Life In Taloqan

Dear Everyone,

Well, I’m trying to regular about these letters, but I lose track of when I’ve sent the last one, and the desperate pace of this work makes the memory of such details elusive. Forgive me if I repeat things, and just enjoy them twice - they probably made a big impression on me.

So far, I’ve been giving you samplings from my journal, in which, up to about a week ago, I was very descriptive and eloquent. That, unfortunately, has changed recently. Witness a typical entry from the last few days:

"Almost feel like crying. PL left me with a final report to do for UNICEF
And I know almost nothing about it. Spent all afternoon trying to figure
out what was going on. I need to go home. I have a headache. It’s been 10
hours in this office."

So. I will leave this sparse, bleak material in the journal, and tell you a bit about everyday life in Afghanistan. Sound good? Good.

I’ll start with my room. The office I mentioned above is about a 6-minute walk away from the guesthouse where I stay. The first part of that walk is along an SFL-built road, and the rest is in the mud that passes for a street here. When I first arrived, I noticed that Afghans wear their pants very short, high above the ankles. Now I know why. The guesthouse is really a compound, which is also a big thing here. The public spaces and private spaces are clearly separated, usually by walls. So inside the walls here there is a yard and a garden, with the buildings to one side. There are four rooms here, and a washroom. You actually wash in the washroom; other business is done 84 steps away, across the yard in the latrine. I never have to remember to put the seat down for the ladies in the latrine, partly because there are very few ladies, and mostly because there is no seat. What there is is a deep pit covered by a slab of concrete, and a hole cut in the concrete. You get good at squatting. If this sounds rustic, please know that it is preferable to plumbing, because plumbing is technology, and technology rarely works here. Believe me; you'd rather have a hole in the ground than backed up pipes in this country. I’ll get to the washroom later.

Back to my room. This I can take from the journal:

I am writing this in my room at the guesthouse. Out of my window, there is a leafless tree, a small vineyard, the wall of the compound, and the grey sky. It has been raining. If there were no clouds, I would be able to see the mountain, probably fresh with snow after all the rain we've had here. My room is small, about ten feet by fifteen. It has no stove, but the other room was more of a hallway with a bed, so I chose this one. The others have round stoves that burn wood at a terrific rate. My room is cold. A bare bulb hangs from the ceiling and flickers along with the struggling generator. The floor is cement covered with a red carpet. The walls are mud brick and whitewashed, with coat hooks nailed into them. My bed is two heavy mattresses, called toshaks, on the floor and a couple of Japanese sleeping bags. Those Japanese! These bags consist of two panels, a top and a bottom, which zip together (and completely apart), leaving a healthy zippered, and thus drafty, perimeter around the whole outside of your body. There are shelves set into the wall beside my bed and a piece of loose wallpaper hangs behind them to hide the exposed bricks. The paper is patterned in tiles with a garish design of lilac and pink carnations on a red and white background. I can't believe wallpaper like this exists. All my things are on these shelves, the books and the pictures at the top. Above me, the ceiling is made of straw mats supported by round rough beams about the thickness of a leg, set crosswise from wall to wall. It has just begun to leak. Around here you catch the drips in cups and buckets until rainy season is over and then you pack more mud on top of the leaky mud and call it a day.

Sometimes we take showers. Showers here are done by lighting a fire under a small water tank, heating the water and then mixing hot with cold in a bucket to get the desired temperature. you then stand in a recessed basin in the cement floor, use a big cup to scoop water from the bucket and pour it over yourself, soap up, and rinse again from the bucket. It’s quite nice actually, because the hot water tank heats up the little washroom very well and you don't have to step out of a hot shower into a cold room. You just dry off in the heated room, dress, and leave.

