‘And that was?’

‘You can get good bread here now.’

I ponder this as I go upstairs. Part of me rejects it as a cynical comment, tossed off without thought. Of course if you left here in the early 80s, before the country was shot to pieces and if your baseline is Melbourne, then current Afghanistan does not compare favourably. But his remark reflects a deeper truth, which is that Afghanistan has dropped a long, long way from the high watermark of the early 70s, and it has not recovered. 35 years of conflict and still counting, we should not be surprised at the slow rate of change.

That said, there is plenty of evidence of similar cynicism: a friend sat next to a leader from the Panjshir Valley on a flight recently, and this leader told him how they have a shadow Government, primed and prepared to take over as soon as Kabul falls. These are not Talibs, but Tajiks. Competent, probably, and long-sighted, they are planning for the next decade. In contrast, aid donors and military planners think in terms of the next 6 months. There are multiple such shadow Government structures all around the country.

*

The ditches being dug around the place that I referred to earlier: an interesting aspect to these is that the drains used to be regarded more or less as the property or responsibility of the adjacent householder. Now that some donor has paid for the municipality to subcontract their construction, the ownership and maintenance of these ditches has become unclear. As a result, no one is cleaning them out. For most of the year they collect rubbish, rocks, dead animals. But when it snows – then they block, and flood. Was this foreseeable? Could a better process have ensured community ownership of the ditches? Because while a donor was happy to pay for their construction, no one has the money or willingness to pay for their ongoing care.

They do serve the purpose though of allowing you to shake your carpets out.

Meanwhile, it has snowed. This cleared the air and created a whole big great wonderful lot of fun.

Then it snowed more and yesterday when we woke up there was a foot or so on the ground. The children were delirious with excitement.

Easy for us to enjoy it, with barrels to kerosene to fill our heaters with, and thick snow clothes inherited from our Swedish friends. Not so much fun for poor Afghans. We have had a few requests for help, and have given away a bunch of clothes and jackets, following St Basil’s admonition:

‘The bread which you do not eat is the bread of the hungry; the coat hanging in the wardrobe is the coat of the one who is naked and cold; the shoes you do not wear are the shoes of the one who is barefoot; the money you keep locked away is the money of the poor; the acts of charity you do not perform are the many injustices that you commit.’ 

We know that giving away money and clothes is a short term solution. It is, however, a solution to those who would otherwise go hungry and cold, until a better solution can be found. And that is not going to be anytime soon, here.

Finally, the Government must have decided that ‘illegal’ roadside installations are to be eliminated, because all the nice little shops and so on along the streets have been torn down. The guard boxes are being repositioned, as you can see. I can’t see this working for the shopkeepers though.

A (minor) annoyance that strikes us as a result of all this digging is that the phone line that provided DSL to our neighbourhood has been cut. A month is the estimated repair time. So until then, no internet access at home, and we are back to using a satellite connection at the office. So if you don’t get a quick reply, you know why.

These reports are about two types of tragedy; that of poverty, and that of excess. The common denominator is that in both cases, the child is being used to please men, and that their families – including their mothers – are complicit in this abuse.

Our daughter in the Christmas nativity play. She was the lead role and quite beautiful.

For Christmas, we got all creative and made toffees and chocolates in the shape of lego pieces. It was good to do Christmassy stuff. For anyone interested in how to make these, it is not hard: find it here.

Finally, walking to work this AM, I saw the local rubbish truck. While much of what I see happening does not represent real progress, I think you could say this does. A real system of rubbish disposal. Sure, they are not recycling – not in an official sense – and sure,  the rivers and ditches are still choked with the trash of years, and no, there is not much civic pride, but three cheers for the garbage collectors.

In Faryab – seeing as I have now started – it used to be peaceful. Then some Taliban moved in. Then the US came and shot up some valleys and had some of their drones drop some bombs. Then one of our staff got kidnapped and lots of NGO staff got threatened. The insecurity continued to get worse, in part it seems, because people realised that insecurity attracts money. And sure enough, the big money came. And now, people in the villages – those few places where we can still work, where security is sufficient that it permits us a presence, big uncritical aid has corrupted the local people so comprehensively they no longer want to be participants in development. They want it all done for them. They will not contribute free labour: they want to be paid. They will not send their sons and daughters to literacy classes: they want incentives – wheat and oil – before they will give their children permission. And so on. And there goes our approach.

But more on that later.

So: it is Thursday. I have dropped some friends at Chicken St, and then I continue to Bush Bazaar, where I intend to stock up on provisions for our friends, Tom and Lyn, who are coming to Kabul to teach at the kids school. I buy oats and bacon, soap and shampoo, hot chocolate and real Italian pasta, weetbix and real coffee. It is a successful expedition.

I return to our car, and notice my front tire is flat. This is a frustration, as I am meant to be home in 15 minutes, so Julie can go out to lunch. The little boys who attend the vehicles, occasionally polishing them with filthy rags, in the hope of receiving a few Afs compensation for their re-arrangement of the dust, notice my arrival and gather around.

