New photos

Some new photos posted in ‘Afghanistan’

 

The Colours of Afghanistan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

A look at a latrine

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.

  

 

Afghanistan.

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.

  

 

Photos

Have been away… in the south. It was renewing.

A series of new photos are posted - beach scenes. These are all untouched close-ups of the Margaret River beaches, following some hard Spring storms - the fine white sand has been washed away, leaving the tiny rocks and stones and shells. Quite beautiful. Here’s the link: Beach photos

 

Award

I won the Victoria Park Art Award for Photography last night with this photo:

 

Street shots

Get your nails done and a new book too.

There was an old man at the bus stop. I think most people assumed he was homeless, but he just looked tired to me.

 

the war on terror is best fought with t-shirts

 

Scenes from the street

I am sitting in a cafe, looking out across the street. Cold wind in the morning sun.  From the fast food restaurant beside me a young woman and her children emerge on to the footpath.  

‘You fucking get here. Stop that mucking around.’ The mother hits her daughter hard across the back.

The daughter skips away, then turns and screams to her younger sister and brother back in the restaurant. ‘Come ON. Get here now. ‘  The younger sister comes out, and in turn, screams at the boy. The boy is perhaps two years old, and cannot walk so fast. He is carrying his shoes and a small plastic horse. 

The mother has already crossed the road, pushing the pram with a furious anger, the daughters skipping behind her. The son trails, hop-footing on the cold pavement. On the other side of the road, the mother turns again.  ‘Fucking get in the pram.’ 

With care, the little boy moves around to the front of the pram, but as he climbs up, the mother jerks the pram in impatience, and he drops the shoes. The mother pauses, and throws her head back, and then, with a sudden, snake like intensity, strikes the boy across the leg. She seizes him, pushes him down into the pram and grabs up his shoes, moves quickly after her daughters.

 

My friend

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?

 

The balloon seller of Mazar

 

Kabul

Main street, Kabul.

 

The balloon seller of Kabul

 

Mazar-i-Sharif, April 2007

 

Good Friday’s suicide message

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.