Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church

This month Dave Cowen interviews Carls Schroer..."On Christmas Eve 2004 I literally Googled “San Francisco De Haro Episcopal” because, while I didn’t remember the name of the church, I did know it was an Episcopal church.  Also a good friend of mine had told me when I moved into the neighborhood that she attended a lesbian wedding there. That suggested to me that it was likely to not be too offensive, and at least welcomed a diverse group of folks. Up popped SGN, and on the website, I found that there was a 10pm service, so my husband and I went.  I really didn’t think I would be returning except perhaps the next year on Christmas Eve.  But it didn’t work out that way.”

November Nyssa News

Letters from Paul

In the eighteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel we hear the following story: 

“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Two men went up to the temple to pray. 

The first was eminently respectable, a pillar of society. He was well educated and intelligent. He understood the ethical code that had developed in his ancestral religion, and he had sufficient resources to be able to observe it to the letter. He was a Pharisee - the best religious sort of person the world had devised.  He was good.  He was decent.  And he was a liar. More about that in a second.

The other man seemed very different from the first.  He was just as smart, just as insightful. He had money; but he wouldn’t care to say how he’d acquired it. His profession was collecting taxes for the invaders who had taken control of his country, and he knew that good citizens shouldn’t give their oppressors that kind of support.  He knew the tax system was corrupt, and that people like him made money from it mostly through extortion. He was an outcast. And, you wouldn’t think it to look at him, but he told the truth – completely, at least when it came to God.

The religious man had led a good life and he knew it. His behavior was exemplary, and he knew that too. So he thought his prayer should be a thanksgiving, in essence an appreciation for being the kind of person he was. His prayer could be summarized thus:  “God, I thank you that I am not like other people.” The religious man gives thanks for the things he is able to do: fasting, tithing. Apart from being thankful for all of this, he isn’t aware of having any needs.  So what’s wrong with this man, this deeply religious man?  He is a liar - he bends the truth about himself to suit his own limited vision.  The truth is he is just like the other man in the story: the taxman.  He lies to God and he lies to himself when he claims that he is not like “other people.” The one thing the taxman says that sets him apart from the Pharisee is this: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

That is the taxman’s only prayer.  It is the most honest prayer in all of the scriptures.  It is the most honest prayer because it tells two truths.  It accurately describes the condition in which the human beings find themselves - we are sinners.  And his prayer accurately describes God - God is merciful.  If there is any one trait that captures the totality of God, it is His mercy. The taxman knows God. His prayer for mercy is a plea for God to act like God.

Two men went up to the temple to pray.  One was blinded by his religious illusion of himself.  The other was opened by his humility.  Humility means seeing things the way they truly are.  Like seeing that all people are children of God, that different circumstances of education, residency status and economic position have nothing to do with a person’s worth in the eyes of God. It is acknowledging that even social outcasts and people we think of as enemies have God within them.

How much of our lives are we going to surrender to unconditional love as the cornerstone of our relationship with God? To what degree are we willing to let God love others through us in the same unconditional way? And how much of the self that feels better than others and contempt for them are we willing to let go of?

This parable raises lots of serious questions about how we are going to be the community of Christ for one another, and for the stranger that comes to be with us.  It raises questions about the ways in which we are going to pray for the strength to live into God’s grace, and demonstrate the results of that grace in our lives.  And it raises questions about the meaning and usefulness of being merely religious, especially in a world that is hungry for something much more important, like love.

Deh Mazang

First thing after breakfast the next day, we headed up the hill behind our house. Deh Mazang is one of the many “informal” settlements that make up much of the city these days. Other words people use to describe them are illegal settlements, squatter settlements etc. I love them of course. When I heard squatter settlements described I first imagined shacks built out of cardboard and tin and tents and so forth, but these are stone-built houses with big metal gates in some cases, and electricity pylons etc. There’s no running water, and you see the young girls (mostly) carrying heavy water buckets up the hill to their houses. I was very impressed when I saw how difficult it was just to haul myself up there. Pietro’s concern for the houses built on these hills is that there doesn’t seem to be much fortification against earthquakes, and Kabul is in a seismic zone. If they were to have a major earthquake, thousands of people would die in those settlements.

At the base of the hill Pietro pointed out a community graveyard. Some of the graves were just marked by slabs of slate, or rocks like you would mark a pet’s grave. Some of them had regular carved gravestones and little wrought-iron fences around them. Some of them had fabric fluttering silently in the breeze. I was struck by the emotional feel the place had, different from my village graveyard I had visited just a week or two before. Henlow had felt sad but more contained and steady. Here the grief felt deeper and wilder and the longing was palpable.

We stopped to buy juice to fortify us for the climb. The group of men clustered around the juice stand were polite but their eyes were cautious. One man sitting in the centre of the group was silent for a while but very watchful. Unlike so many of the Afghans we had met, he didn’t seem very excited to meet us. Pietro chatted a bit with the others and I hung back. P was telling them that we were getting ready to go up the hill to see the neighbourhood, we were Americans etc. The silent man said with a toss of his head something to the effect of “I don’t see why you’d want to see our neighbourhood”.  Pietro pounced.
“I am a professor at the University” he said. “I teach about city planning, and this community is very interesting to me.” The man seemed to warm up a little and they got talking. He invited us to his house, where there was a little bakery providing bread to the whole neighbourhood. We politely declined as there was already not going to be much time for our walk, and then he gave Pietro some directions as to the best way to go up the hill.

That was the attitude we met in Deh Mazang a lot. People were polite, but not thrilled to see us. The feeling seemed to be that if westerners were interested in their little nook of the world, the end must be near. And I could understand why they felt that way. I’ve heard stories of informal housing being levelled to make way for some government official’s new mansion, and they don’t have any legal right to the land. Probably as the political system settles in Afghanistan, there will be new regulations and taxes and laws governing these settlements, and the fact that they’ve made it onto the map means that it’s only a matter of time before their lives change in one way or another.

The view from Deh Mazang, like that from Tap-e Tup, was beautiful. The alleyways are built straight, so you often get a clear shot of the city between the houses. Electricity poles held spider-webs of wires, spanning out to the houses beyond. On one wall was the word OMAR painted in large letters, which Pietro told me was to tell us that the building had been checked for landmines. Actually we met another enterprising young English student moments later (he’d brought his grades to show us) who told us that in fact it was the local office of the landmine agency. We went higher, climbing a street that was paved with drying sewage and other garbage. The smell was strangely familiar, then I realised where I’d encountered it before. “Actually honey,” I called out to Pietro “Living on Sixth Street in San Francisco is a pretty good preparation for Kabul”. Then we noticed the discarded syringes lying on the ground, and the comparison was complete.

