murambi

IN 1994, in the village of Murambi, in Rwanda, over 40,000 Tutsis were killed in four days. It was one of the greatest single massacres of the genocide. But that's not why I visited Murambi. I visited because of what happened afterwards, when the bodies were thrown in mass graves and covered with lime to mask the smell. Ironically, the lime preserved the bodies. It mummified them. And so when the survivors came back to identify their dead, they decided to leave some of the bodies unburied. On display, in the schoolrooms where they died.



15 years later, the memorial at Murambi makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Some say it's too horrific and divisive, and it's time to bury the bodies. Others say, no, expose more of them and never forget. Hear the story on the Nextbook podcast.

smuggle this

Alidad, the human smuggler/ part-time baker of Quetta, Pakistan, is the subject of another of my Marketplace "Working" profiles. Hear more about Quetta and an encounter with another smuggler who asked me to shoot his chicken on This American Life.

To my friends in Afghanistan, happy norouz and see you soon.

camel with flag (kogello, inauguration day)

Inauguration Vibration

Spent the inaugural day in the Obama clan village in Kogello, Kenya. Pre-inaugural festivities included cow-slaughtering and camel rides. I was out here for the new internet venture Global Post (www.globalpost.com), and while there, filed a short mid-afternoon report from a tremulous location:

T-4 Countdown to Obama, plus rain.

Wake up in my rented room in Nairobi, rain on the window. Outside I can see the uniformed guard at the front gate under a large bright red umbrella; surrounded by jungle foliage he looks like some kind of toy soldier. This is the neighborhood where Obama’s step-mom lives, or used to; it’s a wealthy neighborhood owned mostly by fifth and sixth generation Indian families. There’s a casino and a Thai restaurant across the street.

My roommate knocks on my door and tells me she’s stepping out, and did I want to come explore the neighborhood a bit, so I throw on a poncho and we walk through the puddles down a potholed road with no sidewalks, ducking for cover under corrugated tin awnings. Under one awning, a woman in a loose red top is scrubbing a painted plate, the kind sold to tourists, and stacking them on a huge pile of painted plates. Under another, a man in brown waits for a bus. But, there is no bus, no traffic at all, really, which my roommate says is really really weird, until we see why: jammed inside the rotary, blocking all cars, is a massive Russian-made mach truck with its back wheel stuck up against the curb and its front wheel in a pothole. Like a frustrated elephant it rears and roars, belching exhaust, while about a dozen Kenyans scamper timidly around trying to push without getting trampled. It is incredible the truck driver thought he could even fit in there; though I don’t know, maybe he does this trip every day. As we watch, the truck is suddenly freed, and momentarily heads straight for us, before veering away again. Mud flies everywhere.

We pass yet another casino, and two malls, plus a 24 mega-mart, where I stop in to buy some supplies and immediately feel underdressed compared to the other shoppers. Even the font is aspirational. Posters of couples with expensive looking watches glare down at me, smirking about financial security. I buy juice, some cheese and a loaf of bread and hit the checkout counter where I grab a Kenyan men’s magazine with Obama on the cover. The cover is a parody of men’s cool: Barack in Ray Bans, a crisp white shirt and grey tie, thrusting his index finger directly into the camera, so close to the lens that the fingertip is out of focus and in motion. Below him, in shadowed white lettering: “Obama: Our man in the White House.”

I buy the magazine expecting a gushing fan letter to American politics, but when I turn the pages I find an homage to American consumption; this mag, it turns out, is a Kenyan version of the most standard men’s mag fare: with sports-round ups, vicarious financial advice, motorcycle porn, aspirational gadget reviews (“we take a look at the best boy’s toys of the year”), style tips (“want to wear a jacket, but afraid of looking too formal? Team it with a simple t-shirt”), and lots of pretty girl photos (a four-page spread where a 22-year old “college graduate” is body painted, a feature profile of Hugh Hefner and another of supermodel Kimora Lee Simmons), plus plenty of ads for brandy, banks and shaving cream. It is a magazine targeted at the middle class Kenyan man.

And, if these glossy pages are any judge, middle class Kenyan men are a lot more concerned about relationships than politics. There’s exactly one article, a short blurb, really, about Barack Obama’s ascendancy. (The cover was a bit of a ruse.) Whereas there are 14 feature articles on handling the opposite sex, including advice on how affectionate to be with your woman in public (“three women explain the ‘secret’ rules”), how to know if a woman likes sex (“if your woman enjoys her food, chances are she’ll be good in bed”), what books to read if you want to seduce an intelligent girl (“the way to a woman’s bed is via her head!”), as well as advice on why it’s normal to feel somewhat emasculated by Kenyan woman’s feminism and how you can respect her emancipation while still ‘reconnecting with your inner caveman.’

Oh, there is one other mention of the president elect. In the style trends section, we’re told that “what’s hot” in 2009 includes sushi, smart phones and funky shades, whereas what’s “so last year” includes analogue TV, wallets, and “Ethnic or tribal acrimony: You’re a global citizen. Behave like one. Think Obama.”

T-5 Countdown to Inaugural: Nairobi

It has been four months since I was in Kenya the last time, and the season’s changed. I walk out of the airport in Nairobi and think I’m in Florida. That balmy breeze fringed with rain. Suddenly I feel nostalgic; I am part of me six years old and arriving in Fort Lauderdale the airport doors opening to the sunshine and my grandma, smiling, squatting down to press her wrinkled skin into my neck. The memory lingers, inappropriately, and I feel suddenly mournful, floaty and wistful and slightly lost. Maybe I’m just jet-lagged. I readjust my shoulder strap and scan the crowd of taxi drivers holding paper signs. I find my name near the back, on a piece of paper with just my first name in all caps. It stands out from the others. In a sea of signs for “Mr Khalihi” and “Mr Chan” and “Mr O'Donnell”, I am simply, GREGORY. I feel like a five year old. Or a rock star. Like Bono.

“You must be Gerald,” I say to the man holding my nametag, and he gives me the African handshake. Gerald is in his mid-30s with a blue-grey collared shirt. His face is scarred with pockmarks, clustered like little islands off the mainland of his mouth. Gerald kindly grabs one of my bags and then actually groans to himself at the weight. This is surprising because it’s my lightest bag, not really heavy at all, nevertheless I watch him valiantly struggle, switching the bag from right arm to left arm and back to right again, then left, almost knocking out one of his kneecaps in the process. Two minutes later we reach his parked Toyota and he heaves the bag into the trunk and we’re off.

The weather is perfect for driving. The sunshine is warm but not so hot that the car gets stuffy or the doors scald your arm. We cruise out on to the main road past wide savannahs dotted with concrete buildings, construction zones, billboards. A billboard for a brand of bleach features a 40-foot white baby with a baby mohawk and an ornery baby mouth and the phrase, “Topex: The Toughest Answer to Stubborn Stains.” We cruise on. The road seems improved since I was here in August. Gerald tells me he was born north of here, near Mount Kenya, a popular safari spot. He is used to tourists. He points out some giraffes grazing off on the grasses in the far distance. “That is Nairobi National Park,” he says. Around where the giraffes are, there is nothing else; no trees or buildings or other animals. Just 4 or 5 giraffes, silhouetted against the blue sky, their long necks raising and lowering like oil pumps.

The giraffes remind me of a conversation I was having a few days ago in New York with my friend Jonathan. He asked me what sound giraffes made and I said I didn't know. I ask Gerard. "I mean do they make any sound at all?" I say. "Do they speak?”

“Oh, no no no.” Gerald says, with a kind and patient smile. “They are just giraffes. They do not speak. They only talk to each other.”

I thought about his answer for a while afterwards. I think he actually thought I was asking if giraffes here could speak some universal animal esperanto. But after all, he’s probably used to stupid questions from white men, who arrive off the plane with their sun hats and their heavy luggage and their dumb assumptions. At least I didn’t insist on whistling The Lion King.

But of course, now everything is different, I think. I may still be an ignorant Westerner with white skin, but now we share something, Gerald and I. We have "Someone In Common." That Someone being, of course, the most famous man on the earth. The reason I am here, in Kenya, this week.

"I am headed to Kisumu for the inauguration," I tell Gerald, enunciating my words. Kisumu is the region of Kenya where Barack Obama’s father is from. Gerald smiles again.

“That is a not bad place to go right now,” he says. “They say if you can’t go to America, go to Kisumu.”

There is something rather unsatisfactory about Gerald’s answer and I ask if he’s an Obama supporter. He slips away from the question by arguing tautologically that because Obama “won the game” – the presidential race – he is the best. “Just like sports,” Gerald says. “The team that wins is best. It means he want it more. It means he is meant to be.”

I suppose in a way this is true, and in the end it’s all I can get out of him. We spend the rest of the car ride nodding to reggae on the car radio. Maybe tomorrow I should interview the giraffe.

photos from Rwanda

One legged cyclist in downtown Kigali. Took this with my cell phone from the back of a motorcycle taxi.



"FaLuJa 2008" Outskirts of Kigali.



Boys in Gsenyi. I asked them where they were going with the long logs they said, "To the marshes."



Kids screaming at me on side of the road. Ruhengeri.

we chased them from their homes and then they were died

Next day, in a Rwandan prison, interviewing former perpetrators. None of them admit to anything. The most they’ll say is that they chased people from their homes. Beyond that, the passive voice is utilized.

be the best

Spent the day at the genocide memorial in Kigali, listening to one of the guides tell his personal story. Serge was 14 when the genocide began. The genocide marched into his living room the evening of April 8th, 1994. There were eight armed men. They attacked his father and ordered him to kneel. His father knelt, immediately, as though he had known all along what was to happen. One of the men pulled a knife and Serge shuts his eyes. But then – a miracle! – the leader of the rebel group offers to take money in exchange for his life. Suddenly, the whole family is racing around the house, pulling bills out from drawers and pots and secret cabinets. The cash piles up in the bandit’s palm until he says, okay. He orders his men to withdraw, but not before warning the family that they’d be back in three days to kill them. “You know, I almost see them as kind,” Serge says. “For giving us a head start.”

Serge and family flee, first to relatives, then to another village, then finally back to their local school. The school is already packed with thousands of families, there is no room for them. So they continue on, are seized at a roadblock, and Serge’s father, and his older brother, are bayoneted and left on the road. Later, Serge is told that his father’s death probably took three days. Serge escapes by donning women’s clothes and fleeing with his mother and sisters through the marshes to the local church.

And it is a testament to Serge’s incredible powers as a storyteller that, remembering this moment, a wry smile plays on his face. “We thought if we could just get to the church, at last we’d be safe,” he says. The error of that assumption became clear when he saw the pastor, greeting them at the doorway of the church, a loaded pistol strapped to his hip, and a flak jacket in place of vestments. “Hello, cockroaches,” he told the women.

For the next month, they endured starvation and disease, and ambushes by soldiers. The soldiers would choose women and girls and drag them off to the bushes. The women would not return. For a while the Red Cross was providing some food but then more refugees came and the Red Cross could not get the food past the roadblocks. So then they had no food. “At this point we knew we were going to die,” Serge said. “So then there was no more fear.”

Some of the killers were superstitious. They didn’t want to murder anyone on church grounds. They would send in child soldiers to choose their victims. Serge remembers a boy came up to him, a boy probably eight years old, dressed in full battle gear. Serge was lying immobile on the church floor, next to a classmate from school. The child soldier smacked Serge in the face with a slipper.

A slipper?

“Uh, yes a slipper?” Serge says, “Like is on the foot?” He points to his own polished black shoes, then continues his story. “So I look at this boy, and he looks at me,” he says. They just… stare at each other. And then the boy points to his friend. “You,” says the boy. “Come.” The teenager rises. As he stands, he squeezes Serge’s leg goodbye.

If Serge is telling you this story, he will at this point lean over and squeeze your knee. His light fingers will make a spider around your kneecap. It will even tickle a little. “Like this,” he’ll say. “This is how he said goodbye.”

Serge tells his story – and there is much more – in an unbroken narrative. He never once takes a drink of water. He has told this story a thousand times, maybe more. He accepts questions gracefully and with humor. He is charming, sweet, optimistic, and forgiving. He is studying to be an accountant.

14 years later, I stumble out of the memorial, dazed, sunburned, dizzy. Billboards rise monumentally over a city that seems to be all of it under construction. “Picture Success,” shouts a bank ad showing a smiling bespectacled young woman with chin upraised. “We’ll Help You Achieve It.” An ad for a local beer bills itself as “The Taste of Success.”

Out that night, drinking the same beer with a young man, Jean Marie, who is also studying to be an accountant. “I have over one hundred American friends,” he brags. The television plays Bob Marley tributes and the bar is called Copa Cabana. “That’s my friend,” Jean Marie points to a guy next to me at the bar. “Be The Best.”

Excuse me? His name is…?

“BeTheBest”, says BeTheBest. “Nice to meet you.”

“We also call him Cheezo,” Jean Marie adds.

Bethebest wears a black and white checkered shirt streaked with yellow with an enormous collar and a shtetl hat like my grandfather’s; he looks like a cross between a Chicago bootlegger and a pro bowler.

“Why are you called Be The Best?” I say.

“Because I want everyone to be the best at what they are,” says Bethebest. “The best it can be. Just like you are smiling? Now? And we are talking? This is best. Just like this.”

jogging with machetes

Morning in Gitwe. I go for a jog and the people come out from their houses to watch me. I wave to everyone and they wave back, machete in hand. “Bonjour monsieur!” Machetes are so common, I shouldn't be concerned – no one is very hostile, just surprised and shocked to see this white guy in shorts (well, boxers, actually, I forgot to pack running shorts) huffing past them on their way to work... but it is unsettling to realize how this everyday work tool was turned into an murderously efficient instrument of genocide. “Ça va bien!”

the jungle is louder

The jungle is louder than I ever imagined. First day in Rwanda, out in Gitwe, 2 ½ hours southwest of the capital. Spent the day with a village boy who made good and moved to America, he returns every few months to help out and start projects. When he does, the prodigal son is welcomed with song.

Tonight the welcome song will be sung by 19 children and a cow. The youngest child is five and the oldest about 16. The cow is in its pen. There is a bonfire in front of the children. The moon is quite full. On either side of the fire is a raised log where the older folks sit. We are told that the children have been waiting. We apologize that our interview went so long and we are here after dark. Okay don’t worry just sit. Now the children aren’t ready. They confer amongst themselves. They don’t want to sing! They are too shy. The older folks shout. So the song begins. Slowly, haltingly, with sloping harmonies that slope at different speeds. It is a kind of cacophony that resolves itself unexpectedly into a rousing chorus. The oldest child sings a solo, then there is another chorus, then the youngest child sings, shyly, with lots of encouragement – I think I’m at Passover – then another chorus, and so on. The cow joins in in the pauses and everybody laughs. Later, the prodigal son translates the song. “The first verse,” he says, “tells the story of a woman who poisoned her husband because she was bored. And then she found that after he was dead, she was not only bored but lonely too! The second verse tells the story of a man who went to the bar to find love. But when he found her, he couldn’t afford to marry her, because he had spent all his money on drink!” and so on.