‘You have a flat tire’, they trill.

‘Yes’.

‘But it was the police. See, they have taken your number plate too.’ I am slow to catch on. It was the police?

‘Yes, you can’t park here. They said. They did it. They tore off your number plate. See, look! Come, see!’ Their excitement is palpable: a foreigner in trouble is high entertainment. I go see, and sure enough, the plate is gone. I look down the row of variously arranged cars; abandoned it seems, for such is the Afghan way of parking. I notice that perhaps half have similarly had their front tires punctured. Others are without plates too. It is not just me then.

Now my anger begins to build. Issue me a fine for parking in a wrong place (though post some ‘No Parking’ signs first), but take my number plate? Puncture my tire?

‘When did this happen? Where are they?’ I demand of the boys, as though they were complicit (they possibly were: they certainly encouraged me to park there, and I can’t be sure they don’t benefit in some way from all this).

‘Up there – see – if you run, you can catch them.’

It seems I have little choice. To have no licence plate is a serious problem and who knows to what graveyard of remote offices the hapless number plates will be borne and hidden? It could take me days to find. Better to try to retrieve it now. I set off jogging down the street, acutely aware that about $300 worth of goods are now sitting in my car in open sight.

After 5 minutes I catch the police. There are about 30 of them. Good Grief. How many coppers are needed to stab tires and pull off plates? Is this an all day thing? Is it such hard work? But more pressingly, who is in charge? Which is the commander? Who do I talk to? I gabble to various underlings and thrust my registration papers at many lowly police toe-rags before finally finding the Commander, and puff out my story. I am not abrasive  - perhaps I should be, or might be, if I hadn’t run the best part of a kilometre. I mainly want my number plate back, and starting a fight with 30 police officers is not going to work. See, I have learned something in the last 12 years.

The Commander scans my papers and grunts. I babble apologies. He takes a single appraising look at me, as if to ascertain how much trouble I can cause, or perhaps how much I am good for.

‘Give him his numberplate’. This is a concession to the fact that I am a foreigner, I am sure – an Afghan here would be told to get lost, to come to the office, to come back in three days. The Commander, without raising his eyes, starts to write something – a fine, perhaps, and then his sidekick, based on some subtle communication from the Commander, jumps to life and tells me, ’1000Afs’. About $20. It is not too much, though whether it is a bribe or a fine I do not know. Should I protest? Is it too much? Is it official? An official bribe perhaps. The Commander writes out one, two, three, four, and then a fifth copy of the receipt.

‘Why five?’ I ask. Foolish, perhaps, but why do I need so many?

‘Five hours. 200Afs per hour.1000 Afs’ The Commander’s meaning is oblique. ‘Eh? Five hours of what?’ I start to ask, and then decide the better of it. That I was ‘illegally’ parked (note, there are no signs what so ever forbidding parking in the entirety of the street) for only one hour is not going to get my 800Afs back, and if I start to argue my case I might just find myself in his car along with my numberplate.

I get the number plate, the five receipts, my registration papers, and begin the jog back. It now takes only about 45 minutes to locate the jack, the tire lever, pancake myself under the car – now so low to the ground that you could barely slip a pizza underneath – jack it up and change the tire. The jack is the sort that you turn with a small handle, and it offers very little mechanical advantage. With each turn, the jack raises about 1/10th of a millimetre. It is a slow business, and with every turn, my knuckle knocks on the underbody of the car. In warm weather it would be painful, in the wintery 5˚ C, it is murderous, and at one point, I get up, kick a rock and say a bad word. The Afghan boys are delighted, and laugh openly: ‘He has a flat tire! He is changing the tire! He is angry!’

I derive only a small amount of satisfaction from the fact that I am a source of amusement to small boys. More interesting is the solidarity I feel with other car owners, who return to find their number plates gone and their tires down. They too look disgusted and angry, and when our eyes meet, there is the brief recognition that we have been wronged, together.

Finally I am done. I am filthy, from the mud, the oil and grease caked around the jack, the black of the tire, the effort, the blood from my banged knuckle.  I lower the car, hang the punctured tire on the brace at the back of the car, and I drive home, and though vexed, I am not furious. Perhaps I am getting better at managing these situations. Or perhaps I was just too irritated to get really enraged. Or just realised at a subconscious level the futility of it.

I continue to speculate as I drive. If my encounter with Kabul’s police was archetypical -and all I know and read and am told suggests that it is – I wonder how the people of this country are meant to vest trust in its institutions and its officials. I wonder at what point it tips, when enough people decide that on balance, ‘this’ state of affairs is preferable to another. What corruptions are acceptable and what aren’t? What will people put up with? I know it is a world I am largely not part of, and when I get home, I tell our watchman what happened. He says little, but looks at me in a way I can’t quite fathom. It is almost – almost, like he is thinking, ‘Now you’ve had a taste of it’. I do not mean he is mean, or vindictive – far from it, he is a kind and gentle man. But he knows, and I know, that I rarely ever experience anything like the privations and pains that he does, that poor people do. I would not blame him at all, for taking a measure of satisfaction that for a brief minute, I shared something of the hardness of the life of the poor.

