proudly pointed out that both his nose and teeth are unscathed. He also told me the interesting, and perhaps little known, fact that all the best boxers in the world always eventually wind up converting to Islam.
Our chat was interrupted by a man in his forties or fifties, with a suntanned face and a neatly trimmed beard, who accosted the window and asked the driver if he might speak to me. Having been assured that I spoke Dari, he explained that he was a teacher, but he was forced to beg because he had five children to support.
I didn’t have any money and told him so, and when he withdrew the driver explained that even experienced teachers only receive about forty dollars a month – which in Kabul can hardly be enough to keep body and soul together, never mind support a family.
Not five minutes after the teacher had departed, an old lady in a tattered burqa, lifted up so that we could see her face, clung to the car window pleading for a few Afghani to feed a poor widow. Again I explained that I had no money, but again I don’t think she believed me. In Europe, it is possible to feel confident that beggars and the homeless can rely on the state or private charities, but in Kabul, where even the teachers beg, there are just too many.

Leaving Uzbekistan

2005-11-01T14:01:00.000+04:30

The next morning it was already time to rush back to Afghanistan before my visa expired, lest I find myself like Cinderella at the border, in all wrong clothes and a huge penalty to pay.
Alas, it was already getting late by the time we reached the border, and what with the Uzbeks having perhaps the most paranoid government on earth (up there with N Korea, Saudi A and Turkmenistan), we didn’t have an easy time of it. They moaned about my visa, they sifted through Ed's pockets, accused us of hiding our customs declaration and disappeared with my passport for an hour and a half, leaving us on a concrete curb in the gathering gloom.
We had 40 kg of luggage with us – having collected my voluminous winter wardrobe from storage in Tashkent, and were expected to walk over the 3km of bridge and no man's land, because "it is not safe" to allow cars across at night. Luckily we persuaded a special status UN car to take our heaviest bag across with them.
By the time we reached Afghanistan it was 8pm, and the Afghan on duty had fallen asleep. There was no sign of a car to pick us up. Finally we managed to persuade the roaringly drunk head of the border police to let us use his phone to call Mazar. We were told by a frightened young radio operator that he had been refused permission to send us a car, because the road from Mazar was "dangerous at night". Neither he nor anyone else in the cuckoo organisation that employs Ed had any suggestions as to what we might do in a small Afghan border town until it became safe to send a car for us (the next day), so we are lucky that the drunk commander decided to take us in hand.
We were ushered us into his own room in the barracks, the way flanked by saluting underlings, who scrambled to carry our luggage without dislodging their machine guns from their shoulders. He gestured to the amenities his room offered, and announced we should sleep there ("Clean sheets!" he remarked several times for our benefit), while he ordered his underlings to fetch us rice and meat, fruit, Pepsi and vodka (the latter largely for his own benefit).
One junior soldier with his Kalash on his back was made to peel and chop apples for us, while another was dispatched to find us a suitable room for the night (after a few more vodkas he had concluded that "it is not good for women to sleep near soldiers").
He regaled us with stories of his Buzkashi exploits (the Afghan ancestor of polo in which a headless sheep or calf is substituted for the ball, and rules are few), and showed us the ugly scars on his leg dating from the last match. He proved his great love of horses by showing us his mobile phone, which whinnied on command, and commissioned us to buy him a pair of British Army boots when we next had the opportunity.
So, after dinner and toasts we were driven off to the flat of one of his colleagues, where a meek little wife and seven children smiled shyly at us and made us up a bed for the night. I fell asleep almost as soon as I had been ushered into the ladies’ room, but Ed enjoyed a few more rounds of Afghan courtesy before joining me.
In the morning we were plied with cake and fried meats, quince jelly and fresh cream, while the family apologised profusely for not joining us in any refreshments, as it is Ramadan and they were all fasting. They had had their breakfast at 4am. We were sat down in front of the telly (which was showing "Antz") until the ACTED car finally arrived to take us to Mazar.

GRE a la Uzbeque

2005-10-28T13:57:00.000+04:30

My husband and I would love to attend graduate school in the US, and with this in mind set about studying for the GRE exam shortly after arriving in Afghanistan. The GRE is a necessary hurdle in the application process whatever subject one intends to study, and it must be sat in October ideally. We discovered that the nearest exam location to Kabul is Tashkent, and so I set about applying for an Uzbek visa several weeks in advance. No response from the relevant ministry.
After days of nail-biting suspense, and many visits to a suave Uzbek consular official with deceptively liberal ideas about world travel (“Borders? They are not God’s work! God created the world, but man created borders! My child and your child are the same underneath!”), I was finally granted a three day Uzbek transit visa – the day before our departure.
Cars are a little scarce in my husband’s organisation since the earthquake in Pakistan, and this NGO’s timely emergency response that stripped its Afghan offices of all essential staff, but nonetheless with a little bargaining we reached Mazar in a day.
I was very happy to see our friends at the guesthouse again, and to catch up with Sugarlump’s latest stories. We crossed the border into Uzbekistan with eerie ease, only to find no one waiting on the other side. So we walked along the path through the fields to the little teahouse, where we sat on a wooden platform under the apricot trees and drank a bottle of mineral water. The tea was a little while in coming as all cooking was being done over an open fire, but an Uzbek matron and her two daughters kept us company. One of them was busy making an extremely elaborate cushion cover using a flower-shaped stitch I had never seen before. They all had gold earrings and teeth and were very cheerful, laughing at anything we said.
Finally we were picked up, and taken to the guesthouse in Termez, where we were fed and watered before being put on the very small plane leaving for Tashkent. [to be continued…]
In Tashkent we were warmly greeted at the airport by our friends from the office there, one of whom had toothache and had swollen up like a hamster. As soon as we were settled into our room, we took great delight in walking out un-chaperoned into the great, dark city. It felt unusually wonderful to walk the dimly lit, tree-lined streets of featureless Tashkent, which had never struck as so pleasant before we had experienced months of Kabul claustrophobia. We found a Uyghur café that was still open (Uyghurs are a Muslim ethnic group from Western China who speak a Turkic language similar to Uzbek), and were welcomed into their warmest room. We had suzma, a tangy cream cheese to be scooped up with bread, and lagman, the Uyghur speciality: long noodles dexterously handmade at high speed, in a rich broth with seasonal vegetables and small chunks of mutton, seasoned with a liquorice-like herb. Old favourites of mine.
The next morning our thoughts were very much taken up by our exam, due to begin at 2pm, and by how to find the venue. We arrived in good time, and sat through our two essays, our 30 mins of verbal acrobatics, our 45 minutes of maths (rather painful), and a mysterious "experimental" section on which we were not won't be marked. I severely ran out of time during the maths part, it almost as bad as being at school again – even after all my revision. Luckily it was all multiple choice, in which blind guessing can also bring its rewards.
We were so glad when it was over – as well as chuffed to realise that both Ed and I had got the maximum score in the verbal section – that we went straight out and blew all of 28 dollars on a huge slap up meal at the most expensive restaurant we could find. This was a most discreetly elegant Korean place with Russian waitresses in tiny scarlet skirts (a most pleasing change from Kabul), where we were given seven types of complimentary salads as a starter - which won my heart already - and then elaborate little mouthfuls wrapped up in seaweed (a bit like sushi), whole roasted fishes, and - forbidden delight - roast pork nuggets with sesame. We only made one bad choice - a scary soup with fermented soy beans in it - but that's good going considering we were deciphering a patchily translated menu.

quake

2005-10-09T16:07:00.000+04:30

I was woken on saturday morning by the sound and motion of my bed, rocking from side to side, but not violently. When I opened my eyes, I saw the chandelier swinging two and fro above my head, and heard the walls or window frames doing a certain amount of creaking and whining.
I stayed awake just long enough to realise it was an earthquake, and to hope that the epicentre was somewhere nearby, which would have meant that it was but a baby earthquake.
Alas, as we now know, quite the opposite is true, and I am lucky not to have found myself further east that saturday morning.

New blog!

2005-10-04T17:08:00.000+04:30

Today I have launched a new, special blog, dedicated to Bemani and the fundraising effort to send her to England for surgery. You can read an INTERVIEW with her, to get an idea of what an amazing person she is.

Today is also the first day of the holy month of Ramadan. I wish all my Muslim friends strength in their fast, and many happy iftar meals with their families.

Ripples from a murder

2005-10-04T07:59:00.000+04:30

The ripples from the recent killing of a parliamentary candidate in Mazar-i-Sharif continue to grow. Ashraf Ramazan was killed with his bodyguard on 27 September, and the protests at his death have been gathering momentum. Already on the day after his death mourners took to the street in protest, demanding that his killers be swiftly found and tried.