Most of the time we are picked up by trucks and the drivers take us to the office. At night, the drivers are off so it is up to us to drive. All the trucks are Toyotas. I think every vehicle in Afghanistan is a Toyota. Diesel Toyotas. In theory, one drives on the right hand side here, but a good rule of thumb to follow here is drive where you can. This includes the right, the left, and off the road all together. Other good rules are:

1. Assume the right of way
2. Pass everyone
3. Honk when doing 1 and 2, and at all other times
4. Ignore the guys with signs
5. Obey the guys with guns

One of the trucks I drive sometimes is a relic with a gearshift that has more play in it than a first string quarterback and a reverse gear that I swear changes position. It is also a right-hand drive, which is jolly good fun. Sometimes I wonder why the guy beside me isn't driving, and then I remember that I am. There are an equal number of right and left hand drives on the vehicles here. It seems to make little difference to the Afghans. And no matter what side your wheel is on, you can be sure that each seat, including your own, will have two or more people in it. A motorcycle is a family vehicle, and a bicycle is good for three. They trick out their bikes here with reflectors, plastic roses, streamers, and the plastic wrap they are sold with. Motorcycles are operated with what seems like a specific intent to wait until the last minute and then gun it through the six inches remaining between passing cars. Other modes of transport include horses, donkeys, and carts pulled by horses or donkeys. You can walk, too, especially if you are shouting and herding a river of sheep through all of the above.

This is a man's world. Actually, it is probably what Neverland really looks like, after all those lost boys never grew up. You eat with your hands, sleep in your clothes, get dirty and don't change, wipe your nose with your scarf, the whole world is your bathroom, and the women aren't allowed to talk to you. Until you get inside. Then it's the women's world, I’m told. I’ve never seen the women's world, and I won't ever, unless I marry into it. But outside the women are covered up with burqas in blue and white, like children dressed as ghosts for Halloween. The men have an Old Testament dress code, with turbans, loose clothes, and blankets wrapped around them and tossed over the shoulder. The color of choice, and practicality, is brown. If you're really flashy, you wear grey. Children are dressed in the brightest colours allowed by natural law, and they are everywhere. As young as six, they are leading donkeys, herding sheep, digging gravel into potholes, racing sticks in the ditchwater, playing hopscotch, throwing rocks at each other, selling bread, ploughing fields, washing cars, pulling carts, collecting water, and chasing foreigners. School starts in two weeks, so I hope some of them will be in school as well, the little rascals.

Children are probably the most beautiful and heartbreaking thing about this country. With bright clothes and brighter smiles, with grim faces and silent trudging, with kites and rocks for toys, they are like treasures covered in dirt.

They are also the future. This country is 50% children. Pray they last.

Thanks to all of you who remember me and them. Special thanks to those of you who wrote me. I will get back to you personally. Peace to all. -rjs

How To Write A UNICEF Report

Dear Everyone,

Thank for all your thoughts, and for those of you who sent messages, double thanks. Writing little notes like that takes 5 minutes for you but it's life-giving for me to get them. To those of you that did write, I will make sure to respond personally soon.I'm afraid I don't have many long descriptive tales of my adventures this time. I'm waiting for a breather. This week has been like an avalanche. The head of office left two days ago for a month long holiday in the states. Norman (the other American) and I are trying to figure out how this place runs. Especially hard is the fact that our role as ex-pats is strange: we are looked at as though we have authority but it's no secret that our knowledge of how anything works is slim. It must be hard for some of thenational staff who are men in their 50's with engineering degrees and lots of experience to have to deal with greenhorns who know nothing but must be respected because we're ex-pat NGO staff.My own particular demon right now is the fact that I've been left with the responsibility to write a final report to UNICEF on a project that I know next to nothing about. Once I get the info on it - always a lengthy process here - I have to either figure out or come up with a format for the report, but I'm mostly guessing at this point. Then there is the small issue of the beneficiary list, on which all 2400 names are in Persian and must be translated to English and entered into the computer, but our data entry person does about 100 names a day, and the whole thing is due in three.He'd entered about 300 names so far but the disc he was saving on bugged out and we lost them and had to start again. Want something to pray about?As for my situation, which I wrote about last time, it has been settled. I will go to Faizabad, as planned, within the next two weeks, as soon as the replacement head of office arrives and gets settled. I feel peaceful about the decision, and I'm excited to go. thanks for remembering me in this.I will try to compose a more pithy letter next time. From what I've heard, the last one was well-liked and will be hard to top. Not that it's a competition, because I'm the only contestant. Hey I've an idea. Some of YOU could write ME about what YOU'RE doing.