Later I go out the bazaar and get the tire repaired. It is only 100Afs.

I please myself the following morning, by being able to laugh when the same watchman comes to the door at 7AM to tell me that I have two completely flat tires.

This year, the fire came. I care not to blame any one person or department or decision; if it wasn’t DEC it might have been a motorist with a cigarette butt, or a piece of glass, or an arsonist. The fire came, and it burnt the lot.

Here is the old railway carriage that we first lived in, back in 1975. I did it up a few years ago: restored the floors and walls, pulled out the old fittings, painted it. It was a lovely studio space.

And here below, is the view of the beach right in front of the land. It is a view that I have never tired of. When the brown dust of Afghanistan gets to me, I remember this place.

Here is what remains of that railway carriage.

And here is the view down to the sea. Few patches of the fragile coastal heath remain.

My sister used to work in a bookstore while she was at med. school. She collected antique books, first editions. Of the hundreds of books stored there, this was all I could find.

Some years back, we built a shed for the tractor, the vehicles, the tools and equipment necessary for caring for 160 acres of bush. The shed is now a wreck: the roo-bars melted off the ute; the windscreen draped over the steering wheel like silk, 8m ladders reduced to pools of metal on the floor. The diesel exploded, blowing off the roof.

‘

‘

I have often described Afghanistan as being brown and blue: brown land and blue sky. Margaret River has new colours for me: white and black.

The tractor we pulled out and left to rest under some trees. I will later sandblast and repaint it. It is good to hold onto to some of the destroyed things, they are a way to grieve and go on.

After four days of solid work cleaning, repairing the water and the electricity, salvaging items, talking to a crowd of officials and inspectors, we went down to Gnarabup beach and swam.

That night I went down to pull the old padlock of the incinerated back gate, and I saw that a bare week after the fire, the bush is coming back.

We’ll fly back to Kabul on Sunday. ‘We’ is Nathan and I. Nathan and Bronwyn and their kids are friends of ours in Kabul. When they heard about the fire, Nathan said he would come with me. I shook my head. But he just went ahead and paid $2500USD for a ticket, and with his wife’s blessing, he came and worked along side me, all week, through all the destruction.

Thankyou Nathan.

Earlier in the week, without being asked, another friend, Dave, had driven down to Margaret River, evading police blocks and closed roads, and walked in through the still-burning bush to conduct the first reconnaissance of our place, and give us some picture of what was ahead of us.

Thankyou Dave.

1. “You’re poor and marginalized already, you just don’t know it. You haven’t seen the kind of wealth commanded by the average man of 500 years from now, but when his day comes, he’s going to look back at you and wonder how people ever survived living in such shocking poverty. You and everyone on this planet today is desperately poor, poorer than you can probably imagine.”

Well, I deal in the here and now and the immediate years ahead, not some fictive future 500 years from now. Who knows what things might be like by then, and I am 100% sure that any Afghan would not find any succour in the idea that he and I were comparative equals from a far future standpoint. I am also not sure what metric you are using to say we are all poor on this planet. That just doesn’t make sense, not by commonly held understandings.

2. “…we very quickly end up taking on a worldview in which we’re the elites, which by implication means that everybody else isn’t. The resulting impulse is to help the downtrodden, which is admirable so far as it goes, but when it’s done from a notion of “I’m better off than he is,” then with it comes the unconscious notion of “he’s less than me.” “

If you have read any or some of my posts, you will see that this is a view I do not hold, and I think most people are capable of more nuanced understandings than that. I do not think it wrongheaded to understand my own privilege. That does not mean I am better than any one else, and many of my posts are in fact about my own failings. But more broadly, one is a statement of wealth or power, the other a moral statement. I do not confuse the two. I would challenge you also to find too many Afghans who sees their livies as more enviable than mine. Or put it this way: will you trade your nationality for an Afghan one? I would guess not.

3. “You work in aid and development in Afghanistan, and so do I. Virtually all of our aid programs are built on the premise that the Afghans are poor and weak, and need our help in order to stand up. Like I say, that idea quickly gets taken way too far, and billions of dollars in debilitating handouts have been the result. After a decade of working here, this country is a mess precisely because we see ourselves as more advantaged then they are, and therefore obligated to help. We are wrong in that view, which is why so many aid programs here have been utter disasters.”

Actually, the aid and development programs I work in are premised on the idea that Afghans are resourceful, clever and industrious. That they are busy solving their problems long before we come along, and will be long after we go. As I said, I do see myself as more advantaged, and yes, that obligates me and the rest of the privileged world to help. ‘Help’ does not connote ‘poor miserable Afghan’. It connotes ‘get in there and get useful’. Finally, many of our projects have been somewhat successful. Not utter disasters. Not full successes. But not bad.

