itinerant and indigent

OK, time to come clean. I am back in Australia. Have been for a little while, was just maintaining the illusion of being in Afghanistan still for artistic purposes. More on that later.

I want to be careful how I write this.

I visited an old friend recently.

He has several disorders and difficulties. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, diabetes, and some others. I first got to know him when working as a church outreach worker back in 1994. He rang the church office (where I lived) at 4.00am to complain about the CIA bugging him, and that the bomb squad had been to visit him, following a threat he had made on then Premier Richard Court. We struck up a friendship, and over the years it has persisted. My friend, G. has made some serious mistakes over that time, errors of judgement and foolish decisions. He has moved house (conservatively) 30 times (I have helped with about 20 of those moves, Steven Daly has helped with probably more), he has lost his licence several times,  he went off to Kalgoorlie and nearly to jail. He’s done other things too, things I never though he was capable of: gone to England on a month long holiday, he bought a house (and sold it for almost as much as he paid), he moved to Adelaide, he’s held down a job. In recent years, he’s learned to apologise and he has said sorry to me for various things (I have needed to apologise to him too, probably more often). 

Life has been hard on him. He’s been abused in many ways, he’s been threatened, beaten, held up with a gun (fake, but he didn’t know that). He’s been to court on dangerous driving charges, fought with banks and credit companies, with landlords and neighbours. And in the meanwhile, he has bought and sold hundreds of CDs, CD players, DVDs, cars, TVs and computers, gadgets and gizmos.  He is quite an astute business man, and while sometimes foolish, is not dumb. He’s tried to strangle me twice, abused me times that I can remember, abused my wife too, hung up, walked out, walked in and generally occupied my time and thoughts quite consistently.

I hadn’t seen him for a while, following an argument we had, but a week or so back, Elijah and I went to visit. G. struggles with his OCD, and while he often keeps it under control, on my recent visit I was shocked. It was not under control. G. admitted this, he knows what is going on, he is self aware. He was embarrassed about it, the state of his house, of himself.

[Elijah at G's house; some of G's CDs and video junk; G's washing waiting to be done]

We had a good time together. Julie had cooked a chocolate cake for him, and I helped him with some documents he needed for a credit battle he is having, we had a cup of tea and shared some stories. Elijah watched ‘Wind in the Willows’ and G. enjoyed it too. It is his birthday coming up, and he wants to do something together and hopefully, we will. As we said goodbye, he went around to Elijah’s window, and Elijah put his arms up to give G. a hug and a kiss. G. was nearly overcome. His whole manner changed, he became soft and hugged Elijah back and I thought I saw a tear in his eye.

I wanted to write about him. Not to show him off, or to show me off. There’s more that’s shameful in my behaviour than his.

I wanted to try to show a bit of G’s good side, his character and sweetness. That sounds very trite, but it is less obvious than my good side or my positive traits. G doesn’t present well. And so he often gets treated as a idiot, or a dangerous man, or a sick person. He is none of those. He is hard to get on with. But he doesn’t get much of the love and care that I get either, and people reflect what they receive. I suspect if I had suffered like him, I might be the one who had made foolish choices, who was struggling to hold it all together, who was living in a mess.

As Elijah and I waved, and drove away, I wondered how much physical affection G. ever gets. When people touch G, it is to push him away, to arrest him or to strike him. Most people recoil from even approaching him.

But Elijah had just gone in, said hello and shook his hand and sat down on the filthy chair. And when we left, he had hugged G and kissed his unshaven cheek. Who feels at home in G’s place like Elijah did? Who touches him like Elijah did, unselfconsciously, not seeing the grime and the stain, not smelling the unwashed sweat? Who holds his hand?

Been thinking about stuff. Things. Coffee makers, clothes, iPods, phones, new shoes, toy fairies, drills, new cars, fancy watches. So much stuff to buy and use and treasure and want and want more of. Mostly it doesnt interest me, but I’m not immune.

As the Buddha says, ‘There are two ways to have enough. One is to buy more. The other is to desire less.’

been doing some cartooning in my spare time.

