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.