Around the corner, resting in the shade, we came across two men in matching baseball caps with a clipboard. They had been administering polio vaccinations to the kids of the neighbourhood, up to the age of 5. Pietro asked about the syringes, but their reply was inconclusive. I found myself disapproving that they were hanging out chatting instead of industriously plying their vaccines, but it was late in the morning, and they had a long list of names on their clipboard, so maybe it was okay.

We headed back down the hill. Further down, someone (CARE in Afghanistan?) had come in and paved the street with slate, with a deep trench in the middle for the sewage etc. to run out. I was carefully watching my footing, and didn’t notice a wide-laden donkey coming up the hill on the same side of the trench as me. Pietro had already hopped over to the other side, but I hesitated. Pietro started to reach for my hand, but hesitated too, not sure if it was okay to touch me in front of people. In that instant, a woman in a turned-back burqa reached out for me and helped me over the trench. I thanked her profusely, Pietro melted away, and she and I chatted as we walked down the hill. She was tall woman with strong features and dark glittering eyes. After I had told her what I was doing in Kabul, and in Deh Mazang in particular, she gave the hems of my trousers a little tug so that they covered my ankles more completely. “Here in Afghanistan” she told me “we wear our clothes like this. When you are abroad you can wear short sleeves and little skirts.” She was still very friendly, but quite firm. I found myself touched by the moment of contact, and I felt much more like I had gained a sister than received a reprimand.

We came back down through the neighbourhood, past a small clay-brick factory, and down to the main road, where once again a taxi was very easily hailed, and we were off to a tour of the headquarters of Turquoise Mountain Foundation.

TMF – the Fort

Turquoise Mountain is a recently-arrived non-profit concerned with bringing back traditional Afghan crafts and forms of construction. They were started by this guy Rory Stewart, an ex-Etonian who worked as a diplomat in Iraq and later walked across Afghanistan. He wrote a book about it called The Spaces In Between. Rory is famous, and to some extent, so is Turquoise Mountain. I heard several people mention the organisation to Pietro before our trip, and my sister’s godmother sent us a clipping from the Daily Telegraph with a photo of Rory in full Afghan drag and a piece on the foundation’s effort to counter a Soviet master plan for the city. TMF is definitely the sexy place to be in Kabul.

As such I had decided I wouldn’t like them. Our taxi pulled up as the heavily guarded gateway was opening and a couple of large black SUVs were leaving the compound. That just confirmed my prejudice. Pietro kept reminding me that he was really excited about the work that they were doing, so I tried to keep an open mind. We were to be taking a tour with a Spanish woman called Ana who was an expert in assessing heritage sites. Pietro got talking to her as we were waiting for someone to meet us, and told her he thought the TM people would be really interested in her methods of taking notes on reconstruction projects.

It seemed the people of TM were all working very hard. The woman who was scheduled to show us around was in a meeting and couldn’t get away. Two fresh faced British guys came in and stalled for her a little, but neither one felt qualified to lead a tour, and both talked about how overwhelmed they were with the work they were doing. They’d recently had some trouble with the Kabul Municipality which had shut down one of their projects for a few days. They had come to a compromise and were cautiously going ahead with work, but it had been a stressful time for everyone in the organisation. We started anyway with a young American woman called Shoshana as our guide. She brought us down to the ceramic department, where several Afghan ceramics artists were experimenting with glazes and different designs. The men stood up when we came in, and Shoshana introduced them by name, but after that there was no attempt to speak to them and nobody was on hand to interpret, so there was this awkward feeling that they were like zoo animals and we were learning about their habits. Shoshana made some comment about how the TM staff didn’t make any remarks about the quality of their work, but that they were trying to steer them towards a style of work that they knew to be authentic. 

Right around then we met Jemima, the British woman who was originally intended to show us around. She took us to see the calligraphy studio and the woodworkers. The carved doors and screens we saw in the wood working shop were just gorgeous. Jemima pointed out to Ana the different styles of carving, mixed Classical and Nuristani styles, and I learned that the Nuristani style was more geometric and angular while the Classical styles tended to be more floral. It was very interesting and as I said, the work was fantastic. “It’s quite nice, isn’t it”, said Jemima blandly. I wondered if she had been that stiff-upper-lip when she lived in Britain, or if it was an ex-pat’s affectation.

We saw a woodworking class in session. The students were all young women, but the teacher was a venerable old guy in his seventies, who told us a little about what they were doing. It was hard for me to follow what he was saying because it was all new vocabulary to me, and Jemima’s Farsi didn’t seem much better than mine. They were working on screens, intricate designs that were carefully pieced together rather than being carved from solid wood. Jemima picked up a couple of pieces and put them together, but they fit loosely and wouldn’t stick. “They are supposed to fit together without glue” she told us. “Sometimes we catch them using glue, and we get very cross with them.”

Pietro was particularly excited by the bricks they were making. He told me that the bricks we’d seen in Deh Mazang were pretty much solid clay with a little straw as a binding agent. The ones at Turquoise Mountain used much more straw, which is an excellent insulating agent, and a little slaked lime to harden it since they were using less clay. They’d had trouble getting straw that was long enough to make good bricks because their suppliers seemed to assume they were using it as feed. Pietro told me that a sixty-centimeter-thick wall of these bricks would meet German domestic insulation standards, and sure enough when we walked into a building made of these bricks, the air was several degrees cooler.

We were invited to stay for lunch. The meal was delicious: Afghan bread, salad from Jemima’s garden and a simply perfect cheese omelette served by a smiling man from the kitchen. But the conversation again was hard for me to take. There were no Afghans at the table, and Jemima and Ana dug deep into the failures of the current Afghan administration; the corruption, the thousands of dollars of aid money that had disappeared. Others joined the table and joined in. They were all people who had worked for months in Afghanistan and were thoroughly cheesed off with how difficult it was to get anything done. It seemed that they were all pushing really hard and the rigors of the political environment, climate, security and culture were all wearing on them. Andre joined us, took several moments to realize that he knew both Pietro and me, and with his arrival I got a complete picture of a group of people who were passionate and working a little beyond their means. They reminded me of Shotgun Players.