Afterwards the kids sing more and I walk among them with my long foam-covered microphone. Unfortunately they all hog the microphone like would-be rappers, distorting the sound, so the only solution is to hold the mic over their heads where they can’t get so close. Four little boys crane their necks upward, singing, like little birds. It is one of my favorite recordings I think I’ve made all year. Then the older girls start dancing and then everyone is dancing, I am dancing a little bit or at least moving side to side and they are clapping and the cow is mooing and the moon is looming and it seems not quite possible that some three days before I was in the back of a cab in new york.

technology defeats me

My first morning in Kigali. I spend the morning arguing with airport personnel about some lost luggage, meanwhile my cell phone is running out so whichever airport exec I’m arguing with, I try to position the argument next to an outlet where I can plug in. It is a bit like having a baby without cutting the umbilical cord, but then again, not. I teach another airline guy how to use his dot matrix printer, the old technique of pulling up on the page and circumventing the feeder. None of this matters, since no one calls and what comes out of the printer bares no relation to reality. I give up and drive westward.

the singapore of africa

Rwanda is much cleaner and safer than I expected. "The cleanest city in Africa," I’m told. “The Singapore of Africa” another says. My first night here, I go for a walk down the streets until quite late, jetlagged, staring at the moon and the rolling hills and the lights of the city beyond the banana trees. I take a motorcycle taxi back to the hotel.

rWaiting for Rwanda

stranded in an airport lounge in Nairobi, waiting for a plane to Kigali, Rwanda. Souvenir giraffes as far as the eye can see. A woman’s voice comes over the loudspeaker to signal missing passengers. She’s very polite though. She never uses last names. “Mary S., and Janubu B., please report to Gate 4. Mary S., and Janubu B.” Her voice is tinted with a British accent. There is almost no one here awake. Everybody is splayed in plastic chairs, some sleep right on the floor, newspapers covering their faces. “Joseph K., please report to the transit desk, Joseph K.” On CNN they are interviewing the hostages. I fall asleep and when I wake up the channel is changed to a cricket game. England vs South Africa. I fall asleep again and wake up again. Now a man is sitting at my table, also watching the game. He wears a lycra sweatsuit in the colors of the Kenyan flag. "Is it a good game?" I say. He mumbles. The score is something dream-like, 524 to 208, but the announcers gamely insist that South Africa still has a shot. When I wake up again, the ‘first boundary’ has been penetrated, ‘putting an end to the aching tension of the 5th over.’ Or something like that… apologies to my Pakistani readers. I stumble up with a crick in my neck and wander over to the duty-free. I’ve gone through all the books I brought for carryon so I lurk by the books section. It is all dime novels and self-help books about achieving personal wealth. “Come closer!” says the salesman with the nametag Mike. He asks me what I’m looking for and I don’t know what to say so I say, “Something classic.” (Which may be from now on my go-to answer. Seems that it services pretty much most questions I don’t know how to answer.) Anyway, Mike scans the shelves and hands me “You Can Do It” by Richard Branson. Actually I don’t know if it’s called You Can Do It – this whole blog entry is seeming highly unreliable… but I do know that it’s by Richard Branson and since I took a Virgin Atlantic to get here on the air journey which has gone on forever and forever I just shake my head, quietly, disturbed. Mike shrugs. His favorite book is The Secret, the ultra-best-selling self-help book that I first encountered on a flooded-out street in New Orleans, and since then have had recommended to me a dozen or so times. But Mike gives me a different formula. “God comes first,” he says. “Then read The Secret. Without God, the Secret is nothing. With God, and The Secret, all your prayers will be realized. Eventually.”

RadioLab: The Podcast

So, um, hello again. It's been oh a month and a half since my last post from Pakistan. So here's a quick recap. Since that post, I returned to Afghanistan to file this story for The World about an Afghan journalist who has been in jail for the last 6 months for insulting Islam. (The reason I'm posting the story is that, well, he's still there. Nothing's changed.)

Then I went to Iran with a bunch of American magicians and Canadian poets to meet poets from Iran. It all culminated in one balmy evening in Kashan where we performed our magic and read our poetry and the Iranians read their poetry, and no one quite understood each other, so it was sort of like farce, but oddly beautiful too, given the political realities, like some last-ditch diplomatic effort choreographed by Lewis Carroll. I'll write about that more real soon, but meanwhile, while I was in Iran I met up with a French cartoonist friend of mine who drew these pictures of one of the events:







Well so the artist's name is Nicolas Wild and I strongly recommend his two-part graphic novel, Kabul Disco, as well as his blog, which is great if you read French and even if you don't. Kabul Disco is being translated into other languages as we speak and is ripe for an American publisher.

So, after Iran I flew home to New York, just in time for the podcast debut of the"Radiolab: Pop Music" episode, featuring lots of amazing stories as usual, as well as a story about what happened when I took my accordion to Afghanistan and encountered the ghost of the late great Ahmad Zahir, a/k/a the Elvis of Afghanistan.



For the record, since some of you have asked, the youtube video of my Johnny Cash-inspired accordion performance in Afghanistan is still up. It seems that some servers say the video is "no longer available," but then again about a thousand more people have watched it since then so that's not universal. I'm not sure what's going on, maybe some smarter minds can weigh in on this. Meanwhile, try it from a different computer is my lame advice. Or cross your fingers and click below:




Oh, one more thing. Since I opened this post with a piece of mine that seems to have had no impact at all, here's one that seems to have had a modest one: a few months back I wrote an article for the Washington Monthly, "The Schools That the Taliban Don't Torch," about a neglected program for aid delivery called the National Solidarity Program. Last week Senator Dick Durbin gave a speech on the floor about aid in Afghanistan, and he quoted the article, and at least I'm told by Durbin's office that we'll now see an increase in funding to that program. I think that's a good thing.

target practice

One last Quetta story. My last day in the city, I was in the business district waiting for someone when I saw a kid come out of a shop and stand eight or ten feet away from me. He had a sparkly red cap and dirty clothes. His shaved head indicated he was probably Wahabi, a particularly militant sect from Saudi Arabia. I guess he was about 15. But his expression was what stopped me. I would write that he looked at me with hatred but it was more dead than hateful.

He pulled out a toy gun, took aim, and shot at a railing. A little yellow pellet emerged and made a pinging sound. I watched him, this young radical, with the (fairly realistic looking) toy pistol, and thought “I should really get my camera” which is when he turned to me and pointed the gun at my chest.

“Hey,” I said in Persian, which was probably a mistake because he maybe only spoke Pashto. Then he pulled the trigger, and shot me.

"Excuse me,” I said. Then I tried to think of what to say next. “I’m here as a guest in your country.” He shot me again. I tried out various arguments asserting my right not to be fired upon, but none convinced him, and since I wasn’t going to actually shoot him back, or go find his mother, I gave up. I walked away, not quickly so he’d think I was scared, but hey, who was I kidding. He'd won and he knew it. As I passed, he nodded and smiled, making his eyes seem even more reptilian.

The story unsettled me - well, the kid did too, but also my story about it - because I felt I was missing something. Some hours later, I considered another way of looking at it: At least he didn’t shoot me in the face. Because as I walked casually (not too fast now, expression firm) past him, it would have been quite easy for him to point his pistol at my eye or something where it would actually have caused damage. As it was, the pellets just bounced off my chest – I didn’t even feel them.

Only target practice.

afghan star

It’s 10pm and we’re walking through the abandoned streets of Quetta like the last five men on earth. Shop windows are shuttered; political posters flap in the breeze. The distant sound of a motorcycle fades into infinity. Everyone’s inside. Watching TV. It’s Friday night. And the final episode of “Afghan Star” is on.

It is said that during this hour all crime stops in Kabul. Bored young policemen stand idle at their checkpoints, no cars to check. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do notice that the normally crowded streets of Quetta are sure quiet. Our footsteps echo. I’m with my translator, JD, and four of his best friends. All of them were former translators (“terps”) for the marine special forces.

Suddenly other footsteps, other young men appear. Our band of 5 becomes 10, 20, 40. All of us streaming in the same direction. JD gives me the frantic ‘cut’ sign with his hand, meaning: no more speaking English out loud. Mutely, I follow the crowd into a large dust field. There, an 18-foot Scandinavian man in a doctor’s uniform is projected against the brick wall of the tallest building. He is talking about sunblock. His visage is replaced by bottles of lotion. Then that commercial ends and another one begins, this one for a local airline. The square is still filling up with people staring up at the screen. They crowd around cars, motorcycles, pushcarts. By day this field is the town vegetable market. Tonight the empty pushcarts sit like dumb stubborn animals under the gleam of a full moon. Behind the screen, far in the distance, the mountains of Quetta slice the horizon in a squiggly line of dark and less dark.

Now the commercials are over and the screen shows a guy who looks like my 7th grade math teacher singing under colored lights on a stage. He turns out to be not one of the competitors but one of the judges. For those who aren’t familiar with Afghan Star, it’s a singing competition fashioned after American Idol. Viewers use text messaging to vote for their favorite singer. Each episode someone gets eliminated, and tonight there are only two left. Unlike American Idol, though, Afghan Star has a tribal flavor. Every warlord has their candidate, who they shower with money and support. Votes tend to fall along ethnic lines. Tonight’s singers are named RafÈ and Hamid, but everyone thinks of them as the Tajik and the Hazara.

I have been living in a Hazara neighborhood in Quetta, so for the past few days, well-dressed boys with clipboards have been accosting my friends on street corners, drumming up votes for Hamid, the Hazara singer. The guys with clipboards are Hazara nationalists, members of the Hazara Democratic Party. “A minute of your time, brother,” they cry. One is wearing Malcom X-style glasses.

Why is it so important that the Hazara singer win? “Still the war is not finished in Afghanistan,” explains Triple H. Triple H is one of the former marine terps, a handsome musician-type with curly hair. He once taught singing lessons to the Hazara boy that now stands poised to win. Next year, Triple H plans to enter the competition himself. To do so, he’ll have to get the support of the various Hazara political parties and former warlords. Then he has to hope the show’s judges choose him. If he’s chosen of them, his warlord sponsor will then buy thousands of phone cards and hire companies to make text message calls in his favor. Doesn’t this seem a little undemocratic? Triple H thinks more practically. “They used to fight with guns,” he says. “Now they fight… with us! And we are getting the benefit!”

More singing. More colored lights. I am freezing and waiting for the end. Still we must sit through the standard speeded-up montage of Hamid trying on various blue shirts and ties. Hamid getting a haircut. Hamid walking through the hallways of the TV studio. Then more commercials. Actually, the same commercials recycled. “What is SPF?” asks one of the terps, and I’m embarrassed to see how quickly I answer “Sun Protection Formula.” Why can’t I have that kind of instant recall with, you know, books and stuff?

Finally, at long last, the envelope. We all know what’s written there, though. The Hazara guy is going to win. We have it on good intelligence (the show is taped the night before in front of a live audience). This public viewing, this projection screen in the vegetable market in the Hazara part of town, has all been set up last minute so that the community can watch en masse and then celebrate. I wonder how they will react. After a century of persecution, victory! After the massacres, the land grabs, the forced servitude, triumph! Afghan Star style! I have no idea what they’ll do. Will they riot? Will they lift torches and march? Stand atop pushcarts and howl? I am so focused on these eventualities that I don’t even notice when the Tajik guy wins it. The crowd, quiet, immediately disperses. The headlamps of motorcycles illuminate their sad, drawn faces.

“Wha---” I say. “I thought you heard for sure that…” Even hearing myself speak I realize how silly I sound. This is Afghanistan, after all.

On the cold walk home, only recriminations.

And this paradox: In a land of constant rumor, it’s easier to keep the truth secret.

blogging in quetta

Me, and JD.

hawoooooooo karachi

Happy afghan new years. Am writing from a net café in Pakistan where the air is loud with the sounds of Doom, the video game. The volume is on max so I hear every cocked gun, every rushed footstep, and, whenever the character gets shot, a computer voice saying: “The terrorist has won.” This seems strangely funny to me at the moment and I chuckle quietly to myself while waiting for an achingly slow internet connection in my little private booth. Private booths: the big thing now in net cafes here. Is it like that everywhere? Is it so we can view porn with greater privacy? My booth has a frosted plastic window and a seat covered in fake fur. Mrao.

So, a bit of a recap; I arrived in Karachi 10 days ago on assignment for Marketplace. Much like in Kabul, one divides one’s time in opposite worlds; the days I spent in the industrial quarter with the poorest of laborers, the stench of chemicals and butcheries and poverty and decay; my nights out at some restaurant or party, including a soiree at the island yacht club hobnobbing with consulates and former ministers of health and a air-force-pilot-crooner named Johnny who recounted New York stories from his second book. (One of them was rather funny involving three Irishmen, a raincoat, an off-duty mugger, and a pub on St Paddy’s Day.)



But it was nice to leave Karachi for a smaller town on the outskirts, where I’m now living in a house we rented for $50 a month. We have electricity half the time and a gas lamp for the rest of it. The kitchen is a room with a bench. The house has no furniture. The living room has two mattresses, one in each corner, with pillows and blankets and a rug beneath. That’s it, oh and a bound copy of the Koran on a shelf just above our heads. We remove our shoes when we walk in. When we leave, small children peek out of their doors, which are corrugated aluminum cut from the side of shipping containers.

The town is small and people feel safe to walk after dark. The streets are narrow and winding; the houses nuzzle up close to the road like curious but blind animals. It feels like a shtetl – with many little grocery stores, and a few beauty salons, many tailors with their window display of vests (called here ‘waistcoat’, perhaps some piece of European fashion imported centuries earlier). There are sheep in the road splashed with pink paint and a young boy selling bags of yoghurt mixed with green spices. At dusk the vegetable stands are lit by gaslight, while the man with a pushcart and a pot of chicken soup is just wiping down, but willing to serve us two last cupfuls; for 25 cents you get the cup, the soup, and as much pepper as you can take. (“With egg or without?” he’ll ask, and with your consent, he’ll sprinkle chunks of hard boiled egg on top of the soup.) During the day the soup cart functions socially as a barbershop; a clearinghouse for rumor and information. You see two or three men at a time standing at the cart sipping soup.

