Sunday, February 13, 2005
Ed Blogs Afghanistan - A New Start
I started my blog a few days ago, but I have decided that it is better to be placed on a site with some kind of searchability so that what I write actually has a chance of being seen. So I have abandoned the little backwater of the web that I had registered as my own (in fact originally designed to serve as an instruction board for the guests of my forthcoming wedding) but unwilling to abandon too my little font of verbosity, see below for the first few posts.
20.41, Friday February 11, 2005
I spent the day trying to get to Mazar yesterday. We left early in
the morning. It has been snowing as heavily as I have seen this winter, and so it looks like I will not be able to get there for at least a couple of days. We drove for a couple of hours up towards the Salang pass with the weather getting thicker and thicker and the hills growing up around us, the landscape more and more densely muffled in white, and stopped to eat and take stock. So it was that I spent the most of the day in a restaurant on a snowy hillside drinking green tea and playing chess as my colleagues called regularly to check on the status of the pass. Finally we were sent back because it was blocked up with snow. It has snowed like billi-o for the last few days, even in Kabul which hasn't seen this much snow in years. The papers and the airwaves these days are full of bulletins about refugees dying in the cold and it breaks the heart even more than usual to see the beggars on the street – little girls with plastic shoes and no socks or pregnant mothers shivering in thin dresses, trudging through the snow and appealing for ‘maaney, maaney, dollar, dollar’. Of course you just walk by just as usual. I suppose I give to beggars with rather higher frequency that I do in London, and always accompanied by the same mixed feelings arising from the strange relationship of giving, the irritation at being hassled, and wondering whether it is going to do any good, and where it will go. I always come away wishing that I could have some kind of more human relationship with these people, regretful that I do not seem to be able to.
As well I always have a sense of irritation at being spotted as a foreigner. I have always liked to blend in when I am abroad, or at least be taken for something other that British. When I lived in Syria in 2000, people used to ask me if I was Chechen or Albanian (possibly taking me for one of the masses of Islamic students who come to Damascus to brush up on their Quran, Hadith and Islamic Law, though I didn’t sport the de riguer knitted cap and scraggly beard). In the gulf I often get asked if I am Lebanese. All this pleases the hell out of me. But in Afghanistan, foreigners really LOOK foreign. Afghans are a bit darker that folk in the middle east, but also I guess foreigner just look so green. Most of us shut up in compounds for most of the time, let out for swift, secure shopping trips, we know doubt glow with beacon-like naivety as we stumble through the uneven streets, our radio handsets buzzing.
All the other expats were in the office by the time I woke up from my booze-induced dreams (in Afghanistan, Thursday night is, of course, the new Friday night) so after a quiet little read of Rumi, and a bit of sitting in an armchair, indulging emotions of bitter yearning for Flora, I slipped through my organisation’s cordon and wandered round the streets of Kabul. After a few days of confinement you really appreciate the human organism’s need for movement after every now and again. I forewent the opportunity to play squash earlier this week due to seeing-off the Square-Jawed Yank, and was shocked to find that my brisk walk (if you can call such a stumbling, squelching trudge through the snow, mud and (to be explicit) shit, a ‘walk’) was inducing breathlessness and perspiration. God knows how I will perform when I finally do manage to set up the squash match. Anyway it felt good to be out. I was taking close note of the appearance of the Afghans as I walked, to see if I had any hope of emulating them and escaping notice. I don’t consider myself a blushing flower normally, desperate to avoid all attention, but beyond my perennial delight at being taken for anything other than British (or German or American, now that I think about it) in Afghanistan working for an NGO, there is so much hoo-haa about security for foreigners that one naturally ends up wanting to disguise oneself. The number of beards sported by the expat community here is massively higher than at home, as we men take the opportunity
a) to indulge growths that would be laughed out of town back home
and
b) to indulge our natural laziness, and just not bother to shave
While I early on toyed with and discarded the idea of a beard for myself, I have been considering getting myself a Shalwar Kamiz and some shiny black shoes, and going native. A few hours on a sunbed wouldn’t go amiss, though at a pinch I could pass for a Badakhshani or a Nuristani or some other pale mountain-dweller. My friend Nick, who travelled through Afghan a few months back, gathering material for his travel book, went to Lashkar Gah dressed as an Afghan is as pale or paler than me, and despite his best efforts to dress, walk and piss in true Afghan fashion got spotted, so he relates it, for walking like a foreigner. It makes sense. I quite see that the usual Oxford-London head-down, eyes-on-your-shoes gait giving off the wrong vibe.
