Snap and Scribble

This blog post started life as a response to a post in my friend Ingrid’s blog – but i thought it warranted a post of its own…

Living here in Kabul, as a relatively rich foreigner, i seem to have become a member of the privileged elite. I don’t need to worry about trivial matters like washing machines and vacuum cleaners, as we employ people to worry about things like that. We haven’t actually got a washing machine, but that doesn’t really bother me much, as we have a cleaner who comes in a couple of times a week and destroys our clothes for us under the pretence of washing them.

I do sometimes think we should get a washing machine, to save her having to handwash everything, but they’re very expensive and i don’t know how long i’m going to be living here.

The cleaner also transfers the dust from the floor to the air with one of the local “brooms” – which are kinda like those brooms made out of a bundle of long bristles, only without a long handle – which is what people use here. Obviously the people who have to sweep floors aren’t important or rich enough to warrant putting back-saving handles on the things… Or maybe broom handles just haven’t been invented in Afghanistan yet – like lots of other things, including screws!

But we have got a vacuum cleaner. And i’ve even used it – once. So the cleaner probably doesn’t really use the broom… (I’m always at work when she comes, so i don’t know.)

It’s kinda weird having a cleaner – or rather two of them, as the one that my housemate Roya employed brings her sister along with her for protection, as there’s men in the house. But both of them have got husbands who are unable to work, and families to support, and it provides employment for them and shares a little of our money with women who would otherwise be quite skint no doubt.

We’ve also got a couple of chowkidors – or “guards”, who work rotating 24-hour shifts. They spend almost all their time at work sitting in the guards’ hut near the gate – drinking tea no doubt, smoking dope (one of them), and watching television, or sleeping. And they don’t do very much apart from opening the normally bolted gate in the 3m high wall (which surround most houses in Kabul) when anyone wants to go in or out. But they do light the fires for us and will go to the shops for us too, if we ask them. Which i don’t.

It’s a very strange life. I’ve never been keen on people cleaning up after me or running around for me. But it’s very normal here and it’s hard to avoid. At least we haven’t got a cook – like we did where i lived last.

Tags: Afghanistan, Society, Travel and Places by will
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On Wednesday morning i was woken up by an explosion – for the first time in a few months. I only half heard it, because it woke me up, but i could tell it was quite a distance away – and a bloody big explosion. So i went back to sleep.

There was a bit of drama that morning with getting to work. Our boss told the few of us foreigners working for the organisation to stay and home and keep off the Kabul streets until there was more information about what was going on.

In the end, i got picked up by a work driver at about half past nine – about an hour and a half later than normal. I didn’t mind this at all, as i’ve had bad toothache for a few days and i hadn’t slept well the night before – so i slept till about nine o’clock, when i got the message that a driver was on the way.

It turned out that the explosion was an accident in a gun shop two or three kilometres away from where i live. It destroyed quite a few shops around it and half a dozen or so people were killed.

It seemed really weird, in a city where deliberate explosions are not exactly unknown, for something like this to be an accident. But i guess they happen here just as much as anywhere else.

Tags: Afghanistan, Travel and Places by will
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I had some bad news the other day. The Arirang House Korean restaurant not far from work, in Karte Se, which has been closed for a month, isn’t going to reopen! It was my favourite place to eat in Kabul. In the whole of Afghanistan. Maybe even my favourite place in all of central Asia! This is going to have a seriously detrimental effect on my life, my diet and my health!

Here’s a blog post i wrote about the Korean restaurant a few months back.

Tags: Afghanistan, Travel and Places by will
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There’s a very old wall that runs over the top of the hill called Kohi Sher Dar Waza, close to the centre of Kabul. It dates from the Moghul empire and runs from one side of the hill to the other. Parts of it are still complete and parts of it have been reduced to a low ridge down the side of the hill – no doubt by people taking materials to build houses. Parts of it have crumbled a bit, but are more or less intact.