Love you all,

rjs

Coming To Taloqan

Dear Everyone,

We are back in the swing of things here at the SFL Taloqan regional office. We had the whole last week off, due to Eid, which is like a Muslim Christmas. No one works and everyone visits everyone else. They serve a soup made from rice and corn and mutton and, well, oil, and you get it at every house you visit. It's called "Mast Aabha" which translates loosely as "Party Water" Go figure. So, after a week of visiting, bowl after bowl of mast aabha, a lot of nodding and smiling due to lack of comprehension, and general relaxation in between visits, we are back at it.

I have more or less taken over the job of office administrator here, for now. It's a position that badly needs filling, and the head of programs, Patty-Leigh, badly wants me to fill it. It's nice to be wanted, but it's not what I was originally commissioned to do. As most of you know, I was heading to Faizabad to teach in a technical institute set up by SFL. The trouble right now is that the school lacks a supervisor, or anyone to take charge of programming and such things, so it's unclear what I would be doing there, and how I would do it, and for whom. Also, there's been a shuffle in areas of authority in SFL, and there is a different Director now for development operations in Faizabad, the category under which the school falls. So the Director for Relief in Afghanistan and the Director for development in Faizabad need to get together and talk about where it would be best to send me. Don't quote me on any of this, and if you understand it please write, because then you could explain it to me. Ha ha.

Personally, I can really see the need here, and I think that I can help. Also, being a relational person, it helps me to work with people that I really connect well with, and I connect well with Patty-Leigh. Her idea is that if we can develop skills and build the capacity of our own national staff, we do a lot to create tomorrow's leaders for this country after all the NGO's are gone. But in order to have the breathing space to do that, we need to get this office out of the panic mode it's currently in, and that means someone (me, potentially) who can implement and oversee some more efficient ways of doing things and training staff to do them. This appeals to me. Plus, once we get these systems in place, we can add other in-house training programs further to build the capacity of our staff, things such as English classes and computer training. This makes a lot of sense, because these guys are already in a working environment in which new skills are applicable immediately, rather than abstract.

So, I would like to enlist your help to remember the country directors and those who need to make the decision about where to put me. Request that wisdom is given, and that I will be allowed to work where I am most needed. Inshallah.

And now, a bit more of the journal, in which I drive from Kabul to Taloqan.

Jabulsaraj, February 3, 2003

It’s 930 in the morning and we've stopped at the checkpoint for the Salang Pass. It’s been four hours since we left Kabul. I was awoken this morning by bob coming into my room with a storm lantern at 515am. "They’re here! We’re going! Now!" Good thing I packed the night before.

We left Kabul by starlight. The mountains glowed white, catching the edges of the dawn. Every 200 metres or so, there would be a huge rift in the road. I read somewhere that the soviets built these roads with cement slabs that have since shifted apart, leaving gaps that are so big - some of them - which cars simply disappear into them. Haven’t seen that yet, but some of these gaps are pretty big. As the dark lifted, the countryside appeared, revealing bombed out bridges and the rusting shells of military vehicles strewn across the plain. They are in no particular order of pattern, they sit facing whichever direction they were going when they blew up. There are so many of them, like the bones of dinosaurs and monsters after some holocaust.

By dawn we arrive here at Jabulsaraj and run into a backed up line of vehicles. The pass is closed; there's been an accident. It will be two hours, we hear, before there is any more news. Not two hours until it's cleared, note, but two hours until there's more news! Are all these radios just for show? Bob goes to talk to the ACTED guy. ACTED is the French NGO in charge of keeping the pass clear. Bob returns, having discovered that... surprise! We will have to wait 2 hours for more news. Engineer Atiqullah, who we are traveling with, buys us breakfast. There are boiled eggs, bread, tea, and walnuts. There are also some biscuits that taste like sugar cookies made with diesel, probably because they are. Because we are an NGO vehicle, we are waved up to the front of the line, but then everything halts again. No one is going through, not even the UN. The road fills up with vehicles and all-male crowd which mills around. Never have I seen such milling. Milling like this in America usually means that windows are about to get smashed and stores looted and the riot squad called in because axel rose didn't show up or the Canucks lost again. Here it's just milling. It’s like a tide, it flows towards whatever is interesting.

I, it seems, am interesting. I step outside for a minute and soon there is a crowd. One guy speaks English, sort of, but better than I speak Dari.

