itinerant and indigent

We had dinner tonight with old friends.

If I remember it all correctly, we met them in 99. We were new in Afghanistan, they had been here a year or so. We were in language school and they welcomed us, had us over to dinner every Tuesday. We had our first Christmas here with them and I shared the Pan Forte my Mother sent. One night we took soup for our Tuesday dinner there, and when we walked home from their house in the dead quiet of a Taliban winter, we were attacked by a crazy dog and I beat it off with the saucepan. Then we moved to Mazar, and later, after 9/11, and when we returned to Afghanistan, they moved up to Mazar too, and again we were friends. I borrowed Ken’s bike, and I remember riding through the thick mud of Mazar’s raw streets, a stripe of syrupy brown up my back and coating my legs. I bought Ken a coffee grinder for his birthday, which he happened to share with Jesus (the birthday, not the coffee grinder). It took me hours of searching in Mazar’s eccentric shops to find one – an old Russian one, with Cyrillic script on the bottom. When Richard was killed in the plane crash, I told Ken. I used their piano tuning tools to tune the old church piano in the basement where we used to meet.

Now, after a break they are back in Kabul, and so are we. We sat with them tonight – it must be their fourth or fifth home in this country. We are in our seventh home, if you count only stays of more than a month, and we will shortly move to our eighth, where we will live for the next few years, all going well. We talked about the new times here – frozen chicken breasts are available in the bazaar, wine glasses, wine, power tools (even if there is no electricity). Everything is now available, and if you can’t get it, talk to a shop owner. He probably has a brother in Dubai, and he will get it for you. And there is Bush Bazaar, so named because of the huge quantities of American goods available from a row of shipping containers. I haven’t been there yet, it is near Pashtunistan Square, where the old Electric Street is. We would go there to get switches and wire and globes, it was the only place they could be found in Kabul. Illicit TVs and satellite dishes were sold from under the counter, and I once walked into a shop where three Talibs were loading a sports bag full of banned cassettes and music tapes. They glanced up at me, disinterested and unembarrassed. I suppose it got boring being a good moral Talib sometimes.

I used to hate it that you couldn’t get a decent bag of coffee anywhere in Afghanistan. My mother had to send it from home. Now, you can get bags of Lavazza and Vittoria, and you can have a latte or an espresso at the Kochie Coffee house, and I hate that even more.

We have found much joy in coming back here. But it is not all joy.

Well, Lal wa Sarjangal has been great and now we are now ready to leave. Except we can’t. In Lal, the airstrip is only long enough for a small Cessna to land, and that small Cessna is now being used for training activities elsewhere in Afghanistan. We only found this out yesterday, and were due to leave tomorrow. Today then was spent exploring other options: a 10 hour drive to Bamiyan (site of the ancient Buddhas before the Taliban decided to remove them), and then fly down; a six hour drive to Chaghcheran and fly; a two day drive all the way back to Kabul, via Bamiyan. These options quickly evaporated too: the flights were all full and the road after Bamiyan was insecure (meaning high risk of becoming a guest of anti-Government forces, ie, kidnapped).

So that means waiting until Saturday, when the little Cessna will be free again. Except that an local man, irate because the project here won’t give him a job, has decided to take his revenge building a house on the runway. He has, apparently, got as far as dumping a load of stones for the foundation. In previous times he was content with protesting his unemployment by standing in the middle of the runway as the plane was landing; now he has upped the stakes. The team leader here was to talk to the Wuluswal – the local Governor about it, and she was confident it would be resolved. Hmm. She had been confident we would be leaving tomorrow too. Lal: you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

Lal’s superlative runway, pre-housing development.

 We were in a village the other day, assessing the quality of the development efforts that have taken place there in the last few years. It turned out the female Community Health Worker had died two years previously. Her husband, the male CHW was still operating though. He looked dangerous. I asked him a few questions.

‘How do you treat diarrhoea?’