The line of this wall is a fairly popular walk for foreigners in Kabul, as it’s one of the few places in this city where you can get away from the crowded and dirty streets and get a bit of fresh air. There are lots of hills, but this is just about the only one you can walk over and not have to worry about land mines – because a four or five metre wide strip along each side of the wall has been de-mined. Yesterday, Meghann and Rose and i walked from the west end to the east end of it.

We were lucky with the weather – which has been very changeable lately. It was a beautiful, sunny day. Although it wasn’t really what you’d call “warm”, it wasn’t a bad temperature for a long and fairly strenuous walk.

Most people seem to do the walk in the opposite direction, for some reason. But we started at Baghi Babar – a walled garden that the emperor Babur built about five hundred years ago. His tomb’s in the middle of it.

We went inside the garden first, and had a bit of a look round. It really wasn’t the best time of year for it, though, as all the trees were leafless and nothing much was growing. It would no doubt be beautiful in spring.

We didn’t really know how to get to the wall from there, but we’d managed to get some vague directions from somebody who’d done the walk before. We walked around the back of the garden and up the hillside, through the little streets and laneways between the illegal houses that creep up the sides of almost all the hills in central Kabul. These houses are the standard rural-type mudbrick construction that you can see all over the place outside Kabul.

There were lots of kids playing in the streets, and most of them hassled us either to give them pens or to take their photos. Meghann and Rose took quite a few photos of the kids. I hardly took any here, as two people photographing them seemed like enough – plus i’ve got quite a few pictures of kids on the streets already.

We walked up and up, but didn’t seem to be getting any closer to the wall. Eventually, the houses started to thin out and a young guy outside one of them gave us directions. He ended up walking with us up the hill, until we got to the wall.

It was a bit tricky picking the best path a lot of the time. There was still snow on the hill to the north of the wall, but none on the south side. So, where possible, we tried to either walk along the top of the wall or on the southern side of it. But we still had to walk through the snow quite a lot on the way up.

It was great being out of the city – even though we could see it laid out below us, and hear the weird cacophony of city noises drifting up the hill. And it was great to be able to have a good long walk somewhere without concrete, cars, people, or lots of mud. There were a few muddy bits up there – but not many, and they were nothing like as bad as the mud in my street.

Of course, being totally unprepared for a long walk, we hadn’t brought any water with us. So Meghann got quite excited when a couple of other people came into site, walking towards us. Her first thought was maybe we could scrounge some water from them!

She got a drink from them, but neither Rose nor i did – as they didn’t seem to have much to spare, and we weren’t that desperate. The other thing we got from them was a bit of an idea of the lie of the land at the other end of the wall. We had no idea where we were going to end up, and hadn’t been able to arrange for our driver to pick us up, as he didn’t seem to know, either.

At this point, we were at the highest point on the wall and about halfway through the three hour walk. The views were spectacular and it was interesting to get this sort of perspective on the city.

On the way down the other side, we met a couple of other groups of people walking up the wall in the opposite direction. And round the point where the wall ended – which was still quite a way up the hill – there were a few groups of Afghan men and kids out for a bit of fresh air and a different view.

From here, we had to pick out a path down to the bottom of the hill, through a much smaller group of houses than we’d passed through on the way up on the other side.

At the bottom, there’s a really big cemetery and, beyond that, a large lake. The cemetery, like all the cemeteries i’ve seen here, mostly didn’t have grave stones, as such – graves were surrounded by long bits of rock, with one end stuck into the ground. But there were a few graves with manufactured surrounds or inscribed headstones.

There was a bit of driver confusion, and we had to wait there for half an hour or so. But fortunately, there was a small corner shop where we bought some water, mandarins, sultanas, walnuts and biscuits, and had a late lunch – which we ate sitting on a low wall in the cemetery, looking across the road towards the lake.