"How are you? How are you?"
"Fine. Good. Tashakor."
"Where you go?"
"Taloqan."
"Ah, Taloqan."
"And you? Where are you going?
"Kunduz."
"Ah, Kunduz."
"What you doing Taloqan?"
"I’m a teacher."
'A teacher? You speak Persian? Dari?"
"Ha, ha. Ne, ne, but I will learn."
(He looks at the logo on our truck, seeking more conversation pieces, and finds one) "You are Sheltar fore Loif?"
"Bale, yes."
"What is your salary?"
(I laugh. Is this even appropriate?) "Ne, ne, ne!"
"You from America?"
"Ne, ne. CANADA."
"Konoda. This province of America, yes?"
"Ne, ne, a different country."
"In Konoda is engleesh?"
"Bale. Inglisi."
"You like to boy clothes?" (he points to his shirt)
"You want to sell me your clothes?"
"Yes, yes."
"I’m not buying your clothes...what will you wear?"
"No, my cousin, Kunduz, he make these clothes."
"But I’m not going to Kunduz."
"No. (he laughs) so, what is your salary?"

I wish them all well and get back in the truck. The human tide spills around the vehicles, gathers and flows. Cigarettes are smoked, knowledge is pooled, and speculation. Two young guys wrestle. Kids walk amongst the cars, vending sweets, crackers, bread, eggs, toilet paper. Men group and regroup, wrapping themselves in their brown blankets - pattus - waiting, smoking, talking, milling as the sun climbs high over the hills and lights up the red rocks of the mountainside.

It looks like we are moving. They let one of the UN trucks through. A man comes up and talks excitedly through the window to our driver. He waves around his arms. He points, raises his voice. He opens the door and grabs Basir's arm. Basir stares him down like Clint Eastwood, says something in the same quiet menacing way. More yelling. More Clint Eastwood. We move to the side. The guy apparently was the gas station attendant and we were blocking his thoroughfare. Who’s getting gas, I wonder? None of these cars are moving.

...a bit later...

The opening of the pass was like the start of the tour de France. One minute everyone was milling, the next, they were running like crazy back to their cars in a stampede of flapping turbans and blankets. Engines fired up, doors slammed, and a cacophony of horns began. One driver stood like an exasperated island while vehicles honked and swerved around him. His passengers hadn't returned yet. The guards at the gate yelled, held up hands in futile signals, and finally bashed any bumper that moved with their sticks. We jockeyed into place, slipped through the gate, and joined the traffic up the road. "Traffic" is polite. It was more like a stock car race. Honk lots and floor it. The huge rain ruts and craters in the road add to the fun.

Salang Pass, later that day.

We are stopped again, one of a long line of vehicles stacked up inside a long avalanche gallery in the pass. The mountains are spectacular, piles of buff coloured rock covered with snow. Further down we passed villages built into the sides of hills, made of the same dirt as the hills themselves. They look as if a giant had carved out a pile of blocks out of the rocks. Some of the window frames in the houses are painted bright blue or green in striking contrast to the earth tones around them. A splash of red here and there is a carpet hung out to dry in the sun, or a young girl's dress as she stands against the sky. In a land where men are brown and women are blue and white, they dress their children in the most brilliant of colours. People watched us go by, but their faces were inscrutable. Boys inexplicably scooped snow on the road, and then - more inexplicably - held out their hands for money. Occasionally we passed someone leading a cow or a donkey, or a family walking through the snow piled on the side of the road, the woman pulling her burqa close to her face in order to see her path.

When we finally got to the Salang tunnel, it was such a sight that I wished they'd stopped us again. The road just disappears into the mountain. The Salang Pass is not a pass at all. the road winds up through a series of smaller tunnels and avalanche sheds until it arrives at the base of the highest ridge, a solid slope of snow-covered rock fringed with jagged turrets of stone and needle-point crags that towers above. We arrived there in late afternoon, when the slope was covered in long shadows and the craggy fingers of the mountains were catching the warmth of the falling sun and holding it against the cold blue sky. And then the tunnel. Black, a hole, gaping like the mountain had a mouth, overhung with snow and huge dripping icicles like fangs. There was no cement arch or canopy to delineate tunnel from mountain; any evidence of its construction was folded over by cornices of snow. It looked as if some god had punched a hole straight through the mountain. Actually it was the Russians.