‘Amoxicillin!’

‘What about pneumonia?’

‘Amoxicillin!’

‘And vomiting?’

‘Amoxicillin!’

‘Rii-i-ight. What exactly is the difference between a cough and pneumonia, do you think?’

‘Oh, with pneumonia, you have a cough, fever. You know.’

Confidence and ignorance. A bad combination.

Back. Back in Afghanistan. Back in Mazar-i-Sharif. Back in the winter’s adhesive mud and bitter cold. Shivering showering in a bucket. Stinky, sooty diesel heaters that… no, no wait, that was 2003.

We are back in Afghanistan though. And we are showering in a bucket. But, it is great to be back, and we feel strangely happy. It probably seems hard to understand why we keep coming back to this place: you may have to come and visit to experience the particular beauty of this country and the pull it exerts on your heart.

We arrived in Kabul last Friday – a week ago. It was a long flight via Singapore and Delhi, but comfortable. On arriving in Kabul, we were pleased to find all our bags had come with us and not ended up in Bogota. Then began the long ridiculous trek from the airport to the carpark: because of security, cars are not permitted closer than a kilometre to the airport, thus ensuring a brisk trade for porters and an annoying end to the journey. While we were locating our transport, a fight ensued between two porters, which was resolved by a policeman wading in and swinging his fist; unfortunately on his backstroke he biffed our daughter in the face. Welcome to Afghanistan.

After a few days in a guesthouse, we flew in a tiny plane up to Lal wa Sarjangal, in central Hazarajat. This part of Afghanistan is easily the poorest and most marginal in a poor and marginal country. The town, Lal is a street with mud houses scattered either side, a scrounge of stray, violent dogs and a river. Onions and flat Afghan bread are generally available, as is tea, second hand clothes and a smattering of other goods – soap, rope, broken motorcycles and oil cans, tyres and shovels. My colleague here, Andy, needed a key cut – a modern type key that you would typically use for a door or padlock. He asked his Afghan co-worker where he could get another cut here, and the co-worker laughed, as though he’d been asked where the local gym and day-spa was. ‘You can’t do that here! No, no, no! you have to get that done in Kabul.’

Andy then produced another key, an old-fashioned one, the sort your grandmother used to lock her wardrobe with. Here, these keys are still in common use and are cast in cheap metal and then filed to shape. It is iron-age technology. ‘What about this key?’, Andy asked tremulously. ‘Ha! No! No, that you must also get done in Kabul. Here is it impossible. Send it on the plane that comes next week. In a few weeks he will bring you a new one.’

Such is life in Lal. We travelled out to a village last week, as part of the assessment Julie and I have been asked to do. This village is 40km away, and it took us two hours to get there. Andy was wearing a pedometer, wanting to know how far we walked around the village, but before we even got out of the car, it registered 5.2km in bumps travelled.

But our children are happy. Our son in fact told us he wants to buy the house we are staying in and live here when he is married. It is unlikely that even by then (he is 4), there will be running water or electricity: presently, we pump water by hand from the well and cart it to the house. A fair part of each day is simply spent filling buckets. But it is comfortable and clean and warm, unlike the homes of people we have seen in the villages. It is difficult to imagine how life in some of these villages goes on. It is something like -30 in the winter, and the ground so unyielding that only potatoes and onions might grow. The diet here, day in, day out, year in, year out, is bread and tea. People count themselves lucky to have a spud: meat and fruit are luxuries in the same way that a ride in a limousine might be in Australia. No, not a limousine. That is attainable for most people, and probably not novel. A ride in a private jet, is a better metaphor.

Poverty and peace. It is interesting: those parts of the country that are in some ways wealthiest from poppy crops, are also attracting the greatest donor interest, in an effort to stem opium and replace it with legitimate, ‘friendly’ crops. Peaceful areas, like Lal, on not on anyone’s radar screen for investment or reconstruction.