Today, hundreds of protesters in Mazar blocked the main road from Kabul and from Mazar airport into the city. Ed and I had set off for Mazar at 6:30 am this morning, but we were warned by radio of the road block and only reached as far as Pul-i-Khumri. We had lunch there, and headed straight back on the 6 hour journey to Kabul.
However, there are protests in Kabul also, for the same reason, and the latest news is that the Taliban have claimed responsibility for his death.

According to RZ, who we spoke to from Pul-i-Khumri, the protest in Mazar is not limited to the Hazara or Shi’ite minority who would form his most natural constituency. Ramazan belonged to the minority Shi’ite Wahdat party, and was ethnically a Hazara, but seems to have been generally liked in Mazar.

Ramazan was said to have been in fifth position in the vote count for the Balkh province elections, which would have given him one of the eleven district seats in the new parliament. The results of the elections are due to be announced only on 22 October, but a lot of the experts have already been wondering whether the “assassination clause” in the electoral law was a good idea. This clause stipulates that if a winning candidate dies, his seat passes to the runner up candidate.

The protests and roadblocks in Mazar are expected to continue for some days, but it remains to be seen whether the start of the fasting month of Ramadan tomorrow will have an effect.

Protesters are demanding the resignation of the provincial governor, Mohammed Atta, as it seems to many that he could well be behind the killings. There’s an article by Christian Parenti here which gives an idea of how life and the rule of law are respected under Atta’s regime.

“As a prelude to becoming governor here, the warlord Mohammed Atta had his men lay siege to the home and offices of a rival, the provincial security chief Gen. Mohammed Akram Khakrizwal, who is almost universally acknowledged to be an honest man committed to the rule of law. Police loyal to Khakrizwal were driven away, and an armed standoff ensued for the next twenty days.

During the siege, Khakrizwal was resupplied with food and water by the small garrison of British troops stationed here, but the foreign soldiers were unable or unwilling to intervene further. Eventually some accommodation was reached and Mohammed Atta was appointed governor of Balkh province.”

The current regime in Afghanistan does seem to be dangerously conciliatory towards such thugs – the only occasion in which I have seen Atta was at a dinner at the Indian Embassy celebrating India’s Independence, at which he was an honoured guest.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY WILLIAM !

2005-09-29T18:15:00.000+04:30

Today is my little brother’s birthday - I remember William when he looked like a squirming little beetroot in the bath with me, and when we dressed him up as Father Christmas and let him loll around in the fireplace.

But now William is an accomplished author, who has penned many spine tingling tales in his youth, but more recently turned to comedy. He starred, together with black Labradors Humphrey and Dora, in the grisly horror film “The hounds of Hell”.

He is celebrated for having written the history of Yutlin Island, for which he also drew the first maps, and conducted a study of its people in great detail, down to the uniform worn by the police of this little known island. Indeed, William for many years has had a strong interest in law enforcement, quite eclipsing his earlier fascination for burglars, and at some stage wished to be a riot policeman.

William is an epicure, privileging quality over quantity when it comes to food: while uncertain about the point of many vegetables, he adores truffles and is fond of fine dining in exclusive restaurants.

His taste in music is decidedly catholic, as although I believe his all-time favourite is still J.B. Bach, he also sees the merits of 50 Cent and Iron Maiden. William is also a consummate musician, and plays both the piano and the violin to the great delight of his rather less musical family.

Perhaps William is more of an intellectual and artist than a sportsman, but this does not mean that he and I have not engaged in deadly kickboxing sessions on the lawn.

With such qualities, who could blame me for missing him? Can’t wait to see you, William – and Happy 13th Birthday!

Security, archaeology

2005-09-29T14:17:00.000+04:30

Well, I had my laugh about security warnings.

Yesterday a suicide bomber attached one of the bases of the Afghan National Army, just as a graduation ceremony was being held for the new recruits, and at least twelve people were killed.

This morning, Ed received a call from his young archaeologist friend to say that the parliamentary candidate who was employing him has just been assassinated.
Neither of these events make me feel that my personal safety is any more in jeopardy than it was, but they are grim reminders of the challenges faced by the courageous people fighting for a peaceful, honest future for their country.
RZ, the young archaeologist, is one of our best friends in Afghanistan and an extraordinary person.

My first contact with him was through the presents that he gave Ed to celebrate our marriage, before I had met him. He gave us a rather charming plaster cast of the Madonna and Child (unexpected!), a very colourful poster of a sinuously loving couple in Shahnameh style surrounded by riotous flora and fauna, and a beautiful sample of his calligraphy, one of his many talents.

RZ is a tireless and effervescent young man who was born and brought up as a refugee in Tehran, and travelled to Afghanistan for the first time last year. He has settled with his family, like most of the new returnees, in an exposed patch of land on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif.

He has no formal training in archaeology – a subject which it would have been a great luxury to pursue in the circumstances, indeed his undergraduate degree in engineering was interrupted when he was obliged to leave Iran. But he is extraordinarily knowledgeable and well-read, having combed the ancient remains in and around Mazar and read everything he could find about Afghanistan’s past. He has written four books (unpublished, as yet – but I am sure that will change when his luck does) on the history of Balkh province, the Bactrian empire and so forth.
All his books are written out by hand, and illustrated with his careful drawings of Bactrian coins and transcrubed insciptions.

He has been employed by the Ministry of Culture, despite his youth and lack of qualifications, and is responsible, I think, for the Museum in Mazar, or possibly for Historic Monuments in general. The Ministry of Culture appears to be a somewhat fluid and mysterious organisation. RZ largely supports himself though by running calligraphy classes for girls and boys in Mazar.

Doubtless because of his great energy and flair, RZ was employed by one of the candidates in the parliamentary elections to organise his campaign and write his speeches.

He worked extremely hard in the run-up to the elections – sometimes all night, it seemed, but he was very reserved in speaking to us about this, and he did not tell us the candidate’s name. He told us only that the candidate was a very rich man (with several large cars, as I recall), and a good man, and that he hoped he would receive some help if the campaign was successful. Knowing RZ, I can imagine that the help he hoped for would be something in the nature of better funding for architectural preservation, or a more concerted effort to combat the ongoing plunder and defacing of the monuments, which distresses him so.

Now it seems that this man is dead, and RZ is badly rattled. Without knowing the details, I can only assume that this candidate was perceived to be a threat to the interests of the powerful drug trafficker / warlords who control Balkh province (of which Mazar is the capital), a focal area for opium production and conveniently located on the border with Uzbekistan (which has a rocketing heroin problem).

One of my main goals before I leave Afghanistan is to help RZ to get a fully funded place on an archaeology degree, preferably at UCL or Chicago University. All offers of help and advice gratefully received as always.

security warning

2005-09-27T12:56:00.000+04:30

It can be nervewracking to live in a city with so volatile and threatening a security environment as Kabul.

Today, for example, all NGO and international workers billeted in Kabul found the following security warning in their inboxes:

"Please be aware of demonstration conducted by a small group of people with disabilities.
According to the information a group of people comprised of 60-80 people have came together on Shah Mahmood Ghazi Watt and demonstrating for better Remunerations. The exact location of the demonstration is reported to be between the Ministry of economic (former Ministry planning) and UNDP compound. The demonstration is reported to be peaceful, but ANSO advise NGO community not to drive on Shah Mahmood Watt."

ANSO is the Afghanistan Non-Governmental Organization Safety Office, and we rely on them for these regular bulletins, to brighten our mornings.

2005-09-25T18:03:00.000+04:30

Kabul election posters

Rubbish

2005-09-25T15:55:00.000+04:30

Kabul is so dirty. I went out for a short walk yesterday, just as far as Chicken Street, where the closest DVD shop is, and the sight of the fetid piles of rubbish littering the streets and clogging up the ditches put me in a bad mood for hours afterwards. Needless to say, it is not only the sight of such mounds of rubbish is noisome, the smell is enough to make me gag, too – especially near the butchers’ areas.
I really cannot understand why it is so much dirtier than every other city I have been in, including ones that have an otherwise comparable socio-cultural environment, such as Iranian and Tajik cities.

Of course, Kabul city administration probably does not have enough resources to deal effectively with rubbish collection and disposal, but I think this is only part of the problem. After all, Tajikistan is just as cash-strapped and receives less international aid, but Tajiks do not seem to litter so conspicuously, and regularly take the initiative to burn the piles of rubbish outside their homes – which may cause air pollution, but I’d still rather a few hours of black smoke to relentlessly growing mounds of stink. Tajik students engage in more or less voluntary clean up operations on a regular basis, round town and the universities - a Soviet practice (the subbotnik) that seems to have survived the meltdown.