Men were lined up along the approach like spectators at a joust. At the mouth of the tunnel is a huge muddy pool of melt-water, and the road drops into it. Literally. It’s about a one-foot drop into the puddle initially followed by another splashy nosedive halfway through. The Toyota corolla ahead of us took a good run at it, and was in over the hubcaps in no time. He sloshed around in the ruts for a while, then gathered for a final push up the other bank and disappeared into the blackness. Cheered on by the crowd, we followed. The tunnel itself is three miles long, walled with concrete, and filled with diesel fumes. We followed the corolla's taillights, which sometimes took a dip or launched into the air, which meant the road was about worse, which was hard to believe. We passed a bus stranded inside. Two guys had a fire going. Nasty place to camp, no doubt. We didn't stop to ask.

The road down from the pass was an elephant walk of cargo trucks climbing up the other way. Huge Russian Kamaz trucks, Mercedes trucks, and some unidentified relics, all loaded to flattened leaf springs and chugging out diesel smoke. These trucks - all of them - are decorated, decked out with pieces of flair, for lack of a better descriptor. They’ve got paintings of lakes and mountain cabins on them and painted pastel patterns all around. Even the ironwork has non-functional curlicues welded onto it. And of course, all of them have the obligatory picture of Massoud in the window. Massoud was the martyred commander who fought the Russians and the Taliban, assassinated two days before September 11th. He’s become something of a hero, to say the least, and they've got pictures of him in every pose possible. Passing these trucks groaning up the mountain I’ve seen him standing tall, lying down, gesturing heroically, pointing, laughing, and answering the phone.

Pul-e-Khumri, February 4

We didn't make it to Taloqan. Stayed in Pul-e-Khumri, and had dinner with Mr. Basir, who is a Mullah - like an Islamic priest and teacher. Bob asked him about the next election.

:"if this election is a REAL election - you understand - then no one votes for Karzai."

I asked who would be voted in.

"We don't know. Who are the candidates? No one would vote for Zahir Shah, I think."

I remember asking Chris in Kabul what the Afghans wanted. "They want Massoud to come back from the grave," he said. Judging from all the pictures, I’d say he's right. You never see pictures of Karzai. Of course, if anyone pulls out a camera anywhere near Karzai, he is shot. Massoud's assassins posed as photographers.

UNAMA office, Kunduz, February 5

My first NGO coordination meeting. It’s all numbers: how much coal, how many litres of kerosene, how many families, etc. And just learning the names of the NGOs is a chore. There are enough acronyms flying around this table to fill an alphabet soup. The chairwoman, Paola, wants to know who's doing what, and what the UN can do to help. One guy is waiting for some blankets to come over the Salang. Having been over it myself, I can see why he's waiting.

Driving home from Kunduz I see this written on the crumbling wall of a bombed building: "Denger is here!" And then I see that children are playing in the rubble. And that, just like that, is a picture of Afghanistan. Remember them.

Love to all of you, and thank you. -rjs.

Coming To Kabul

Greetings from Afghanistan everyone. I'm in Taloqan, which is firmly in the north, and a contested area of the old Northern Alliance in the war against the Taliban. I’m mostly doing office work and trying to pick up the language, Dari, as fast as I can. The staff here has been most accommodating, especially the local guys, who are cheeky and love a good joke. I thought I would give some bits taken from my journal, of my first days in Afghanistan, so you can have a little taste of this place. Enjoy.

Frankfurt airport, January 29

Stood in the Ariana afghan airlines ticket line for a long time, while one woman wrote out each ticket by hand. She wouldn't take US dollars when I finally got to her, so I had to go get euros and stand in line again. She’s writing them by hand because they have a computer problem. The problem is they don't have one. Matthias says at least they have a system, which is more than you can say for most things they do in Afghanistan apparently.