However, I was glad to leave. I was a bit uncomfortable among other Westerners because I didn’t know how I fit with them, and there was something about the culture of the organization that made me itchy. There was the touch of the old colonial about the whole thing. I felt the lack of Afghans at the table, and Jemima’s comment about getting ‘cross’ with the wood carvers when they used glue just rankled with me. I thought “My God, these people are making amazing art while their country is burning. You can’t begrudge them a dab of glue here and there.”

Kharejistan

That afternoon, we went into the very downtown of Kabul, where there are trees planted everywhere, and the streets and the sidewalks are paved. This is where the fancy hotels are, one of which, one foreign journalist wrote, makes you “forget you are in Afghanistan”. Pietro calls it Kharejistan because this is where the foreigners congregate, the people like us who are journalists, or working for aid agencies, and sure enough we ran into several people Pietro knew while we were in the area.

We started off at a very glitzy mall, where Pietro bought his heart’s desire camera. I wandered a little, window shopping, while he finalized the sale. The place definitely seemed light years from where I’d spent the last few days. The walls were all mirrors and the floors were polished white marble, seemingly designed for dusty shoes to slip on. Most of the shoes I saw there weren’t dusty, though. The women, in particular, were very sharply turned out, in tight raincoats with the belts cinched in and skintight jeans. They wore sparkly high-heeled sandals which clacked on the hard floors and steps (the escalator was broken). I was even shocked to see one Japanese woman without a headscarf. My friend from Deh Mazang would not have approved.

Expensive flashy camera purchased, I suggested to Pietro we stop for tea downstairs. Pietro looked down at the pristine little cafe and said, “well, it’s not the safest place to hang out, but what the hell?” So down we went, and when we asked for tea, this time they brought black tea with sugar cubes and a little pitcher of milk, not very Afghan at all. We sat sipping our tea and looking at each other. It was our last afternoon together in several months, and there wasn’t much we could say to each other. I tried, though. I tried to express something of how much I loved the city, what an amazing experience he had given me. I had always dreamed of the kind of travel that I’d just been doing, and there was no way I could have experienced Kabul like that without him. I tried to tell him how much I admired him for the way he was being in this city, for hacking his way through in Dari, for telling people proudly that he was American, for listening to everyone he met, and for networking Afghans and others together, sharing all the information he had and for always, always remaining positive and optimistic about the work ahead. As we looked at each other across our tea, I was very clear that we’d taken the right decision for him to come to Kabul. As hard as his absence was on all of us, it was right for him to be there, and I was glad that I was there to see it.

After a while, even I began to get spooked by how clean the cafe was, so we took off.

We headed to a shop we’d been told about by the women at Aga Khan. It was a store selling clothing and crafts made by Afghan refugees and Afghan craftsmen, and the proceeds went back to support them. I have no idea how Pietro found it. The women had described where it was and he wrote it down, but still, there was no address and no sign over a door. In fact, it looked like we were going through the back parking lot of an unmarked building, with no mention of a clothing store or anything until we were inside. Once we got in, the merchandise seemed very much like what you might see in an ethically conscious store in Berkeley: nice linen clothing, bags made out of foreign newspapers, embroidered cushions and so forth. I got myself a long linen shirt and some sweet little goat bells for the children. We bought a fabulous wooden tray, carved, as I now knew, in the Nuristani style.

We collapsed on the couch in the lobby. We had two hours before we were meeting Andre for dinner, and what we really needed was a nap. There were notices in English for people to help themselves to tea and coffee, so I made us a pot of Earl Gray, and we lounged vacantly while people came and went. I was impressed and jealous of the other western girls who came breezing through, picking out throw rugs and cushions for their homes, who knew where. One very chipper American girl was there by herself, which just floored me. She had good Farsi, she seemed to know everyone there except us, and I heard her tell a beautiful blonde girl that she was just coming through Kabul for a couple of days this time, trying to catch up with old friends. I couldn’t imagine a life as glamorous as that.

Living Large

After a little rest and some shopping on Chicken Street, Pietro got a glint in his eye and said “I know where we’re going! Do you want a gin and tonic?” Oh no. I was really nervous.
“Is it illegal?” I asked “I really don’t want to push our luck.”
“Well I don’t think there’s a law against non-Muslims drinking alcohol in Afghanistan” said Pietro. “And this is a good, safe place. You’ll see. We’re going to Gandemak Lodge.”

I felt like we were slinking off to a speakeasy in the days of the prohibition, and sure enough, we got to the gate, and there was a little window at the top, which slid open for the gateman to get a look at us. Pietro hailed him discretely in English, the flap slid closed and the door opened for us. Inside, another walled garden of Eden. There were tables and chairs set around in the grass, and a verandah with restaurant tables set up. Nobody was there. Pietro led me around to the rose garden in the back, fetched some Persian cushions for us to sit upon, and after a little while, a handsome boy came over to take our order. He did not flinch when Pietro ordered two gin and tonics, and as we waited we watched a small fleet of fat ducks, with duckling in tow, rootling around in the grass. The G and Ts were cold and delicious, the sunset was glorious and my husband was as beautiful as I have ever seen him. As the light slowly receded, little fairy lights came on in the trees around us.

After an idyllic hour, it was time for dinner. We went inside to pay and, surreally, found ourselves in a traditional pub. Neon signs advertised beer, and there were bumper-stickers on the ceiling such as “Ski Mad River Glen”. While Pietro paid for our drinks, I found the answer to my previous concern, framed and hung on the thick wooden door:

Ministry of Information, Culture and Tourism
To: Ganda Max Lodge

Dear Sir/Madam,
Conveying sincere compliments, you are requested to prevent and disallow any Muslim or Afghan National having alcoholic drinks within your operational workplace.
Thanks for your consideration in this regard
Sincerely Yours,

... and it was signed by the Deputy Minister for Tourism.

So that’s how it works, I thought. I wondered if the barman ever checked passports, or quizzed customers on the five pillars of Islam before he would serve them. I guessed not.

As I was reading and pondering, a man and a woman came in and also requested gin and tonics. Pietro knew the woman from the Aga Khan Foundation; she introduced her friend as working in the British Embassy. I surprised myself by saying “I’m Lizzie but you don’t need to remember me because I’m leaving tomorrow”. They both laughed at my directness, and agreed that there was a way that Westerners invest in each other when abroad. I let Pietro do the talking. He told them about the work he was doing in the University and Polytechnic. He described a paper one of his students had done, studying different types of mosques in the city and their function from a planning perspective. Embassy man started grilling Pietro on this, and it turned out that they were trying to work with mosques in the city to funnel aid money into deserving causes rather than into corrupt men’s pockets. Pietro agreed that he could probably put him in touch with someone who could help him, and they exchanged cards. I didn’t like Embassy man. He spoke with his jaw locked like the American stereotype of an upper class Brit, and he adopted the same amused superior tone I was beginning to find familiar. I was glad to head out for dinner.