Kabulis on the other hand don’t seem to have too much civic pride – surely understandable after years of war and uncertainty, but I wonder how it will change.
Tin cans whizzing out of moving cars are a common sight, the Kabul river is a stinking trickle of dark filth wending its way past rusting barrels and car parts, and mounds of rubbish obstruct the entrance to shops and houses. Sometimes, in a stomach churning variation to a bucolic theme, a plump flock of sheep can be seen grazing on the rubbish mounds, nosing aside the plastic bottles to unearth the juicy morsels beneath.

Perhaps understandably, Afghans do have a great love of picnics in natural beauty spots, and wax lyrical at the drop of a hat about the clean air and pure mountain water of Afghanistan, but they stop short of taking home the litter from their picnics or taking a long, hard look at what makes the rural picnic spots nicer than Kabul (for now).

I think part of the problem is that, such mounds of trash must have caught Kabulis unawares. During the years of war, before the main roads were repaved, it must have been much harder to import the consumer goods that are such plentiful sources of rubbish, with their bubble wrap, cellophane and other non biodegradable claptrap. With peace, have come vast quantities of comprehensively packaged Chinese electronics, air conditioners, and a multitude of soft drinks in mixed plastic, hard to recycle containers. Once you have finished drinking a cola, there’s nowhere to throw the bottle but the ditch – and even if you do go to the trouble of bringing it home and putting it in the trash can, that will only be emptied into some other, larger ditch elsewhere.

Living in Kabul only really brings home the worldwide problem of rubbish disposal, as of course there is nothing uniquely selfish or reckless about the Afghan approach. The mounds of rubbish are much larger in richer countries – and getting larger all the time, but discreetly tucked away in underground cement lined chambers, giving nothing the chance to rot, but also (we hope) minimising the chance of toxic spillage. Last I heard, the British government was having trouble finding sites for waste dumps (strangely unpopular with the locals) and was looking at the idea of paying poorer countries to ‘dispose of’ British rubbish. How’s that for a sustainable solution?

Beard, beard

2005-09-22T14:21:00.000+04:30

In Afghanistan, facial hair can be endless topic of conversation, much as the weather is in England. This is because facial hair is so common and so varied - but almost noone is entirely lacking. I amused myself in the run up to the parliamentary elections by scanning the posters portraying the candidates' faces, which by the final week plastered every wall, truck side, water tank and even tree trunk in the city centres, looking for the one with least facial hair.
Many had the full Taliban-style beard and moustache, neatly combed but otherwise unpruned, and glowered fiercely at the electorate from under their turbans.
Indeed, I began to think that affecting a smile for the camera must be perceived as a sign of unwonted frivolity and lack of dignitas on a par with being clean-shaven. It is difficult to take the clean-shaven seriously, as a rule – my husband shaves quite regularly, but he does have large sideburns.
There were those candidates whose facial hair was hennaed, or elaborately topiaried, whose beard covered only a central patch of chin, and even those audacious enough to shed the beard altogether – leaving only a large moustache. Those latter ones had usually also discarded Afghan dress in favour of a Western suit.
There were, of course, women candidates running for election too, but generally speaking their posters were of rather inferior quality – printed in black and white, in a very grainy texture that would have hidden any downy upper lips, and may also have rendered them hard to recognize on voting day.
[As so many of the electorate is illiterate, each candidate’s name on the ballot sheet is accompanied by a very small mug shoot]. The female candidates also looked almost unremittingly grim.
A luminous exception to this rule was provided by the posters of a young woman photographed tilting her head to one side and smiling warmly, against a pale yellow background, in a light coloured headscarf tied loosely enough to avoid the danger of headaches. I hope she gets through – and I know of at least one man who voted for her, the chap who sold me a SIM card the other day.
He also asked me whether I had been to school. I felt rather insulted by this somehow, and haughtily replied that I had a degree, too – then of course felt extremely sheepish when he explained placidly that he himself was undereducated, and picked up what he knew about mobile phones (most of it in English), after leaving school at 10. He had a moustache.
I have since been told that there is only one facial hair configuration that one must always beware of, unless it is on the faces of very old men – and that is the flowing beard with shaved upper lip. Such men are invariably narrow minded in the extreme, or so I am told.

Bemani

2005-09-19T21:38:00.000+04:30

NEWSFLASH! Remember the girl I wrote about a few weeks ago who was badly injured when her house in Kabul was bombed? I wrote many emails on her behalf to specialist medical organisations and hospitals in the UK, only to be met by several weeks of resounding silence.
Today, at last, I was contacted by a hero of a doctor, a maxillofacial surgeon and expert in facial trauma in London, who has offered to operate on her for free. He even seems to be interested in establishing further contacts with HAWCA (Humanitarian Assistance to the Women and Children of Afghanistan), the organisation who has supported her and for whom I am volunteering.

I am very happy – now all I have to do is work out a way to raise enough money to cover the 350 pounds that the hospital will charge for every day the patient stays there. Having grown up in countries with basically free healthcare, I think I have been taking hospitals for granted – I certainly had no idea they cost as much as that!
Still, it’s very good because if we succeed, it means that our patient will be able to travel to London for treatment at a time when, as it happens, HAWCA’s director will also be in London studying for a Masters.

Our patient – whom I will call Bemani, after the heroine of a Dariush Mehrjui film, who is also badly burnt but survives to find happiness – is coming to the HAWCA office tomorrow so I have a chance to see her. Bemani means "Live!" or "To stay alive".

Sayyaf MP?

2005-09-19T18:58:00.000+04:30

Here is a short extract from the HRW report I mentioned earlier, which serves to illustrate why some Afghans feel so strongly that some of the parliamentary candidates had no right to stand for office. In Paghman district, just west of Kabul, the election posters on display showed the face of only one man, Abdul Rabb al Rasul Sayyaf. In his previous incarnation, he was the leader of the predominantly Pashtun Ittihad party, supported by Saudi Arabia.

Human Rights Watch interviewed a Pashtun man who, despite his Pashtun ethnicity, was held by Ittihad forces in the summer of 1992 because of a non-ethnic dispute with troops. The man said he was put in detention, and […] that night, as fighting raged outside, the man said that the Ittihad forces brought in Hazara civilians: “Sayyaf’s forces brought thirty or forty Hazara civilians. . . . They were not fighters, but civilians, old and young. […] [T]he fighting got severe. We could hear the artillery. There was a lot of shooting. I could hear these people, Sayyaf’s people, talking about retreating. And at one point, one of them said to Commander Tourgal, “What should we do with these prisoners?” They were speaking in Pashto, and the Hazara people couldn’t understand them. But I could understand. Somebody said, “Go and shoot them.” I was near the door. When I heard this, I hurried away and hid away from the door, in the corner of the room [on the side of the room with the door]. A person came, and opened the door, and shot all over the room with his kalashnikov, on automatic. He just fired randomly all over the room. About ten people were killed, immediately, and four were wounded. . . . After, no one moved. We [who were still alive] were trembling with fear. The fighting outside was serious—the commander called on this guy to come back to fight at the windows with them, so the man left, to go back to fighting.”

It is hard not to agree with HRW, that, having allowed such men to compete for seats in the new parliament, this election represents somehow a lost opportunity for the Afghan people to pursue a future of peace. Arezu agrees: “If only the government had had the courage to exclude these warlords, these murderers! Do you know how many people would have voted then? Millions, and millions more than voted yesterday”.

Post votem

2005-09-19T18:15:00.000+04:30

Why was turnout so low in the Afghan parliamentary elections? This morning we frail and vulnerable ex-pats were allowed out of our compound for the first time in four days, so I was able to explore a little. Over the last few days, BBC World had been feeding us a lot of feelgood pap about how the democracy-besotted Afghans were bravely and happily skipping off to the polls in their millions. I wanted to believe it – it is such a heart-warming tale, and as we were driven to the office I delighted in the myriad images of parliamentary candidates festooned in the trees, on the sides of water tanks and plastered on every wall of Kabul.

At the office, I asked all the Afghans I bumped into, and everyone gathered round the lunch table, to show me their index fingers, and they were all ink-free. None of them had voted – none of the educated, English-speaking staff that the NGO employees.

In the afternoon I had the opportunity to ask my favourite source Arezu, of HAWCA, for her thoughts. For one, she does not think the security situation is to blame. On her way to cast her vote, she met two men, a young man and an older man carrying a child in his arms, and she asked them why they did not wish to vote. The young man said that he did not see the point: many people had turned out to vote in the presidential elections, and yet the government did not seem to be doing enough to help the people of Afghanistan. If the parliament was just going to be more of the same, why bother to vote. The older man was more insightful, in Arezu’s opinion: “when I see the huge posters of the warlords and criminals who are standing for elections, I am disgusted. In Kabul, the very city that still bears the scars of the violence these men instigated, they are standing for election in parliament. To take part in an electoral process that has not excluded such people, would be a shame and an affront to the people of Kabul who have suffered so much. Let those who want such people to remain in power vote for them”.