En route to Teheran, January 30

The airplane has a 70s decor, grubby and worn. Mercifully, the seats actually recline, making for a comfortable sleeping position. The crew is all male, except one woman who ghosts around, so it took me awhile to see her badge. The rest are dark, gentle men, soft-spoken with a polite, apologetic manner. The captain - I’m assuming not the ONLY captain – is stretched out along four seats in the centre row behind me, sleeping out this leg of the journey. I thought we were flying straight from Istanbul to Kabul, but it seems that fuel is cheaper in Iran, so they always buzz down to Teheran to top off the tanks. We’ll be stopping there for "one hour" the announcer informs us. This is an afghan euphemism for "as long as it takes." So far, it has taken close to three hours at each of our previous one-hour stops.

Things are different on this flight. For instance, they make a haphazard announcement shortly before landing, asking everybody to un-recline their seats, etc. but nobody comes by to make sure everybody noticed. Nobody until one guy runs around insisting on it as the wheels hit the tarmac. How often has this zealot gone headlong on touchdown, I wonder.

Also, there are dogs on this flight. They have their own seats. Five American guys, look like ex-military, have a few wired German shepherds with them. The dogs are a going concern. One woman came aboard to find her seat taken by a dog. She raised a stink, the crew swarmed, people chattered away, and someone found her another seat. Now it turns out that the dogs need to lie down, and they want to do it in the exit door row. That’s right in front of me, so I get this priceless exchange between the steward and the guy sleeping in the exit row seat.

Steward: pardon, pardon. (Guy wakes up) excuse me, I am solving a problem. (dramatic pause) there are dogs. [I hold my breath at this point, hoping for the sake of pure comedy that this will be his entire explanation] dogs must lie... here. (he indicates the guy's legroom along with this grand finish) will you exchange seats?

Guy: uh. Can you give me two minutes?

Steward: (with a huge, winning smile) I will give you FOUR minutes, two in cash!

As the plane landed in Kabul, everyone jumped up and began to pull down their luggage, despite the half-hearted attempts of the jovial steward to encourage people to "remain on seat!" He shrugged at the few of us still on seat. "Why afghan want always to be five minutes early? They are five centuries behind anyway."

Kabul, January 31

Chris is one of the SFL staff here in Kabul. He’s a kiwi and full of loopy expressions, "g'day cowboy!, 'ow are yer, cop? oi, sunshine! etc." he's friendly and full of beans. He took me to a moneychanger to get some Afghanis. The guys are in a little shack and they punch out the exchange rate on a hand held calculator, then hand you stacks of bills in the smallest denominations possible. You’re supposed to count them. You’re also supposed to lose count of them and not notice that you're 10 bills short. Good trick except Chris noticed and reached across the desk, counted out some bigger bills and turned to leave with a cheery "tashakor!"
"They give you those small bills to muddle you up?" I ask as we walk away.
"Yeah, it's too bad really. Desperate times call for desperate measures, but those guys aren't desperate. They’re just crooks."

Little boys come up to you on the street selling VCD movies, maps, shoeshine, etc. Sometimes they look mournful and ask for "baksheesh," a gift. But one little dude didn't seem to be asking for anything. He just grabbed my arm and winked and chattered. Later he saw me in a shop and dashed in "HELLO! HOW ARE YOU? FINE THANK YOU! SEE YOU LATER!" and dashed out again.

Yesterday I made my first purchase in Afghanistan. I’m quite pleased because it wasn't even on Chicken Street where all the vendors speak English. I bought two bottles of Fax shampoo, all natural, imported from Pakistan. It cost 90 Afghanis, about $1.80. The shop owner served me tea while he dusted off the bottles and put them in a bag for me.

Kabul, February 3

Now, in early evening, as the sun goes down behind the hills, there are kites flying above the ridge. Four of them, in bright colors, catching the updrafts of dusk. The name for kite in Persian is "kaghaz-paran" – flying paper. The kite flyers themselves are silhouettes against the pale sky, running along the ridge. The buildings around here are filled with bullet holes and the streets piled with refuse and cratered from shelling, but trees still grow outside this window, birds still sit in them and sing, and children still climb the hill at sunset to fly their kites over the city. Kites in Afghanistan. Kind of gives you hope.

Thank you all for keeping me in your thoughts, and remembering me on your knees. Keep in mind especially our staff relations here, as the work is busy and we have some clashing personalities. We need the highest form of peace and mercy for all.

I’m doing very well with the language, for being here only one week, but I still need all the help I can get. Your support in all ways is invaluable. Tashakor! (Thank you).

rjs