4. “What if their poverty is really not so different from ours? What if there’s only a hair’s breadth of difference between an Afghan’s wealth and mine? Compared to the average man of 500 years from now, that’s the state of things– my Afghan housekeeper and I are on almost equal footing. But if that’s the case, then why give things away? Why take on airs of being elites? Why not treat these guys as essentially equals, and try negotiating and bargaining with them, instead of giving them things?”

I don’t really know what you mean by ‘our poverty’. You need to be more specific in that. Again, I defy to you find any Afghan who equates, at a living standard level, your wealth and his. And again, this fictive 500 years from now? Go 500 years back, and you will see that enormous differentials exists in wealth, life expectancy, access, rights, etc etc, in common society. Why should now or the future be any different? Next sentence: I do not take on an ‘air of being an elite’. I am capable of more discernment than that, as are most people. I can recognise what I am, but not take on an air about it. Can’t you? And for your information, a tenant of our work is ‘never give anything for free’. You can see it in our operating principles.

Finally, I am not sure what you mean by ‘an objective moral order to the universe’. That sounds, sorry to say it, a bit like psycho-babble to me. Try placating an Afghan with that, or a Liberian, or someone whose family have just been butchered by the Janjaweed. Well, Alamanach, that’s my response. Feel welcome to continue the discussion, but I would challenge you to get a bit more hardheaded about some of your reasoning.

From within the ruined old palace, the new Parliament takes shape.

We climbed a few internal staircases, somewhat hidden away, and there in a roof space was a pile of school books. It was odd.

The fallen ceiling. It was quite beautiful, the way it hung, a lattice of plaster and wire.

From an upper window. Clearly, someone had been hidden there, sniping at people below. 

On our way out, we passed the guards, and I slipped them 500Afs. I’ll come again, with other visitors, and I’d like to keep the relationship cordial. Needless to say though, the guards looked disgusted at the paltriness of my thanks. ’500Afs? What use is that?’

____________________

Today we learnt that our bush property in the South West of WA has been largely burnt in the bush fires. My uncle’s house is destroyed; my parent’s home damaged. It is hard to be so far away, and the shock has an unreality to it.

We did blend in, a little – but with our lighter skin, slighter builds, without large beards or turbans and not being Pashto speakers it would not have taken much to penetrate our disguise. Plus I wear glasses, which immediately identifies me as someone a bit odd. But really, all we did was land at the airport, be taken to the office, meet, eat, meet, sleep, eat, meet drive back to the airport and fly away. Classic seagull stuff: fly in, make noise, fly out. But necessary sometimes, and despite my misgivings and my desire to be more present there, it was encouraging for the staff and important to heed their concerns: a higher profile visit, or meeting with too many people is just too risky.

The project we visited does adult education – getting adults not just to learn English or a vocation, but engaging them in critical thinking skills, in learning about civil society, what makes a culture, about ethics and morality and owning your own community’s problems and being a part of the solution. In a context where many programs are intensely individual, and focus simply on enabling the clients to gain a skill and better only themselves, this project is a groundbreaker. It is not perfect, and many participants probably do have a more extractionist, pragmatic approach – but some do ‘get it’: they understand that they need to be a new generation who sees things differently, who can articulate a new, critical, engaged vision of the future and draw others into it.

It must also be said that Kandahar is home to millions of mosquitos. And along with the eucalyptus and oleander and bleached colours, it felt quite West Australian. There is a lot of military activity there, and we were searched, thoroughly, several times. Two or three big explosions too, though no one was remotely fazed.

Driving back to the airport, we noticed the blast walls are property marked ‘NATO’. Is theft of these really such a big problem? Each must weigh about 2 tons.

These Hesco barriers, surrounding the airport, often go with the blast walls. It does not create an inviting atmosphere.

I guess I should not graphically represent the sign below, as it tells me not to, but I cannot let the euphemism ‘lethal force’ pass unnoticed. I guess ‘We may kill all persons who attempt unauthorised entry’ isn’t strong enough.

We made it home a few hours late, but safe.

But Rachel has been sick through the most of it. Day 2 Elijah started to get sick. And me. Day three Pieta joined in. As a result, most of the sessions we have only been present for a part of. Today, I was at home almost the whole day with Rachel who was alternately lovely and horrible, but mostly horrible, with a running nose, fever and pains. And at 3pm, our downstairs neighbour came up to say that he was taking his wife to hospital with tachycardia. Could I look after his son? Sick myself, with Rachel muttering obscenities from the floor, I gave a highly conditional assent. At 7.30, Julie, Elijah and Pieta arrived home – all of them clearly sick or getting increasingly so. A few minutes later, Downstairs Dave reappeared to advise that his wife was being admitted to the ISAF hospital. Could be be on hand to mind their kids? Julie offered to sleep downstairs. Dave left. We pushed our own kids into bed, snot-nosed and weepy eyed.

So that was the conference.

On arriving at Herat, a classic illustration of the failure of the social contract: the bags are loaded on a pick up truck and driven out to a dusty field, where the passengers are meant to locate their luggage. No poofy luggage carousels in Herat. Obviously, with bags in a pick-up truck, some are at the bottom, some in the middle, and some at the top. But instead of people showing a bit of wisdom and thought, and unloading them all, the impatient travellers simply moved the bags around in the hope of locating their own.

