Like Hope, I Guess

It's different this time. I remember flying in 6 years ago, and the plane was filled with Afghans, returning home, ignoring the hapless stewards and jumping out of their seats as soon as we hit the runway. I remember the ground around the airport littered with the skeletons of warplanes and the chaos of the arrival hall with its exposed concrete riddled with bullet holes. This time the plane is filled with huge white men carrying desert-coloured army packs and saying nothing. They line up in confident silence, each one alone amongst the others, shifting their weight slowly from foot to foot, their faces set in neutral masks. The area around the airport, I notice, no longer has the ruins of war, only the visible signs of military control and precaution, walls and soldiers and towers.

The Afghan soldiers at the airport are still a jovial bunch, and they still seem like guys that can't believe their luck at getting to wear those uniforms. I left my wallet on the plane and several guys made the rounds of the arrivals hall with different pieces of my ID, calling out mispronunciations of my name and searching up and down like it was a high level mission to find me and return my property. When I finally clued in that it was ME they wanted and MY wallet that was missing from my pocket, one happy fellow escorted me through the security at the airport, waving dismissively to other officials who wanted to question our absolute importance. He brought me to the airline office, where everyone talked at once about getting the wallet back to me and nobody seemed to do anything about it. While we waited for it to come, the officer told me he wanted to get a visa to Canada, and could I help with that? I said it was hard enough getting one for my own wife, and by the way, I should go back and tell her where I was.

I found Esti was standing in the back with our luggage, fending off a crowd of guys eager to help. The efficient officer had whisked me off so fast she didn't really know where I was or when I was coming back, so she gave me a long-suffering look when I finally pulled up and cheerfully announced to the crowd that we had no money to pay them because I lost my wallet. The guys nodded sympathetically and melted away with a few last looks at my wife. We picked up my wallet from the airline office and headed outside.

The Kabul airport used to be surrounded by swarms of taxi drivers, sweeping like a high tide right up to the doors of the building. Each year the security cordon has widened, so we had to walk through two parking lots, across a dirt road, and through another building before we got to the place where our driver was waiting. And no flashy white NGO 4x4 with the logo stickered all over it, either. These days we fly under the radar in normal looking corolla wagons. We call in all our movements to a security post. We don't look soldiers in the eye. We keep our heads down.

***

We arrive at the weekend, which means church. Non-muslim foreigners are allowed to practice their religion in Afghanistan as long as they do it out of sight. We go to two kinds of church meetings. With our colleagues on Friday, we join the Evangelicals (which means everyone of the bible-believing Christian kind) for a house group, where we sing songs and read the bible. On Sunday, we go to the chapel at the Italian Embassy for mass. This is the only Catholic Church in the country. The priest is Father Giuseppe Morretti, an expressive man who welcomes all comers with open arms and wonderful Italian-flavoured English. You have to drive through several blockades with armed soldiers to get to the embassy, and then buzz in at the barricade. The guys that work there all have deadly looking guns, flak jackets, black designer turtleneck sweaters and salt-and-pepper stubble. They look like the French Resistance. They look at your passport and bore into your secret thoughts with uncompromising stares before letting you in for church. The chapel is small, brick, and simple, decorated with some beautiful Italian paintings of saints. A peppy Fillipino couple handles the music, aided by a karaoke machine. The congregation is a small and solemn sprinkling of nuns, Fillipinos, embassy staff, and soldiers. They couldn't be more of a contrast with the Evangelical group, who are mostly young and perky and packed in, straining at their tethers with praise and expression. But these people have come, and the priest's heart is clear, his teaching is true, and the Eucharist is sweet as honey and miraculous as ever.