And what of the majority of candidates for this election, who have no direct links to the bloodshed of recent history? Ah, but while the likes of Qanooni are allowed to stand, what would be the point of voting for any of the others, some people ask. “It would be like voting for an ant, who would find himself in a parliament with the elephants”.

The figures for vote turnout will not be available for some days, but Arezu confidently predicts that turnout will prove to be lowest in Kabul city itself – despite the greater security threats and lower literacy rates elsewhere. This is because, she explains, most of the notorious warlords and criminals who have escaped disqualification have gravitated to Kabul to stand for election – the city which also saw some of the most terrible fighting and atrocities committed (see the excellent report from Human Rights Watch ‘Blood-Stained Hands: Past Atrocities in Kabul and Afghanistan’s Legacy of Impunity’). This is enough to discredit the nascent parliament in the eyes of some – while others are put off by the distance they would have to travel to vote[1], would rather take advantage of the holiday to spend time with their families, or are not even registered to vote.

But Arezu voted, in Kabul, collecting her registration card from a mosque in the area of her office, and proudly displays her inky forefinger. So did her mother and two sisters, who travelled to Nangahar province to cast their vote – they took a picnic and made a day of it.
----
[1] As these are local elections, voters are only allowed to cast their vote in the area where they are registered as residents, creating problems in a country which has seen so much internal displacement, and entails long and arduous journeys across the country

Chashma in Nofin

2005-09-14T18:12:00.000+04:30

Ed and I had been walking all day when we reached the village of Nofin, by the shores of the fourth lake in the chain of seven. We were very thirsty, and delighted when these two girls in the picture (the older ones) befriended us and showed us the way to the spring. The water was delicious, and freezing.
These two girls are wearing the modern, very fashionable, version of Atlas silk, which is very traditional and highly prized fabric in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The patterns and colours on their dresses are traditional, but unfortunately these days most of them are made of synthetic materials.
It is especially traditional for new brides to wear "Atlas" dresses - and these girls are 19 and very recently married when we met them. They were very giggly about it, and about the fact that they can't be bothered to wear the traditional 'flowerpot' style hat under their headscarves to show their married status.
They both had a few gold teeth, another good thing to get done before you get married.

2005-09-14T18:10:00.000+04:30

the minstrels

2005-09-14T18:08:00.000+04:30

ripples

2005-09-13T18:07:00.000+04:30

water of the first kul

2005-09-13T18:05:00.000+04:30

as we set off on our first day of walking

2005-09-13T16:56:00.000+04:30

a rare chance to pose for a photo

Haft Kul

2005-09-13T16:52:00.001+04:30

From Penjikent we took another taxi to Rashna, a village in the Fan mountains which surround the Zerafshan valley, and our driver made sure we found a nice family to spend the night with before leaving us. He even took the precaution of buying our hosts a watermelon as a gift, on the way.
We chose to head for Rashna because we had heard that the Haft Kul, or Seven Lakes, that begin just above the village, are very beautiful, and so they are.
We walked as far as the fourth kul on our first day of walking, which started at about 11 am, much to the surprise of our host family, who had been waiting about for us to emerge and eat breakfast since about 5 am.
Nonetheless, we strode off manfully with our picnic in our rucksack, and were duly delighted by each new kul that we came across. There must have been earthquakes and landslides going a long way back, because the series of seven lakes, each of which flows into the next further down the mountain, were created by huge rock falls that blocked off the mountain stream that feeds them at successive points.

2005-09-13T16:52:00.000+04:30

the young villagers of Nofin catch sight of us

2005-09-12T08:39:00.000+04:30

corner of a susani, Penjikent Museum

2005-09-12T08:36:00.000+04:30

susani in Penjikent museum

Tajik interlude

2005-09-12T08:34:00.000+04:30

Ed and I took off for a long awaited holiday in Tajikistan on Wednesday 31 August – the first day we made it as far as Kunduz, a small city near the Amu-Darya (Oxus) river. The next day we travelled to Dushanbe and were reunited with many dear friends. On Saturday morning before dawn broke we were most unusually vertical, and on our way to the long haul taxi rank. We found a man eager to take us to Penjikent in no time, but it was only sometime later that we actually set off, after locating our other two travelling companions, and having a breakfast of fried eggs and tea. The journey up and over the mountains into the Zerafshan valley, were Penjikent is, was really spectacular, so much so that I didn’t mind the bumps and curves in the road, and the choking dust.

After stopping in a roadside restaurant for a quick bowl of grimly familiar mutton fat soup, we continued our journey, arriving in the town of Penjikent in the middle of the afternoon. We surprised our driver by asking to be dropped off at the Museum, where I fell into rapt admiration of the beautiful susani collection lining the walls of one room. The susani is an embroidered wall hanging traditionally made by women in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, to form part of dowry chests. I took lots of photos of them.

2005-09-12T08:30:00.000+04:30

the Varzob pass

Return to Mazar

2005-08-25T15:42:00.000+04:30

I left Kabul yesterday, and am back in Mazar now. We had a lovely journey from Kabul over the mountains – the highlight was stopping for breakfast at the top of the Salang pass. We sat in a square tent with one flank open to the wind and overlooking a roaring mountain stream far below us, and we were each served platefuls of fresh fried fish and miniature bright lemons, with rounds of warm bread.
There were four of us: myself and Ed, Habibullah the driver and K from Australia, who lives with us in Mazar, but with frequent travel to minister to far flung vulnerable villages. We had a cheerful and very tasty breakfast, much livened by K who is one of the sunniest people I know, and Ed surreptitiously filmed it all, while ostensibly ‘just checking the lighting’.

Further along the road we stopped at a waterhole to swim – in a beautiful spot with steep bare mountain flanks rising on all sides, and emerald water. However, on finding the rim of the water surrounded by youths of the silently squatting type, and that our garments were thin and inclining to transparency when wet, we girls decided not to swim. But we paddled, and very soothing it was too. In fact, Ed was the only swimmer, as, it later transpired, our driver had volunteered himself to stand sentry so that we girls could swim. It seems it would have been indelicate for him to swim while the ladies were cooling their ankles. I admire greatly the modesty of Afghan men, and applaud their consistency. Not like these couples one seen quite often in parts of the Muslim world, where the wife is muffled in a big black sack and the guy is wiggling his bottom in tight jeans, sporting a spray-on T-shirt and speaking incessantly into his mobile, which has a naked lady screensaver were one to look closely.

Story of an Afghan woman

2005-08-22T19:06:00.000+04:30

This morning I paid a visit to a local NGO founded in 1999 to protect the rights of the women and children of Afghanistan. Naturally the task is a daunting one for a small, under funded charity, but the staff I met were upbeat and proud of their programmes: literacy centres in all the main cities of the north, a women’s centre for victims of domestic violence, and a women’s cultural centre scheduled to open next year. They were frank about their recruiting problems – a local NGO constantly bleeds qualified staff to international organisations with vastly larger budgets. IOM pays its drivers 600 USD a month – far more than any engineer or doctor working in the public sector could ever aspire to. I plan to volunteer for them, keeping in touch by email from Mazar and visiting them whenever I am in Kabul, and as most of their funds come from Italy and Spain I will be able to help them with liaising and donor relations. Finally my days of indolence are ending, and I can begin to feel useful once again!

While I was there, I met someone I am sure I will never forget.
I was introduced to her as someone who has had a tragic life, which is putting it mildly, even in the context of Afghanistan. I hope my face did not betray anything untoward as I was introduced to her, as her face is severely burnt on one side, pulling her eye out of shape and puckering up her mouth. As she spoke, in a low, almost inaudible whisper, I tried not to wince as she nervously twisted and pulled at the crinkled skin of her chin and neck, but occasionally a wide white smile would flash out and light up her face. At first, remembering the shelter for domestic violence, I assumed that she had been the victim of an acid attack, but I did nothing to lead the conversation in that direction. We talked instead of her studies: she has attended the courses in literacy, computer studies and English organised by the NGO, who is also subsiding the rent of her family home, and she will graduate in May from high school.

According to the agreement she has made with the NGO, she should start working with them once she graduates, as this is the smart system they have devised to address their recruiting problems. But recently she has decided that what she really wants to do is go to university and study law, so that she can really pull her weight in the fight for women’s rights. She told me that there are two faculties of law in Kabul – a Law faculty, and a Shariah Law faculty, and it is the latter’s graduates who end up working for the government. Our friend Brendon described his visit to the Kabul law faculty in his blog. When she explained how worried she is about the role accorded to Islamic Law in the new constitution drafted for Afghanistan in 2003, her intelligence shone through her shyness.

When that conversation dried up, we fell silent, but she continued to look at me expectantly, perhaps wistfully, so I ploughed on with more topics, spurred out of my shyness by embarrassment. Incidentally, I noticed that her clothes were rather strange, even admitting that she is poor and hardworking – she was wearing a shalwar kameez of a very plain pattern, in dark blue, thick fabric like worker’s overalls, a yellow and black check head covering done up in none of the usual styles, and no trace of feminine adornment anywhere.

