Dispatches from Afghanistan
|
SEPTEMBER 16, 2004 - KITES MEET HELICOPTERS
The Kabul of today is not the Kabul of three years ago, or even half a year ago. While you can see plenty of burnt-out cars and houses reduced to rubble without looking hard, businesses are open, houses are being rebuilt, and people are out on the street en masse during daylight hours, going to work, doing their errands, and visiting with neighbors.
People are going on with their lives. Despite the ways in which life has improved, sadly, too many Afghans are struggling to survive, especially in the extremely insecure rural areas that make up the majority of the country. For now, at least, in Kabul a new day has dawned, albeit an extremely nerve-wracking and tenuous one.
Seated at the bottom of a valley ringed by mostly treeless, daub-colored mountains crusted with clusters of mud-brick houses and crowned with crumbling forts, Kabul is surprisingly green and lush. The weather, except around noon, is relatively cool in September, and pine trees and other vegetation have recovered from the ravages of nearly a decade of drought, giving shade to the torrent of cars stuck at one of Kabul's many rotaries. Pam Constable, a journalist here with the Washington Post, told me that during the Taliban era you could stand at one of the traffic circles for an hour and not see a single car. Now, Kabul is one giant, perpetual traffic jam
At the same time, though, Kabul is a place well-aware of the dangers that both surround it and lie within its city limits. Embassies and commercial buildings alike are ringed by serpentine coils of barbed wire and improvised blast barriers made from materials ranging from shipping crates filled with concrete to rocks packed in chicken wire. These measures are constant reminders of the real threat posed by gunmen, car bombs, and rocket and mortar attacks.
Members of ISAF, the security force commanded by NATO, whip around the city on patrol in distinctive armored Land Cruisers. Chinook helicopters, Hueys, and Black Hawks dart among the clouds. You don't need an alarm here to start your day. The transport planes will wake you up—and they don't acknowledge snooze buttons.
But military aircraft are not the only occupants of the sky; something else flies above Kabul as well, showing that there is still room for simple pleasures among the heightened tensions of this uncertain season.
Throughout the day, flocks of kites wing their way erratically through the sky like drunken birds. Usually made of vinyl, cloth or plastic, kites are omnipresent and important parts of Afghan culture, whether in the air or on the ground. Children (and adults, too) stand on the roofs of their mud houses and try and catch the sometimes violent gusts of wind that tumble down from the mountains, which resemble deformed sand castles at your local public beach, waiting to be washed away.
One of Afghanistan's most popular pastimes, kite flying was banned under the Taliban but has now come back with a vengeance. Today I saw one red-cheeked and muddy child try to fly the most pitiful-looking kite you've ever seen—it was a composite of a thing: a plastic bag and some used soda straws attached to a length of greasy string. But the boy was happy, as you would be too if you managed, as he did, to get that Frankenstein of a kite off the ground for more than a minute.
Many of the kites bear the red, black and green tri-color of the Afghan flag. Some are adorned with bright pastels, others with tiny mirrors that reflect flashes of light as the kites dangle above. If you look up long enough at the kites of Kabul, you begin to think that this is any other place, that life here is just plain normal.
Kids. Kites. Sun.
Suddenly, however, whoosh... Afghanistan's other reality intervenes, and there are soldiers, somewhere overhead, hurtling off towards some place where kites are absent from the sky.
Smokey Robinson and the Acronyms
The way the Afghans dress, not surprisingly, is as varied and colorful as their kites. The men usually wear clothes representative of their various ethnic groups. The Uzbek wear the bright green and embroidered cloaks that Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan's transitional government, often wears as a sign of unity to go with the rest of his multi-ethnic ensemble. Old, turbaned Pashtuns follow their foot-long beards down the street, while Tajik men congregate on the corner wearing the distinctive Pakol hat—tan and flat and associated most often in Western depictions of Afghanistan with the Mujahideen and Shah Ahmed Masood, the late leader of the Northern Alliance assassinated by Al Qaeda operatives on September 9, 2001.
Masood's picture hangs in Kabul from office buildings, gates to residential compounds, and taxi windows; you can even purchase his likeness on prayer rugs or see his profile painted on the back of trucks. If you didn't know who Masood was, you would think that Afghans were huge Bob Marley fans, the resemblance is so similar. I should, if I have time to swing it, write a post just about buses and trucks. They are upliftingly garish affairs with ornate roof racks that defy adequate description. Many have frescos painted on the cab that show lions eating antelopes, mountain vistas, or defiant eagles, a common symbol in Afghanistan. These vehicles are more "land boats" than traditional trucks, lumbering across the rough roads of the rural areas crammed to the roof with men, women, children, their possessions, and livestock.
Anyhow. Back to my point, which is around here somewhere... Many of the women still wear the distinctive blue burqa, infamous in the West as a symbol of the Taliban-era fatwas, or religious edicts, which severely restricted even the most basic human rights of women. These ankle-length shrouds cover the entire body in a style that looks practical only if you are a beekeeper. The Hazara women, on the other hand, don silk shawls on their heads that are distinctive in design and texture.
According to a survey conducted during the Taliban period, more Afghan women wore the burqa outside Taliban-controlled areas than inside it, a finding contrary to the conventional wisdom that still prevails. At the same time, however, you also see some women wearing decidedly western dress, makeup and all. I saw a five- or six-year-old girl wearing sequins this morning near the Kabul Inn, the guesthouse where we are staying.
But regardless of what they wear, the women of Afghanistan are still far from equal members of Afghan society. They eat in rooms separate from men. Women at many rural clinics sit behind screens in waiting rooms to avoid sitting next to men. And many women are not allowed to travel outside their homes without a Mahram, a male guardian who travels with female family members in public to protect them from various perceived threats to their chastity and purity.
These are just a few, comparatively minor, examples of how Afghan women from all ethnic groups are treated as second-class citizens. Though Afghanistan is often cited as one of the most extreme examples of women being treated that way by their societies, there are so many other countries where women are not allowed—let alone actively empowered—to contribute all they are capable of giving to their communities because of entrenched discrimination.
Oxfam is working to help women in culturally appropriate ways be full participants in their neighborhoods and villages. Involving women civically in their communities is a key part of our Afghanistan program. One way we try to accomplish this goal is through our support of CDCs, or community development councils, which are a key part of the World Bank's National Solidarity Program, or NSP. (That all aid workers speak only in acronyms is a CKBRAF, or Commonly Known But Rarely Admitted Fact.)
Most of the major international NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in Afghanistan are helping to facilitate the NSP. These CDCs are helping community shuras, or councils, to elect leaders, choose development projects that the NSP will fund, and pave the way for local governments to coalesce.
On another note: The "Jordan" toothbrush is working out fine. One problem, though—I forgot my toothpaste. Yet another problem to be surmounted by your men in Kabul—your supposedly intrepid blogger and the irrepressible Kenny Rae. Most of our days are spent dealing with the hiccups that come from trying to get your work done in a place where telecommunications are difficult, movement is restricted for security purposes, and it can take days to set up the meetings that you need to arrange with people who may or may not understand what you are saying.
But Kenny is the master of the cell phone, dialing and redialing all the people we need to see to check on our existing programs and explore funding new ones. Without his persistence, and the patience and help of our colleagues at the Oxfam offices here, I would just be sitting in the compound at the Kabul Inn listening to the loop of MoTown music they play during dinnertime. There is nothing like listening to the mingling of a Muezzin singing the call of prayer at the same time Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' "Tracks of My Tears" breaks your heart in the background.
Only in Afghanistan...