With all this in mind, I carefully inspected the walking patterns of my fellow pedestrians. I have to say, I did not come up with much. They do not put their hands in their trouser pockets, for a start, so I dug my hands into my coat pocket instead, which also served to conceal the tell-tale aerial of my handset. Still though, people would stare at me, or give the little mumbled ‘Howarryoo?’ This remark, it seems is never designed as a question, or anything for which a response is expected. For a start, it is normally let loose when you have passed a good few steps beyond. And the tone is never questioning. Normally it is just rapped out in a monotone, or sometimes there is a little touch of derisive humour. Its basic meaning seems to be “Ha-ha! I have spotted you. You’re a foreigner!”
I did a little better when I took my hat off. My sister gave me a black trilby-like hat for Christmas – the kind which has been reinvented from an older style of male headwear, and has been seen gracing the heads of pop stars, and the members of guitar bands, though I like to turn it up at the back to give it a more old-school look. It has in a short space of time become a battered and dusty-looking hat, and though I could imagine an older Afghan man, of the generation educated in the years of Russian ascendancy, giving head-space to such an article, Afghans of my age tend to be wearing beanies or else kafiya-style scarfs wrapped round the head and face, or else letting their curly hair, or greasy curtains bounce free. So I crumpled up my battered trilby and stuffed it into my pocket. Rather better, until I put on my glasses. Very few people seem to wear glasses, and certainly not like the over-sized squre monstrosities that I am left with at the moment. So whenever I specced-up to catch my whereabouts, or to squint at the grey surroundings of snow-covered wintry Kabul, I would be greeted by more howarryoos, and outstretched hands from the wandering packs of beggars.
Funny though, when I got tired of aimless wandering, and sat down for a kebab in a disreputable looking and very grubby café, and would have been happy of a bit of a chat, I was studiously ignored by the clientele, who continued their discussion about Baluch insurgency in Pakistan, and glancing at the TV screen which was showing a very fuzzy 70s Bollywood film. In most other countries I have visited, someone would eventually strike up a conversation out of curiosity – at least to find out what country I am from, but they let me munch my liver and lamb in peace.
Tomorrow I am going to continue my weekend’s fun with a trip to Kucha-ya Kharabat, fingers crossed. I want to get a Dambura I think – 2-stringed thing that you beat like a drum with your thumb as you strum.
Valentine's day next week, and I am not sure what to do about it, other than invest
in a nice long mobile phone call. I looked in to Interflora to Kyrgyzstan, but I am
not sure that it would be trustworthy outside of Bishkek, and they don't
look as nice as the English ones. It;s a bit depressing. Still, I have been stocking up with Italian classics and Romantic flics from Kabul’s excellent selection of pirated DVDs to make sure that my next R&R has the right flavour.
OK, I had better go. Our fun-loving Ismaili Head of Reporting has just very sweetly called to find out if I am coming to dinner. The one good thing about being shut up with your colleagues all day and night is that you do develop a sense of community very quickly.
10.55, Wednesday February 9, 2005
I have a certain sense of fear that now I have announced myself to be ‘blogging Afghanistan’, it will seem to be humbug to the general reader, who finds that I have less to say about Afghanistan and more to say about picking the lint from my navel during the long cold evenings. Still, if this is the case, I suppose that I can keep the very existence of this site to myself. And besides, the lint-picking side of things is definitely one of the characteristic features of expatriate life in the security-intensive environment of the International NGO in Afghanistan. It has an interest in its own way. Life in the golden cage has a way of sending people stir crazy in a matter of weeks.