I told her about my family, and discovered that she lives with her parents and three sisters, in a little house up the hill. Her hand is bandaged up because she recently fell off the bicycle she uses to cycle to school, and she rocked slightly back and forward in her chair as she spoke as if in pain. I told her she is very brave to cycle in a city like Kabul, and she said she thought that she was the only woman in the city to do so. “Women are not to drive cars, not to ride bicycle or motorcycle, only men”. Stumbling for words, I told her what an inspiration she should be to other women, with her courage and her sense of purpose.

In another silence, she told me she would like to hear about my country, as so I told her about the hills of Italy where I live, and the sea, the beautiful sea which she has never seen. She flashed one of her beautiful smiles, and said that she would love to visit the sea with me when – as one hand fluttered about her damaged face – her face is cured.

Then she explained that a rocket had hit her home during the fighting in Kabul, which had left her brother dead, and her severely wounded. She lifted a flap in her head covering to show me the burnt stump of her ear. She has no hair, either.

When her brother died, and the Taliban came to power, her family lost their only breadwinner, as women were forbidden from working and her father is mentally ill and unable to work. So, at great personal risk of course, she, the eldest daughter, dressed in her brother’s clothes, assumed his identity and went out to seek work.
That was when the Taliban were in power, and she has kept her family and her male identity ever since. She has worked in the fields and on construction sites, and goes in constant fear of being unmasked, but she is also afraid of revealing herself as a woman.

Perhaps she feels that she has burnt her boats by taking on her brother’s name and documents, but she feels that her only way out is to have reconstructive surgery, and only then to come clean as a woman. Even as I write, I can hardly believe that it is all true, and I met her only this morning. I can scarcely begin to imagine how her life must be. I must try to do something to help her.

The Bagh-i Babur mosque

2005-08-22T19:00:00.000+04:30

A day of independence

2005-08-21T16:41:00.000+04:30

Afghanistan celebrated a day of independence from the British on Friday – there were squares of fabric in the colours of the national flag tied to railings along the streets of Kabul, and a big celebration in the city stadium (formerly site of Taliban public executions). International organisations, meanwhile, suffered a tightening of security, and we were told to avoid ‘all unnecessary movement’ in the city. We contented ourselves with planning a trip out of town for the next two days, and booked a car to take a little group of us to Panjshir, birthplace of Ahmad Shah Massoud. That trip, however, was not to be, again due to vague reports of security concerns, whose source could not be ascertained - “sometimes we cannot disclose where our information comes from. We receive it on a need-to-know basis” we were told by an unusually nervy, conspiracy theorist staff member.

After downscaling our requests somewhat until we were asking where, other than the confines of the guesthouse, would it be acceptable for us to spend the day, we received permission to be driven to the Bagh-i Babur, or Babur’s Garden.

This, once the largest green public space in the city, was laid out as a palace and garden complex by the rulers of the Mughal dynasty, but suffered huge damage during the Soviet/ rival warlords/ Taliban eras. The garden found itself on the shifting front line between rival factions, and came under heavy mortar and rocket fire which gutted the buildings and levelled the perimeter wall. The irrigation system was destroyed, the plants withered, and the trees cut down for firewood by the desperately poor Kabulis massed in earth brick homes on the surrounding slopes.

Luckily, the Aga Khan trust for culture has been carrying out extensive research and reconstruction on the site since 2002, and the Bagh-i Babur is once again emerging as an oasis of calm and beauty in the midst of a densely populated, depressed urban area.
Entrance costs 5 afghani, or 10 US cents, for Afghans, and 20 times as much for foreigners, which seems reasonable – although we did try to persuade the guards to give the Tajik lady who was with us a discount, to no avail.

The garden is a hive of activity, as over 150 gardeners, builders and skilled craftsmen beaver away across the site to get everything finished in time for a grand opening scheduled for next spring, but it is also a very peaceful place.

Everything that day was suffused in a rosy haze of delight at having evaded our gaolers in the security department, and the grass of the Bagh-i Babur seemed to us incomparably greener than that of our lovingly tended guesthouse garden.

We had brought a carpet, two melons and three flaps of hot bread, and we spread ourselves out on a grassy terrace under a fruit tree. The garden is terraced, and the 700 newly planted trees are watered by little channels that bring water down from a large stone pool at the highest level. Soon, a series of fountains and pools built along the central axis of the garden will be completed – at the bottom, a visitors’ centre will be housed in a traditional earthen dome building going up on the site of an old caravanserai.

From our quiet, cool vantage point under the tree, we could see the teams working on the restoration of the haremserai complex, and watch gardeners sprinkling the lawns with the aid of a spade. Everyone we encountered was friendly, proud of their work and keen to show us round.

Soon after we had arrived, a little boy turned up wanting to sell us hard boiled eggs. We bought eight eggs from him in the course of the day, shared our melon with him and asked him questions. He was a pitiful sight, with light coloured eyes, broken teeth and a pockmarked, scared face, a child so damaged-looking it is hard to imagine him reaching adulthood, somehow.

His eyes avoided ours as he answered our questions, and told us he did go to school, and was 6th in his class of over 35. He lives with his mother and siblings, his father is somehow unable to work. He buys his boiled eggs for 3.5 Afg, and sells them for 5 Afg, so that in a good day he makes a dollar. He did not invite pity or even sympathy from us, wandering off in the midst of our questions, to return a little while later and sit under the shadow of a neighbouring tree.

Some drunken men in uniform came up and asked us for whisky, and retreated when we offered them water, scattering plastic cups and other rubbish about them. In a flash of anger I upbraided them for fouling such a beautiful place with their rubbish, and threw their rubbish after them. All of Kabul is awash with trash, and in general people demonstrate a cavalier disregard for cleanliness, order and the natural habitat outside their own homes. Surprisingly, in retrospect, the men in uniform reacted good-naturedly, apologised for being ‘a little crazy’, and ordered the little egg boy to collect all their rubbish.

The rest of the day passed peacefully – the high point was being shown round the haremserai, where some lovely carved tombstones have been discovered, and the greenhouse, where I met a flock of ladies, with their billowing blue burqas lifted up over their faces. I fell into conversation with one, and it made my heart skip to do so, as the women of Afghanistan have seemed so remote and unapproachable to me, forever inscrutable under their burqas or invisible behind the walls of their homes.
It turns out these women are from Mazar, and had come to Kabul only for a few days, for a family wedding, so I will be able to visit them again once we return north.

2005-08-16T14:45:00.000+04:30

an old beggar outside the shrine of Ali

2005-08-13T19:12:00.000+04:30

in the main shrine precinct, Mazar-i-Sharif

Swim

2005-08-13T19:01:00.000+04:30

I finally managed to have a swim! Once again after work, we asked to be driven to the Hotel Khifoyat. This time, the pool enclosure was not locked, and there were a few guys milling around. We approached the man closest to the pool, a middle aged guy in tan coloured shalwar kameez, a muslim cap and a flowing, extremely neat rich brown beard. He was very polite to Ed, and said yes, he certainly could swim. And how about women? Ed asked tentatively. Oh no, not women, no – he replied, but a very young man approached and unexpectedly contradicted his elder, assuring Ed that women could swim.

Well, what is she going to wear, asked the portly gentleman with the flowing beard, gesturing with his chin at me and miming an obviously deeply unsuitable skimpy bathing item against his own body. Oh no, I assured him in shocked tones, as if we were discussing polo rather than swimming, I’m not going to take my clothes off.
So, we got permission, and we were shown to a little cubicle where I removed my headscarf (which felt very daring per se, in the open air) and ample silk skirt, but retained my long shift and leggings underneath. I showered in this get up before entering the pool, and what a delight it was! I couldn’t say whether the clothes slowed me down a good deal, or whether I am generally out of puff, but the pool seemed to be very big and deep and green once I had got in.

I got into my stride and set about doing laps as solemnly as I could, looking demurely straight ahead to avoid making eye contract with the small crowd of silent onlookers who gradually assembled along one side, sitting on their haunches. But it was splendid, that swim, I valued it all the more for the obstacles we had overcome along the way, as there is really nothing quite like it for cooling the blood, and clearing the mind.

Tajik Menu

2005-08-10T13:30:00.000+04:30

Now, what follows has nothing at all to do with Afghanistan, but I am offering it to the world here because I did not have a blog when I lived in Tajikistan and first came across, and because Ed has just found the original transcription among his papers.