After mass, the Indian and Pakistani nuns flock around Esti, who they recognize as a sister, and we are introduced to everyone. I want to ask Father Moretti if there is anyone celebrating mass in Mazar i Sharif, because we have been told that is near where we will be working in the north of Afghanistan. He shakes his head sorrowfully. 'No,' he says. 'This is the only church in Afghanistan ... Maybe one day - we hear maybe a Jesuit will begin to teach up there - but now, no.' I wonder if he knows about the Evangelicals and their house churches all over Afghanistan, and I wonder for the thousandth time since becoming a Catholic how the zealous and heartfelt Evangelicals are part of this deep secret, this one, holy, and apostolic Church. It makes me sad, like my heart is pulled in two. Maybe it is prophetic, and for that moment my heart and the Sacred Heart are one. I feel as if I will carry this all my life. Father Moretti is asking me something. No, I say, we won't be back in Kabul until Easter. He sympathizes, then brightens up. 'But Jesus say you can go into your room and pray ... Of course the Eucharist is good and necessary, too." He looks at me in a fatherly way over his half-spectacles. "Take strength today, and come back when you can." He shakes my hand and turns to the others who have been waiting for him. Esti has finished chatting with her sisters and we walk out into the night, filled and still longing.

***

After two years of drought, the land in northern Afghanistan is drinking rain again, and the dry dirt is covered in carpets of new wheat, splashed around with great beds of gul-i-lala - wild red tulips - and purple flowers. We drove north from Kabul through the Salang Tunnel, which has been improved since my first 13-hour journey through it six years ago. It is still covered in snow and clogged with exhaust and dilapitated vehicles being coaxed and threatened through by their heroic drivers. But at least they have a traffic system now, and the delays are less. (I have to say I miss the old days, though; driving straight through without a hitch lessens one's sense of dash and adventure). And the drive, as always, is wild and beautiful, full of fierce mountains and delicate hues, and hills as smooth as whipped cream. We see shepherds, and farmers, and shadowy women, and children running in flashes of the brightest colours. I saw an old man in a long coat and turban, walking with his granddaughter while she held his hand and chattered up at him with her head scarf slipping unnoticed from her shiny hair. Driving by, this place feels so far away from the horrible stories you hear of women beaten and children shot. But I know that somewhere, because of the dark, these things are also true.

Our work will be based in Jawjan province of Afghanistan, which is in the north of the country, bordering Turkmenistan. Mostly we are trying to relocate an office and residence to a town called Sheberghan. The project base is 45 minutes north in a town called Aqcha, which became too unsettled a while back for foreigners to feel comfortable living there. Sheberghan is calm and peaceful, so we will set up a small office and residence there for foreign staff to live and work, while continuing to supervise the work based out of Aqcha. We will also be trying to find donor funding for our work, most of which has recently been providing make-work projects for people so they will have an income after the two years of failing crops.

One interesting idea we've been working on is giving out spinning wheels to the women who spin the raw wool into carpet thread. Aqcha is one of the biggest carpet-making centre in Afghanistan, and most of the wool is drop-spun by hand. This is tiring and time-consuming. With the wheels, they will be able to spin more and better thread. The carpet maker, Javaid, who showed us his wheels is also the owner of Indigo Carpets in Kabul. He speaks very good French because he goes to the homes of his wealthy French clients in Paris and Nice so that he can custom make their carpets to match their decor. His carpets are all made with the finest hand-spun thread and dyed with natural dyes. They are exquisite, subtle, and costly. The light cream one with delicate interwoven tendrils of colour hanging by the door is a Spanish design and was commissioned by the US Embassy. I don't even ask what it cost. Javaid shows us the dyes, pomegranate for red, indigo plant for blue, walnut for black. It is more another world than a carpet.

I have always loved colours in Afghanistan, maybe because they stand out so much more against the dull brown of the backdrop. The red flowers, the green wheat, the coloured flags on the shrines of saints, the shades of blue in a wonderful carpet, a girl's bright shawl trailing behind her and she runs through the sunrise. It looks like hope, I guess.

It's nice to be back.

p.s. I axed the flickr link because flickr cost money and was painful to use. For photos, see my Facebook album. If you're not on Facebook, click HERE.