Things have been particularly quite since the Square-Jawed American left for Indonesia yesterday, to add our efforts to the scrum of NGOs fighting over the tidbits of international relief money. Yesterday evening there was a kind of ghostly quiet in the guesthouse where we live, despite the fact that La Petite Anglaise brought along a mild-mannered French Embassy fellow back after dinner to liven the company up. The Wild-eyed Tajik entertained the company with a series of obscene and hilarious Russian anecdoti (I am considering adding a special link entirely dedicated to these in fact, so that the more well brought-up readers (and Mum and Dad) are not offended. But possibly this should wait until I have got into the rhythm of my blog.) La Petite Anglaise is doing her best to widen the field of experience open to her in this constricted life of ours, and as a result she has been doing the Kabul restaurant circuit justice for the last few days, perched on the back of the Frenchman’s motorcycle – no doubt a delicious sensation after several months of our organisation’s security rules which limit the extent to which we can even tread the streets. Having said that, of course there is a tendency to bend the rules, as one generally considers that mental and physical health comes before the slight risk of bombing or kidnapping. But I am still playing it safe for the moment, until I get a real sense of what it is like out there. So far Kabul has seen no major security threats since the kidnapping of the 3 UN people last October, but clearly you don’t want to be stupid. Still, I have been trying to get to Kucha-i Kharabat for the last few weekends to no avail, and I am beginning to get frustrated. Kucha-i Kharabat is set in the conflict-battered old town, the quarter where traditionally, the musical instrument makers had there workshops.
It is a very redolent name. ‘Kharabat’ means ‘the ruins’, and used to refer to the run-down outskirts of medieval towns, where the city authorities were less rigorous, and where as a result, the pimps and the gypsies and the Christians and the wineshops and the dancing girls and the barflys and general merry-makers and dubious types would gather to do their thing. So it was an exciting revelation for me to hear that the musicians of Kabul still populated a quarter with this name. Of course there are not so many craftsmen left as there were, but still, some have returned to set up shop. I will let you know when I manage to get there finally. Not this week, I fear, as I have to get the car from Kabul to Mazar-i Sharif tomorrow, to try and find some land in Mazar on which to build a cultural centre. OK, I am going to load this up now, and see what happens. If I do manage to get the car to Mazar tomorrow, then I will probably have a good chunk of time to put to blogging on the road, or at least as long as the battery on my laptop lasts. Fingers crossed that the Salang pass is not blocked up with snow – it has been snowing pretty hard these last few days… apparently the first time in 12 years that it has snowed in Kabul, and therefore it looks like the end of the several years of drought. If it is fine weather, I will try and get some photos along the way.
14.11, Tuesday, 8 February 2005
So this is my first attempt at setting up a blog, inspired by the excellent words on Afghanistan from my colleague Brendan (see Brendan's blog ). I will not write anything much now, as I should be at work in fact, but you can be sure that this page will soon see many a maxim and pithy apophthegm.
20.41, Friday February 11, 2005
I spent the day trying to get to Mazar yesterday. We left early in
the morning. It has been snowing as heavily as I have seen this winter, and so it looks like I will not be able to get there for at least a couple of days. We drove for a couple of hours up towards the Salang pass with the weather getting thicker and thicker and the hills growing up around us, the landscape more and more densely muffled in white, and stopped to eat and take stock. So it was that I spent the most of the day in a restaurant on a snowy hillside drinking green tea and playing chess as my colleagues called regularly to check on the status of the pass. Finally we were sent back because it was blocked up with snow. It has snowed like billi-o for the last few days, even in Kabul which hasn't seen this much snow in years. The papers and the airwaves these days are full of bulletins about refugees dying in the cold and it breaks the heart even more than usual to see the beggars on the street – little girls with plastic shoes and no socks or pregnant mothers shivering in thin dresses, trudging through the snow and appealing for ‘maaney, maaney, dollar, dollar’. Of course you just walk by just as usual. I suppose I give to beggars with rather higher frequency that I do in London, and always accompanied by the same mixed feelings arising from the strange relationship of giving, the irritation at being hassled, and wondering whether it is going to do any good, and where it will go. I always come away wishing that I could have some kind of more human relationship with these people, regretful that I do not seem to be able to.
As well I always have a sense of irritation at being spotted as a foreigner. I have always liked to blend in when I am abroad, or at least be taken for something other that British. When I lived in Syria in 2000, people used to ask me if I was Chechen or Albanian (possibly taking me for one of the masses of Islamic students who come to Damascus to brush up on their Quran, Hadith and Islamic Law, though I didn’t sport the de riguer knitted cap and scraggly beard). In the gulf I often get asked if I am Lebanese. All this pleases the hell out of me. But in Afghanistan, foreigners really LOOK foreign. Afghans are a bit darker that folk in the middle east, but also I guess foreigner just look so green. Most of us shut up in compounds for most of the time, let out for swift, secure shopping trips, we know doubt glow with beacon-like naivety as we stumble through the uneven streets, our radio handsets buzzing.