In downtown Dushanbe, on the main tree lined avenue, there is a grand teahouse and café, the Chaikhona Rohat, built in the monumental Soviet-Central Asian hybrid style. This means that, while it is built of no-nonsense reinforced concrete, as opposed to the more traditional wood and mud brick, and though it occupies an entire city block instead of being a modest bungalow, it is organised around a series of courtyards, and the ceilings are decorated with floral designs and abstract patterns in bright colours. Concrete pilasters clumsily echo the shapes of Central Asian wooden columns, which can be very beautiful.

On a visit, then, to the renowned Chaikhona Rohat (= Rohat Teahouse), we faithfully transcribed the menu (with a few omissions of less interesting dishes), which I reproduce here:

Choikhona “Rohat” Salads Meat allsorts Custom-made salad (under a furcoat) The cooked meat The first dishes Lag man (portion) Lagman (floor of a portion) The hen broth
The second dishes Cutlets on Kiev The forse meat shish kebab The furnase pies	Garnish Potato free Rise
Drinks and juices Drink from a dogrose Doug	Spirits drink Vodka “Orion” Ligueur “Merri Giyoh”

The food is actually rather good, for Dushanbe.

A wedding glimpsed

2005-08-10T13:11:00.000+04:30

I caught a glimpse of an Afghan wedding the other evening. Ed and I had come to the Khifoyat hotel for the second time, hoping for a swim, but the pool area was closed off, and the young men on the other side of the fence would not explain why. So we sat on a rather crowded lawn, and I gazed balefully at the intensely unappealing ice-cream tub I had bought from the hotel café. The packaging was crumpled, and the creases dust filled, and when opened it proved to be half melted and bubble gum flavoured. Ed stoically ate his way through a saffron-flavoured and virulently coloured ice-cream on a stick, and we both looked around.

We watched dusk fall, and a spectacular array of lights draped all over the Khifoyat come to life and take the place of the sun. A row of artificial palm trees developed coils of green and brown neon snaking round them, and yellow coconuts glowing like embers, while neon strips in blues, reds, violets and oranges ran along the fences, up and down the façade of the hotel and flashed from the top of metallic constructions looking like abstractions of dandelion puffs. Ed and I argued idly as to whether these could more correctly be termed installations or sculptures, if they were in a Manhattan art gallery that is, until we were interrupted by some friendly chaps super-impressed as always by Ed’s Dari skills.

They told us that the crowds all around us (all men, but I had hardly noticed), had gathered in the grounds of the Khifoyat for a wedding. Soon, the women did begin to arrive, and in minutes the drive up to the building was completely clogged with cars, as each tried to get as close to the front door as possible before releasing their precious (dangerous?) cargo. The adult women were mostly in burqas as usual, but the little girls were most elegantly dressed, coiffed, and startlingly made up – with huge blackened eyes and sharply pencilled mauve and biscuit lips (more professionally rendered than the university students managed. But then again, the students’ makeup is inevitably smudged onto the inside of their burqas while in transit).

As we were leaving the Khifoyat hotel, on an impulse I followed a group of well dressed girlies and well muffled ladies up the steps to the ladies’ entrance (the men take part in a totally separate function in another side of the building). Of course I stuck out terribly, not only for being tall, pale and freckled but also very shabbily turned out in comparison. I was turned away by the old man on the door, but not before having caught a most tantalising glimpse of what lay beyond.

The brightly lit hall was fast filling up with gorgeous evening gowns in the brightest colours – all burqas having been dumped in the hall – and I guess at the end of the night they must all pick one randomly as they are indistinguishable. The scent of a hundred overlapping floral and fruity perfumes was heady, as was the excited chatter above the drone of the dozens of fans.
Everything was shining and sparkling: the lacquered hair in tendrils, curls and spikes, the dresses ruffled, ruched and laced with pearls, diamante and sequins, long nails like talons in scarlets and crimsons, gold lame stilettos, slingbacks, wedges – all polished and shimmering like mirrors.

All this finery the women don for each other’s eyes alone, I thought, but I was amazed to see an all male band tuning up on stage as well – the only men in Mazar ever to the treated to such a sight!

2005-08-09T17:52:00.000+04:30

"The day my sister got married, I was so happy" - girl, aged 8

Love marriages

2005-08-09T17:32:00.000+04:30

Dear readers, these do exist, in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. I have it on the authority of my dear confidante in the office, who has been helping me with my Dari with great patience. Three times today, within the space of half an hour, she listened to my halting reading of the story of the clever fox and the foolish wolf.

My first Dari teacher was an Afghan refugee I met in Khujand, who had almost no teeth. It was he who first introduced me to “the claywer fowcks and the fawlish who-olf”. He was a dedicated and a gentle teacher, who took great pains to initiate me to the mysteries of Dari pronunciation, but despite all his efforts, such they remained, because coming from his mouth, all consonants were as one. Poor man, I wonder what has happened to him – the fate of the Afghan refugees who found themselves in Tajikistan is a sad one. His nephew, who was one of my English students and who introduced me to him, was a doctor who had never been able to practice, his training cut short by the Taliban.

But now that the Taliban are gone, love marriages are again taking place. They are as yet a small minority, and the definition is quite wide, as any boy and girl who have not met through the auspices of the parents, are committing a love marriage. There is quite an air of scandal surrounding such matches, even though they normally do take place with the consent of all available parents, and I usually get asked through modestly down turned eyes whether mine was a love marriage. Usually couples who marry for love meet in the university, which just goes to show that even candy coloured lip gloss and purple eye-shadow are much more beguiling than a blue cotton grille and a muffled murmur beneath it.

My friend who gave me this news has a mobile phone that beeps and trembles with received text messages very often while I sit with her, and these are never left unanswered for more than a minute, so, who knows but that there might be another love match on its way?

I am keen to find out more.

The children of Kabul

2005-08-09T17:04:00.000+04:30

This morning I have been reading a report by Save the Children USA on the Children of Kabul, which is full of the most moving and piteous stories. The report is based on hundreds of interviews with children and their families, and is full of inspiration and bravery as well as sorrow. Here are a couple of extracts:

"Once my son went to the shop and asked for chaff because we didn’t have any flour or bread. The shopkeeper told him, ‘Don’t buy the chaff because it has medicine for killing the mouse. Maybe your family will eat it and they will die; instead of bread you will get death,’ and [so my son] didn’t bring the chaff. That is how hard our life is — faced with a choice between death by chaff or death by starvation." - Mother

"When I am afraid, my mother sleeps with me and takes me in her arms and says that we mustn’t be afraid because Almighty God will pity us." - Boy, aged 7

"We have seen so many wars, so we are not afraid of war anymore. During the bombardment I heard an interview with an Afghan man who was saying to the western countries, ‘These bombs are just like potatoes to us! War is nothing to us!’ He was right!’" - Girl, age 17

"I love going to school, and in the morning I just wait impatiently to go ... ." - Young girl

Wiruses

2005-08-09T15:59:00.001+04:30

I hope my readers have not been alarmed by my absence from this page – which seemed long to me, if not to you, because I have been engaged in an unequal and enervating struggle against hordes of invading software viruses. Adware, malaware, spamware… these are the unwelcome hordes of visitors who have been plaguing and harrying my poor beleaguered laptop til he is a shadow of his former self, a sick old man blighted by alzheimer’s, asthma and tinnitus.
I have been able to glimpse email only through a hailstorm of popups and security warnings, and I am afraid to say I have still not found a satisfactory cure for my ailing friend.
The blight is in remission just at present, so I seize the chance to update you.

2005-08-04T17:22:00.000+04:30

'you're very tall aren't you?'

Balkh university library

2005-08-04T17:16:00.000+04:30

After my time with the students, I repaired like a homing pigeon to the university library on the ground floor, to the right of the burqa removal station. Libraries never fail to soothe my jangled nerves, and invariably appear familiar and homey places to me, wherever they occur, due to the fact that my father is a librarian, and I always loved going to visit him in his library, where I have spent many happy hours.
In this case too, I was welcomed warmly by the lady behind the glass porthole through which the students put forth their requests, and she ushered me in beyond the locked door when I stammered something about being an English teacher, curious to see their collection.

There were many notices and stickers attesting to the generosity of foreign donors clustered about the door, their odor of sanctity and righteousness mingling with that of dust and mildew emanating from the books themselves.

The female librarian gestured over to where the books in English were, and so I soon discovered that the backbone of the library consists of multiple copies (often as many as 20 or 30) of expensive hard cover McGraw & Hill volumes on Molecular biology, Management Dynamics and the like, still in their plastic wrappings. These are, as was clear even before the librarian laboured the point, quite useless to the faculty of these departments (admitting even that such subjects are taught) and likewise to the faculty of English, for whom they are much too advanced. Of course, donations of textbooks in Dari would be rapturously received, but donor agencies in their wisdom have provided overviews of the culture of the Southern States (of the USA) and guides to public speaking (patently aimed at US politicians) instead.