Today the rumor is me.




NOTE: Tune in Friday in NYC for Radiolab, featuring my accordion and the triumphant return of the Afghan Elvis... Ahmed Zahir. Also in the story is Najib, who you've read about in these pages. Here's a little video teaser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5nvg0_FfjU

Bush bazaar

There's a little market in a seedier section of Kabul where you can buy almost anything that fell off a US supply truck. The so-called "Bush bazaar" is basically a few muddy alleys lined on either side with large metal shipping containers that serve as kiosks. You walk down the narrow lane stepping over little kids and squeezing past wheelbarrows loaded with washed-up items: tins and tins of microwave lasagna in a rice-eating country with no microwaves, also lots of Dr Pepper, A-1 steak sauce, instant mashed potatoes, ketchup-flavored potato chips, bodybuilder protein powder in gallon-sized plastic jugs, dime novels, zit cream, lime-flavored tortillas, and applesauce in single-serve containers.

i bought a can of Snapple for my translator. He studied the list of ingredients for a long time before opening it and sipping tentatively. "How do you like your Snapple?" I finally asked, and immediately felt like a moron. Like some high fructose ambassador.

"Quite delicious," he said diplomatically. For my part, I'd drunk my can too quickly, hoping for a rush of nostalgia, a sense-memory back to the basketball courts near high school, or the back seat of certain cars, or old Sal's Pizza, or the tuna-on-pumpernickel sandwich at the deli around the corner from my first office job. But, nothing. It was, well, just iced tea. I was thirsty.

God bless it.

let us introduce... (Marketplace story link)

This story aired a few hours ago on Marketplace.

bonus just for 'waiting for afghanistan' readers: the first character in this radio story is the same Mahbub on whom the blog entry 'the uses of laughter' is based.

the uses of laughter

last night
i interviewed a boy, tall, and so thin his friends
say that shaking his hand is like grabbing nails.
he laughs and and they laugh.
his thinning hair covered with a knockoff yankees cap.
The Y is too small.

We were sitting on a bed
drinking tea and the boy was telling his story of losing his life savings to a guy he still calls his friend. Meanwhile, the TV behind him played "Wedding Outtakes
Volume II"
And he says that the worst part of being robbed of one year and a half's
worth of salary
was not the money
or his future
or having to see
the faces of his children
but
knowing that he, duped, had duped his friends and cousins too.
And he is telling the story and he is laughing
in the moments of the story where you might expect
outrage
and/or sadness and/or shame
He is laughing. He doesn't know the word Yankees.
There are looseleaf poems in his pocket
addressed to the abstract hypocrite
and behind his ear, hypoglycemic bridesmaids
are collapsing into the furniture
into the grooms
into the priests
and i ask him why he is laughing he says:

"in every job
one person become rich
one person become not rich.
it is not also your idea?
in the school
it belong to the person to first position
it belong to another person to last position.
Every person want to approve. But every person
cannot approve. This is how the school, the job, this is how the life.
and in the last part it belong to God."

oh my god,
i think.
he still doesn't
even
know
he was
scammed.

And then
his tale told,
my microphone put away,
he starts to sing.
And my friend, whose
bed this is, and tea this
is, tells a story about this boy:

how he had a tailor shop
during taliban time
and he would sing and tap his fingers on the loom
the taliban heard it
and burst into the shop
and started to search
saying 'where is the tape, the tape'
and the boy said:
my dear brothers,
there is no tape.
no tape in here.
the sound you hear is just me singing, and drumming on the loom.

and then he sang and he drummed for the men until they cursed
and left the shop and he sighed.
And breathed.
And thanked God
They hadn't searched his drawers
and found the porn.

birthday candies

it's my birthday today. i spent a chunk of it with the poorest family i've ever met. They live in the bombed out grounds of the king's old palace, in what was once the royal stables. The windows are plastic sheets covering holes in the brick. To keep warm they all lie in a circle and put their legs under a big group blanket with a few hot coals in the center.

So there i am, my 33rd birthday, playing toesies with five little girls and boys under a polka-dot red blanket and all of them begging me to take their photos, me no me no me first. Really I was only there as a favor for a friend who used to work in Afghanistan. She'd asked me to pass on some money on her behalf to this family she'd pretty much adopted here four years ago. I'd seen her photos and I'd heard some stories "Now Fareed is ill and can't get help" "Arzoo is just getting her big teeth in" but the stories didn't mean much to me until today, when all of a sudden it's real kids crowded around my real head and the real stink of the real blanket and we're talking through pictures, basically, making faces and striking poses. I should print some of the photos and bring them back for their walls. The mother was so hard-bitten, her daughters so giggly and fun, you felt that she'd tried to absorb most of the blows. All of them were illiterate; they don't go to school or do anything during the day except play games with each other. It was only the eldest daughter who seemed worn.

(She's the one below with the kefiyeh wrapped around her face.)

We stayed for tea, so as to make the exchange of money feel less nakedly colonial, but for a long time the tea didn't come. I mean we just sat there, coughing under the blanket, talking and taking pictures. I saw there was a lot of secret whispering between the mother and the eldest daughter. And I realized what was happening but was powerless to stop it; I knew they were scrounging up something special for us guests; I just prayed it wouldn't be too extravagant, like they'd gone and pawned their only shoes so we could eat chocolate biscuits. In the end they served tea on a tray with two tiny bowls of Pakistani candies. The children eyed the candies interestedly but when I tried to pass them out only the very littlest one took one. The rest were too polite, or too proud. The candies were just for the guests, apparently. So me and my translator dutifully downed two of the sweet stale white things and washed them down with questionable tea. Then the littlest and cutest girl coughed twice and sneezed right into my face. After it happened we just looked at each other, then she gave a big smile as if she'd just learned a new word.

phobocracy

I love this word coined by Michael Chabon in his Washington Post op-ed for Obama. If you didn't read it, here's the money graph:

The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy.

It reminded me of something that I heard on the news just yesterday. We were driving through downtown kabul in a taxi listening to the radio. The woman announcer told us that Mullah Omar had ordered his Taliban fighters no longer to slit the throats of Afghans accused of working with foreigners. He said that slitting people's throats, even if they were working with foreigners, was barbaric and against Islam.

"From now on," he said, "Just shoot them."

Why did Omar say this? Why now? No one could say, though one humanitarian worker mag covered it this way:

Video clips showing horrific scenes of human decapitations and other forms of severe physical torture had been circulated by the insurgents, apparently in an effort to threaten people who support and/or work with the Afghan government and its international supporters. Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) and other international rights watchdogs have repeatedly accused Taliban insurgents of deliberately attacking civilians and systematically violating international humanitarian law. "No more beheadings."

"Mullah Omar's order is effective immediately and there will be no more beheadings by the Taliban," said Zabiullah Mujahid, who claims to be a spokesman for Taliban fighters. About 100 people have been beheaded by Taliban insurgents on charges of espionage in the past 12 months, a leading Afghan news agency, Pajwhok, reported on 4 February.

The implication seems to be, Omar picked up his morning copy of Pajwhok news, saw how many local folks they'd beheaded, and finally saw the light. Right. Since Taliban has never ever as far as I know bowed to the complaints of human rights activists, I feel like this can only mean a few things. One, Omar really hopes to be president of this country again, and so wants to assume some pretense of civility. Or at least not seem like a totally sick and bloodthirsty savage. Two, Omar wants to compare his strong hand with Karzai's impotent one. Karzai makes speeches, Omar makes change. (I wonder what will happen if some Taliban don't follow the rules? Will the beheaders get beheaded? Or shot?)

But I have a third theory, and it gets back to this idea of fear. When the Taliban controlled this country, they were a phobocracy. They ruled by inspiring fear. (Even their fighting technique was designed primarily to intimidate: black Range Rovers barreling full-speed through the dust.) And, well, everyone knows that if you want to really scare someone, you hold back. You don't do the thing you most do show. Not... yet.

I've written to you already about how we're living through grim days in Kabul. Foreigners are spooked. Restaurants have closed. The nightlife, such as it was, is limited. They have us cowering. Everyone's waiting to see what the Taliban will do next.

And, for the moment at least, they do nothing. They sheathe their knife. Slowly bend down to clean some snow off their boots. Even old one-eyed Mullah Omar himself steps out of his cave to give a little papal wave to his people. My good children, he says, no longer will we cut your throats like dogs. Now, if you don't listen, we'll just kill you. Capiche?

And then he winks.

If this was a movie, the audience would be squealing.

prom night

Weekend morning. Bright sunshine. The pushcart peddlers hollering about potatoes in the quiet street. I eat my cereal in the cold then light a stove and open my laptop. At noon a friend stops by; she seems happy at first but once in the house she slowly crumbles down onto the rug. "Not too good," she says in response to the obvious question. She's a party girl by nature, now having to spend nights in her rented room watching reruns of Lost. Since the Serena hotel got attacked, all the restaurants are closed. Every bar but the bars on the embassy are off-limits. Her days are spent keeping development projects afloat as expats back out of their contracts. Everyone is spooked.

She tells me about her two friends that were in Kabul’s luxury hotel the night it was attacked. One felt bullets wizzing around her head and saw a man shot in front of her. Another hid in the women's locker room but when they came to rescue them he had to jump over the dead Filipino woman. "He told us the story cheerfully, laughing" she says gnawing the ruby stone on her middle finger. "He'd fucking lost it." Both of the friends had left Afghanistan, never to return.

We meet another friend at a restaurant, a reedy Canadian journalist with blue eyes and red beard. The last time I saw Red, he was planning to stay a year and write a book about the Canadian experience. Now he's put in notice. He got another job in Sierra Leone and leaves in two weeks. He'll be running to the airplane when it comes.

"I'm done with this country," says Red. "Done done done done done." We are eating the restaurant's specialty bolani, a sort of pastry stuffed with potato cut into bite sized squares. There are two dipping sauces for the pastry, a green one and a red one. Both are delicious. Red says he’s done trying to figure out the Afghan puzzle. He doesn't want to know anymore.

The rest of the meal arrives. Mung beans smeared with yoghurt and cardamon, comforting and succulent, also a kind of ravioli stuffed with leeks and parsely, some south asian-style meatballs, plain rice and fresh cucumber salad. Baklavah for desert. When we put on our coats it is almost four o'clock. We've been here three hours and the restaurant has had only two other customers.

The grocery store where we go next is the only crowded spot. I buy 10 boxes of juice, four jars of pasta sauce and four kinds of pasta. I buy so much food that the store owners laugh at me. I joke back and do not tell them that I have been hungry for four days.

That night I have dinner with three more friends, one of whom just broke her contract and another of whom is thinking about it. The third is sick since Christmas vacation. We are sitting in a living room on couches and cushions whispering on the edge of the circle while a British guy is holding forth to a Bulgarian woman on how when he went to Africa he failed to fix the bloody special setting in automatic cameras that you need to adjust to photograph black people. A christmas tree is in the other corner and a gas stove is making us lightheaded.

It might have been the fumes or perhaps nostalgic longings that drove me after dinner to a party at the US Embassy. The taxi drops me off at the barbed wire and concrete gate and I walk the rest of the way on foot. The concrete path is swept clean and well lit. I walk deeper into the compound. I see no one, just me and my breath under the spotlights. I wonder if there are snipers watching me somewhere in the darkness. Then out from the concrete wall steps a guard with a kalashnikov.

"Ho there!" he shouts. (He doesn't actually say 'ho there,' but the Dari phrase he uses sounds so ornate and old-fashioned. And the cold concrete platform feels like a stage.)

"Hey," i say.

When I finally arrive at the party I hear it before I see it. A guy is screaming into a microphone, something about a queen and a kiss. “It’s prom night!” someone says.

The embassy people, the USAID people, the people that pass out multi-million dollar development contracts several times a month, they're here, quite literally Playing That Funky Music (White Boy) in a cafeteria strewn with paper streamers and string lights and Betty Crocker cake. Someone hands me a slice, on a paper plate.

back again.

Hi again.

So, I’m back. Back in Dubai, waiting for a flight back to Kabul. Back after almost a month away from Afghanistan. My extended absence was a bit of an accident; I took a holiday in France with some friends, which led me to a brief trip to New York, which became a longer trip, and then there was a mix-up about the planes which took another week to resolve.

Obviously, much has happened in Kabul since I’ve been gone. Kabul’s premier hotel was attacked. (Thanks to those who wrote to ask after my safety, though your concerned emails and skypes had the unintended effect of making me feel like a complete poseur, a flak-jacketed frappacino-sipping sideline warrior.)

Also this month in Kabul, the coldest winter weather in 15 years. This is less newsworthy to the West though vastly more important to Afghans than the hotel attack. People are dying. I just got this email from a friend yesterday in Kabul:

from hamida aman
to hamida_aman@hotmail.com,
date Jan 28, 2008 8:07 PM
subject The chain reaction
mailed-by hotmail.com


Dear Friends,

As most of you will have surely noticed, Afghanistan is currently facing one of its harshest winters in living memory.
You might have also noticed that thousands of women, kids, and men are struggling every day to heat and feed their families.
The point here is certainly not to make you feel guilty but very simply try to do something at our very modest level.
Of course, most of you are working for international organizations involved at some point with large-scale humanitarian aid or development projects.
But in our personal and more modest scale, we are a group of friends who want to apply what some call Zakat, some other charity or just compassion by giving what we can.

A donation of 50$ will allowed a family to survive during one month and receive flower and coal to warm their house.

Please write below your name, phone number and the amount you would like to donate and send back the list to the sender. Please forward this e -mail to those you knows who would like to donate.

Many thanks for your generosity!

Meanwhile, here in Dubai, they're offering a free bmw or bentley with every purchase of a new Damanc property.

More soon.

-G.

the schools that the taliban don't torch

(From The Washington Monthly, December '07)

The road from Kabul to Azra, a mountainous district in Afghanistan's central Logar Province, is, in places, not a road at all. At some points it's a rocky riverbed, at others an open desert. For one terrifying stretch, it's a twisty gorge known as the Dubandi Pass, famous for carjackings by Taliban bandits. The steep terrain and treacherous roads have always made this part of the world remote, even by Afghan standards. Tribal ties are stronger than national loyalties, and the unguarded border with Pakistan makes the region an easy access point for insurgents. Azra is the kind of place that both Kabul and Washington worry about most.

As violence has risen, development in this area has floundered. The United States Agency for International Development is funding a much-needed new highway in Azra, but work crews have been repeatedly evacuated because of insurgent threats. This past summer, the murder of two aid workers in a nearby district led Azra's only local nongovernmental organization (NGO) to shut down its office for a month.