My first book – non-fiction was written in about seven months, accepted by a publisher, re-edited, printed and on the shelves of shops a few months later. All with very little complication.

My second book, the consensus has it, is the miscegenate offspring of a group sex encounter gone wrong. It is a literary mess stewed too long, wrought of the angst and idealism of 1970’s politicians, earnest social workers, wanker priests and pointy-headed therapists. It’s my fault (whose else could it be?). I uncritically stewed together fragments and parchments from different continents and epochs, stories told in the past, the future, the present, the imagination. It is a naively optimistic and hippy endeavour, to try bring together on paper in a kind of happy mass marriage, six fathers dripping creative sperm and five mothers fertile with ideas, some already pregnant, in the hope that their creative intermingling, their fantastic procreation will lead to literary brilliance, a competition killer, my very own Pulitzer baby.

But after sixteen months of painful gestation, writing, editing, re-editing, drinking cheap wine and neat vodka, boasting and more writing, it is a bastard conglomerate that has been born. And it is a dunce. As a novel, it is a schizoid compilation, personalities flying in twelve directions, grim, sardonic, comic, depressed and depressing, narratives confused and endearing, dull and extravagant. Editors, publishers, literary agents with unpronounceable European names handle the manuscript gingerly, as though it were a stool sample. ‘What is this?’ they ask. ‘Memoir? Fiction? Fantasy? Non-fiction? Reportage? Montage? Frottage? Who are all these people?’. And the comment I puzzle most over, ‘There is no narrative arc.’

‘Take it out the backyard and shoot it’, seemed to be the general opinion. I can’t. Ugly, ungrateful child though it is, it is still my child. I have packed all 320 pages off to the woodshed, along with other nasty things and let it lie. Perhaps a good wintery ferment and lengthy interbreeding between the characters and sub-narratives would bring forth a genius. But only dolts have so far emerged from the darkness.

What can I do? Every writer produces a hundred times the words that ever make it into print, I am no exception. A hundred thousand words, that so far are just taking up a few MB on my harddrive, and a disproportionate amount of my angst. Imagine, a story that begins with a young man, besotted with his own idealism, flying from anonymity to opportunity, economy class. Here is the first few lines…

It’s going to be a good year. I am doing all the right things. I am taking the risk. The big leap. I will land on their door step and it will all go from there.

The first thing is to get out of Small Town. At a library noticeboard, I see a sign: Air ticket Adelaide-Sydney, male, valid till end Jan, $100. I call the number and organise to pick it up. This is how dreams begin. Risk, good fortune and bravery.

So I become Matt Duffy for the flight, my heart pounding as I check-in, but there is only disinterest from the clerk. I have a single backpack and no return ticket and though the flight is short, I know I am travelling thousands of miles from where I have been. Matt, who I know only by the brief phone call and the five minute cash and ticket exchange, is back in Adelaide to pick up his girlfriend, and he has told me that I can have his room for a few weeks till he gets back. I study the Sydney road directory I have bought as we fly, tracing the unfamiliar territory. George St. Pitt St. Hyde Park. Bronte.

We land in Sydney and I become Owen again, safely. Fortune favours the brave, I whisper. Outside Kingsford Smith, I get on the green airport bus, and get off at Central and get on a 209 to Randwick where Matt has his place. He told me to look out for the hairdresser strip and to get down there. I marvel as I walk down the street, there just can’t be enough hair to go round. There are dozens of these hairdressing shops. I wonder what the collective noun might be. A swarm. A carnival. A clutch. A fancy of hairdressers sounds right.

Matt’s directions are clear and just like he’d said, behind the fourth hairdresser, hanging in the outside laundry on a nail, is the key. No one is in, but I find my way to Matt’s room and later that night I meet Mick, an actor. He tells me he has been signed for a role in Neighbours. It’s a Grumpy Dad role, he laughs. I think he means something by that, but I don’t know what, so I nod, and then more people arrive home. There is Jarvi, from Denmark. He has long hair in a pony tail, is studying stage management and writing a book of erotic fiction. He doesn’t have the huge ego required to be an actor, as he puts it. Jarvi tells me that Matt’s a law student, which I knew, and that his partner Liz is too. In the next days I meet April, who is an actor too. She drifts in and out, and has an uneasy disposition, a psychotic mother and a nervous, public faith in God. I never know if she will smile at me or snap and I keep a distance. But she has the most fantastic underwear: rich purple, embroidered knickers, creamy and lacy bras, very large, large enough to fold my fist inside, and things I didn’t know what to call, that look like cut-off bathers with suspender ties. Her washing day is a rich source of pleasure and fantasy, but I can’t warm to April….