The Last Supper

We were meeting Andre at an Indian restaurant a couple of blocks away, but when we got to the outdoor seating area, he had a companion. It was the chirpy American woman from the clothing store, and her name was Lindsey. I felt like I had truly arrived, and said so, but they all said no, it was just a very small town.

I had felt slightly resentful about sharing my last dinner with Pietro for three months, but it turned out to be a lovely meal. Andre and Lindsey were very entertaining, and it was good for me to see other weserners relaxed and at home in Kabul. It made me worry less about Pietro. We gossiped about the other folks at Turquoise Mountain, told travel stories, talked about plans for the future. Lindsey continued to be impressive. She was a specialist in antiquities, had an apartment in Paris, had traveled to Herat, had taught kindergarten in Istanbul, and she looked younger than me. She gave me advice as to what food to order in Istanbul, and I pulled out my moleskine notebook to write it down. She laughed and pulled out hers, and Pietro produced his too. We compared what we kept in the back pockets. “I have $500 and a credit card” said Lindsey. “I have passport photos and a picture of my family” said Pietro. “I have a leaf and a recipe for meatloaf” said I. We all laughed delightedly.

It was a lovely evening. There was almost no carping about how bad things are in Afghanistan. Andre talked about how he avoids rush hour downtown, and how sometimes his taxi drivers complain when he makes them take the long way around. Lindsey said how she wished she could take taxis, but it wasn’t a good idea as a single woman. She and Andre were both surprised and impressed that we took the Tunis busses, and I felt rather clever that I’d managed to do something that impressed Lindsey.

The food was delicious. I avoided the fish because Andre told us that they caught the fish by putting cyanide in the lake and then skimming off whatever floated to the surface. As I think about it now, it strikes me that he was the one who ordered the fish, and so I wonder if he told that story so there would be more fish for him.

The evening wore to an end. It was time to go home, and Pietro got on the phone and called a company called Afghan Logistics, a sort of taxi service/tour guide service for travelers in Afghanistan. They sent two cars to pick us up, we said a fond goodbye to Andre and Lindsay, and were driven home through nighttime Kabul, holding hands surreptitiously in the back of the car. I felt my heart swelling. I saw the guards on duty in front of Embassies, Ministries, and mystery buildings housing unknown organizations. I thought of Atiq, and prayed that he would be safe. I thought of the next four months of being apart from Pietro, and ached. But I also ached for Kabul. Who knows when I will see this beloved new friend again? How painful it was to be parted from her so soon after falling in love with her.

The airport was as you might expect. Long, slow lines. Late departure. Only one request for a bribe, which I turned down with no fuss. Sad, sad to be leaving my man and this amazing town which had so quickly and firmly lodged itself in my heart.

Aga Khan Trust for Culture

We went to the Aga Khan Trust for Culture offices for lunch. We walked through dusty streets to get there, and I could feel myself beginning to zone out from the brightness of the air and jetlag and the assault on my senses of the last 24 hours. Just when I was beginning to suggest slowing the pace a little, P stopped and rang a doorbell on an undistinguished wall. A small door opened, and we stepped over the high threshold into paradise. A walled garden with a green lawn and roses growing all around. Garden paths led through the lawn, meeting each other at trellises and arbours covered in vines, with luscious bunches of green grapes hanging down.

We found Jamshid Habib, one of Pietro’s former students, having lunch with some of his colleagues (all Afghan men), then went upstairs to meet Pietro’s female “boss”, all very friendly. The women told me that it was now okay to take off my headscarf, and I felt slightly silly. I told myself that it was better to keep it on for too long than to risk offending anyone, but still I felt my lack of experience.

Lunch was very pleasant. We sat in an arbour while the house staff brought eggplant in tomato sauce with bread, rice and chickpeas and. I felt a little uncertain of what they thought of me and what I was doing there. I didn’t know what questions to ask or how I fit in with these other westerners who were so much more experienced than I was. Unlike the westerners I saw on the plane on the way in, I didn’t feel jealous of these people, just a little in awe. I was sorry we’d missed lunch with Jamshid and his friends, but was pleased to see that some of the Afghans working in the office joined us.

The talk rambled in and out of subjects. There was a long discussion on digital cameras, and what model each person would buy if they could. Pietro prompted me to get out my Holga, a 1980s Chinese-made plastic item which I bought for $20 and which leaks light and vomits parts out every time the back falls off. Holgas have quite the cult following in the States. They take very arty photos. Mirwais, sitting to my right (the one whose dream camera costs $5,000) stared, mouth open, in a mixture of horror and disbelief. I thought I must have sunk irretrievably in his estimation until he told me “if you get tired of that camera, you can give it to me. I have a large collection of cameras and I would like to have that one”. I made a mental note to get him one when I got back to Berkeley.

They asked Pietro about his trip to Sarajevo and Italy, and he talked about how his Muslim friend had changed his mind about the Orthodox religion, showed him some beautiful churches and museums. They recommended Mostar as a fabulous town to visit. They asked if I had any plans to travel beyond Kabul, and I said that we didn’t have much time so I was staying in the city. Of course it wasn’t time constraints that kept me in Kabul, but fear of kidnapping or roadside bombs. I didn’t want to tell them that, because it felt insulting to their country, but then they mentioned that the Kabuli police were requiring foreigners to register their passports if they intended to leave the city. They joked that the police did this to make it easier to identify the bodies on the side of the road: “Yeah, we’ll go pick that guy up later ...”

We sat in the garden for a little while. One of the women who cooked in the kitchen brought me a chair to sit on and shook my hand. She held it for a moment, and exclaimed how hot I was, did I need some water? I already felt horrible that she’d been fetching me chairs (not to mention that I didn’t help with the washing-up or clearing the table which apparently just is not done) so I refused as vociferously and graciously as I could, and she smiled and ambled away. I felt generations of British class conflicts, which I have never closely examined, tugging at me from various directions. I settled for feeling a vague uneasiness, which I guess is what all of us khareji (foreigners, or literally “outsiders”) do in places like Kabul.