But there is one project here that's proceeding relatively unimpeded. One sunny morning in July, I visited a small hydropower facility under construction in the village of Dadi Khel. There I watched a few dozen villagers building a small channel, slapping together stones and mortar beside a riverbank. When the project is finished, river water will spin a turbine that will bring electricity to about 300 village families. It will be enough power to allow those residents to turn on lights, iron clothes, and watch Bollywood soaps—a small advance in the face of their many problems, perhaps, but also the first development project that any villager here can remember. And it's remarkable that it exists at all.

Read the rest of the story here.

lowered expectations

Refugees in the little town of Barikab. Click here for story on The World.

if you're a journalist, help us

I am walking to my favorite kebob house for lunch when I see an old woman sitting on the sidewalk, screaming. She is well dressed and she is clutching another woman who seems helpless and embarrassed. There are many leather jacketed men moving in and out of a furniture store like bees after their hive has been cracked open. I know this store. I bought a desk chair there once. But they don’t want to talk to me and so, after standing around for a while with the other gawkers, I go in to have my lunch.

Inside I am seated directly in front of the TV which is loud enough to make my teeth rattle. The program is a talk show in which we are shown tight close-ups of bearded men talking about the corruption problem in government. Then an ad comes on which shows a turbaned genie perched on a village wall. I know he is a genie because there are video-effect bubbles hovering around his head like swollen luminescent gnats. The genie is telling a farmer to warn the police about IEDs. The man seems surprised. It’s the right thing to do, says the genie. OK, says farmer. He runs and flags down some approaching police jeeps. “Look!” the farmer shouts, and points to a landmine which looks something like a lime green bicycle gear embedded in the dusty road. “Thanks!” say the police. The farmer’s son thanks the genie who promptly snaps his fingers and disappears. It's like the persian version of those subway posters.






Outside the screaming woman is gone and the crowd is dispersed and the leather jacket crowd at the furniture company are more amenable to speak. In fact. they spot me and flag me down. “We have big news!” they say. For a moment I wonder if they are trying to sell me another chair. But then I see the manager has blood on her hand which has spattered onto her shirt. “If you are a journalist, please help us," she says. “They came in, they kicked everybody they kicked everything." It takes a while to get the story. They are subcontracting a cell phone project to a shady dude in the east who came in this morning to demand more and more money. An hour after he left, the ‘special crimes unit’ police arrived. They wore no uniforms. They dragged away the owner, and smashed his cell phone when he tried to call for help. “He has a heart condition,” says his daughter.

As I'm sitting listening to this story, one of the "policemen" come back! He says he needs the man's heart medication. His daughter screams and jumps into the car to go home to get the medication. The cop sits looking bored. I fear the worst.

I am writing this while sitting on the desk chair he sold me.

I’ll call tomorrow to see what happened.

christmas in kabul

let me start with some sorrys. first for the title of this post. i really didn't want to begin on such a cheesy note. But it's a holiday with a lot of gravitational pull. Second for falling off the blog for a few weeks. i don't exactly know who i'm apologizing to, but you know who you are, my bench team.



Somewhere in the mess on my floor, among the multivitamins and DV tapes and old saucers, among the notebooks and paper scraps and alka seltzer and flak jacket and wasabi peas, pepper garlic flavor, among a selection of bagged tea and the collected stories of Barthelme, my dusty sneakers, my little red accordion, wires, cords, memory cards and baum de tigre and some long underwear, somewhere amongst the junk is a christmas card from Waheed. Festive Greetings, it says, Especially For You.

There is an odd feeling one gets at christmastime in a strictly muslim country. I suppose its a bit like being a Jew in Kansas. The holiday differentiates you from your neighbor. Today I got a text message from an Afghan friend which read: "Christmas is a special occasion for you. Hope you are enjoying it in afghanistan any way."

It's the opposite of christmas in new york, where the collective spirit might either epel you or sweep you up. here, christmas makes you the object of attention, so you end up feeling a weird sense of ownership towards the day. it's like a little crumb of holiday. But somehow it tastes quite sweet.

anyway, my power is about to be shut off. so, merry christmas, and enjoy.

g

meat of human

There are big warlords, and there are little warlords. Big bombs and little bombs. Suicide attacks are happening with increasing regularity in Kabul, but when you consider that 3 or 4 people die out of a city of 4 million, the risk of actually getting killed by a bomb is very small.

The bomb up north last month, though, was one of the big ones. Not just because more people died than in any blast in Afghan history. Not just because there were six delegates (the entire economic committee) and 70-odd schoolkids that died. But because no one took responsibility. And thus the bomb is like a question mark for Afghans - was it Taliban? warlords? Even Karzai himself gets blamed in the furious rumor mill that has its own aftershocks and casualities.

That is the significance of the bomb up in Baghlan. I went to Baghlan a few weeks ago and did this story for The World. You'll understand the title of this blog if you hear the piece. If you don't have time to listen, I'll just say that 10 days after the bomb the trees were still red.

(And yes, for those most loyal readers, this is the same story I talked about doing with Dr. Daud up north, i'm just a dork and forgot to post it until now.)

give me my top

got my visa today. The five hour ordeal involved trips to two different ministries and four different offices. By afternoon I was ready to eat the carbon paper. Finally we got the various stamps and signatures and we drove across town so I could pay the $10 fee for the visa itself. The bank is a dimly lit old building inlaid with marble and mahogany and dust. My teller had blocked off his window with a newspaper; looking closer I saw it was the NATO propaganda paper. I had nothing to do but wait and read the tortured syntax: "After long periods of suffering and destruction, Afghanistan is moving forward, not the least of which, economically," began the lead article. The next article was "Taliban Kill Hostage." Then there was something about kids in a library.



Then I heard a voice from behind the newsprint. I stooped down to the little slot and eyed the teller, whose suit matched his gray moustache. "Give me my top," he said again.

"Top?" I said.

I shuffled through the multiple thin sheets of paper with dari script I was clutching. It was only when he used the arabic word bakshish that i realized he was asking for a tip. I just laughed and he laughed and he gave me another thin sheet of paper with scribbles and I left, having paid my $10 and no more.

I think what surprises me about bribe-taking in afghanistan is not how common it is but how half-hearted. I've been asked for bribes dozens of times but they always back down pretty quickly. Unlike in the former Soviet Union, where they rarely ask outright for the bribe but god help you if you don't pay something, or know someone, because you will dribble half your life away waiting for fairness on the cold tile under the fluorescent bulb.

children with adult faces

finally got myself a cell phone with a camera, so expect a lot of grainy pics of kabul from here on. these were two kids i happened to meet yesterday. the boy on the left is a shepherd, i passed him with his father leading a herd of sheep and a few goats down a kabul alley. (The alley near my house turns out to be the main thoroughfare between the squatter homes on the mountain and the street with all the butchers where blood runs down the gutter.) In the kid's hand is a thin tree branch he uses to whip the animals if they fall out of line, though, really there's nowhere to go. I squeeze around the animals copping a feel of rough warm wool as I pass by.

the boy on the right is a chimney sweep I guess you'd say, he cleans out the neighborhood wood stoves (bukari's). I met him this evening in the corner store. I turned around and there's the afghan huck finn at my shoulder just staring at me. His ruddy cheeks are smeared with grey ash. His voice is like a hammer hit hard on iron. He's speaking Dari but I can't understand even a single word he says. He goes over to the cooler and grabs a carton of juice and tips it down his throat. I request a picture. First he says no, then he laughs and says yes. Then he gets shy and hides behind the cooler. This photo was taken during the yes period.

According to the Human Development Index 2007 released last month, life expectancy in Afghanistan is 43 years. That's down from 44.5 years in 2003.

"Afghans live almost nine years less than people in other Least Developed Countries, the report's findings show."

American Taliban (Ibrahim's Song)

Last night I got into a public taxi and the driver asked where I was from. "I'm American," I said.

"No you're not," he said. He looked to be 60 or 70 years old. He had a tiny head and chewed on his gums.

"No, but I am," I said. (We were talking in Dari.)

"No," he said. "Because all Americans are supporting Taliban and I can tell you're a good boy."

I laughed but he wasn't kidding.

"Maybe you're French," he said. "Or German."

I said, "I thought everybody says Pakistan supports Taliban."

"But who supports Pakistan?" he said. "American money! Money!"

He was quiet a moment. Then he started singing. I had him sing the song again for my tape recorder. (Click here to hear). His name was Ibrahim.

Taliban in the treetops

An hour before sunrise, the streets of Kabul are empty. The wedding party drag racers all gone to bed. It’s a tradition here after weddings, brigades of Russian ladas and Toyota minivans and beribboned taxicabs all honking and swerving to beat the newlyweds home, so if you figure on several dozen weddings a night + the absence of traffic lights + the potholes of Kabul, early morning hours can be a bit mad.

But now everything’s quiet. We drive quietly through the checkpoints and stop at a gas station just outside the city gates. In the backseat my friend Vanessa looks wide-eyed at the asphalt and well-lit pumps. She was last here in 2003, when there were no gas stations, just dark shacks and some dude with a bucket. “What’s next,” she jokes. “A Getty Mart?” I look towards the building where, if this were a Getty Mart, the clerk and the coffee and the maps and snacks and newspapers and twinkies would be. They are, of course, not. Neither is the ATM sign or stickers on the door or cans of motor oil or ICE machine. No sink or table or anything else in the small enclosed room. Just, on the floor in the corner, an electric tea kettle and glass mug. And in the center of the room, under the fluorescent light, two hooded figures. One is kneeling in prayer and the other is about to. Their breath rises, visibly.

I give our driver money for gas. It’s more expensive than home—40 bucks to fill the tank. Just as a point of comparison: our driver Daud is a surgeon in one of Kabul’s biggest hospitals. The hospital pays him $60 a month. I pay him more than that in one day. I can do this because there is a market in America for stories about Afghanistan. It’s a funny way to think about the news. Try it maybe. If you listen the story I do from this trip, which should air on the BBC sometime next week, think to yourself: this story helped Daud feed his wife and four kids and continue saving lives at the hospital. That's a pitch you never heard on public radio pledge drives.

Of course, for Daud it’s not only about the money. He’s had some adventures working for journalists. He got to be in the first car to enter Kabul in 2001 after the Taliban were defeated. He was with a four star general and a reporter from the Washington Post. They were driving a Taliban car so at first people didn’t know who they were. When people realized they were Northern Alliance they started throwing candy at the car. The reporter thought they were throwing stones and got nervous. Daud laughed. Taliban had imprisoned his brother for a year. Taliban had made it almost impossible for him to get his medical education. Now the people were throwing candy.

Inside Kabul the Taliban had fled. They found only seven fighters who had climbed a tree. They were foreigners who didn't know their way out of Kabul. From the treetop they fired on the people. They shot a child and a woman before the northern soldiers arrived with their guns. Bang, bang, bang. Plop, plop, plop. Daud watched seven taliban dropping from the branches, like overripe apples.



By sunrise I’m doing my turn at the wheel & Daud is in the passenger seat worrying I’m going to wreck his gearshift. Vanessa grumbles in the back under her hijab because Muslim custom forbids women in the front seat and though it’s okay in Kabul here in the countryside we’d call attention. Daud is thinking about moving to Australia. His cousin is there now driving a taxi. Would you have to drive a taxi too I say no he says there is a course maybe only one year and then I can work as doctor. We drive through the mountains and then along a river and then turn left by a tributary towards the village which is our destination. The riverbed here is dry and filled with garbage but I do notice, under a little bridge, a puddle and a circle of seven ducks. Stiff-necked they face each other pretending that this is exactly where they meant to end their days, under a footbridge in Afghanistan, in a dry gully filled with garbage. I wonder if they know their way home. I wonder if Afghan ducks can fly. I wonder how long before someone sees them and kills them for dinner.

me and my warlord

The word "warlord" gets tossed around so much these days. But how well do we know them? Reminds me of a pretty dangerous dude I met this summer. Big deal guy, no bomb explodes in the province without his say so, of course that could be rumor, but well, he's got five wives and it's not because he's such a knockout. Takes the girls he wants, takes the money he wants, rich as hell off poppy, visited him in his tinted glass windowed massive compound at the end of a wide empty desert road. Inside, I'd never seen so many roses.

Anyway I hadn't planned to meet him, but we had some time to kill before our meeting with the governor, so we called him up and he had time. We talk with the four lesser mafiosi outside, we get the lookover and then we're approved, we slip off our shoes and head into the...well, into ONE of the houses (i guess he has at least one for each wife), and there's this little guy standing there next to an overstuffed E-Z chair. And i figure this is the guy who will lead us to the kingpin but no, this is the kingpin, and as I'm introducing myself I'm looking at this little moustachioed slight man who comes up barely past my shoulder and I'm thinking - if i was casting a sitcom I'd cast this guy as the harmless nerdy neighbor...

but that impression faded very quickly. I don't know what it was about him. Maybe it was the way he lay completely still until he spoke. Or maybe it was the way he took his paralyzed left hand and cracked the knuckles. Over his head.

"I fought my whole life. I'm ready to step out of violence and be a private man," he said. I mean really the dialogue was straight out of godfather.

From there I went straight to the governor's office and he too was a scary, proud, powerful, crafty and fundamentally uneducated man. Later someone said that I'd met the two most powerful people in the province. And there was I, sweaty, dehydrated, dodging fat-bottomed sheep in the street, wearing my ink-stained afghan clothes. There are times that being here feels like I stepped straight into my TV screen. Sweatpants on and dorito crumbs in my lap.

britney spears afghanistan

Flew out of Newark last night. Familiar floaty feeling in international airport terminals late at night, quiet but for the swish of mop and click of high heels & dull but for the colorful ascots and the charm of the marquee at each gate: LIMA 6:45 HONG KONG 8:40 TEL AVIV 6:20 QATAR BUDAPEST and so on. There's something about the nexus of repetitive infrastructure (magazines, bathrooms, over-priced pretzels, repeat) and Narnia-like possibility (behind the locked double door of each gate, an adventure). In such a stale smelling playground it's hard not to ask myself why I'm going back to Afghanistan for the third time.

I'm aware of the importance of this question. I can hear the fear in my mother's voice. We're not an I love you kind of family but she just said it to me on the cell before I checked through security. Still I find myself unable to think about this important question and instead pick up an airport copy of US Weekly, where I read that Britney Spears is showing increased signs of mental illness. exclamation point. The article by Kevin O'Leary recounts a "harrowing delivery of clothes" by an unnamed source to Britney's Four Seasons hotel room: "When we walked in, she was on a towel in the center of the bed, lights off, eating cheeseburgers. The room smelled so bad, like stale fries."