All the other expats were in the office by the time I woke up from my booze-induced dreams (in Afghanistan, Thursday night is, of course, the new Friday night) so after a quiet little read of Rumi, and a bit of sitting in an armchair, indulging emotions of bitter yearning for Flora, I slipped through my organisation’s cordon and wandered round the streets of Kabul. After a few days of confinement you really appreciate the human organism’s need for movement after every now and again. I forewent the opportunity to play squash earlier this week due to seeing-off the Square-Jawed Yank, and was shocked to find that my brisk walk (if you can call such a stumbling, squelching trudge through the snow, mud and (to be explicit) shit, a ‘walk’) was inducing breathlessness and perspiration. God knows how I will perform when I finally do manage to set up the squash match. Anyway it felt good to be out. I was taking close note of the appearance of the Afghans as I walked, to see if I had any hope of emulating them and escaping notice. I don’t consider myself a blushing flower normally, desperate to avoid all attention, but beyond my perennial delight at being taken for anything other than British (or German or American, now that I think about it) in Afghanistan working for an NGO, there is so much hoo-haa about security for foreigners that one naturally ends up wanting to disguise oneself. The number of beards sported by the expat community here is massively higher than at home, as we men take the opportunity
a) to indulge growths that would be laughed out of town back home
and
b) to indulge our natural laziness, and just not bother to shave
While I early on toyed with and discarded the idea of a beard for myself, I have been considering getting myself a Shalwar Kamiz and some shiny black shoes, and going native. A few hours on a sunbed wouldn’t go amiss, though at a pinch I could pass for a Badakhshani or a Nuristani or some other pale mountain-dweller. My friend Nick, who travelled through Afghan a few months back, gathering material for his travel book, went to Lashkar Gah dressed as an Afghan is as pale or paler than me, and despite his best efforts to dress, walk and piss in true Afghan fashion got spotted, so he relates it, for walking like a foreigner. It makes sense. I quite see that the usual Oxford-London head-down, eyes-on-your-shoes gait giving off the wrong vibe.
With all this in mind, I carefully inspected the walking patterns of my fellow pedestrians. I have to say, I did not come up with much. They do not put their hands in their trouser pockets, for a start, so I dug my hands into my coat pocket instead, which also served to conceal the tell-tale aerial of my handset. Still though, people would stare at me, or give the little mumbled ‘Howarryoo?’ This remark, it seems is never designed as a question, or anything for which a response is expected. For a start, it is normally let loose when you have passed a good few steps beyond. And the tone is never questioning. Normally it is just rapped out in a monotone, or sometimes there is a little touch of derisive humour. Its basic meaning seems to be “Ha-ha! I have spotted you. You’re a foreigner!”
I did a little better when I took my hat off. My sister gave me a black trilby-like hat for Christmas – the kind which has been reinvented from an older style of male headwear, and has been seen gracing the heads of pop stars, and the members of guitar bands, though I like to turn it up at the back to give it a more old-school look. It has in a short space of time become a battered and dusty-looking hat, and though I could imagine an older Afghan man, of the generation educated in the years of Russian ascendancy, giving head-space to such an article, Afghans of my age tend to be wearing beanies or else kafiya-style scarfs wrapped round the head and face, or else letting their curly hair, or greasy curtains bounce free. So I crumpled up my battered trilby and stuffed it into my pocket. Rather better, until I put on my glasses. Very few people seem to wear glasses, and certainly not like the over-sized squre monstrosities that I am left with at the moment. So whenever I specced-up to catch my whereabouts, or to squint at the grey surroundings of snow-covered wintry Kabul, I would be greeted by more howarryoos, and outstretched hands from the wandering packs of beggars.
Funny though, when I got tired of aimless wandering, and sat down for a kebab in a disreputable looking and very grubby café, and would have been happy of a bit of a chat, I was studiously ignored by the clientele, who continued their discussion about Baluch insurgency in Pakistan, and glancing at the TV screen which was showing a very fuzzy 70s Bollywood film. In most other countries I have visited, someone would eventually strike up a conversation out of curiosity – at least to find out what country I am from, but they let me munch my liver and lamb in peace.