The Street Markets of Mandawi

Then, it was on to the magnificent markets of Mandawi. Street after street after street of pedestrian markets, grouped in various categories. If you ever go to Kabul, leave several days to explore Mandawi. The fruit and veg markets, the nuts which are roasted on the spot (why on earth did I not buy some freshly roasted nuts?) the rows and rows of cooking equipment (stock pots you could cook me in) the spices, fabulous mounds of brightly coloured powder, little stores filled with strange cleaning equipment and shampoos etc from Iran, which I wanted to stop and read just for the fun of it, carpets upon carpets, fabric stores, which we visited in order to have shirts made for me. We stopped off at one store which sold salt, because I’d been transfixed by the consistency of the salt we had at the guesthouse – not granules but a powder that dissolves instantly. I learned that it was mined from the mountains of Mazar-e Sharif, and so of course I wanted some. The merchant sold enormous pink crystals of the stuff in rocks as big as your head, but we settled for a bag of the powdered stuff. Pietro struck up a conversation with a boy of about eleven, who was covered in dirt and soot from head to toe. I toyed with the idea of feeling sorry for the poor wee urchin until he took us by his place of work, a knife sharpening stall, where his boss, a large man in his forties, was also covered in soot from head to toe, and doing a roaring trade. Pietro pointed out to me that so many of the boys we saw were actually working men, and they certainly seemed much more serious and mature than most of the boys of their age I know.

From the knife-sharpeners we kept walking down the street and found ourselves in the bird market. I fought the urge to buy a hand-made bird cage (I don’t have a bird! How on earth would I pack it?) and watched a man weaving a net by hand while he crouched against a wall. The street was narrow and got narrower as it got closer to the sky. We meandered along checking out various kinds of finches and small birds I’d never seen before. There were also rabbits and guinea pigs, and they all wore a rather mournful expression: they were in little doubt as to where they were headed.

It was quite a change of scene then to catapault ourselves into the 21st century, western style, and visit a department store for electronic devices. We went into the centre of downtown and found an eight-story building jam-packed with little computer stores, cell phone stores, etc. After our lunch conversation today, Pietro had a yen for a new camera, with the excuse that he could give me his old one.  The Holga was obviously no instrument for a travelling gal such as myself.

The 8 story tribute to all things electronica was almost too much for my beleaguered senses. For a start there was not one visible woman in the entire eight floors, and then there was the fact that I felt like I’d stepped directly from Tatooine into Blade Runner, and I was suffering asthetic whiplash. We left without buying a camera, staggered back through the streets to the Shrine of the King of the Two Flaming Swords (“the story is that the guy was beheaded somewhere across town, and kept fighting, sans head, until he finally dropped right there”) and grabbed a tunis home.

Second evening

On our last legs, we ran into Najib Mojaddedi (the Kabuli Al Pacino) outside the guest house. I was good for nothing better than smiling faintly, but Pietro waded in with the playful banter. “Hey man ...” They chatted about mutual acquaintances and work plans. As they talked, I became aware that something was changing over Pietro’s shoulder. Up high above the mountain behind the guest house, the clouds were breaking, and an unbelievable shaft of setting sunlight was bursting out, catching a stray, heart-shaped kite in its light. Unable to speak, I tugged on Pietro’s sleeve, interrupting the conversation. “I’m really sorry” I found myself saying “but it’s just so beautiful”.
“Yes, it is beautiful.” Najib agreed “A beautiful country. If we could only get rid of the old dogs in power. And give them a good kick on the way out.”

After a dinner of okra and lentils, we ventured out to the local ice-cream place, which Pietro, supposedly lactose intolerant, had been vaunting since we arrived. We brought Stephanie with us, feeling bad that she was otherwise stuck at the house so much. At this point it was nine o’clock and I was surprised to find the place still open and going strong. The curled, cardamom flavoured ice-cream construction which I was served looked like a scale model of Persepolis or something. Again, I was convinced that I was sentencing myself to the legendary travellers’ gastro-hell, but it sure tasted good. So I ate the whole thing. I told myself that I was being adventurous and embracing risk, but I think really I just have no will-power. And of course, I was fine.

We sat and chatted with Stephanie (who did not eat ice-cream as apparently she actually is lactose-intolerant). She had been visiting some of the projects her NGO was involved with. She found that one of the women they were working with was trying to produce locally-made tomato sauces, but couldn’t find a way to pack them, so was only selling them to local markets. She had ordered a bunch of glass jars from Iran, but they’d been broken on the way and she still had to pay for them, so it was worse than a write-off. Stephanie was musing on the relative benefits of canning rather than jarring, and I mentioned I hadn’t seen many cans of anything for sale in Kabul. It didn’t seem that people bought food in cans. I had never thought carefully about what goes in to producing cans versus jars, and it was an interesting conversation. I wondered if she could find someone who would make glass jars for her in Kabul, after all there seemed to be plenty of silica just lying around. Now I look back at that conversation I feel very naïve. Really, what do I know about glass production? But in the light of the ice-cream shop, in a city full of enterprising people, anything seemed possible.

The time went by quickly and we were set to go back to the house, only a block and a half away. We stopped to give our thanks to the man who made our ice-cream and immediately were surrounded by young men who wanted to talk. I felt nervous. It was really dark and there were no street lights. Every now and then a truck laden with bricks or a taxi would whiz by, but otherwise we were only lit by the ice-cream store lights. Stephanie also seemed edgy, but Pietro got talking with an eager, bright seeming young man. They talked in Dari and English, telling each other what their jobs were and where they were from. The young man was a translator for an NGO, and got $400 a month. They exchanged cards. Later Pietro told me that he was thinking about hiring the guy: he had a lot of interviews coming up and knew that his Dari would not be equal to the subtleties of information he was hoping to find. I was amazed that Pietro would consider hiring some kid he met on the street. I still am, really. But I guess in a place like Kabul you have to go on your gut most of the time.

Dinner Conversation

That night, over a dinner of aashak (Afghan ravioli), eggplant and rice, we met a woman called Stephanie, from an American organisation that promoted opportunities for Afghan women. She was travelling alone, and as such was stuck indoors unless she could hire a driver. She had been in Kabul for a few days, and was appalled by much of what she’d seen. She was disgusted by the jui system: trenches dug in the middle of the streets that water, sewage and all kinds of trash run through. She found the traffic alarming and wondered whether it would be so difficult to put in cross walks and traffic signals. She was very concerned by the corruption and dysfunction she’d seen in various levels of government, and all the stories of aid money gone missing, officials demanding bribes, nothing getting done etc. “It’s all so overwhelming” she told us. “You just feel like giving up.”