So, my sympathies are with Spears on this one. We've all had our cheeseburger-on-the-towel moments, awful enough without worrying that we're traumatizing the delivery boy, who ingratiatingly patters past our vacant depressed stare while he mentally bottles the stink of our stale fry farts for the tabloid reporter lurking downstairs. My friend Jake Halpern did a lovely piece about celebrity narcissism disorder that I'll try to find a link to. (As I'm writing this I'm in a plane over the Caspian Sea.) Until I heard Jake's essay on NPR I'd never heard a piece so empathetic to michael jackson. But what must it be like to live as a person who the world is watching? Who wouldn't go crazy under that pressure? When your every move really is being broadcast on prime time TV, it's not paranoid delusions. It's your life.

Call it perhaps the Britney Spears Theory of International Relations: some countries have more celebrity status than others. Afghanistan is one of the few places in the world that Americans seem to want to know about. And visiting Afghanistan these days can feel kind of like visiting Britney Spears' bedroom: you're horribly fascinated at the same time endlessly wondering why you've come; you want to stay to notice everything and you want very much to flee, you feel unprepared (you can't be otherwise) and the wider you open your eyes the less clear it is what's actually going on. The only thing you understand is that whatever is happening seems to have very little to do with the half-naked girl on the bed littered with fast food wrappings. She's only the mouse in the experiment. In the same way, and if you'll forgive the tabloid metaphors running through my airplane brain at the moment, but in the same way when I travel in Afghanistan I feel like I'm actually getting to know America, in a way that doesn't always smell super wonderful. And I'm tired of having only the delivery boy's version of events.

So. Here's my promise to you folks for the next month or so that I'm here. I will tell the truth as far as I'm capable, stale winds and all. I will probably not do it every day, but will go as far as my discipline and my electricity will allow. And I will try to include a little more news context, but don't expect details on the latest bombing, because I'm not interested in that, unless I see it myself.

Finally, I'm going to try to provide links to the things that my friends are involved in, even if it's not directly related to Afghanistan, because it occurred to me these past months in NYC how many amazingly cool are the things my friends are doing. And they inspire me and in general fill my brain with interesting colors not found in nature. And because it's nice to have food for one's inquiries besides tabloids and tribal beefs.

the secrets of pork

I had pork ribs for dinner last night. In a strictly Muslim country that's something to brag about. Pork sausages are easy- you can ask for those at the supermarket for foreigners on the edge of town. For pork ribs you have to have a connection. I found the hostess, a Chinese-Australian I'll call L. She found the South African butcher. She'd been in this country for three years, minus just three weeks of home visit in 2006. The butcher she'd only discovered last week. To find it she had to drive to the Spanish Embassy, make a few turns, get lost, and call her contact, who said: "Just look up at the buildings. Do you see the eagle?" Yes she did. The metal bird with open beak was perched upon the balcony of one of the street's new mansions ('Narcotecture,' they call these gaudy monuments of the nouveau riche). She followed the eagle's wing counting two, three, five doors to an unmarked compound with guards out front. They let her in and in the basement she found a tall man in a blood-stained smock unpacking boxes of imported meat. Next to the meat locker was a grill, over which they'd built a massive exhaust pipe that went all the way to the roof. "Indoor grilling at its finest," L said. She said a person could literally reach into the refrigerator, pull out some ribs, and toss them on the grill without taking more than three steps. Across the room was a pool table. On the walls, sexy beer posters and calendar girls. "All of Kabul could be on lockdown for three months," she said, "and these guys wouldn't have a clue." She bought all the ribs they had and took them back with her to her own compound, the one I wandered the streets in the dusk last night trying to find.

"Wait," she'd said when I'd called her a second time for directions. "Don't you see the three story house with the green balconies?" I did not. It took a few minutes of walking back and forth down the street, that is to say, stepping around crumbled rock piles and open sewers, whispering landmarks quietly into the cell phone so that I wouldn't call too much attention to the English I was speaking. "I'm passing 'Ahmad's Bake Shop and Sweet,'" I'd whisper. "Across the street from a naan shop." I was unable to identify the name of the street because no streets in Kabul are marked. "There's a blue sign with an arrow. It says 'Marco Polo Inn.'"

Soon after, safely settled in the wicker sofa on her back deck underneath a grape arbor, a full plate of ribs and slaw and julienned potatoes on my lap, and a cold Fosters beer, I told L that it seemed to me that this unmarkedness was a defining aspect of life in Kabul. All cities hide their secrets; every city has their secret-finders, their Anna Pavlovnas. But in Kabul there is no room for the alternative, restless dog approach. One cannot take a jog, as I so love to do in a new city, and just discover places. Even if you could jog here (and I hear there's a crowd of bold early risers who run before six am; they say it's fine as long as you go early before the sun wakes up the dust and the gangsters) – even if you could take a post-prandial jaunt on a summer's evening, you wouldn't see anything but locked gates and barbed wire. Danger cramps the wanderer. You don't want to take unnecessary risks, and it's not a great idea to roam the streets asking too many people directions; if you're walking anywhere, keep your head down and look like you know where you're going. And besides, the gulf between expats and natives is so wide that often the armed guard standing on the next street over will have no idea what you're talking about. "German restaurant? Wha?" Recently a friend asked me if I knew the location of the new English book exchange in Kabul. I hadn't even known there was one. Of course, there are no Kabul yellow pages. We both scrolled through the contacts list on our mobile phones to find someone in the know. In Kabul, you have to know about things before you discover them. And even then, you have to have the right name on speed dial.

Helmand? fuck.

Poolside, pop music on the stereo, tiki torches.


"Helmand? fuck. I crashed an MI-27 in Helmand."

27?

"A helicopter. The pilot glided it right down into – into – what's the main city there?"

Um, Lashkargah...

"YEE-ah, down in Lash. Five of us. Here here and here. Let me tell you, in a 27 you don't want to be anywhere near the gear mex."

So, you can glide a helicopter? (me trying to sound knowledgable about manly subjects like the mechanics of 27s)

"You can, you can. It lands harder though. And I'm loosening up my seatbelt

"hey Jack, tell him about Cambodia."

'I'm loosening up my seatbelt and three of us we jump, see?

"Jack-

'you got to jump'

"this wasn't his first crash."


"Two of the guys, they got spinal injuries. Me, the other guys, we just got banged around, busted here and here and here." He punches his own face like a shadowboxer high on adrenalin. "You come down but you come down hard. You loosen your seatbelt, you hit ground you jump, yeah?'


Later I hear the story of Cambodia. It was worse. End over end down a cliff. The guy next to him died. I promise him – several times - that if I'm in a downed helicopter I'll remember to loosen my seatbelt and jump. He doesn't seem to believe me. He mimes loosening a seatbelt, hips sashaying in a manic disco rhythm, his arms flailing like a three-year old having a temper tantrum. A gin and tonic – definitely not his first – splashes on his well-tanned hand.

In the audience: a Lebanese contractor with dumbo ears smoking a Romeo y Julieta, a numbingly intelligent young woman from Pittsburgh researching her phD in informal governance structures, and me.

independence day

on a mat on a floor in a dark room in the mountains. electricity has a curfew. breakfast was sugar and naan. dinner was beans and naan. for lunch the head commander slaughtered a lamb. this photo was taken just after the gouty feast. what is it about turbans that makes me look like such a teenager?

the selected of betters

so i'm sitting here reading through old batman comics and eating sour cherry jam that bills itself (on the flowery yellow & purple label) as "The Selected of Betters". A sad synonym for best though maybe it's just the better i can do at this point.

I was teaching english to a taxi driver the other night and taught him 'good, better, best' and i think he couldn't handle the fact that the word 'best' was shorter and so much less impressive than 'better.' he kept thinking I was wrong and feeling around for a bestester word.

Then he taught me the lovely dari word ishtyarwhich means appetite and i taught him the english word and he said:

appetayat.

and i said: appeTITE.

and he said: appetaYAT.

and I said: I, I, I. AppeTYte.

and he said: AppeTYte.

And I said: right, right. And it was quiet then in the taxi it was midnight we were passing by the neon green patio of kabul's main wedding hall so bright against the absolutely dark city and I said the word 'appetite' again feeling so-- sturdy in its syllables.

And my taxi driver said, with equal satisfaction: appetaYAT.

and i thought: i feel so happy at this one little moment and no one will understand why. or even try to - since this isn't a story that's at all tellable. what do they call a black hole that's so powerful it bends time, so it doesn't participate in the linear progression of cause and effect? a singularity. that's it.

just one of those singular little epiphanies of travel.

three boys

actually afghan

Biding time in this circus of a city. Out this evening with an edge-of-the-world crowd – unshaven 'capacity advisors' straight out of Harvard Law, Dutch war correspondents back from the front, a well-coiffed Scottish PR man burnishing the ministerial marble, and a thin British boy specializing in civilian casualties. "It's the hot topic of the day," he admits. After an expensive dinner of bratwurst and beer at the city's only german restaurant, a few of us headed out to hear what was billed as 'the first afghan-american punk band,' but what turned out to be a couple of harmless kids from los angeles who'd hired Afghan musicians to play on their new electric folk album. The lead singer is a gorgeous 22-year old who sings songs titled "Be Gone, Taliban" and calls her band "Lion of Panjshir." Her father, a successful Kabul businessman, sat in the front row of plastic chairs with some other successful Kabul businessmen. I talked with her young guitarist who explained that 'rock and roll was about taking risks' and how the point was that being willing 'to make the journey,' all the way to Kabul, in this case. "It's a gimmick, see," he said, but, because their lead singer was actually afghan, it was more of an 'organic gimmick.'



An orgimmick.



Well, he was a sweet enough boy and I wish him luck but I couldn't help thinking about the raggedy Wakhani musician I'd met just days before; a 52-year-old man who imitated birds with his throat and sung the saddest songs I've ever heard. Mohammad Joshan had a voice like Johnny Cash and hadn't played his instrument in 15 years. He did not want to play at first but I begged and pointed to my microphone, & at long last he brought out a dusty old dumbra with a broken string that wouldn't be worth 50 cents in a pawn shop. Then he requested a knife and a piece of wood. Those things magically appeared out of the dark night. MJ then proceeded to carve himself a new fretboard, saying "I'm doing this because you are a guest in my country," I mean he literally rebuilt the guitar before my eyes, fixed the peg, rewound the broken string, then played a twenty minute medley in two mountain languages that less than 25,000 people speak anymore.



OK so in one sense I'm making an obvious point about authenticity, the Afghan Johnny Cash had it, and these west coast kids whose version of Afghanistan was five days in a heavily armed compound, with a hired band and platters of watermelon, did not.



But it would be wrong of me to stop there; authenticity is only one of the virtues, and i guess you could say that Afghanistan is as much about the circus and the well-coiffed schnitzel as it is about the poverty and darkness. (At least you'd say that if you want to be around pretty girls and watermelon.) Still, I'm going on the assumption that you can write about both, so long as you know what you're looking at: is it the merry-go-round, or the darkness beyond the benches.

The Farther I Go Out

The farther I go out into these villages, the less patience I have for the selective art of conversation, & pity unto those on the receiving end; I want to describe everything, everything, but even the sounds alone would take pages: the muezzin's call, for the day's final prayer, the snap of wood succumbing to fire in the iron stove, from which the smell of baking bread arises both delicious and terrifying in its sameness to yesterday and the day before, the distant low of sheep, the beep of a text message alert downstairs, and under all of these and more sounds the sound of water just below my window, coursing through the canal that traverses the compound, that traverses the village, in a plumbing system almost as old as the river that feeds it with water drawn from the Pamirs that retain their caps of snow even in summer. But of course the sounds are just sounds and not the story, so for example the canal water which seems so gentle and –to me –bucolic, is, for the team of bearded Kabul engineers downstairs, the enemy, the evil, the polluted cryptosporidium dragon who for decades of war enforced an iron dominion over the bowels and livers of his subjects, these villagers. And at night the canal stops and that's another story, where the water goes, turning the micro-hydroelectric plant that gives just enough electricity for every villager to watch their favorite Indian soap opera, and maybe charge their cell phone, & after these and more stories of the sounds one would have to tell the sights, harder to evoke because none of them, save the carved rock face of the mountain that fills my window, seem any of them other than ordinary. And even a mountain is nothing so fantastic. I wish I could explain then why it is that the foreign feels familiar and the familiar, foreign, for instance, here is my room: a ceiling of checkered orange and blue squares, over which my eyes play a kind of ceaseless billiards, walls of concrete painted scholastic blue, a corner fan that turns on and off with the whims of electricity, a hard wood bed, which serves as my desk, while I sleep on the cushion on the floor; a bouquet of paper flowers pushed into a blue vase. Outside, more of the foreign sameness: the bazaar, really a long line of aluminum shipping containers that serve as shops, barely big enough for the shopkeeper and his wares which are the same wares in every bazaar and the faces – whether suspicious or stupid or crafty or woeful or wondering or wise or blank – always the same faces.

On the Roads

It's hard to describe just how shitty the roads are in Afghanistan. Think back to the worst road you ever drove in the states, like that time that you visited your friend's camp in rural Maine right after three days of rain. That last, unmarked dirt road, so uneven you had to drive 3 miles an hour or crack the muffler clean off, with potholes so enormous you had to slip into first gear to traverse them… now imagine a few more boulders, potholes, some horses, and a line of donkeys bearing straw and you have the central highway through the province of Badakhshan.

I took that road this morning east to Baharak. It should have taken two hours but a rock slide blocked the road for an hour. Luckily the slide was next to a river with a grassy field and mulberry trees. One thing about Afghans is they're always prepared to sit one out. Suddenly appeared some cushions, the hot tea, someone caught fish in the river, another climbed the tree and picked mulberries. When we started up again my driver saw my med kit and complained of a stomach ache. So I gave him one of my Immodiums which cured him instantly. "Where is that pill from?" he asked. From America, I said. "Ah," he said, quite satisfied. I wonder if the placebo effect increases the less actual health care you have. Like the way blind people become better at hearing.