It is particularly distressing to note that the textbooks on Obstetrics and Gynecology are also only available in English – while the maternal death rate remains shockingly high and one in four children in Afghanistan do not reach their 5th birthday.

All in all, I got more joy out of the library’s English language holdings than most perhaps, and spent the rest of the morning happily browsing and sneezing in the dust, plied with cups of tea by the librarian, with whom I commiserated on the cramped conditions and inappropriate nature of his stock. And I found a great essay by Margaret Atwood.

First brush with Balkh University students

2005-08-04T16:47:00.000+04:30

I am back in Mazar.

This morning I had a rather unsatisfactory visit to Balkh University to meet the students of the English faculty, of whom my first, and doubtless over-hasty, impression was that they are a bunch of feckless ingrates. Maybe I am just pining for my dear, keen bright students in Khujand (northern Tajikistan), but this lot were even talking among themselves and on their mobiles while the Dean of their faculty was addressing them.

I had come as a result of an earlier meeting with the Dean, an elegantly dressed, mild mannered and courteous man, who was very encouraging when I suggested that I could offer the students extra English lessons. I wanted to offer group discussion classes, and perhaps also individual classes, as a way of making local friends and earning a bit of money. I roughly calculated how much I could charge to make it worthwhile for me but not too expensive for them – it seems that attending university is completely free, but it also seems likely that students do not come from the poorest families.

Of course, the memory of being treated like a celebrity and revered like a soothsayer while freelancing as an English teacher in Khujand was fresh in my mind.

When the Dean took me into one of the four classes, the students stood up initially to greet us, but then all slouched back in their seats (well, it is very hot), and resumed their interrupted conversations. Most of the girls had nasty candy coloured lipstick on, which clashes horribly with their skin colour. No burqas are worn in the university of course, but when the students take them off at the entrance, the mouth-shaped smears of fuchsia lipstick on the inside are revealed. The boys had quivering, oiled mustaches.

The girls greatly outnumbered the boys in the class I visited, and they were all very laidback and blasé. As they remained silent when I outlined my plan, I asked them for suggestions and advice on what might be needed. I received the following suggestions: buy a tape recorder, so we can practice; make sure we all have copies of the book you are using (from my own pocket? I could not help asking incredulously – there were at least 50 of them); you should use ‘Streamline’ for discussion classes; we want to learn the new expressions.

The assembled students are all in their last year of English, and their sole ambition is to become teachers of English in local schools, which perhaps explains why they are not particularly driven to improve their language skills beyond what is strictly necessary and locally available. By contrast in Northern Tajikistan, there is a strong feeling that English is the gateway to all the best and best paid jobs, which are all in foreign organizations. Young Tajiks are starved of contact with the outside world, and eager to escape to pastures new, while young Afghans perhaps feel that contact with the outside world is not necessarily all it’s cracked up to be.

I now think that some of the disagreeable impression they made on me (and I daresay the feeling was mutual), was due to their having been summoned there to meet me on the last day of term, before finally breaking up for summer, and because my classes, I think, had not been presented as optional.
Not to be put off, we agreed to meet again in three weeks’ time.

2005-08-03T16:58:00.000+04:30

our young waiter

2005-08-03T16:55:00.000+04:30

truck painted pakistani style

2005-08-03T16:54:00.000+04:30

a cow, a car...

2005-08-03T16:52:00.000+04:30

view from the Mazar-Kabul road

2005-08-03T16:51:00.000+04:30

mountain village

Fruit and fair children

2005-08-03T16:29:00.000+04:30

Today I learnt from one of the drivers that women who eat a lot of fruit during pregnancy give birth to fair children. I discovered this when Ed asked this driver to stop to buy me fruit.
He approved my wish, taking it for granted that a newly married couple should be desirous of children, and of fair (-skinned) children in particular. His first three children had all been fair, as he had fed his wife a lot of fruit. This is a sign of tender kindness, also, as women are known to have uniformly sweet teeth. Unfortunately, his next three children were all dark, as fruit had become scarce during the Taliban times. This also explains why there are so many dark children in Mazar now.

Visiting

2005-08-03T16:26:00.000+04:30

I have made one home visit to an Afghan family, thanks to Ed and his cultural mission in Mazar. We called upon an elderly archaeologist one afternoon, after a 10 minute drive from the office. We had asked the driver to stop at a bakery on the way, as it is a shame to come as a guest to somebody’s house “dast-e kholi” (empty handed), but that didn’t work out. He stopped once outside a very ramshackle stall heaped with all manner of dust coated merchandise, including some ancient Soviet style biscuits in murky plastic bags, which we felt were not appropriate. Our driver was obviously in a hurry, as he then drove straight to our destination and tooted his horn, causing our host to poke his head out before we could explain that we wanted biscuits before our visit. He obviously doesn’t expect foreigns to observe the niceties of Afghan social ritual, but we felt a little chagrined as we followed our host’s welcoming arm gestures into his courtyard. He led us up a short flight of steps into a room on the first floor, bare except for carpets and cushions. I was removing my shoes when our host, a tall, tanned man in his sixties, asked me whether I was hot. When I replied that I was, he suggested I go down to visit his daughter in the basement, adding that Shahida spoke English. He pointed me down the stairs, so I climbed down, pushed a curtain aside, and found a middle aged woman sitting cross legged on the floor. She turned out to be the archaeologist’s wife, but Shahida appeared very soon, and they both made me feel very welcome.

We soon began a conversation about weddings: weddings, it seems are scandalously expensive in Mazar – up to thirty thousand dollars... The costs are so high because it is a shame not to invite several hundreds of people, and continue celebrating for over three days, for fear of the neighbours downturning their mouths and shaking their heads scornfully. This means that some men are quite old when they get married, after saving up for decades. The two ladies were greatly amused by my failure to guess their ages – having ascertained that the daughter was unmarried, I could not believe she could be a day older than me, if that – in fact, she is 36. Having digested that information, I was able to make a better guess at the mother’s age, although she really did look good for a 52 year old, who has had her share of sadness.

When I asked my hostess how many children she had, I accidentally stumbled on a tragic story, as it seems I so often do in these situations. She told me she had had five, but her eldest son had died in a car accident, two weeks before his wedding, a year and a half ago. The cheerful mood didn’t recover after that, as the mother shed silent slow tears for the remainder of my visit, whilst valiantly pressing melon on me, which I felt disinclined to eat… while the daughter went off to perform her absolutions and then their prayers at one end of the room.
I promised to visit them again, and as I left tried on my first burqa – and I don’t mind if it proves to be my last as they are insufferably hot. But don’t get me started on the subject of hijab today.

2005-08-02T16:55:00.000+04:30

a beggar in her burqa outside the main mosque

2005-08-02T16:54:00.000+04:30

this gentleman sells very fine falafel

Kabul, and a furrowed brow

2005-07-31T06:21:00.000+04:30

Yesterday morning early Ed and I left Mazar for Kabul, a 9 or 10 hour journey by 4x4, over a newly rebuilt road and some very spectacular scenery.
It is so much cooler in Kabul that it feels like a different season, because Kabul is quite high up in the mountains.

And here's my worry:

I fear that so far, the name of this blog could seem a misnomer, in the sense that I have so far collected but few crumbs of convincingly Afghan experience. Yet, as an ex-pat living in this country, I am within the norm. Great efforts are made to shield us from experiencing the lives of ordinary Afghans – for our safety and comfort of course. The trials that we are pleased to complain of – cooped up in guesthouses with nothing to do but read or watch telly, driven everywhere in a 4x4, intermittent electricity, infrequent hot water, patchy mobile coverage… well, if only, is what the average Afghan would say.