I waded in, and started taking the bags down, one at a time, lining them up, so that all the bags could be seen and indentifed. Not a single person helped me. This idea – the social contract – really needs work in this country. It’s absence is evident everywhere – in the way people litter; in the traffic jams that emerge because one driver, and then two and three, cut the vehicle queue, driving on the wrong side of the road, to the front of the line – thus blocking the incoming traffic, and holding everyone up; in the ready recourse to violence as a means to settle disputes: last week, outside a friend’s house, a car blocked another. The obstructed driver got out, pulled a gun, and threatened to shoot the other driver. The threatened driver pulled his own gun. Then the police arrived – there is a post nearby – and the first belligerent threatened to shoot the police. The police left, the obstructing driver  and the obstructed had an altercation, then they all left. No shots fired – this time.

Well. With the bags sorted, and my shining example of the social contract blithely ignored, my colleague and I caught a taxi into Herat. There followed two days of non-stop meetings in Dari and English and occasionally a bit of Finnish, as we sought to resolve a longstanding problem with an Afghan co-worker. An intensely religious man, he has strong links with the armed opposition groups around the province, and with clerics and mullahs. A bad enemy, in short: we cannot simply sack him. Delicate diplomacy and negotiation followed, as I sought to persuade him to join the path of reconciliation and trust. I don’t know how successful it will be. Throughout the meeting, he reassured me of his commitment, his sincerity, of Allah’s goodness, and man’s depravity, of my depravity (emphasised), of his own (not so much), that I should not worry, but that I should also not hamper his work and activities. ‘Kar-e man ra masdud nakonen‘: Don’t put any obstacles in my way. Hmm. Stronger people with better language and more attuned cultural skills than I have failed to make an impact on him. We will review it in three months.

Exhausted, I left for the airport this morning at 6.30am. There, we waited for an hour in the freezing wind, while the ticket office failed to open. I debated whether to put my pyjamas on. Over my clothes? That would look odd. Under my clothes? Even greater open-air oddness would be involved. In the end, I just stood and shivered.

Happily for me, as we were just preparing to board the Kam Air flight, my friend Dan from PACTEC called to me from across the waiting room. PACTEC flies to remote areas that are not served by the commercial airlines, and they are, I would say, some of the best pilots in the world. I expressed to Dan my reluctance to fly more of Less Air, and he offered me a seat on his plane, as another person had cancelled. I needed no persuasion. It was a longer flight, but I would rather that than a sharp encounter with a lot of rock. We stopped at Chaghcheran on the way, and I attempted to capture the treeless nudity of the area, shown here:

I was home by lunchtime.

- a relative said to me, while back in Perth, ‘We’re so glad you are doing this work in Afghanistan on behalf of us, Phil.’

Me: ‘It’s not on behalf of you.’

Relative: ‘I think it is.’

Me: ‘It’s not. There is a moral claim on you too.’

Relative: ‘…’

Christina too, made a comment about not feeling able to respond to this claim, and as I understood her, feels bad about that. Not wanting to confuse or discourage my worldwide readership, here’s an expanded reflection on this issue.

I am white, male, English speaking, and am an Australian citizen. Those four attributes alone mean I am amongst the world’s elite, and never even remotely likely to experience anything like poverty or marginalisation, yet not one of these things did I work for or achieve through my own effort, merit or character.  Nor did I choose these things. Add in that I have three degrees, (which though I worked for, I only really chose in a limited sense – given my family background, it was pretty much a given that I would go to university), and it is clear that I am enormously advantaged. (a note here: Christians often say, ‘blessed’ – as though God had bestowed these on me.)

Yet we often talk about poverty as though it were the result of bad choices, moral turpitude, ineptness. And conversely, we justify our own lifestyle as though our advantage was somehow the result of our character or efforts – or of God’s favour*. Plainly this is grossly wrong and if you spell it out, offensive enough that most people would deny that this is how their thinking runs. But it does. It is this thinking that allowed my relative to justify the trajectory of spending, consumption, self absorption and so on that typifies perhaps not only her life,but the life of many who are similarly advantaged.

Now I am no saint and no ascetic, but I understand that there is a moral claim on me to do something about the imbalances and unfairness of life. That’s what the moral claim is: not that we all come and work in Afghanistan, or the Horn of Africa, but that we recognise that our wealth and power is only fractionally the result of our efforts or goodness, and largely the result of being born in a developed country. That recognised, what flows from it is a responsibility to change and keep changing how you live and what your priorities are.

And what my relation did not understand is that this moral claim cannot be outsourced. It falls on you by virtue of your relative wealth, power and status. The claim is correspondingly reduced the less of these you have. So – Christina – if you are not physically capable, don’t berate yourself. The claim on you is met through solidarity and simplicity, through speaking out and challenging the injustice of inequalities and so on. For someone like me – and a good 90% of my peers – there are no such allowances.