I knew just what she meant, but was in no mood to engage in the conversation. I had fallen in love with the city, and she may have been right about so much, but all I could think about was the sunlight on the mountains, the curious, gentle gaze of the people on the street, the comradely laughter on the bus, and the heartbreakingly beautiful sound of male voices raised in passionate singing of how great God is, echoing, singing in concert across the city at sunset.

So listening to Stephanie, I just kept quiet, but Pietro caught the scent of his mission and plunged in. Gently agreeing with her assessment of how dire the situation is, he started giving examples of simple things that could be done to make a difference, and things that already were being done. He pointed out the road markings and new paving that had appeared even in the three weeks that he’d been away. She tried to get him to agree that it just was overwhelming and paralysing, and he wouldn’t agree. By the end of the conversation, when Pietro got up to go get something from the kitchen, she said to me “Wow. Your husband has a lot of energy. He’s a real go-getter kind of guy.” I told her, “Yeah, he likes problem-solving”. What I was really thinking was how proud I was of him. I have seen him get as depressed as anyone I know, but it seemed that he was unlocking a place for her where she had become stuck, and allowing her to see the situation in Afghanistan as something other than a huge intractable mess. Later in the evening she said “I’ve been watching people go by my window, and you know, it’s actually pretty great here”.

That was just the beginning of the work I saw Pietro doing in Afghanistan. My love and respect for him deepened every hour. Each time somebody asked him where he was from he said very frankly “I’m American. I’m from the United States.” Sometimes people acted surprised, sometimes they expressed a desire to go to America, and sometimes he got no reaction at all. But he never lost an opportunity to tell Afghans that he was American, so they could see a regular American person, no body armour, speaking broken Dari and trying to find out what their lives were like. He spoke quietly and respectfully, accepted offers of tea whenever he could, and showed his knowledge and love for the city at every opportunity.

Babur’s Garden

The next morning we awoke to the sound of a very dodgy generator, sputtering and popping at the place next door. It seemed to be an illegal factory producing building materials. Most of the plot was taken up with an enormous, two-storey mound of used timber. They also had some piles of stone they were processing and somewhere a fire seemed to be burning perpetually. Even Pietro had no idea what they were up to there.

After a breakfast of fried eggs and bread, we headed out to Babur’s garden. Babur was a very powerful sixteenth-century ruler who is buried in Kabul. The site of his grave is now a public garden with a swimming pool for the boys.

We were there on a Sunday, which was essentially a week day. Few people were there other than the workmen who were working on the garden and rebuilding the palace that was above the garden. The place was a hive of industry, and everyone seemed delighted to see us. We passed through an armed guard (there was no entrance fee) and were greeted happily by the men working on the building, who called out to Pietro asking him to take pictures of them. Turns out he had taken pictures of them before, and they wanted him to take more and give them the prints. That happened a lot. The kids wanted their photos taken, but so did the men because it was probably rare for them to have a photograph of themselves.  The women never asked for anything.

Pietro started asking one of the workmen questions about the building and how it was going. The workman, a big happy man in his sixties, took P by the wrist and led him into the construction site, and kept holding his arm the whole time the two of them were talking. It turned out the palace, originally a home ofr Babur’s queen, was being turned into a conference center; a hall for meetings, weddings and music concerts. The room our guide was showing us had fibreglass embedded in the walls for sound dampening. He offered us tea, but we wanted to move on and see more of the building, maybe get upstairs.

Around the other side of the building two workmen were working on the plaster archway to a door. Pietro took their photo and we got chatting to them. Pietro’s construction vocabulary is pretty good, so we managed to find out quite a bit about what they were doing. Half of the original plaster still existed and they were continuing the motif and trying to match it on the other side. They encouraged us to go inside, where two other men were sitting barefoot on an enormous, eight inch thick, slab of wood. It was going to be a door, and we could smell the cut cedar as they were carving it out. One of them pushed a cup of tea at me, so I took it of course and we chatted (I mostly listened) while I drank. Inside more plaster work was being continued and they were rebuilding the upstairs. After refusing a second cup of tea, we went back outside.

Pietro was really excited about how the work on the building was progressing and wanted to see what was going on upstairs, where we could hear sounds of more construction. We were directed to a door which turned out to be barricaded off. We peered in through the door, and a well-dressed Afghan man came out and asked if he could help us, would we like some tea, maybe something to eat? He was in charge of the construction, and no, he was very sorry, there was no entry upstairs as it was too dangerous. So we said our goodbyes and moved on to the next thing.

Walking away, I reflected on how many people we send over to Afghanistan to build school buildings and so forth. It really didn’t seem that the Afghans needed help with builders: they really knew their business. Pietro agreed that the workmanship he’d seen was really good. He said there was one piece of work in the garden that he knew they’d had to send out to India for: a solid carved marble screen for Babur’s grave, but that he didn’t necessarily know anyone in America who could have done it either.

In recent years, Babur’s grave has been open to the elements: I had seen previous photos Pietro brought back where I was struck by the fact that this ancient grave was just lying in the middle of an open area without even a little fence around it. Originally it was housed in a gracious little walled garden, with a marble lattice and roses. The Agha Khan Trust found a nineteenth century English traveller’s sketch of his original grave, and have rebuilt it, placing around it the broken pieces of the original that they found. A man with apparently no tongue was on guard while we were there. He had a big nightstick wrapped in black tape, and keys for the outer door. He let us in and locked the door afterwards, making the people behind us wait outside. We tried to encourage him to let them in too, but they were out of luck. So we had a few moments alone with Babur.

It seemed like a good resting place. He had a very small marble grave (he can’t have been very tall), beautiful roses, and out through the windows in the outer wall, a breathtaking view of his shrine mosque and the city beyond. Pietro and I took photos of each other, and for a moment I had a glimpse of a future in which there was a line of German, Korean, Indian, American tourists waiting to take their romantic desktop photos at Babur’s grave, just like I had seen in Venice and London and Istanbul.

