Done

We got our registration. We got our visas, our work permits, our foreigners registrations cards, our ID cards, our bell-bottomed jazz pants and our three headed monkeys. We can stay here, work, drive, eat and sweat, and no one can tell us not to. Until they do. This is Afghanistan. No guarantees, that’s a promise.

I won’t elaborate on the long final stages. Suffice to say Jalil was involved. Alot. There were trips to the bank. Waiting in queues. $1000 bond was handed over to a nameless man. Signatures were needed. Patience was called for. Tempers flared and were quelled. Elaborate Dari was spoken and thanks were given, repeatedly. Hands were shaken, many times. Men were kissed, sometimes twice, sometimes by accident.

In the long dark corridor of waiting that we slowly traversed, I passed the time by imagining two graveyards out the front of the Ministry of Economy, one for NGO leaders who had grown old and died waiting for registration, another for MOE staff who had been terminated abruptly by NGO leaders who had finally cracked. Fortunately neither of these scenarios eventuated for me, and on Monday afternoon I emerged triumphant, with the Certificate of Registration.

We celebrated by having Qabuli Pilau for lunch, and it tasted all the sweeter for our success. Actually, I made that up. It was not a very good pilau. The meat and the rice were very dry, the sultanas like little mouse poos, and the salad was yellowish. It was hot and foody, that’s about all you can say for it.

I took my camera with me on the many trips into town – some photos below.  Some of these I plan to use for Hagar promotion purposes, I have manipulated them a bit in photoshop to bring out the atmospherics. Check out the Humvee – standard transport for the US troops. Ordinary people are required to give them a 50m safety perimeter, or risk getting shot. ‘Lethal force may be used’ as they say. They don’t like people taking their photos either – hence the hurried covert picture. Wouldn’t want to be lethally forced just after we get our registration…

 

Not there yet…

No, it didn’t happen. The High Commission for Registering NGOs Who Have Been Waiting A Long Time And Really Want To Get It Over With didn’t meet. They couldn’t get together all the requisite people and things: the Ministers and Deputy Ministers and Associates and assistants and crouching hairy assistants and a three toed sloth and a bear with five legs and a chicken egg with a gecko inside*. They will apparently meet next Thursday. So. More waiting.

And to add to today’s sense of failure and disappointment and concern, a rocket landed last night fairly close by, in Silo – about 3 km. Not a RPG, a rocket. It is a long time since I have heard that sound, the whining drone, then the crack-boom of the explosion. No one was killed and everyone is a bit mystified as to why (not that hard to figure out surely). What else? Two French NGO workers were kidnapped in Central Afghanistan. This is happening regularly. Not frequently yet, but more frequently. And I lost my temper with a small boy selling incense smoke in the bazaar – we were pulling in to stop and he hopped up to the window with his can of burning incense, which immediately filled the car. I asked him to go, told him I wouldn’t give him money, asked him again, politely, then started to wind up the window. He stuck his hand in and held it down (it is an electric window). Surprisingly strong, he kept holding it down and when I tried to push his fingers off, he would whip them away, then replace them and keep the window from winding. It became a joke to him and I could see he was enjoying punishing me for not giving him money. Fair enough, I guess, in a sense. Eventually, I got out of the car and clipped him on the back of the head. Not hard, but inside I was angry.

It is not difficult for my ugly side to come out here. It was far easier to think of myself as a controlled, patient, mannered, generous person, when no one begged from me, annoyed me persistently, when things worked. It is easy to be pleasant in a pleasant place. But the reality comes squeezing out when circumstances are tougher and unforgiving. And seeing my own ugliness reminds me of truths about my lack of redemption, weakness and ungodliness.

And, on top of all that there is a earthquake going on around me. Better finish this before the roof falls in

 

.

The incense boy, pre-whacking.

 

* the gecko thing actually happened. A gecko crawled up a chicken’s parts (how? why? surely it must have been a struggle?) and died (pathetic effort, gecko. you should have kept going to the brain, and taken the chicken over). Then an egg formed around the gecko. Some poor guy cracked open his morning hard boiled and found lizard, not egg. Google it if you don’t believe me.