More installments to come… perhaps.

I was in Mazar for a few days. I took a couple of days leave from the work in Kabul, to come back to this city where I lived for so many years, the place where my heart still lies. I was listening to Qorban. 

‘…and then I grabbed his hands and held them tight and I kept saying, “Who are you, who are you?” and he kept mumbling, mumbling, saying nothing, and finally when I got him on the ground, he spoke, and he said, “Stop, it’s me. It’s Hazrat.”’

Qorban looks up at me, his hands cupped out in front of him, each fist clenched a little, as though the bony wrists of Hazrat were still tightly held. Qorban is not a tall man, but he is solid. The long peron and tonbon he always wears hide the muscle and bone. And he has big hands. They are huge. They are the hands that belong to a professional killer, though Qorban is not a violent man. He is a good man, at least, as good as the next. He has done us no wrong that I know of, and he is kind and careful and faithful. Though now, having caught and apprehended Ghulam Hazrat, a thief, and an armed thief at that, Qorban is, I detect, a little proud. He has told me the whole story once, and now this is the second time, and some details, like the gun, the darkness, the noise, the fact that he was awake at night – ‘like all watchmen should be!’ – he has told me several times. 

I am weary of the story. This is the third time I have heard it now. When I was first told it, by Joel, it was interesting in the way a car accident or failure is interesting: someone else’s pain and grief and failings are intriguing and juicy and bring out the spectator in me. But that feeling passed, and as I thought about it, I just felt sad. And now hearing Qorban tell it again, and again, I want to do him the respect of listening, and Qorban did a good thing too, no doubt, and I tell him that, but still I am wearied by it. Hazrat was my friend. As much as you can have close friends, here. This is Afghanistan.

I think back: 1999. Julie and I had just arrived in Mazar-i-Sharif to live and work. We had nothing much but raw energy and faith and idealism and a few words of Dari. We joined the Community Development Project that the aid agency was then running, and within a few months, after the Project Leader left, I became the new boss, and we began to expand the work. We needed staff, we advertised, we put posters up at the mosque and sent the word around that we wanted four new Facilitator/Trainers. Two men, two women, to join the team, work in remote, scruffy, dusty shit holes in the North. It was Taliban time, the worst time, and jobs were few and people were thin. Women – widows, who the Taliban had forbidden from working to maintain their purity were being forced into prostitution just to survive. We had a hundred applicants, maybe more. We chose the two men and two women fairly easily: a fruit seller, a woman who had been wrapping candies for a living, a university teacher and a vet. They had some skills, some of them, but mostly they had a good attitude: learners, not experts, facilitators, not controllers. Poor rural people do not want city boofheads coming to tell them how to fix their lives up, mostly they know what to do, they just lack the resources. And when they don’t know, they want to be helped by friends, not instructed by pedagogues. We were happy with the new eclectic team. 

But there was Hazrat. He had come in for interview sometime in the middle of the first day. He tried to walk in lightly, but he couldn’t hide the sag to his body: the sag of someone who has not eaten well, for some time. He perched on the edge of the chair, afraid to sit back, not able to feel at home. I think he was expecting us to tell him to go. Gaunt and fading, he told us he was a nurse. No, a nursing assistant. He had worked at the Red Cross. Helping nurses. Anway, he could drive. He had a license. No, he didn’t a license. But he was getting one. He would get one. He could work. Work hard.