Turtle Jihad

All my best pictures from today i couldn't take because there were either women or poppy plants in the way. And photographing either of those would have caused trouble. Up in the mountains of Fayzabad, took a hike today with a mixed group of afghans, pakistanis and americans I met on the plane. We left early and followed a tiny dirt path through minefields and poppy fields, and one of the american boys commented about what a good email he was going to be able to write that afternoon. He was right of course, but i felt caught in the outdoors magazine-y tone of that email. Afghanistan's clichés can make you claustrophobic. The afghans among us seemed less impressed by those tropes; they prefered the turtles. Really. Anytime we spotted a turtle, one of them would grab it and put it in the path and take pictures as it ran back to cover. This happened four or five different times. They were really getting into those photo shoots filming mr. turtle from all angles. I made a dumb joke about turtle soup which got far more laughter than it deserved. Something was up with those turtles I'll never know what. The word for turtle in Dari is the same as the word for tank and along the mountain ridge we passed many destroyed russian tanks. If I had a better camera I could have taken a sort of turtle/tank composite shot, though what that photo would mean to anyone I have no idea. It would be a photo that would require a lot of explanation. I would have to talk about afghan versus american tourism, about life on a mountain and life in a shell, I'd probably have to repeat a dumb joke about turtle soup, and I'd just end up feeling lonelier than I do already.

Volleyball in Fayzabad

Early flight to Fayzabad on the Afghan airline. Ragging on the state-owned airlines is oh so kabul but it got us there comfortably enough. Only the seats were made of that wrinkly school bus seat foam and the engine sounded like a dustbuster vaccuum trying to swallow a whole GI Joe. Fayzabad is up in the mountains to the northeast; it's where a lot of afghan fled the Taliban, since it's completely mountainous and rather inaccessible. The Northern alliance started here.

I ran into a rather amazing young Brit who has been living here 3 months and not changed a lick. We joined a pickup volleyball game in a pretty empty park. The little boys beat us then mocked us. In other words, no different than 11 year olds everywhere.

Here's a picture of volleyball, and another picture of a boy on the street who begged me to take his photo, but didn't understand the concept of an action shot. I was trying to get him to walk with the cows but whenever I picked up the camera he'd stop and smile while the cows carried on out of the frame.

fasten your seat-tables and upright your seat-backs

we're flying into Kabul. There’s even a bus this time to meet us on the tarmac. And– the terminal’s got a makeover! I never knew fluorescent fixtures would make me so happy. I find myself smiling over the floors like in friend’s new home. Charming! And that must be stone tile. Marvelous! Yes, it was all finished two weeks ago, says my neighbor. He and I are standing in line for passport control (“Passport Entery”). We share stories about the old terminal – so dark – so dim! – and those weird forms filled in duplicate (the first one I had to fill out, the second one by the officer – though the forms were the same and the officer spoke little English, so the answers came out all wrong, in short a creepy and absurd waste of time)… while now we’re whisked through with no forms no papers just stamp stamp flip on the visa and it’s all done.

While we wait they bring in a busload of deportees from Dubai. Each holds a green sheet of paper and little else. The police pick them up as they find them. Some shuffle along with small bags from duty free. One boy in acid-washed jeans and a salmon-colored t-shirt seems ready to fight someone.

Out in the city, lot of new construction. Is the mood here different, or is it just Spring?

oh, dubai

In Dubai for a layover. Dubai is like los angeles in that it's planned around cars. But more so. The streets are like highways, you can't cross them. So to get to the grocery store across the street you get in a cab, drive it down to the roundabout and back down on the other side. $15 round trip.

My hotel has four nightclubs. Iranian, Pakistani, Indian, and African. All are on different floors and there are, well, not fights exactly, but grumblings in the elevator based on which club you get out at.

This is sort of a blow-off-the-dust, stretch and warm up blog. I arrive in Kabul tomorrow.

Slate: The Italian Lived, the Afghan Died

Sad news - the Afghan journalist Ajmal Naqshbandi who I blogged about two weeks ago "daniele vs ajmal" was beheaded sunday afternoon. So I wrote up something for Slate.

confession: It's very strange to reread that blog, written while in Kabul, nearing the end of my trip. And all the things that have happened to me since then - such as they are - while Ajmal sat with Taliban goons wondering what was going to happen to him. Yikes, I don't mean to be too grim, but what are you going to do.

Blogging from Washington DC, listening to the jackhammers on the sidewalk outside and the grumbling in my morning stomach.

still waiting for Afghanistan (the klezmer afghan hip hop edition)

I started writing this post in the back of a taxi in Delhi while motorbikes and Hyundais beeped and bickered and the battery of my laptop slowly dribbled to zero as I struggled to come up with some perfectly crystallizing last story to sum up this whole trip. The end. Finito. It snuck up on us, my friends. I’m back home.

Then I was in Heathrow with an hour layover enjoying my first unpeeled apple in a month and cursing the half-life of pentium, and decided to forget the summing up and just tell a little story about my last night in afghanistan, when I got together with the afghan rapper (there’s only one) and he and I attempted to make some klezmer afghan hip hop. Niche, anyone? But the story got longer & the battery ran out so I had to wait till I was back in Washington to post the following:

The party was in a ritzy section of Kabul in a pimped out pad with furniture so low slung my knees were level with my chest. There was beautiful tilework on the walls and ceiling panels painted in day glo colors evoking nostalgia for the hi-flying afghanistan 70s of hippies and hotpants and green parks and trees. This was the first Afghan home I’d been to that I didn’t have to take off my shoes. Johnny Walker Red and afghan hashish were in abundance. Otherwise it was a typical afghan party meaning lots of boys, no girls. I was there because Najib had introduced me to the rapper’s manager four hours earlier at a show at the university. “Bro!” said the boy. “I hear you like Afghan music, man. We should make a party, get together make music with your accordion, man? Western music and eastern music mixed up what you think, man?”

I said yeah.

So let me quickly explain why it was I dragged my accordion to Afghanistan in the first place. (A travel-size version of the instrument, but still.) The simplest reason is that since I don’t speak Dari, I hoped music could fill in where the phrasebook failed. And that part at least has been sort of true – I mean, I can’t bargain a driver or pass a checkpoint, but there have been several times that a little melodic doina or two has deepened some of my relationships here beyond the merely contractual. I’ve played accompanied by village musicians on casio keyboards, I played oy mrs feinstein in the norouz festival in Mazar’s last remaining cinema to a crowd of 400 cheering Afghans, I’ve serenaded countless sheep with hava nagilah. But it’s had a local impact too; I think the accordion helped Najib and I become friends.

That’s a kind of achievement in a place where the gulf is so wide between native and foreigner, and where so many relationships revolve around money. Because the fact is this: no country has this much foreign aid coming into a place with so little of anything of its own. It makes for massive imbalances. For example, Afghanistan is one of the four or five poorest countries in the world, but the housing market in Kabul is more expensive than Los Angeles. Billions of foreign dollars flowing like a river into a desert, and who can blame all the smart ambitious Afghans for fighting for a bit of mud? Whether that means joining the institution, like becoming police chief (going price for the position, $300,000, I’m told) or simply making yourself invaluable to a foreign reporter and thus sharing a piece of his limited budget, every relationship in Afghanistan shares some flavor of the donor-recipient paradigm. It’s a frontier capitalism with few rules and no protections.

“It’s like the wild west meets 2007,” explains Alex, the owner of the dayglo house, a 26-year-old with goatee and baseball cap whose family escaped Afghanistan back with the royal family and who has houses in Beverly Hills and elsewhere. Alex hangs with the rap crew. Also present were two secret service members and some Kabul real estate moguls.

Alex tells me he came back to Afghanistan three years ago and promptly lost a quarter million dollars; now he’s slowly making it back. “Back in LA, well I don’t want to brag, but I was, you know, an operator,” he says. And as the British and the Persians and so many others before him, he imagined Afghanistan would be an easy eastern extension of his empire. To his surprise, the traders were tougher than any he’d met in the US. “What’s left in Kabul is like a few big sharks,” he said. “And lots of little tiny guppies. And I’m like a guppy that lost his fin and an eye and just barely is swimming around, you know? But now I got my baby shark teeth.” He grinned maniacally. “And you know I’m gonna be pretty soon a full size shark. And you know what I’m gonna be then? A GREAT WHITE!” he said, spitting into my eye.

I once wrote here that journalists get a lot of respect on the Afghan street. And that’s true. They’re also seen as here to make money like everybody else. (That’s part of the respect.) But the funny thing about being a journalist in this frenzied mercantilistic stage set of a country, well, it exposes something shady about the exchange. After all, what is journalism but cultivating intimacy, gathering material, then using the material for one’s own purposes. So what’s the difference between that and a villager who serves you tea in his home, charmes you with his stories and then expects compensation in return?

Not that the exchange is so blatant – I only once paid for an interview but then in extenuating circumstances. More commonly I would be asked for favors. People would ask me to “tell the Americans” to get them a hydroelectric plant so they could have electricity. Only $50,000! Others would ask my help getting them a scholarship to America. I gave advice or help when I could. Other times I just felt helpless and angry and wondered what my translator had said about me to get the interview. But it probably wasn’t his fault. To village elders struggling with poverty it’s hard to explain the difference between an American journalist and an American surveyor and an American donor agency. All of them are foreigners, all come to ask questions, all get their answers and all of them leave. I brought my accordion in part to get beyond this cliché, to interact rather than just interview.

Making accordion-flavored afghan hip hop seemed like the perfect cap to the experiment. And the rapper was good -he rapped in English and Dari, with some German thrown in there as well. Then I played some tunes and that was odd & fun. Then we played together and it was, well, I think a train wreck would have sounded more coordinated. Imagine Oyfn Pripitchik meets G-Unit...

It wasn’t just the musical differences that killed it, though. It was that he was so interested in making me happy that we couldn’t get started. Afterwards he said he wanted me to get him a gig in the states. “Do you know any rappers, bro?” he asked. “Like 50 cent, or Jay Z, and don’t forget about Dre?”

Just then the food arrived from Afghan Fried Chicken and we ate and I said my goodbyes. I drove home past that day’s suicide bombing. The stone entryway of the damaged building teetered like some old sacred ruin.

On Being Kidnapped ("Daniele vs. Ajmal")

Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo has returned home to a "hero's welcome" 2 weeks after being kidnapped in southern Afghanistan. For weeks we saw Daniele's face on television, and heard his story - about being kidnapped on the road in Helmand, being bound hand and foot and forced to watch his driver beheaded, 'thinking he was next.'

Well, Daniele's back home and of course everybody's grateful he's ok. But we hear very little about his translator/fixer Ajmal, who still remains missing in Taliban hands. Ajmal was a friend and classmate of my translator Najib. I've written a fair amount about Dr. Najib in this blog. A correspondent once told me that 'you're only as good as your fixer' which is absolutely true. They interpret not just language but the outside world. They are your enabler, sometimes your protector, and they work long hours with little credit for little pay.

So here this Italian reporter does a really suicidal and stupid thing: he drives into a war zone because he wants to "see for himself" what it's like. And what happens? His 25 year old driver with 4 kids gets his head chopped off, his translator, a young university graduate, gets kidnapped and no one knows his fate, and the director of the hospital, who was the messenger between government and Taliban negotiators, has now disappeared as well. Meanwhile, in a highly-criticized exchange deal, five Taliban get released from prison, which just made it a hell of a lot more dangerous for every other journalist in this country. The price on our heads just went way up.

It reminds me of a story that Najib told me about a Canadian reporter named Quil Lawrence, actually a former IRP fellow, who reports for the BBC and was posted here in Afghanistan a few years ago. Najib is always telling stories about Quil - Quil playing guitar in the car on long road trips through the Hindu Kush, Quil skinny dipping in the Qargha Reservoir, Quil cursing like a taxi driver in Dari. So I admit I was getting a little jealous of hearing all the homage de Quil til Najib said "Do you know when I first started liking that boy?" and he told the following story:

It was June, 2002. Another very popular fixer here named Farouq was having his 27th birthday party. (Farouq later told me this was the first birthday party he ever had as an adult. Before, during the Taliban time and before that during the war years, there was never anything to celebrate.) So, this was a big party, much more than just a birthday, and everyone was invited: all the foreign correspondents, of which there were a lot more then in Afghanistan, plus all Farouq's classmates from medical school. And yes, there might have been alcohol, technically illegal in this muslim country.

Well, either it was the booze or else the presence of so many foreign women gave some neighbor a prostitution fantasy, but someone called the cops, and all of a sudden a dozen police bust the party, swinging their sticks and pushing people around. They handcuff birthday boy Farouq and try to drag him away. And the only person that stepped forward was Quil. And Quil said, according to Najib, "This is a democracy, this isn't Taliban time. If you arrest him, you arrest me." And Quil actually went with Farouq to the police station and continued to argue there. And Farouq said it saved him a beating.

See, you can't really do the foreign correspondent thing without taking risks. The problem is that when you take risks you're not only risking yourself. It's your native staff that might be in more danger. George Packer writes about this in Iraq, a brilliant article, and worth clicking on the link if only just for the headline photo. It's a scene we've seen a thousand million times before: the American-looking soldier knocking on the door of the muslim-looking citizen. But this photo adds a twist: the faceless translator whose wild eyes make the other two seem about as relevant as cardboard cutouts.

radio alert: interview on air america

hey folks, i'll be on Air America on Sunday evening talking about corruption in Afghanistan; yeah I know Air America went bankrupt but they're back under new ownership, and I really love the show I'm on, Laura Flanders' RadioNation, if you get a chance to listen, it starts at 7pm sunday and I think i'm near the top of the hour. On the radio in NYC on 1600AM or online at http://www.lauraflanders.com/pages/radionation.html

On Going Native ("Pahtooled")

Afghanistan is pretty variegated genetically - there's dark skin and light, blue eyes and brown, and each region has its genotype, so what a 'typical' Afghan looks like actually changes as you traverse the country. Now that i'm a little worn with travel and my beard's shaggy, Afghans tell me I could pass for an Afghan from the Panjshir valley, in the northeast about two hours from Kabul. I admit a little pride in this since in a country famous for its fighters the Panjshiri villagers are fierce as freaking lions. ("Panjshir" actually translates to "5 lions.")

So I figured I'd complete the disguise and bought myself a hat popular in Panjshir called a pahtool. It works surprisingly well. When I wear the pahtool and afghan clothes, i get treated like an afghan, which has taught me that at least in the city of Mazar it's a lot better to be a foreigner. As a foreigner i get smiles, my bags aren't searched, and tailors refuse to take money after sewing my fraying coat because i am a "guest." (I also get swindled, stared at, and am the butt of most jokes). But as an afghan, i get shoved by police at the shrine, hit up for bribes on the road, and stopped at every bank or electronics shop i choose to enter.

Anyway, here's me with my pahtool. In the background you see a bunch of buzkashi horsemen racing towards us. Two or three seconds after this photo was taken, I and the photographer went fleeing to safe ground (note the guy behind me to my right, already mid-leap.) In other words, this picture was taken just at the end of ignorance, just before panic, smiling cheerfully in the direct path of a horde of buzkashi warriors and their frenzied horses battling over a goat carcass. 3 seconds after this photo i'd look neither panjshir nor lion-like.