__________

*If God does bestow such advantages, each comes with an equal and irrevocable responsibility. In the end, it doesn’t really matter though, the origin of the advantage; what matters is its existence and the arising claim.

Well, it seems not, as the Labor Government is following, or was following, identical trajectories to the Liberal Government it so roundly chastised. Anyway, I wrote a book, and its all about this very issue, so go out and buy a copy, peoples!

And in case you don’t trust my judgement, here’s what the critics said:

Some gathered reflections:

- a relative said to me, while back in Perth, ‘We’re so glad you are doing this work in Afghanistan on behalf of us, Phil.’

Me: ‘It’s not on behalf of you.’

Relative: ‘I think it is.’

Me: ‘It’s not. There is a moral claim on you too.’

Relative: ‘…’

..

From the conference in Sri Lanka: It was good being a meeting dominated by Asian development workers. Nepalese, Indians, Cambodians, Laotians, Sri Lankans. Great to hear some Asian development theology from Rev. Ebenezer, also. But – and this I don’t get – many of the presentations were from white-skins. While us whities were only 8 out of the 120 people, we gave maybe half of the talks and workshops. But the whole conference was organised by Asians. Did we simply volunteer to give the talks more? What about the full depth of indigenous expertise there? What was going on?

..

As Julie noted, whilst in Hong Kong, and it is true here too: an incredible number of people travel plugged into iPhones, iPads, Kindles, etc. Too bad if you want to start a conversation with someone.

..

While I enjoyed being in (parts of) Australia (mostly the bush in the SW), and seeing my mother was good, I came away discouraged by what seems to be dominant trends in my country. Insularism, racism, material aspiration. Is this the new Australia? I used like Australians. I found us hardbitten, humorous, resilient, economical. What a whinging, small minded, worldly, spiritless lot we have become. As a friend said to me, in Perth, ‘I think (Pauline) Hanson won, in the end’. Perhaps.

I spend hours talking to the team the first night, and the next day, we travel out to a village, where the local TV station is filming the opening of a water tank built through our development team’s facilitation. I am pushed to the front to say a few words for the camera, and then we cut the ribbon. Later we visit a nearby school, where a large grape trellis has been built in memory of Fay, a worker with our agency who died in Kabul early last year. It was not a violent death, but terribly sad nonetheless.

At this same school, the development team has helped install water filters. I know this is probably quite a dull photo in terms of content, but the significance of it is immeasurable. These blue filters you can see are bio-sand filters: no cost to run, they function indefinitely, and with periodic cleaning, they provide 99.8% pure water. The water fills the yellow plastic tubs, which are then poured into the steel tank, from which a series of taps provide water to the 600 students. These girls now have clean water. Out of frame are a group of toilets, and in the homes of these students, more filters. It is such in insignificant thing to us, who are used to pure water. To them, it is a huge step towards full life.

The headmaster then treats us to watermelon and green peaches under the shade of the trees in the school garden. He is intensely proud of his school, and once he realises I am the Big Boss From Kabul, he spends a lot of time haranguing me for more assistance. He is not likely to get it from us, but I appreciate his fervour. God grant that there were 1000 headmasters and mistresses across this country, who cared so much about their schools and students.

Further on we inspect a work in progress: a deep well is being replaced by an electric pump, again facilitated by our staff. The original well was dug and the hand pump installed in 2007, but the water is more than 60m deep, and hand pumps cannot really operate at that depth: it failed regularly. I comment that DACAAR, the implementing partner at the time, should have known better. Mark,who consults in the project corrects me: at that time, there was no electricity, and so no alternative. Sure, the pump broke regularly, but it could be fixed. It is only in the last year that electricity is reliably available, and so an electric pump and storage tank possible. I am chastened.

As we drive out, I see a wonderful contrast (but badly photographed as the exposure was way too high…): a man hauling a new chest freezer on a donkey. 

The next day and a half are spent in meetings with the team, and I fly home the day after Rabbani’s assassination.

Learning from my last experience, I arrive at 10.30 promptly. A few minutes later I am permitted entrance. On the way in I check to see if the security staff still have my scarf that I left here last week. They deny all knowledge of it.

Inside I join a long, defeated-looking queue of men. With glacial speed, we are called up one at a time to enter a small, dark room where the power is off, and where an Indian visa-bureaucrat-King exercises his rule. He finally takes my collection of passports and forms, and then spends several minutes on the phone, talking to his colleagues, dealing with other passports, and eventually glances at mine.

‘Wait five-ten minutes. I will finish these. Go outside.’ I demurely accept. Outside I wait for maybe 20 minutes, and then an Afghan sidekick emerges with my passports. He staggers off to a dimly lit hallway. 20 minutes later he returns, and I overhear the conversation:

‘No fax… no number… no clearance…checked?…. Yes but nothing… check some more…’

After another 30 minutes I go inside to another section, and… and…really, dear reader, it is too tedious to recall all the petty details of our sorry visa saga. I was ticked off for filling out the forms wrongly (despite them approving them last week: no use pointing that out, I was told not to argue, in the same tone a parent might use with a naughty child), I was told to fill out more details, and then sent back to another room, where, after more chitchat and humdrum and to-fro, I was told to pay $240 to another man in another room. This man, with a comb-over and the eyes of a slow-loris, with the care and slowness of a monk copying parchment, this man wrote 5 separate receipts, and told me to return at 4pm.