I had a humbling moment as I sat cradled in a wooden swing this morning, on a bright green lawn under a tree in the grounds of our Kabul guesthouse, my brow furrowed as I worked my way through a Farsi lesson. I was feeling annoyed with the inaccessible style of the author, seeking to draw my attention to the behaviour of categorical predicates of copulative verbs, and looked up to meet the eyes of a man mowing the lawn with a rickety mechanical device. He was an elderly man, with a long white beard combed out into a smooth mane, and clothed in an austerely elegant way, in a mud coloured shalwar kameez, with an extra cloak round his shoulders and a turban wrapped round his skullcap. When our eyes met, he gracefully raised his hand to his chest and inclined his head forward in a wordless greeting, and I did likewise. Then it struck me that, judging by the statistics, this man can probably not read, and it would be hard for him to find the time to learn now. A large majority of adult Afghans cannot read. Those who are learning now, mostly children of course, are learning to recite the alphabet over and over again parrot fashion, in schools with no books and badly paid, under qualified teachers. My information comes from the reports produced by the international donor organisations, upon which we all rely for our knowledge of the country we live in, we cocooned foreigners.I am very grateful, of course, not to be living the life of the ordinary Afghan, but it is alarming to think of the important decisions, with far reaching consequences, made by professionals hermetically sealed from this society, working on second hand information. So far, I differ from this model in that I am not responsible for any decision making at all.

exercise

2005-07-30T22:16:00.000+04:30

I have not troubled this page with my attempts to find a job in Mazar and give a more ordered shape to the next chapter of my life. I do not have a job yet, but I have, as they say, some interesting leads, one of which is tangentially related to my discovery that Mazar has a swimming pool. It is a semi private pool, set in the well watered and rose scented grounds of the Khifoyat hotel. At my first, tantalising glimpse of it, the pool was effervescing with little lithe bodies, leaping in and out of the water clutching items of garden furniture as props to their acrobatics. Not having a bikini to hand, I consoled myself with the thought that I could hardly hope to swim there without the risk of concussion, as I surveyed a rippling line of boys teetering on the high diving board from my vantage point on the lawn.
The hotel staff courteously assured me, quite unprompted, that they would get rid of all the little boys at once should I wish to swim myself.
Until I made this happy discovery, I was sure that the prospects for agreeable exercise in Mazar, for a genteel married lady such as myself, were very limited, given that I am lucky enough not have to pound the household's laundry by hand (the chief form of exertion for most Afghan women of the city). The main other aerobic exercise is sweeping the yard and house, a truly Sisyphean task in this dustbowl. Which is why I had come up with an elaborate plan, prior to arriving in Mazar, for establishing an exercise club for women, to be hosted initially by myself on the basis of expertise gleaned from a pile of assorted exercise DVDs bought in London at a greatly reduced price. Having watched the programmes, I now know that the reason they were so cheap is because they were all made in the early 80's, which to me gives them a charmingly retro feel.
I am too young to blush at seeing those haircuts, the fuchsia lycra and the neon leg warmers, and I thought an Afghan audience might enjoy them.
I don't know yet, though, because the exercise club is still a twinkle in my eye.
I have yet to identify a group of willing guinea pigs, but next week I have an appointment to meet the female students of the English language faculty of Balkh university, which I hope will prove my core constituency in this venture.
The new peak of my ambition, imagined a couple of months from now, is to lead a group of my aerobically toned new friends to a swim in the Khifoyat hotel pool, which will have been booked out for our exclusive use for the occasion.

2005-07-28T15:36:00.000+04:30

Mazar's hero, Ahmed Shah Massoud, can be seen brooding soulfully on the passing burqas from atop a cafe

2005-07-28T15:35:00.000+04:30

pedestrians

2005-07-28T15:34:00.000+04:30

street signs in Mazar

2005-07-28T15:20:00.000+04:30

Flora in a Mazar juice bar

street children

2005-07-21T13:42:00.000+04:30

Yesterday evening I heard that one of Ed’s Afghan acquaintances had congratulated him on his marriage. “And how old is she, your bride?” When he heard that I am the same age as Ed, 27, there was a slight pause “Ah, well, the important thing is that you love her, isn’t it?”. There is nothing like travel to Central Asia for feeling at one time both over the hill, and yet also curiously young and frivolous...

I was very distressed to hear on arrival in Mazar that a day centre for street children, one of the most impressive and worthwhile projects I visited on my last visit in November, has since been forced to close down for lack of funds. The centre provided hot meals and a variety of activities, from sewing to calligraphy and computer lessons, to over a hundred children who are out of school and on the streets all day. I treasure the mental picture I have of the children having lunch, sitting in two long rows around a cloth laid on the floor down the side of a long basement hall. They all looked up from their plates of rice pilau when I came in, and gap toothed smiles rippled at me from up and down the room.

I had heard something of this financial crisis, and had resolved to do what I could in terms of fundraising once I arrived, in gratitude for the hospitality of my old agency, but it seems I am too late. At the moment I am a lady of leisure in Mazar, having come here on the heels of my husband, who is engaged in an ambitious cultural project, so I have plenty of energy, pace the climate, to dedicate to finding out what happened to the funding and what can be done to find more... you can expect to hear more about this (hoping this does not soudn too like a threat).

First day in Mazar

2005-07-20T18:40:00.000+04:30

Mazar-i-Sharif is very hot today.
Even in my underwear with the fan turned up high, I feel rather heroic mustering up the energy to tap feebly at the laptop keys in our new bedroom. I hope this is only because I am still recovering from my travels, and in particular from yesterday’s exertions. The crowning glory was walking across one of those heroic Soviet misnomers, the Friendship Bridge, which crosses the sleepy Jaxartes river to link Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, and was used first by invading armies of the USSR. It is a long and monotonous bridge, and I walked it in the midday sun, shrouded in layers of suitably modest garb, trailing my 30 or so kilos of truly indispensable belongings. When I reached the other side, the friendly group of Korean NGO workers who had walked a few hundred yards ahead of me, smiled encouragingly. The man among them detached himself from the group, and approached me proffering a bottle of cool water with these words “We think you should drink some water. Your face is red and your lips are already cracking”. They knew I was about to meet my husband and so must have known I wanted to look my best.
Once the Afghan border guards, who seemed rather festive and ceremonious in comparison with their truculent paunchy Uzbek counterparts, had cursorily inspected my passport, one of them invited me to sit under a tree and lay down my bags. He handed me a note from Ed saying that he had gone for lunch (having waited all morning, I supposed), and brushed crumbs off the bench on which I was to sit. I did not sit long, for as soon as I let out a little cry of dismay at the thought of lunch being had without me, another guard immediately brought out his mobile phone to dial Ed’s number.

My favourite aspect of the Uzbek side of the crossing, which consists of many hurdles and booths to be visited for various inspections, stamps and mysterious scraps of paper, was a swallow’s nest. It had been built in the corner of the ceiling directly above one of these booths, which presents a face of shaded glass, with a small round hole at about the height of my navel, through which travellers hasten to stuff their passports for inspection. When I arrived at this booth, it was already surrounded by a little group of Afghans who clustered around the port hole, anxiously awaiting the fate of the passports they had earlier thrust through the aperture. As I hung back waiting, I watched the mother and father swallows ministering to their brood. The four seemed rather a spoilt lot: although they were nearly as big as their parents, indeed too big for the nest, so that one had been pushed out on to the adjacent ledge, the all opened their yellow beaks very wide and round as soon as one of their valiant parent approached with a morsel. I was fascinated to watch how the parents fed their children in strict rotation, and never gave a morsel to the same one twice in a row. They I noticed that almost as soon as each fledgling had finished swallowing, he or she would nudge around in the nest so that his back end and tail would be poking over the nest, and release a round and perfectly formed poo. These were moist and thus invariably adhered to the hair of whichever supplicant happened in that moment to be bent over with his face pressed against the round hole in the glass of the booth. Having taken note of this, and had a secret giggle about it with one of the Afghans who had also noticed, I approached the booth from the other side when my turn came.

I was sorry to be so puce of face when I met Ed, but otherwise it was of course a delight to be at last together, and in a big jeep speeding towards our new home. In all the excitement, he forgot to carry me across the threshold, but I now know that he had meant to.
I had already spent a week in Mazar in November, and so did not add anything new to my impressions of the city in the course of yesterday’s drive to the guesthouse: dusty roads, hastily erected Soviet style apartment blocks daubed in Dari signs, and ramshackle street stalls. But different produce glimpsed on the stalls: I was pleased to see piles of mangoes, melons and aubergines. When I got out of the jeep outside the guesthouse, again as last time, a woman in a skyblue burqa wafted by, turning the lace portcullis like a submarine’s periscope to keep me in her sights for as long as possible as she hastened by. Was there any point smiling at her as I could not hope to see a smile in return? I noticed that she had shiny, high heeled shoes though.
In the guesthouse where Ed and I will live for the foreseeable future (up to a year, I have been telling people), we are looked after by two men whom I shall call Sugar Lump and Friday, as this is how their names translate into English. Between them, they guard the premises, cook and clean for us and whoever else among the employees and friends of FACTUM happens to pass through town. But there is also a washerwoman, as Sugar Lump reminded Ed when he came back from the office today for lunch. Why had I not ventured out of the house all morning, he wanted to know. I should not have been afraid (or shy, perhaps), because the washerwoman was about, too. He asked Ed over lunch if I had not been very bored, all alone all morning. They will continue to speak to me through Ed, I expect, even when my Dari does improve beyond the mere basics, as they are very polite.

Ed came back for lunch brandishing a clutch of wedding gifts from one of his new friends, an archaeologist: the most unexpected was a plaster cast in Italianate style of the Madonna and Child, in a very elaborate baroque architectural setting. Ed suspects his friend of being a bit of a Sufi. We had a very nice meal of stewed aubergines with rice, chips, salad, and two kinds of melon. It makes me feel rather sleepy, in this heat.