People in America often talk about whether it's dangerous to be a foreigner in Afghanistan and of course, in some situations, it is, but in most cases one can usually leap out of the way. As an Afghan one cannot leap out of the way of a career making $50 a month (and that would put me in the educated elite) in a shitty government job while supporting one's parents and eight brothers and sisters, and at the mercy of every corrupt government official with precious little chance of being allowed to ever leave the country, ever.

Such are my thoughts after spending this morning touring some ancient ruins with Reza, an absolutely charming 24 year old self-taught archelogist who practically danced around the Mosque of the 9 domes showing me the bhuddist signatures and 'well Gegary what do you think THIS means?'; he is exactly like all of my favorite professors. To illustrate a story about Genghis Khan he actually pluckd some 800 year old finger bones from the mud wall and lined them up in finger form on the rock. (which does say something else about Afghanistan. How many ancient sites could you go to in the world and find human bones and bits of 13th century pottery and keep them as souvenirs?)

But Reza only has a high school education because there's no archeology program in university here; and he says every time he gets a scholarship to get his degree abroad the culture minister gives it to someone else. This has been happening for the last five years and he is losing hope. It seems to me that this is the real gulf between us and them: not language, not wealth, not religion. It's freedom. It's when you live in a country where some bureaucrat can inch by inch steal away your calling, just because you are Shiite and he is Sunni, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. "God is great," shrugs Reza. "It will be as it must."

producing public radio is like flushing yourself down the toilet

the relief, the rush, the inevitable downward spiral. Afterward, the lone square of paper floating in the empty bowl like a white flag of surrender.

I did a short piece for ATC today about afghan musicians. You can hear it here. I had many frustrating tech issues and cried out many times like Job with his potsherd, but i got no commiseration from the heavens, just the hum of the compound generator. Fortunately the kindly proprietor Sebastian allowed me to use his office internet connection, even after I in panic tore the cable from his server and plunged the compound into cyber blackout his eyes looked pained. "Oh, Mr. Greg," he quietly moaned.

soy sauce and mint jelly do not a mango chutney make

So my first night in Mazar I stayed at Hotel Barat, which I misheard as Hotel Borat, that should have been my first warning. Still the view of the shrine over the balcony was lovely so I took it, despite the rundown appearance, the abandoned feel and the lack of internet access. I regretted the last one after learning that the internet café Tahir swore was “just around the corner” was 15 minutes away and closed at 8 pm. Besides, I’d managed some dicey lamb kabob for lunch so all I wanted to do was sleep; I picked up an invalid's supper of sugar biscuits and coke from the gazebo across the street.

But i couldn’t get my room’s heater to work. So I walked down and told them and they sent up a guy with a can full of propane which he glug glug glugged right into the stove. That was one of those moments where you see something terribly dumb about to happen but the happy ignorance of the actor leaves you paralyzed until the gas is out of the jar. Of course the tiny room filled immediately with fumes that I could remove only partially with the ceiling fan. Finally I was climbing into bed for the third time when I got a call from a guy with whom I’d was scheduled a lunch meeting the following day; he informed me that I was on the shrine’s northwest corner, where a 1-ton bag of explosives had been discovered that afternoon. I woke a short time later the pilot light had gone out again and the place smelled strongly of gas, so I dragged my mattress and blanket out to the balcony and slept there. The pre-dawn air was quite pleasant. Then it started to rain.

The following morning I checked into a hostel recommended for its wifi. It turned out to be an American-style guest house exclusively for foreigners. “Please to put your Afghan nationals on a list, otherwise we can’t let them in,” explained the owner, a Pillsbury-shaped Indian-American named Sebastian with gap teeth as wide as his hips. “We have to be safe.” Everything is very safe here, including the food, all imported from Dubai, down to the napkins and toothpicks. In a land of naan, the only bread here is sliced and white. Still, I like Sebastian as a person but I wish he’d get a wife. The place needs a woman’s touch. Tonight for dinner I ordered the veggie curry and heard the microwave beeping. I should have gone for the lamb chops; at least I would have had the right condiments.

a post i probably shouldn't publish for multiple reasons

It’s said that there’s no better hash in the world than Afghan hash. And in the country of Afghanistan, the best hash comes from the northern province of Balkh, whose name sounds like you’re deflating a rubber balloon with your mouth. And the best hash in the province of Balkh? Is in the town of Balkh. Like a rubber inside a rubber, and the solution to a riddle.

So it’s my third night in Mazar-e-Sharif, which is about 20 miles from Balkh, the town, and my email inbox is buzzing with military press releases. NATO sez “Roadside Bomb Targets ISAF convoy; Kills Afghan Child” US_ARMY sez back “Afghan patriots added to police force,” NATO shouts “Nursing Students graduate from Qalat PRT!”

I misread the next release from US_ARMY, when I drop a letter and read it as “Qalat PRT treats ailing Afghans in Stinky District” which is when I figure it’s time to shut down gmail. Besides, my connection’s frozen so all I can do is stare at subject headers. (I’ll post this when it’s up again, inshallah.) You know who else doesn’t have internet access right now? The city’s university. Yes, the bastion of knowledge in the world’s hash superpower! Even the professors don’t have email addresses. I interviewed the director of the agriculture school today. He was a slight man with a worn pinstripe suit and very round brown eyes. I requested a tour of the facility and he looked pained, then resolute, then politely guided me out in the rain to gaze on the small field of test plots behind the concrete dorms.

“Inja Safflower as,” he would say, “unja Canola as,” his gesturing palm dripping in the increasingly heavy downpour. I declined his offer to walk across the field to the tiny tree nursery, and with that the tour was over. He gathered up his trousers in each fist as he hopped bowlegged back down the muddy path. They’ve not had internet access all year he says because they can’t afford the subscription fee. He passes me a towel to dry my hair. He says his department has just $200 a semester to spend on textbooks and lab materials, about 30 cents per student. Even the faculty who live on campus don’t have hot water or electricity. I make a note of this with my $2 pen on my 80 cent notepad and I wonder how much of his budget was spent on the two plates of biscuits which the assistant director brought us along with green tea for the honored American guest.

In this blog so far I haven’t really touched on anything to do with the stories I’m working on, which was sort of intentional, the idea to keep the blog anecdotal and not a pain to write. But reporting here especially as a Westerner is a weighty experience. Weighty in ways both good and bad. Last week I broke bread with a bald American cowboy in an Operation Freedom windbreaker; we talked war and agribusiness and terrorism and then he sighed and said, “I’ve never been in a country where I experience such high emotional highs and low emotional lows” and I knew the man spoke truth.

Because on the one hand you get a thrill covering stories in a place where even the small stories feel important. When you say you’re a journalist you get respect from people on the street; which is partly Afghan politeness but also that people see reporters as maybe their last allies against crushing forces. On the other hand the deeper you query the more twisted the facts and interpretations and there are many layers to all but the very simplest stories. I never know when to stop peeling the onion and pretty soon I’m crying into my kitchen knife.

a fairy tale

Lives are lived under such pressure here. It crushes most and leaves a few bright as diamonds. Tahir lives in Mazar-i-Sharif. He has one pair of acid washed jeans which he wears all the time never mind the boys around him in pajama pants. Tahir is on the move. He's a stringer for Reuters and the BBC.

When Tahir was 17 he started a school to teach English, called the "American English School." He had hundreds of students including the governor of the province. When he was 18 and living in Pakistan he memorized the Koran, since it might help him with his political career, and after all he was bored. Did I mention that Tahir has a photographic memory? He recently translated "Bush At War" into Dari and wonders how to get in touch with the publisher to sell it.

He's 21 years old now and wants to be prime minister of Afghanistan. I ask him why and he tells me a story i've only read in fairy tales. It's a girl, of course. Her father has forbidden Tahir to see her. He's even pulled his daughter out of school so she won't see him. She can't call either, as he's taken away her mobile phone. They talk on a friend's phone, only in secret and only once a month or so. The reason? Tahir isn't rich enough. He's going to marry her to an older man, a trader. So Tahir is working to prove to her father that he too can be rich as well as smart. That's why he works so hard, he says. "Only that. I have to prove that I am right and he is wrong. That is the reason."

It is rather humbling to have this young man as my translator.

blog from the deep

It was really nice that a few of you checked on me after I disappeared in Kandahar and didn’t blog for a few days. I got swept up in a lot this week and every time I turned to write I’d think it would be a good idea to blog horizontally on my bed with my eyes closed. A dream blog. So right now I’m on a little 18 seater beechcraft flying north to Mazar-i-Sharif. it’s a 45 minute flight and I’m going to try to sum up the last few days in Kandahar. I also want to tell another story that happened before I left, and which I’m still not sure I understand. Just for fun I figured I’ll theme this blog according to the 10 commandments, in no particular order, and I might drop that structure if it gets boring. Ok?

YOU SHALL NOT COVET: I smelled a girl’s hair for the first time in three weeks. She was just passing by me outside the little UN terminal. I was stuck standing in the mud with a soldier who was halfheartedly trying to solicit a bribe. It was more plea than strongarm. “Bakshish?” he kept saying. “Bakshish?” I pretended I didn’t understand the word and shifted the bags on my shoulder. He was maybe in his early 20s, a slight guy with a moustache, a little dumb looking but not unkind. Suddenly this waft of girl and shampoo passes us and we both turn. She was probably French, probably from an NGO. I never saw her face. I practically pinched my soldier’s nipple in brotherly love as I walked past him.

NO OTHER GODS BUT ME: Kandahar makes me miss Jerusalem. Something ancient about this ruined oasis, baking in the sun and dust, the people in sparkly caps and embroidered shirts like time travelers from a royal century. It’s a sober, spiritual place. The dust is cleaner here than Kabul. I arrived on Monday and my cough cleared right up.

THOU SHALL NOT SKIP LUNCH: Okay that’s not one of the Sinai 10 but it’s a serious commandment in Afghanistan. Anyway, my flight was delayed and I didn’t get in till one o’clock. I was restless and raring to go interview some elders but I asked my translator Nadir if he wanted lunch and by a slight downturn in his “As you wish!” answer I realized the man was starving. He hadn’t eaten all day, which he didn’t admit to me until we were sitting down and the plates of rice and meat were laid out before us.

THOU SHALT NOT STEAL Over lunch Nadir tells stories of corruption in his city. One that sticks out for me: a gynecologist in the hospital comes in drunk, hits midwives, and frightens patients. He’s been there for 20 years but he’s in a powerful tribe and can’t be fired. “People who try to do good work get crushed,” Nadir says. “People who steal get rewarded.” There’s a joke I heard in a village: A farmer came to Kabul to see President Karzai and asked him to do something about corruption. “No problem,” Karzai answered. “How much is it worth to you?”

HONOR THY FATHER AND MOTHER The next morning I wake up in my guest house, stumble around until I find the kitchen and someone to cook some breakfast. I sit down at the table with Jalal, an Afghan who moved to Toronto 20 years ago. Now he’s back, and he’s brought his two teenage daughters. “They love it here,” he says. “Yeah the first few months they were bored and said they want to go home, but now they say they want to stay here through high school.” He tells me that he was a taxi driver in Toronto, now he manages a major development project in Kandahar. “Because I have an education, because I have experience in the West? I’m like a king here,” he says. “I’m treated with such respect.” I want to ask him if his daughters are treated with respect but he anticipates my move. “In the West, people ignore you, here, everybody is family. You feel like you belong.” He looks at me, then points to the bright morning sunlight through the kitchen window behind him. “You’re here having an adventure, yes. But imagine how you’d feel if you looked out that window and saw your cousin walking by?”

OK he got me there, because I’ve been missing my cousin a fair amount recently. In fact I had just been wishing she was hanging out with me here in Afghanistan. I swallowed the rest of my omelet and walked upstairs. The sun was already strong and it would be quite hot in another half hour. I stared out at the broken city and at the mountains beyond. I took a couple pictures with the timer on my camera. This one was over-exposed but seems to capture the light as it was.




flight just landed. More soon but Mazar is iffy on the internet.

kandahar is kanda great

arrived in kandahar early this afternoon on a UN flight. Sat next to an Afghan Turk who hunched gnome-like under his patoo and mumbled fascinating theories about the tribal dynamics of southern afghanistan in a voice so quiet i gave myself a neckache trying to hear him above the propellor. The plane was full of important people and i felt a little silly in my pajama outfit.

Kandahar sort of reminds me of Jerusalem, a more conservative, more spiritual place than dusty noisy Kabul. Foreigners are rare. Today I was waiting outside the police HQ waiting for permission to interview the chief. There was a young guard staring hard at me and smiling. Maybe 17 or 18 years old, all of 90 lbs, his frame so small his pants were safety-pinned at the waist, the Kalashnikov around his chest almost too heavy for him. He wanted to touch my hand and we sort of communicated in rudimentary hand gestures. (I speak a tiny amount of Dari at this point, but I speak absolutely no Pashto.) Still, I believe I understood him as saying, "Welcome to my country. I know that some of people want to shoot you? But not me!"

hot naan in the mornin

16 hour day yesterday most of it on the road. much to say but i have to race to the airport. still, life is good. this morning i managed to score a several minute long hot shower and warm fresh bread with honey! I bought the honey the other day in a little shop with little else to choose from. It was $10 for a big jar, very expensive by afghan standards, Hafiz the night guard was blown away by the price. He kept staring at the golden jar. Then i realized he'd never tried honey before. His face when he tasted it was probably one of my top moments of this whole trip.

kawkaw

i can't wait to tell you about this old guy i met in the road. but i have to wake up in 5 hours so for now the picture will have to do. & that's Dr. Najib in the middle.

boy o boy

Friday in Afghanistan is the weekend, so I tagged along with Najib on a few social events. First was his friend's wedding party, held in a big hall in Kabul which is actually two buildings in one. Any man who enters the woman's side is killed. (I had pictured something more like an conservative shul, where the screen dividers allow a little peeking. Shows how much i know.)

So the men's side was about 200 of us all sitting at round tables. There was a band, and a dance floor, and Afghans are very vocally appreciative of smooth dance moves as I discovered. I busted a few maneuvers and the crowd ahhhed and clapped. One boy started dancing with me sort of suggestively and my gaydar started bleeping, but then i looked and every boy had taken another boy as a partner. So I relaxed and went with the flow. That's when the shadram, the best friend of the groom's father, grabbed my hands in his and started leading me in a series of foot hops which was sort of like caveman ballet, or over-caffinated tai chi. I kept jumping the gun and leaping to the other foot too early. We spun back to back and my hat flew off. Then he grabbed me around the hips. I know what this sounds like but everyone else was doing the same thing and it didn't feel awkward. Reminded me of my dad teaching me how to dance a girl in our old kitchen in larchmont. Those are still my go-to moves.