Hazrat hid his fear well. I don’t think he really was hoping for anything anymore, and he didn’t plead with us. But I couldn’t see any point going on with the interview. He didn’t have medical skills, which he had claimed, that was clear. Maybe he could drive, maybe he couldn’t: practically everyone said they could drive or speak and write English and Dari and Pashto and Urdu, or they could do accounting and use a Codan and they could all use Excel and Word and Photoshop, and some of them claimed they could do everything, including heal the sick and leap tall buildings, and it was almost always total rubbish.

But you shouldn’t think of it as lies. It was just the voices of dying hope, of terrible desperation. The voices of people who has lost so much, again and again, but still dared to believe their lives might be better. Regardless, we couldn’t use Hazrat. He had nothing we needed and Afghanistan was full of sad and hungry and dying people. That was why we were there, after all. So I looked over at Liisa and at Julie, and back at Hazrat. His clothes hung off him, there was dirt on his shirt and under his fingernails and his eyes were dull. No, I didn’t have any questions for him. ‘Tashakor az amadan-e shoma. Man yak maktub dar darwaza beshanem, roz-e se shanbe.’ Thank you for coming, and we will post a list on the office gate on Tuesday.

But at the end of the day, as we talked over the candidates, we couldn’t get him out of our minds. The gait, the drawn skin, the disappointment. He hadn’t eaten for three days. I don’t remember why that came up, probably Liisa, in her usual blunt way just asked it, seeing how thin he was.  So.  So we invented a job for him. Driver-assistant. He would drive. Keep the cars in order. Help the other facilitators when they needed something. We didn’t need a driver, but it felt like we were letting him die otherwise. Him and his wife and children. Sometimes you have it within your power to help someone, and we had that power then.  

So Ghulam Hazrat joined the team, and over the years, he developed some reasonable skills. After about a year, he became a good driver, though he was so slight he always needed a cushion to see over the Landcruiser bonnet. He did do some maintenance work on the cars and he helped the others in their work. He needed prompting and pushing but so did most of the staff. He was one of the ones there when the Talibs came to Saidabad village in 2001, and beat up the staff and ransacked the village rooms, tore the place up. Shot at the staff. Hazrat was struck twice with a rifle butt, and when they came back to the office, fear crazing their eyes, he cried as he told me what had happened. He came to our house at Easter and ate hotcross buns and and I still have a photo of him holding one up. He never put much weight on, but his eyes grew lighter over the years. When we left for holiday in August of that year, before the madness, we embraced, and I think he knew that I loved him, as much as I loved the other staff. After 9/11 and when we were kicked out, and then came back, and started up the work again, in 2002, he was still there, and I helped him get a job in the interim until the project got up to speed again. Then he came back with us, and we worked together again, and it was he and Akbar who were held up by bandits out in Dasht-e Laili desert one day, robbed at gun point. But he was still there with the Community Development Project until it was closing down in 2006.   And then late in that year he came to the office one night. He’d gotten into debt. We knew he had a drinking problem. Knew he gambled. Knew he beat his wife, and sometimes his kids, and there were other rumours too. But this was Afghanistan. There were very few pure success stories. I’d spoken to Hazrat, Julie had spoken to his wife, we had loaned money, helped him get out of debt, done all kinds of things.   But I guess it wasn’t enough. He climbed over the wall late one night, with a rifle. Who knows if he planned to use it? He had thought the guard would be sleeping, had thought he could just open the office, take the computers and the cash and load them into the Landcruiser and be gone. So when Qorban heard him and came, quietly, and reached for him, it was Hazrat who was terrified, and he swung the gun around and Qorban got the muzzle in his belly, and then it was Qorban who bellowed in fear and lunged out with those big hands, knocking the rifle down and screaming, ‘Who are you? Who are you?’, until Hazrat said in his quiet voice, ‘Stop it. It’s me, Hazrat.’ ‘Hazrat?’ said Qorban, disbelieving. ‘Tu inja kar kadi! Az inja mash grefti! Inja naan khordi, namak khordi’. But you worked here! You took your salary from here! You ate bread here and you ate salt here!   After Qorban had tied Hazrat up, the office manager was summoned and then the regional manager, then the police came, and finally Hazrat was taken away and put in jail. He was released three months later, and Joel has seen him in the street and at the bazaar, and they have talked. But I was only in Mazar for a few days, and I didn’t see him.