Tags: Afghanistan, Travel and Places by will
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On Sunday 25th February, less than 48 hours after getting back from Badghis, i set off on another trip out of Kabul. This time it was only a day trip though. I went to Panjshir with three guys from our technical unit with enough equipment to install a new radio station there.

Panjshir is a mountainous province, about three hours drive north from Kabul. the province was made famous by Massoud, a commander of the anti-Taliban forces and now a national hero. The radio station we were going to install was within sight of the monument built in Massoud’s memory.

There was a lot of messing around before we left. We had to take furniture as well as equipment, so we went in two cars. All this stuff had to be loaded up and we didn’t end up leaving in the first of the two cars till after ten o’clock. Of course, i managed to forget to bring my camera with me when i left the house that morning, so we had to call in at my place on the way out of Kabul.

I’ve never driven out of Kabul going north, so this was a completely new route for me. The northern road goes into the mountains (yes, Ingrid, the Hindu Kush) and they gradually get closer and closer until it feels like you’re driving up a really wide valley.

Some way out, a long line of power pylons stared – these are all newly built and are going to be part of a power line that will eventually bring electricity from Tajikistan to Kabul. It’s supposed to be going to be finished this year, but i can’t help feeling these pylons will be very handy targets for the Taliban.

About half past twelve, we came into a town called Charikar, where we stopped for lunch. We went to a restaurant called the Panjshir Restaurant. It was a bit like a workers’ cafe in London, in its decor. There were pictures and various decorations around the walls and lots of tables, all fairly close together. It was a largish place and it was almost full.

We found a table and sat down. There were three things on the menu – Kabuli Pilau (greasy rice with strips of grated carrot and raisins), Kofta (meatballs) and Kebabs. We all ordered the Kabuli Pilau, which wasn’t nearly as greasy as some of them are! It came with a cup of some really nice soup with chick peas in the bottom of it, a small plate with some chickpeas in a sauce and a single meatball, bread, and some salad – sliced tomato, chopped cabbage, whole green chillis.

The pilau came with a big chunk of mutton in it. The food was really good – for Afghan food, anyway. Not too greasy, and the flavours were good. We followed it with some green tea.

From Charikar, it was nearly an hour until we entered the Panjshir valley. There was a boom gate across the road, with half a dozen police or soldiers (i can’t tell which is which) standing around it. We had to stop and they took our names and the registration number of the vehicle. Someone said this security was because there were lots of commanders living up this valley. I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant though…

Twenty minutes or so drive up the valley, we arrived at the PRT base, where we had to go to pick up the keys to the station building. The station itself was up a steep and dodgy track a long way up above the road. It was two “connex” type huts – which are really shipping containers, with wall linings inside and windows and a proper, house-type door. They’d been put right next to the mast, which was built a few months back.

We started at about three o’clock and the station was on-air by about six – which was pretty amazingly fast, really. Two antennas had to be put up the top of the 30ft mast and a cable run up there from inside the building. A small generator, which we’d brought with us, had to be rigged up and wired to the building electrics. The transmitter, mixer, computer, etc, had to be hooked up together. A satellite dish had to be installed, pointed to the right satellite and adjusted for best reception – and then cabled into the building.

When it was nearly finished, i had a climb up to the top of the mast myself – just for the hell of it!

We left the station on-air, rebroadcasting our satellite service – which it will do for a few days until station staff can be trained etc. Station staff and a board of management are normally organised before it gets to this stage, but this one was a bit unusual.

On the way back to Kabul, we stopped in a different town to have an evening meal. This restaurant didn’t have tables – instead there were raised platforms down each side of the long room and one down the middle. There were carpets on top and a strip of vinyl running down the middle of each platform. You sat cross legged on the carpet and the food was laid out on the vinyl strip. This is a fairly common way to eat in Afghanistan.

The food was similar to the place where we had lunch, but i didn’t think it was as good.

I finally got home at about quarter to eleven that night.

Tags: Afghanistan, Travel and Places by will
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