itinerant and indigent

I’ve been up in the Panjshir, evaluating an aid project. Latrines, water supply and health promotion training.

I do wonder what the Afghans made of it. A group of men, wandering around their village. One of them bangs on the door of a yard and calls out that we want to look at their toilet (imagine the converse: you are sitting at home, and a group of Afghans bang on the door and call out they want to see your bathroom).

A small boy is deputised to run around the yard and hustle any women inside so the strange men (and I mean strange in several ways) won’t see them. We are then permitted entrance. My Afghan colleagues demure, but I am here to evaluate whether this significant sum of money has been well spent or not, so I stride over to the newly built latrine and switch aside the sacking that acts as a door and disappear inside. All that can be heard now is me taking a long deep sniff.

Some latrines barely smell at all, and they are clean. Fresh almost. That could be a sign of a well used, well built, properly ventilated latrine. A tick for the book. Or it could be a sign that the latrine is not used at all. Sometimes it’s not so hard to tell: I have discovered latrines used as storerooms, as chicken pens, as dog houses. One had a 500 pound bomb sat upright it in. Well, the answer there is obvious. But clean empty latrines?

So, undeterred, I exit and walk around to the back, where the cover is, where the dried crap is meant to be dug out and spread on the fields for fertiliser. It is no fun, examining a large pile of someone else’s poo. But it is a good way to tell if a latrine is being used or not. Except if the little chamber is dark. It can be hard to see then. The answer to that is the squat down and look deep inside, trying to assess the freshness of a pile of drying shit (something I have done in many meetings in countless boardrooms). If I was really keen, I would have brought a torch.

I am not that keen. I do not want to look like someone really freaky.

Meanwhile, the Afghans, both my colleagues and the local people look away embarrassed, or stare incredulously, or make small talk. ‘Where is he from? Ahh, Australia. That is a good country. Hmm, yes, a very good country.’ It would be easier if I didn’t speak the language, then I could be referred to obliquely, through a third party. But I force them to get involved, I turn to them, ask, ‘who uses this latrine? Who? You? Your family? All of them? Do you empty it? When did you last empty it? What do you use the stuff for?’   I am hard to ignore.

Anyway, I get the information I want, and we move on to another site. I have a phrase for all this in my mind, which makes it easier to hold together. DOA. Directly Observed Assessment. You want to know if an aid project has made any difference, you need to get close to it. Smell it. See it. Be ruthless with it. Most people who deliver aid want it to have all worked as intended. They want to know their efforts have been useful and valuable. They don’t want it to have failed, and they generally don’t want you to discover too many failings. But good aid is not about making people happy.

The first time you come to Afghanistan, it is all new. No lines have yet been drawn across your heart. The smell of diesel and dust is raw, but not yet evocative. The bloody carcasses hanging at the butcher shops, the blaze and slap of the tandoor ovens, where flat bread is furnaced, the unforgiving land; all of it is new and enticing, and it draws you in like a lover. 

And like a lover, Afghanistan disappoints, and hurts, and burns, and abandons, and whispers to you and gently asks you back. And so, it becomes so layered, like a marriage, like a life. No longer can I walk down any street here, without a cascade of memories sifting back over me. Here was where we emerged from a friend’s home one night, in the dead of a Taliban winter, the sky dark like pitch in the absence of electricity, to walk home, and be attacked by a crazed dog. Here is where we lived, and where I killed the chickens for our first Christmas here.  Here is where I stumbled across the bits of a man, killed in a suicide bomb. Here is where I walked with my friend in the bazaar, shopping, and where I was beaten for not going to pray at the mosque.  Here, at the Hotel Intercontinental I walked, in the chill despair of December, 2001, to search for interpreters, amidst the gaggle of reporters screaming into their satellite phones their latest dispatch on America’s campaign. This road, here, I travelled in 1996, 99, 2001, 2002. In this place, there were mines; Tim and I had to walk carefully around them on our way to Mazar-i-Sharif. Here, on this road, my wife was struck by angry Talibs one day. Here, at this guesthouse, I played squash with my friend Dave (I miss him so much), the court lit by a hole in the roof, torn open by a RPG, shadows slanting across the walls.  Here, at this place, as we left Afghanistan for the last time in 2005, at dawn, a man lay dead, curled under his motorcycle, blood pooling on the black road. Here, here, here. 

Each time I come here, another layer is added, a layer of love and pain. This time, as I arrived and walked through the new airport customs area (finally renovated after for years being a bombed ruin), I knelt down and touched my head to the dusty ground. An acknowledgement, a kiss. Soldiers and aid workers, veterans of maybe five months here,  looked at me puzzled.  That excitement, that passion that crackles in the new days of a relationship will never happen here again. Not for me. Some part of me was lost here, for ever it seems: my innocence perhaps. In those terrible days in the evacuation and chaos of 9/11. Some part of me died then.  

I wonder if it could have been different.