Main street, Kabul.

I was reflecting on the last post, Repositories for weirdness and I realised that it probably seems out of context. What has my spiritual preferences got to do with aid and developement work?

The connection is, that it seems to me that development work is inherently spiritual, as well as inherently many other things: political, conflictual, economic. But while those aspects are often acknowledged and debated, the spirituality of development isn’t. Yet in almost every development setting I have worked in, the people believe in something. They are openly, orthodoxly spiritual - they are not plant-lovers, or tree huggers or discovering their inner adult (not that there is anything wrong with that. More people should discover their inner adult).

Most of the developing world are worlds of faith and belief. Non-belief and un-belief are largely Western, privileged-life orientations. Indeed, there is no word for atheism in many of the languages of the poorer world; faith of some sort is assumed. And again, unlike the West, daily life is embedded in spirituality. Faith in a God or gods or something seeps through every aspect of living. Even if if you don’t share it, you can’t ignore it. Half of the time its the Prophet’s birthday, death day, Ramazan, Diwali, New Year, Old Year, Eid, Muhurram, Passover, Yom Kippur. I don’t know a tenth of the holy holidays that occupy the ’normal’ working year. Then there is daily namaaz, pooja, penitance and worship. Faith and life are indistinguishable.

So what happens then when the worlds collide? My spiritual world and the spiritual world of the people with whom I am working? Generally what happens is predictable. One set of spiritual paradigms are assumed to be superior. Most Christian evangelicals take that line and for that reason are disrespected and disliked by the secular aid community (and often by the national people as well - No one likes it to be suggested that their faith is second rate and superannuated. And what’s more, the attitude of evangelicals - of any type - Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jew, whatever can quickly move from sympathetic, to persuasive, to assertive, to aggressive to arrogant - I have been evangelised by Muslim charismatics before, and it was not fun). 

 Or what happens is the local peoples’ life view is considered irrelevent. Only when it reaches extremes (ie, Taliban versions of Islam) is it considered fair to question it. Even then,  it can take the horrors of the collapse of the Twin Towers and the death of a couple of thousand Americans, before such radicalism is unacceptable. A few thousand Afghans killed in the name of Taliban purity was never a problem before 9/11…).

But maybe there is a third way, that is a little more progressive and gently provocative. Is there a way that we can sit together and start by not having to reconcile all our different views about God? At least, not in the first day, or month. Or even the first year. Can we sit with the tension of unknowing? Maybe if we stay long enough in this place of discomfort and irresolution, we might actually arrive at some deeper truths about the nature of God and justice and love and life. We might begin to see where the shared values are and then might begin to build some common understandings. We could even challenge one another’s prejudices and inconsistencies. We might begin to ask why it is that we don’t take the uncomfortable teachings of our God or gods more seriously - those annoying teachings about including the ugly, the poor, the difficult, the unlovely, the teachings about self-sacrifice or mercy, the injunctions to seek the good of others.

As one of my gurus says, ‘The truth is in the struggle’.

Anyway, enough spiritual barking at cars. Coming soon: Ghulam Hazrat and Qorban the big-handed. 

  A thought occurs to me. The churches that I feel comfortable are those that have become a repository for weirdness, that provide a sanctuary for the strange. Churches where men with drooping handlebar moustaches and women in 1950’s frocks from Shirley’s sit alongside the nutty, the ugly and the terminally obnoxious. People who in ordinary society are shunned, misunderstood, or told swiftly to get lost, in my sort of church find welcome and are respected.  

And we all sit along side one another longing for a better world.