For the time being though, the American professor and his wife had this historic spot to themselves. Until the door was unlocked and in walked a man who recognised Pietro. A big, droopy-eyed bear of a man, Dr. Najimi is a staff architect at AKTC and he immediately joked in English “Ah! the Americans are here! Are you trying to buy up some land here in Babur’s grave?”
“Yeah,” said Pietro, “I think I’ll put a MacDonald’s in that corner right there ...” We all laughed. Inside I thought “ouch”. Dr. Najimi was leading a little tour of AKTC’s work in Babur’s garden. He and Pietro talked shop a little. It felt a bit odd to me to be standing over a guy’s grave talking business, so I was relieved when we got outside.

Pietro and I were just laughing about how, wherever we go we always run into someone he knows, when to prove the point, along came Najib Mojaddedi. Najib is the founder of Afghans for Tomorrow, which runs Pietro’s guesthouse, and P calls him the Al Pacino of Kabul. It’s a good moniker: he’s a good-looking guy casually dressed in expensive suits, with hair slicked back, and a wide US-style swagger. “Hey, man, how’s it going?” He was at the garden to meet up with Dr. Najimi, and for a while his entourage, Najimi’s entourage, Pietro and I all stood converged, introducing each other and making nice talk. I was suddenly aware of how many men there were, with me the only woman. In fact, looking around, I was the only woman in the garden. I stood up a step to get on the same level as the group. No. I was still the only woman in the garden.

We said our goodbyes and moved on. We passed by a gorgeous little shrine mosque, built out of white marble by Shah Jahan, Babur’s great-grandson, around 1640. It had one wall and a roof with pillars and was open on three sides. A few men were sitting around with their shoes off, talking. A man sitting by himself had heard us talking, and called out to us. We introduced ourselves and talked a little. Like so many of the people who approached us in Kabul, he was curious and wanted to practise his English a little. There was something about this guy, however, that has really stuck with me. He had been praying, and had a centered, quiet feeling about him. His name was Atiq, and he was a night security watchman at the United Nations Development Programme. He told us this simply, with the air of someone who has been told they have six months to live. My heart went out to him, and later as we drove through the city at night, past the gated ministries, the heavily guarded embassies, I found myself tearing up thinking about him and his family, hoping he’s okay.

It was in Babur’s garden that I had my one proposition from an Afghan man. We were buying pomegranate juice from a vendor when a very young man struck up a conversation with me. Pietro was right next to me paying for our drinks, so I chatted happily in English with the guy who asked what I was doing in Kabul. I indicated Pietro and told him I was visiting my husband here, and he asked if I had family in the city. When I said no, he said “I have family here, you can come with me! Do you want to?” And that was it really. No sleaze, no bicep flexing, just a straightforward invitation. Pietro let me handle it, and as we were walking away he said “Well, I guess he figured it didn’t hurt to ask.”

Looming over Babur’s Garden is Tap-e-Tup, the hill of the noonday gun. Climbing through its dusty streets we met a teenage boy who came running out to be our guide for a few minutes. When he and Pietro shook hands, the boy didn’t let go, and they stood holding hands, looking out over the city.  The view was gorgeous. I noticed how yellow the air was in the basin of the city, the dust settling down over the houses. I saw two or three kites soaring high above the city, only dots when I tried to photograph them, and I wondered how long the strings must be for them to soar so high. Like a child, it took me a couple of days in the city before I realised that those were the kites that had been cut loose and were floating free. That made me love them even more. Back on the ground, Pietro and our guide were still talking. I worried that the boy was hoping for money or would want to come with us, but when it was time for us to go to lunch, he said goodbye very courteously with his hand over his heart, and that was it.

to be continued.......

Perhaps it’s because so many of us live in lawn-starved SF, but the lawn chairs at Bishop’s Ranch always seem to see some of the heaviest use during the parish fall retreat. Unless the weather is totally unseasonable, a fine cast of familiar characters will reliably be populating the grassy knoll by the ranch house with their sudoku puzzles and mystery novels, semi-abandoned as their solvers and readers chat with each other in front of the exotic (again, especially to city dwellers) view of actual agricultural land. With experience, I have learned not to pack too many accessories for the solitary lifestyle (and maybe we should reconsider the use of the word “retreat”?), so this year I brought only one novel plus my all-purpose sketchbook.

Back in the day, a thousand years ago or so, monks and other scholars (not that there were many scholars who were not monks, but I can’t rule it out) commonly kept notebooks for themselves full of their favorite quotes. Since many of them were basically professional copyists, keeping these books was a pretty natural extension of daily life. Just so, my sketchbooks date back somewhat continuously to my college days, when we (baby architects) were expected to have some sort of log of ideas, inspirations, etc. as part of developing professional disciplines. Now the good part about doing this kind of thing all the time is that there’s very little pressure to be precious about the topics or materials; my notebooks are outwardly mismatched and quite unremarkable as they sit on the shelf more or less over my head. They are full of notes from a hundred classes, lists of now random things to look up, a thousand drawings of various sleeping pets, sketches of unaware classmates, and now that I’m well into my dissertation, the ratio of contents is significantly distorted by pages and pages of handwritten remarks on, say, Anglo-American agrarian land use (so let’s just say that my thoughts looking at the Sonoma fields are probably not entirely the same as yours, and as much as I love to read, there is an element of work in it for me).

But I brought my sketchbook anyway, and with it I brought some unfamiliar drawing tools. The further I get on my dissertation, the more I simply want to make pretty things that do not require footnotes. With their awkwardness and elements of surprise, new tools can make the oldest habits fresh, and while the results were not exceptional, they weren’t totally embarassing either. So here’s my homage to the lawn chairs, those vehicles of informal community and sunset rituals-- see you there next year.

Afternoon Tea

Pietro wanted me to meet his friend Andre, who was working on a reconstruction project in the old part of the city. As we got deeper into the neighbourhood, things got a little funkier; more trash on the sidewalks, the ground a little more broken up. A man called out to us, asking if we wanted tea. I was stunned to hear Pietro say “actually, that would be a good idea” and I turned around to see the man’s tea establishment, which consisted of a little cart on wheels, and a wood-fired water heater, one very low chair, and a makeshift awning of tattered fabric. All of it looked like it had grown out of the pile of trash and dirt it was sitting on. Two feet away began a mound of garbage, plastic bags, various organic matter, with swarms of flies buzzing around. At the top of the pile stood a little boy, trying to use the slight elevation to get his kite off the ground.