I exit, resigned. I decide to stay in this side of town. It is 12.15pm. It will take me 30 minutes to get back to the office, and I will have to leave at 3pm to get here at 4, as traffic will be bad.

I kill time by visiting Chicken St, once a place of old beauty and modesty: shops with genuine artefacts and antiques, carpets rare and beautiful, wonderful leatherwork, lapis jewellery. It is all being torn down.

The old shops are disappearing, to be replaced with concrete and glass. The old things are gone, replaced with cookie-cutter Dubai gold, fake Pakistani ship sextants and compasses, awful Chinese tat, lions and jugs and ashtrays made from shiny marble and plastic. This, if it is progress,  is unspeakably horrible. The shop where Julie and I bought leather waistcoats in 1996, hand made and beautiful, is now rubble.

I find one old shop, and sit and talk to the owners. We bemoan the loss of Chicken St, and deride Kabul’s planners for destroying the one place that could have been, indeed was, a kind of tourist drawcard. A Petticoat Lane, a village within the city. ‘What to do?’ The shopkeeper shrugs. He has a tv on, and then he turns to me: ‘Have you seen what is happening?’

I watch with him the live reporting: about 1km away, the US Embassy is under attack. And then there are the unmistakeable crumping noises of explosions. I can’t quite believe it, partly because outside, there is absolutely no change in behaviour:  people are carrying on as usual, they wander up and down the street, are supremely unconcerned, they shop, they chat, they sit together and laugh. Are they so inured to violence? So resigned?

The shopkeeper looks at me, ‘What is our country now? What sort of place is this?’

I used to say, that here in Afghanistan, if nothing else, I was a person of hope. But I have nothing to say to this man. What can I say to him? I struggle for some words, and after a few more minutes, I leave, and walk slowly back to the Indian Embassy. Security there now is tight, and I am barely permitted entrance: I have to convince the guards of my peaceful intent, I am frisked and searched several times. Finally at the Embassy, I get our visas, but there are new attacks on the road between me and where we live, at De Mazang and Habibia school. Roads will be blocked.

I walk. It is safer, I am not stuck in traffic, or held up. I avoid the crowds, and am told to walk around the police station near our home where the police are still mopping up. It takes me an hour and a half, but by 5pm, I am back home.

The drive in is surprisingly open. We are in general warned against going into the business/ Government sector in Kabul before 10am, as statistically, most suicide and armed attacks occur between 7 and 10, when traffic is at its peak. But I want to get to the Embassy early; I have plans of being in and out quickly.

I am refused entrance at the first gate. No point in arguing that they let me through here last week; then I had Rachel with me, and Pieta, I was clearly a family man, and Rachel was being cute, and it was Ramazan, and people were trying to be kinder, in order to win favour with God. Today, I am refused, and a guard swings his gun on me as I turn the car around. I find parking about 2 kilometres away, and jog back to the Embassy, arriving at 9.00. My haste is pointless: the Embassy is closed to those seeking visas till 10am. The guards are officious and punctilious, to the point of violence. I wait demurely in the shade, trying not to think too much about the havoc wrought here two years ago, when the Embassy was attacked and 30 people killed. I console myself that now, security is so much tighter, that any attack is highly unlikely.

As I wait, several well dressed Afghans approach the guards, and are let in. They are applying for visas on behalf of their Western employers: diplomats, other Embassies, the UN. Some are getting visas themselves; they have connections, show cards, phone someone higher up and are permitted entrance. I see several of the big Landcruisers, blacked out windows, no number plates. Always there are two men in the front; one driving, the other holding a weapon.  They have short hair, sharp eyes and plenty of muscle; they drive right into the Embassy.

Our organisation has no such connections, no such facilities, and I find myself resenting the absence of privilege. Being a foreigner, being white-skinned, English speaking, confident – it all counts for little today. I wait alongside the other Afghans, squatting in the dust at the roadside and trying to avoid the wrath of the guards. I try to remind myself that this is what it is like to be poor and marginalised; this is the experience of countless thousands of Afghans and poor people the world over, every day, for all their lives. They watch as the powerful people, the big men, walk right on in and receive preferential treatment. I have done the same many times: when our son fell from the second floor and split his head, we went straight into Cure hospital and were seen by an American doctor. No waiting. We go into the Serena hotel, or the Finest supermarket and spend our wealth, exercising our privilege. To be stripped of something I am used to is unpleasant, and it is a humbling experience, and at times humiliating. The guards shout at us, the man next to me is struck. They can make us wait, and they do. But at some deeper level, there is much more that is wrong here. Mainly, it is that I am resenting being treated like a nobody. What I should resent, I realise, is that people – anyone – is treated like a lesser person. My feelings are selfish, they are about me being brought low, not that such inequalities of access and power exist. My temporary journey into the poor Afghan’s world unsettles me, makes me question myself, but all I want is my privilege back.

