September 20, 2004 - A Tale of Two Snapshots

Posted: 20 September 2004

by Nathaniel Raymond

Today was the one day we were able to leave Kabul and actually see what Oxfam and our partners are doing on the village level. Kenny and I rose early to hit the dusty trail to Parwan, one of Kabul's neighboring provinces, in the company of Jalaluddin Ahmed, the Afghan Program Manager for BRAC (the Bangladesh Rural Assistance Committee), one of the organizations that Oxfam is supporting.

We passed a market bazaar on the way out of the city a little before 9 a.m. Women in their burqas were moving from stall to stall, pricing grain, fruit, and eggs. A teenager was cutting a piece of metal with an acetylene torch while a group of men gathered nearby in a tight circle to listen to what looked like some sort of an Imam—a Muslim teacher.

Leaving the city's outskirts behind, we climbed steep hills in our Land Cruiser on the newly paved road leading to Charikar, the provincial capital of Parwan. Just a few kilometers outside the city, rows upon rows of new housing compounds were being built out of the hillside. The full white sprawl of Kabul was visible behind us. Men on bicycles and in donkey carts disappeared in the rearview mirror.

Blown-out and bullet-pocked hulks of armored personnel carriers lay along the road, unintended monuments to the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan. Rust-crusted artillery pieces faced yesterday's frontlines. In one field, nearly a battalion's-worth of lime-green tanks, their barrels pointed haphazardly, perhaps at ghosts, sat waiting either for a museum to be built around them or to be cut apart for scrap metal. The sheer plenitude of derelict military materiel between Kabul and Charikar is a fossil record of winners and losers—mostly losers—in the past three decades of attempts by nations, warlords, and militias to control this country.

BRAC's work in Parwan, like its ongoing programs in 32 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces, focuses on establishing integrated projects in communities to provide Afghans with livelihoods and basic skills that will reap benefits after outside support ends. BRAC, one of the largest budget lines in Bangladesh's annual budget, is the world's biggest NGO in terms of both budget and number of staff. Its headquarters, the BRAC tower, is home to tens of thousands of staff in a building that would seem more suited to downtown Manhattan than downtown Dhaka.

BRAC won an award last year from the Gates Foundation for its contributions to poverty alleviation. The incoming class at Harvard Business School this fall will be studying BRAC's bookkeeping and project-management techniques as one of their case studies. Using models BRAC has developed over the past 30 years or so in Bangladesh, it has proven to one of the most effective aid agencies working in Afghanistan.

While some groups are still in a humanitarian-response posture, BRAC has shifted its approach decisively to a "development" focus, looking toward long-term results rather than responding to immediate concerns such as temporary food shortages or emergency water provision. Afghanistan is a place, like so many post-conflict environments, that requires emergency relief and long-term development assistance simultaneously—a tough balance to achieve in such a precarious security environment.

Arriving in Charikar, we met two of Jalal's colleagues, who led us on our tour of four projects under way in Charikar and nearby Jeb el Sug, basically a suburb of the greater Charikar metropolitan area. We followed behind them in our Land Cruiser while they led the way in a mud-splattered station wagon with a decal of a giant bird on the rear window that said SPEED EAGLE underneath it.

As we approached a test plot in the Oxfam-funded hybrid maize project, Kenny seemed to be dreading our first stop. It turns out that on his last visit to Afghanistan in April, Kenny took a photograph of one of the local farmers that is benefiting from the program. Kenny, ever gracious, promised to send the farmer a copy of the snapshot. Needless to say, the picture had yet to arrive.

Fortunately, much to Kenny's relief, the first plot we visited was not the one owned by Marwiq. (Please, Marwiq, forgive my spelling.) An old man clutching a rake met us at the top of the path eager to show us his pride and joy, a maize plot that produces more than twice as much maize as is grown by traditional methods. Standing several feet above their neighbors, these maize plants were greener and hardier than their midget counterparts in surrounding plots. Improved fertilizer, drought-resistant plants, and better irrigation techniques are making these test plots the envy of other local farmers who want to learn how to improve their yields like this man has done.