In India we used to go to two churches each Sunday. The first, at 9.00am sharp was the acceptable, orthodox church where good Indian Christians went. The people dressed nicely and sang hymns from 1970’s English hymnals. Never anything Indian. Beggars and lepers and children with missing arms and twisted faces lined the doorway and the path, and the good people walked past them every Sunday.Then at 10.30 we would get on a bus and arrive in time for the devotions at Sahara House, the drug rehabilitation centre we worked at. 80 men, maybe 20 women, a bunch of streetwise kids and thin babies, people with AIDS, with Hep A, with huge wounds from knife attacks, open sores, missing teeth and fingers, prositutes, gangsters, hold-up men, holy men, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, non-believers, unbelievers, us. A pirate crew of misfits, dropouts, geniuses, losers, sad men and beaten women, all sitting together on the floor, two guitars and a set of tabla and us all wanting a better life for ourselves and each other and asking God to be part of that.My kind of church.

There are other worlds. Other kinds of dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible. Honourable. Sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth.

There are plenty of warriors who go to war each day, knowing in advance that they will fail. They’re less successful in the most vulgar sense of the word, but by no means less fulfilled.

- Arundhati Roy, ‘Come September’

Long time since I have been in a church, where the first notice given, is not about the Ladies Craft Group, or Friday night Youth Group (Youth Grope, we used to call it), but about how to evacuate the building in case of a suicide bomber.

Perhaps I should rewind a little. You may not know that I am a person with a SofGos. Now that is not a type of rash you find in the unwashed creases of your body, but a Sort of Faith in a God of Sorts. Kind of like a vestigial tail, this faith of mine doesn’t do much, but makes me uncomfortable, in a moral sense. Makes me think about poor people, those who are left out of life’s better moments, about my own failings. So it was that I decided that given that I was in Afghanistan – a country that is currently one of the epicentres of violence and impoverishment - Good Friday was a good day to go to church.

I dressed in my best Afghan clothes – the baggy pants and long shirt that is the equivalent of a Sunday best, and asked our driver to take me over to the other side of town, where the expatriate church meets.

I am not a big fan of expatriates getting together in war zones. Too often it seems like behaviour that would normally be restrained at home, the war, tension, fighting and pressure suddenly now permit. And that applies in both secular and holy settings. I kid you not: at a party the other night, as I yelled over the thudding boofdoof music to a fellow Australian, a woman with a squint and a pork pie hat, several Americans behind me screamed into the Kabul sky, ‘Team Fuckin’ American!!! Yeah! Hooo-aaaah!!!’, the Frenchmen took their shirts off, and a short man with a sparse beard ran about, pushing his camera up women’s shirts and taking candid shots. And no one seemed to mind, about any of it.

In churches, I have heard sane and good people beseech their God to remove the curse of Islam, watched them go into apoplexy, and seen an undercurrent of fear of the other, that disturbs me. (Though I have to say, when the men took their shirts off at the party, I felt an undercurrent of fear too. Momentarily I wondered if I had stumbled into Afghanistan’s first Gay Rave.) It has occurred to me to ask whether in the mosque nearby, there might be  devout Muslims praying that God would remove the curse of Christianity, but that would explain to you why I am now a person with a SofGos, rather than a person with foam flecking my lips.

I digress. Determined to see as all, Muslim, Christian, shirtless-party dancer and weird photo-snappy short-man as equally redeemed and equally fallen, I went off to church, turning my mind to the ‘open’ setting, (as opposed to its normal setting, ‘vacant’). As we drove up the wide, main street leading to the Parliament, crowds thronged in front of us, and the way was blocked by two ISAF tanks, and three Amoured Personnel Carriers, and usual coterie of black, tinted-window security vehicles. It didn’t take long to work it out: a suicide bomber. Another suicide bomber. Now I have lived in Afghanistan in the Mujahideen times, under the Taliban, in the chaos before and after September 11, and under Karzai’s new deal, and I have seen plenty of horror here.  But the random violence and carnage of a suicide bomber is deeply upsetting. Two bodies lay inert on the street, roughly swathed in plastic. Bits of car were flung over hundreds of metres, barely recognisable. Sump oil, bone, and blood mingled in the brown mud. Two attack helicopters shuddered in the air above. Half of my mind puzzled at them. Unless spectacularly unsuccessful, a suicide bomber does not flee the scene.

I took a few photos, and we drove on. Barely half a kilometre on, we turned into a side street and I got down and went into the Good Friday service, feeling numb and shaken. Not stirred. 

Bits of somebody.