The food at this event was something special; there was the usual birinj -rice with boiled raisins - and yogurt and spinach but here with two kinds of meat and cauliflower and some dumplings and a kind of afghan kim chi. Then there was more dancing and then a formal note was passed to the bandleader requesting an 'attan,' a pashtun dance/contest where the dancers twirl and kick in a rotating circle until one by one they drop off exhausted and only one remains. We left soon after that dance and ran into some actors filming a movie. A short guy in a silk yellow shirt and dark sunglasses was falling over and over down the stairs while crushing a can of pepsi in his hand.

a sleepy call to prayer

i woke up early and walked outside in the dark. the muezzin had just started his call to prayer. The voice crackly over the megaphone from the mosque many blocks away sounded young, and freshly woken, like someone singing and stretching at the same time. Then it finished abruptly like he just said "fuck it" and dived back into the pillow. there was this beautiful absence of sound and a few very bright stars in the sky.

i stepped through the courtyard over to where i'd left my new shoes to age in last night's rain. i had to buy them at a little shack in the kabul market & i believe the guy charged me double or triple price, that is he charged me $12. I bought them for Kandahar because i'm told everyone wears the same shoes in Kandahar. They're known as 'silver shoes' and they're ugly, dark & uncomfortable. i love them. i think i'll take a shower in them now.

this blog is powered with diesel fuel

i wrote this first sentence in the dark. and this one. Now the generator is humming and the lights are back. Diesel fumes drift up to my office on the second floor, mixing with the smell of rain, and the firewood in the stove. Other smells of Kabul include: sewage in gutters. garbage in mud. those tasty bread patties stuffed with green stuff and grease. unheated rooms. closed doors. And dust - ok that's not a smell but it lingers long after. My sinuses feel like beach dunes.

I had four minutes on Morning Edition today. It was fun but took a while with tech problems. We were supposed to go through a super-clean satellite phone but it wasn't firing, so i spent a few hours on the skype line with NPR's tireless engineer bob duncan trying to reposition this little dirt-smudged doodad on my balcony in kabul to sync up with a satellite over the indian ocean... it wasn't catching the angle but a couple of afghanistan ag reports did the trick. by that point it was 2am when i wrote my previous blog entry totally beat. Only today i found the darn doodad died, no juice in the battery, which meant a frantic search for the plug and then finally I just talked to rene by cell.

before the call i walked over to NATO HQ to meet with them and get my facts straight. I haven't spent much time at the base. It's a multi-national force of course, & there's something like 15 or 17 different languages spoken; even the soldiers have trouble communicating sometimes. Today I dealt with an Italian, then a Virginian while the Russians and Moldovians hung around back at the post telling jokes. Finally I was escorted into the base by a pair of press reps. I find military press folks generally more likeable then their civilian counterparts. They're the interface between the patriotic class and the brainy cynic; the result in some is a sort of open-knuckled irony which i find very enjoyable. I walked out smiling and tore my wrinkle-free shirt on the barbed wire.

more npr

hey - thanks for the nice words on the blog - it really means a lot. And my 15 subscribers! Thanks for tuning in! This blog is sort of my faithful companion out here on the steppes. Sorry i've been neglecting - it's been a really blogworthy two days- plus i got to meet the guy who inspired this whole afghan adventure!... all the details very very soon. plus pictures.

Right now i'm exhausted - 2 am here - and it's possible i'm going to be live on NPR tomorrow. on morning edition. or not...news is shifty.

take care all! nothing like lonely ol' kabul to make you miss the folks back home.

the taliban killed my day

i left for jalalabad with high hopes, a tight schedule, and a photographer in tow. but the best laid plans were suicide bombed away.

1. So we left for Jalalabad early yesterday morning. Really early, and it was snowing, which put my driver Zalmay in a bad mood and he chomped grumpily on a cold slab of uzbek bread. But Dr. Najib my translator/fixer/protector/fool (in the sense of the royal fool that's constantly mocking the king) was in a capital mood, he said he loves to get out of kabul and into the mountains. As we drove he sung a song whose lyrics are roughly ' mountains of afghanistan, how we love you... you defeated the russians, you defeated the british, you defeated alexander, etc etc.' He said that he loves to hike the famous Afghan mountains and once met an old man on the trail in winter walking in flip flops. "Uncle," said Najib, "aren't your feet cold?" "No," answered the man, "the magic of the mountain keeps them warm."

2. As we approached Jalalabad we descended in elevation, almost 200 meters, so the snow turned to rain and we all shed our winter coats. We all wore 'perohan tambon,' the long shirt and loose pants and vest that is the uniform here; all except our photographer Massoud, a refugee from Iran. He was all corduroy and fancy sunglasses. We drove past a lake, famous for its fish sold by boys on the side of the dusty highway, the fish strung on twine like christmas lights. The guys clamored for a fish breakfast but I said no - though i was starving.

3. Even still we were late to our first interview, only to find out that most of the province was under security alert. In fact, hundreds of angry villagers were at that moment marching down the road towards us. Things got a little hectic after that, but it turned out that a minivan loaded with explosives had targeted an American convoy; what happened next is under dispute but the US forces did shoot back and killed at least 10 civilians. The village we had meant to go to was now inaccessible, so we ditched that story for the moment and went to the hospital to interview some of the shooting victims. I filed something for npr which took all day what with finding an internet cafe and all. If you heard the npr spot you can hear typing in the background, which was a jalabad dude IMing his girlfriend in Pakistan. The day was lost and the area still hot so we headed back to the hotel, where al jazeera english tried to buy my videotape from the hospital only it turned out it was the wrong format for international tv. Too bad because I could have eaten a lot of fish with that cash.

4. The next day all the NGOs were on lockdown preparing for a protest in Jalalabad which never materialized, but kept the workers in long enough to kill some of our photo plans, then we headed down a bumpy road to the Kama district. God this is beautiful, poor country. I'll post those photos soon.

5. Then we ate our fish and zalmay beat me up.

red hot & sizzling

I am excited to get out of Kabul. I wonder if it's partly because i'm living in relative luxury at the NPR compound - with an infinitely kindly staff who feed me well and only minor things to worry about like hot water, electricity and internet. There's also something skewed about Kabul, just because there are so many internationals here. The other night my driver Zalmay and I went out for lunch and he took me to a block with two Sufi restaurants across from each other. (Just because I realize you're probably picturing a normal city block with restaurants, let me explain that there's nothing else on this block except the two restaurants, and a blockful of rubble.) One restaurant had a security gate and an armed guard and a sign in English advertising Tasty Sufi Delights. "That one for foreigner. Very much expensive." He turned to point to the other one, which had a broken sign and stacks of what looked like chicken cages out front, and loud voices and cigarette smoke wafting out from inside. "That one cheap!"


But I admit i have partaken of a few of the foreigner joints, like mexican food the other night, and tonight, dinner with a couple of development contractors in a steak joint built outside the old soviet housing blocks - the restaurant is called 'Red Hot and Sizzling' and the manager also operates this catering service called 'Catering Without Borders' where he'll promise a full meal flown in to any airport in Afghanistan or surrounding. During our dinner one of the contractors was arranging for a catered breakfast at the Kandahar airport, complete with helicopter pickup, the guy was saying yes yes yes i half expected him to say 'and how many vegetarians?'

Tomorrow, Jalalabad and Batikot. I won't have my computer but will blog again in a few.

the persian art of cursing

The scene: A Kabul traffic jam. No lanes, no street lights, dust everywhere. Everybody's honking, nobody's moving. Landmine victims balance their thigh stumps on crutches in the center of the road, their hands outstretched for change; other beggars are the women with dust-streaked burkas holding babies with sore splotchy skin - the women wailing but their babies deathly silent - and the orphans, some as young as 4 or 5, darting in and out of the cars selling pieces of gum or trying to wash your windshield (with no water, just a scrap of rag). Some of these boys actually press their face up against your window and just sob.

Among all this suffering there's a certain salvation in the art of the exquisitely delivered curse, of which Afghans are - at least according to them - the world's masters. I'll let you be the judge, but here was today's exchange, between a bicyclist and a taxi driver; the taxi cut off the bicycle and in return, the bicyclist slapped the car as he rode off. The driver opened his door, leaned out and shouted: "Fuck your mother from the front and your sister from the back!"

To which the bicyclist, fast disappearing into the dust responded, "Fuck your grandfather's bones!"

sin city

I met the star of "Sin City" in a gym in Kabul. OK, not that Sin City. I'm talking about the soon-to-be-released Afghan version, starring Massoud Hashimi? Who you might know from his Bollywood infotainment show on Afghanistan's most left-leaning TV station, "Tolo?"

Yeah, him. I met him at the gym. (Apparently my baby yoga moves convinced everyone in the place that I was Italian. Don't understand that one.) The gym was lo-fi, of course, a chilly little free weight room on the second floor of a sort of blitzed out market; but a friendly enough joint with a little boombox playing europop and a beer/juice bar off in the corner. Massoud showed me the poster for his new film, which he also produced and wrote. It stars him, two girls and three nefarious looking dudes. The dudes kidnap his fiancee and the other girl commits suicide because he's got a fiancee (ok, he's a hottie and knows it). I point to the bad guys and ask if they kidnap for Taliban. "No no no," he says, "We don't want to make films about the old problems like Taliban. We need to talk about the the bad guys that are killing our country now."

It's true. In the West you always hear about Taliban, which makes sense because that's who the allies are fighting. But for most folks I meet here, the real enemy are the thugs, the rapists, the criminals that roam freely in a country that can barely police itself.

arrival in the land of mountains & dudes

sorry no photos today folks - my eyes are still focusing. first day in afghanistan & where do i begin? i only hope that you yes you aren't subscribing to this blog because i'd really like to be able to edit this post after the fact without you knowing it. no way I'm gonna get this right on the first try.

So, arrived in Kabul this afternoon from Delhi. Flew Indian Air, where security is strictly voluntary: they screen your luggage, then give it back to you before you check it, oh well. lovely in-flight meal though. spicy veggie rice & chickpea raita, & what's that darlin yoghurt dessert with the squishy rice noodles i love so? landing is a similarly DIY affair - dudes are out their seats while the plane is still taxiing. And they're almost all dudes on this flight. I grab my accordion from the overhead bin and join the leather-jacketed masses out onto the tarmac, where we're surrounded on all sides by the snowy granite faces of the Hindu Kush mountains. A silkscreen of President Karzai embossing the terminal seems positively trippy - he's tinted of purple and yellow like an icon by Andy Warhol. Under those glowing arms is a rather desperate-sounding quote, something to the effect of: "All the Afghan People are One Nation and We Desire to Live in Peace." We're herded into an unlit unheated concrete structure where men huddle around every available hard surface filling out their arrival forms. Sort of that apocalyptic bank lobby feel I recognize from certain eastern european countries but the people are much nicer, they make a space for me. When I finish scribing my form, in duplicate, a skinny guy in an olive green jacket - he's obviously freezing - grabs it and starts copying out the information onto a third card. Only he can't read English and some of the questions this card asks are different so there's confusion. We huddle together sorting it out and I wonder how many times he's done this procedure. I can't help feeling that we're sort of making up the rules as we go along, and the sense continues in the guard station - they scowl and glare at the passport of one passenger, but laughingly stamp mine without a glance. No customs form, no bag check, no questions about the bottle of duty-free single malt scotch I've smuggled into this muslim country.

Bottoms up, friends, and welcome to Afghanistan.

medicine men

It all starts tomorrow. Tonight I'm laying over in Delhi, and laying low... still getting over the flu. Got a massage, ate curry, strolled through a beautiful temple in my socks, did manage to locate the only store in the city selling 'danceable cassette tapes' (Bobby brown, anyone?) in order to obtain a gift for my fixer and new friend in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif. Bought sandals i don't need, gave money to a street urchin which prompted a mass swarming around me; escaped into a metro station, found myself in the motorcycle district, discovered another temple, and then I met Palwan, a former strongman who now uses special herbs to break open 'the walls around the muscles that stop them from growing.' He also cures broken bones and the pink muscleman graffitti in the background is a painting of him. He's very kind and strong in that fairytale way and I wished I could take him with me on the plane to Kabul.

nothing permanent (Delhi)

arrived in delhi in the wee hours, exhausted, still nursing the flu, choking on the smog that shrouds the airport like the scene in casablanca. not so bad as it used to be, apparently, now that all the buses & rickshaws run on natural gas. "Now you can see the sky and everything!" says my taxi driver Ahmad.

chotchkies

This photo taken in Washington Dulles airport just before departing. Note the NCPR thermos, rapidly becoming my favorite travel item. If I look dazed its because I've just stuffed my pockets with overpriced airport souvenir pens that say "Welcome to the USA!" I wish my gifts were more useful. Also, my cheap CVS watch keeps falling off. I miss the watch my dad gave me. Little things can leave you feeling disconnected from yourself.

T-4: boiled garlic & specialty underwear.

well, here we go. Four days before my plane to Afghanistan & I'm curled up on the couch with a serious headcold. sleepy, coughy, with a headache that persists unless i pour a steady stream of honeyed tea down my throat. i'm popping boiled garlic cloves because the raw ones make me cry.

Don't know why i got sick. Perhaps it's stress. Or the weather. Maybe it was the late night i spent at REI stocking up on wicking fabrics and specialty underwear.

As it happened, the REI salesguy was a special forces marine who had just returned from Afghanistan. (I've given up being surprised at how many strangers I meet turn out to have just been or about to go.) He was very helpful, said he'd email me a better place to find a first aid kit - "what you need they don't sell here." (Ominous but kindly.) Unfortunately, my mom was shopping with me, which led to the following exchange:

MOM: So you were just in Afghanistan? How is it over there?
MARINE: It's bad. And it's gonna get a lot worse.
MOM: Really.
MARINE: Yes Ma'am. Taliban are going to try their best to make life highly difficult.
MOM: Oh my.
ME: Hello? Um, yes. Sir? Yes I just wanted to introduce my mother? this is my mom.
MARINE: Nice to meet you.
ME: So, uh, let's just keep it, um... [horizontal hand chopping gesture].
MARINE: Well the good thing is the people have decided what they want. The Afghans. They don't want the Taliban. They want freedom and democracy. We're going to see a new Afghanistan pretty soon.

Notice how his second answer never contradicted the first but conveyed the opposite impression. What a salesman.