Growing more maize gives immediate and real benefits to farming families. Besides putting more food on the table and in their livestock's feeding troughs, extra maize can enable families to afford to keep their kids in school, purchase medicine, and buy more farm animals. As I have mentioned in previous posts, Afghanistan is basically 25 years behind the rest of the developing world in terms of agricultural technology and learning. Most Afghans are farming the way they did in the late 1970's—making them unable to compete with many other developing economies that abandoned such traditional approaches to farming decades ago.

It was at our next stop, another hybrid maize test plot, that Kenny would finally encounter the sum of all fears: Marwiq. We parked our vehicles near a bridge at the bottom of a hill. Another burnt-out armored personnel carrier lay in the creek beneath the bridge like some wounded prehistoric animal, water flowing beneath it. Walking up the dirt road to visit the farmer, I turned around and saw a vista that was straight out of a Rudyard Kipling novel or "The Far Pavilions." Jutting from a hill was an ancient Afghan fort—turrets, minarets and all—that was framed by mountains that are covered by snow in winter, according to the locals.

Boys were flying the ubiquitous "plastic bag" kite in an untilled dirt lot as we approached. I could see elderly men, maybe members of the local shura, or council, sitting on the ground in the shade of a small grove of trees. Sadly, but not surprisingly, there wasn't a woman or girl to be seen-if they were outside the house before we arrived, they were inside now.

As so often happens when foreigners are visiting a community development project in any country, not just Afghanistan, word spreads quickly that you are in town, causing the trickle of people following you to turn instantly into a flood of active curiosity. Hey, think about it this way: If 10 Afghan guys showed up on your block in traditional dress, taking pictures, and inspecting your neighbor's backyard, wouldn't you at least get out on the curb with your binoculars and lawn chairs, too?

I think you would.

Jalal and his other colleagues from BRAC were pointing out the differences in the hybrid crop and the other maize and grain crops in surrounding plots when surly Marwiq and his son came out of nowhere, walking with purpose toward Kenny and me. We politely greeted him and his neighbors, posing for pictures with several very short and very old bearded men who were excited to have their pictures taken.

It was at about this point that our friend made it quite clear that he recognized Kenny and would not have Kenny take his picture again since he still hadn't received the photo from last time. I agreed with Marwiq. Who could blame him, really? So the upshot is that Kenny will be sending TWO pictures to a small village in Parwan province, Afghanistan, now. I fear if Kenny doesn't, next time we visit there's going to be trouble.

Moving on from viewing various examples of the maize program, our next stop was the local veterinary clinic located right across the road from Marwiq's plot. The clinic, run by a young vet from Nagrihar province, was abuzz with activity. People were bringing their goats, sheep, oxen, and cows in and out of the mud-walled compound in droves. This place is the equivalent of the local hardware store or post office for this community-gossip is exchanged, business is done, and livestock are vaccinated.

Held by their owners in a rickety wooden pen, the animals are seen one at a time while the other creatures and their owners look on interestedly, all of them amateur vets in their own right. I saw the vet apply a dark purple shellac to exo-parasites that were creating large boils on the skin of a cow. Some animals he would vigorously inject with various vaccines and antibiotics; others received the basic checkup where their hooves, eyes, and tongues were inspected for parasites and other common but potentially fatal conditions.

Jalal told us that the clinic is so popular that people used to walk from several villages away to access the services dispensed at the clinic for a small fee. BRAC now has started mobile veterinary clinics to reach all communities in the area, and it is even setting up another permanent clinic on the same model a couple villages over from this one. With a group of well-trained "para-vets" running the mobile clinics, the region has seen such a positive impact from the program that people almost never go to the government-run clinic because the quality of services is so much better through the BRAC program.

If you ever wonder how Oxfam specifically makes life better in concrete ways for people struggling to get out from under the yoke of poverty, the vet clinic is a perfect example. Ensuring that farming families are not losing their livestock to disease or injury is one of the keys to sustaining rural livelihoods in developing countries, lessening the impact of natural disasters and conflict before they happen. Oxen, donkeys, goats, sheep, and other friendly quadrupeds are drivers for economic growth in poor communities, especially in post-conflict settings.

Today was a good day.

Moo.