Tomorrow I am going to continue my weekend’s fun with a trip to Kucha-ya Kharabat, fingers crossed. I want to get a Dambura I think – 2-stringed thing that you beat like a drum with your thumb as you strum.
Valentine's day next week, and I am not sure what to do about it, other than invest
in a nice long mobile phone call. I looked in to Interflora to Kyrgyzstan, but I am
not sure that it would be trustworthy outside of Bishkek, and they don't
look as nice as the English ones. It;s a bit depressing. Still, I have been stocking up with Italian classics and Romantic flics from Kabul’s excellent selection of pirated DVDs to make sure that my next R&R has the right flavour.
OK, I had better go. Our fun-loving Ismaili Head of Reporting has just very sweetly called to find out if I am coming to dinner. The one good thing about being shut up with your colleagues all day and night is that you do develop a sense of community very quickly.
10.55, Wednesday February 9, 2005
I have a certain sense of fear that now I have announced myself to be ‘blogging Afghanistan’, it will seem to be humbug to the general reader, who finds that I have less to say about Afghanistan and more to say about picking the lint from my navel during the long cold evenings. Still, if this is the case, I suppose that I can keep the very existence of this site to myself. And besides, the lint-picking side of things is definitely one of the characteristic features of expatriate life in the security-intensive environment of the International NGO in Afghanistan. It has an interest in its own way. Life in the golden cage has a way of sending people stir crazy in a matter of weeks.
Things have been particularly quite since the Square-Jawed American left for Indonesia yesterday, to add our efforts to the scrum of NGOs fighting over the tidbits of international relief money. Yesterday evening there was a kind of ghostly quiet in the guesthouse where we live, despite the fact that La Petite Anglaise brought along a mild-mannered French Embassy fellow back after dinner to liven the company up. The Wild-eyed Tajik entertained the company with a series of obscene and hilarious Russian anecdoti (I am considering adding a special link entirely dedicated to these in fact, so that the more well brought-up readers (and Mum and Dad) are not offended. But possibly this should wait until I have got into the rhythm of my blog.) La Petite Anglaise is doing her best to widen the field of experience open to her in this constricted life of ours, and as a result she has been doing the Kabul restaurant circuit justice for the last few days, perched on the back of the Frenchman’s motorcycle – no doubt a delicious sensation after several months of our organisation’s security rules which limit the extent to which we can even tread the streets. Having said that, of course there is a tendency to bend the rules, as one generally considers that mental and physical health comes before the slight risk of bombing or kidnapping. But I am still playing it safe for the moment, until I get a real sense of what it is like out there. So far Kabul has seen no major security threats since the kidnapping of the 3 UN people last October, but clearly you don’t want to be stupid. Still, I have been trying to get to Kucha-i Kharabat for the last few weekends to no avail, and I am beginning to get frustrated. Kucha-i Kharabat is set in the conflict-battered old town, the quarter where traditionally, the musical instrument makers had there workshops.
It is a very redolent name. ‘Kharabat’ means ‘the ruins’, and used to refer to the run-down outskirts of medieval towns, where the city authorities were less rigorous, and where as a result, the pimps and the gypsies and the Christians and the wineshops and the dancing girls and the barflys and general merry-makers and dubious types would gather to do their thing. So it was an exciting revelation for me to hear that the musicians of Kabul still populated a quarter with this name. Of course there are not so many craftsmen left as there were, but still, some have returned to set up shop. I will let you know when I manage to get there finally. Not this week, I fear, as I have to get the car from Kabul to Mazar-i Sharif tomorrow, to try and find some land in Mazar on which to build a cultural centre. OK, I am going to load this up now, and see what happens. If I do manage to get the car to Mazar tomorrow, then I will probably have a good chunk of time to put to blogging on the road, or at least as long as the battery on my laptop lasts. Fingers crossed that the Salang pass is not blocked up with snow – it has been snowing pretty hard these last few days… apparently the first time in 12 years that it has snowed in Kabul, and therefore it looks like the end of the several years of drought. If it is fine weather, I will try and get some photos along the way.
14.11, Tuesday, 8 February 2005
So this is my first attempt at setting up a blog, inspired by the excellent words on Afghanistan from my colleague Brendan (see Brendan's blog ). I will not write anything much now, as I should be at work in fact, but you can be sure that this page will soon see many a maxim and pithy apophthegm.
# posted by Ed @ 6:48 pm 