Finally at 10.45, I am permitted to enter and am able to submit our applications forms. It takes another 50 minutes, and I am forced to rewrite certain parts of the forms, in the way a teacher might give lines to a naughty child. The strange thing is that I play along; I become submissive, grateful for any assistance they give me, polite to the point of cravenness, I fold myself into myself to occupy less space. It is because they have power and I don’t. I want something only they can give or withhold at whim.

It is done, and I exit the Embassy; the line of people waiting as long as it was. I jog back to the car, and spend 5 minutes checking it for magnetic bombs: cars left unattended can be targets. A convoy passes me enroute, and I quickly photograph it, such convoys are rare in Kabul these days, as the military mainly now bypass the city, trying to avoid civilian confrontations and attacks. My car is safe, and I drive back to our area, arriving sometime near 1pm.

Nothing is ever perfect: last week there was an attack at the British Council, and we fully expect the 10th anniversary of 9/11 to be significant. But we have to take the good moments when we can. In Faizabad, in the north east last week, I helped a new team of community development workers with their training; all going well, we will start work in another set of remote communities within a few weeks. Our renewable energy work there is extraordinary, thanks to a committed Afghan team and a scrupulous German engineer. Villages that would otherwise be forever using candles and torches are now having electricity via hydro-power, every night. And our adult education program is bringing people into new countries: critical thinking, interrogation of long held beliefs, voicing opinions, forming civic groups, standing up against injustice.

I sat tonight and smelt the rain and felt grateful that I can be here.

The last serious drought I know of here was in 2000-2002. The rains had failed for about 3 years, and by 2001, people were eating weeds to survive. This is not exaggeration: I know it, because I saw it.  In some places, they mixed sand with wheat to make the flour go further. I know it, because I ate such bread.

The strange, horrible thing about drought is that it looks almost like nothing. It is not like war, where the casualties are obvious. In drought, in the cities, you can continue to get butter, chocolate, fresh grapes, watermelon. The market place is relentless in providing what people will pay for. But in the far flung areas, in the aatraaf, as it is said in Dari, drought is visceral. I remember in early 2001, we were surveying villages to work out who should be included in emergency feeding. A woman emerged from her home, with a small boy, and a baby. The family was impoverished and the baby was hydrocephalic, but this was 2001. The woman told me: It is four days since we have eaten. There was nothing we could do. We were 6 hours drive from a hospital, two days by donkey. No food, no treatment. The baby would die, and probably the mother and the boy. I gave her some of our leftover lunch as we left.

And now it is all happening again. Rains failed this year, the winter was mild and short. And though now summer is over, the crunch is just beginning. The crops have withered, and the wells are now running dry. It will be March before the water is back and another harvest is ready – assuming people have wheat to sow. In our own yard, we can only run the pump for 5 minutes before it screams, the bearings spinning against the hot metal. There is no water.

We are trying to mount a response. But drought is hard to respond to, and whoever gives you an easy solution is naive. People need food first, and then water, but trucking food or water to the remote parts of this inaccessible, insecure country is an impossibility. Bizarrely, we persist though, in trying to keep people in their places of origin, while knowing that they will have to leave. So we participate in this charade, knowing that the response is ridiculous. Here are notes from a UN meeting in the north, a few days ago:

UNICEF Mazar on 16 August 2011

Participation: ACTED, Actionaid, Afghanaid, CARE, NPO/RRAA, OCHA, PiN, Save the Children, Tearfund, WFP, ZOA. Apologies: ACBAR, ACF, Helvetas, Solidarites, WHH. 

Agenda:

-       ERF cash for work proposals for most vulnerable people in priority A drought affected areas

-       Status of NGO consortium proposals to USAID/OFDA and ECHO

-       WFP request for soft food for work NGO proposals 

The minutes of the meeting go on like this for several pages. It is ridiculous, but at the same time these disinterested bureaucratic procedures are sincere. They are real efforts to try to solve what cannot be solved, what can only really be suffered. I know, I chaired such meetings myself when I worked for the UN. So if drought is nothing in the cities, as we continue to eat our salads and chicken, and if it is bureaucracy in the regions, and if it is slow suffering in the rural areas, what do we do?

I don’t know. Friends in the UK have contacted us, offering to raise money. Some of our key donors have signalled they have funds to allocate to drought action work. But the bottom line is that people will die. Droughts don’t happen in developed countries with functional democracies. Droughts don’t happen in Australia, or in India. Or if they do, the worst that happens is that crops fail. This is because functional democracies link meteorological data with agricultural reports, civic feedback with media information, social security records with Government representation. It is linked together and decisions are made and action is taken and because of these links, people don’t die slow, anonymous deaths. Slow anonymous deaths are already happening here, and will continue to happen, because the Government is weak and such linkages are absent and because aid agencies are not empowered, nor equipped, nor present enough to make such links, take the action and halt the suffering. We just pick up the left over pieces and try to fit them back together.