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.