The tea-man, who looked like a cousin of Scott King, gestured for me to take the chair and commenced rinsing out two cups in boiling water with his bare hands. I tried asking him “doesn’t that hurt?” but he just smiled at me. Pietro murmured “we would call that ‘nerve damage’” but I guess he just considered it part of his job. When prompted, I said I would like sugar, so he spooned in about three tablespoons of coarse-ground sugar into the bottom of a rather small glass. He poured the tea on top, and I drank it without stirring. It was delicious. The sugar lasted me for a second cup. We sat in silence as we drank our tea. Every time somebody came up to talk to us, our tea man shooed them away insisting “They won’t understand you, they’re foreign, go away!” Then he would turn to us and say “Don’t talk. Drink your tea”. The result was that we settled into a contemplative stillness, and despite the smell of the garbage and the flies buzzing, it seemed to me to be the most romantic cup of tea I had ever had. We sat peacefully in the crystalline air, watching the boy with his kite, the sun low in the sky glinting on the tower of the nearby mosque, the hazy mountains in the distance.

We found our way to the reconstruction project, an old traditional Afghan house called Murid Khaneh. Inside we met Andre, a good-looking man who looked Indian and sounded Australian. He was working late and seemed to be burning the candle at both ends and the middle too. He admitted he’d been working too hard, and showed us how much weight he’d lost in the last few weeks by holding his pants out, and then letting them drop back onto his hips. He said he was overdue for a vacation and would probably go to his family in Bombay for a couple of weeks. Pietro said “aren’t you worried your folks will arrange a marriage for you if you hang out for too long?” and Andre rubbed his eyes and said “I dunno. I could probably use the help.”

We walked back through the market to get a taxi. The sun was setting, glorious shafts of pink light bursting out through the clouds, over the mountains. The mood on the street seemed to thicken, intensify, as if something was about to happen. At that moment a startling, clear, man’s voice sang out strongly over the market streets: “Allaaaaaaahh hu akbar!” I was breath-taken by the beauty and passion in his voice, and the sheer act of defiant faith it took to proclaim that God is great over this broken, hurting city, which continues to see so much violence and fear. I found myself in tears from fatigue and the beauty of it all, and told Pietro “I think that God must really love this city”. He said “I may well quote you on that”.

We got a real speed freak of a taxi driver. His windshield was cracked clean across, and that could have been our clue. Even Pietro grasped my hand as the taxi pulled out into oncoming traffic and then accelerated towards stopped cars ahead. He knew his business, though, and we got home safely. Tired, a little over-stimulated by the thrill ride of the taxi, I got out and forgot our postcards in the back of the cab. It had been a day.

Dinner Conversation

That night, over a dinner of aashak (Afghan ravioli), eggplant and rice, we met a woman called Stephanie, from an American organisation that promoted opportunities for Afghan women. She was travelling alone, and as such was stuck indoors unless she could hire a driver. She had been in Kabul for a few days, and was appalled by much of what she’d seen. She was disgusted by the jui system: trenches dug in the middle of the streets that water, sewage and all kinds of trash run through. She found the traffic alarming and wondered whether it would be so difficult to put in cross walks and traffic signals. She was very concerned by the corruption and dysfunction she’d seen in various levels of government, and all the stories of aid money gone missing, officials demanding bribes, nothing getting done etc. “It’s all so overwhelming” she told us. “You just feel like giving up.”

I knew just what she meant, but was in no mood to engage in the conversation. I had fallen in love with the city, and she may have been right about so much, but all I could think about was the sunlight on the mountains, the curious, gentle gaze of the people on the street, the comradely laughter on the bus, and the heartbreakingly beautiful sound of male voices raised in passionate singing of how great God is, echoing, singing in concert across the city at sunset.

So listening to Stephanie, I just kept quiet, but Pietro caught the scent of his mission and plunged in. Gently agreeing with her assessment of how dire the situation is, he started giving examples of simple things that could be done to make a difference, and things that already were being done. He pointed out the road markings and new paving that had appeared even in the three weeks that he’d been away. She tried to get him to agree that it just was overwhelming and paralysing, and he wouldn’t agree. By the end of the conversation, when Pietro got up to go get something from the kitchen, she said to me “Wow. Your husband has a lot of energy. He’s a real go-getter kind of guy.” I told her, “Yeah, he likes problem-solving”. What I was really thinking was how proud I was of him. I have seen him get as depressed as anyone I know, but it seemed that he was unlocking a place for her where she had become stuck, and allowing her to see the situation in Afghanistan as something other than a huge intractable mess. Later in the evening she said “I’ve been watching people go by my window, and you know, it’s actually pretty great here”.

That was just the beginning of the work I saw Pietro doing in Afghanistan. My love and respect for him deepened every hour. Each time somebody asked him where he was from he said very frankly “I’m American. I’m from the United States.” Sometimes people acted surprised, sometimes they expressed a desire to go to America, and sometimes he got no reaction at all. But he never lost an opportunity to tell Afghans that he was American, so they could see a regular American person, no body armour, speaking broken Dari and trying to find out what their lives were like. He spoke quietly and respectfully, accepted offers of tea whenever he could, and showed his knowledge and love for the city at every opportunity.

to be continued....

Playing the Tourist

Behzad’s book store is on Kuch-e Morgha – “Chicken Street” – one of the very few streets in Kabul which actually has a name. (I still don’t know how their postal system works.) It’s also considered part of the ‘touristy’ section of town, a street which sells carpets and trinkets and jewellery for people like me to take home with them. I wanted postcards: I wanted to behave as if this were a normal tourist destination, and somehow, by my behaviour, to bring that normalcy into being. When I was growing up in England we responded to the threat of IRA terror by pretending it didn’t exist, so in a real way, it didn’t. In the same way, I had a fantasy of thousands of tourists flooding into Kabul simultaneously and sending beautiful postcards home to their loved ones, thereby completely effacing the worldwide image of Afghanistan as a place of charred bodies and twisted metal. So far, though, I’m the head of a pretty lonely campaign. I had a glimpse of how rare it was for people to send postcards from Afghanistan when we went to the central Post Office in Kabul and they ran out of postcard stamps.

Behzad’s bookstore was the one place Pietro knew I could get postcards, and that was partly, I realised, because Behzad produced them himself. Even so it seemed to me that he didn’t really grasp the idea of postcards; that you’re supposed to show your country at its best, all the pretty things, the things that make the recipient sigh and wish they could be there. Instead, Behzad’s collection seemed to reflect what he expected westerners thought of Kabul, bombed out buildings, tanks in the street, funny looking peasants, that ubiquitous National Geographic cover pic of the girl with the blue eyes (who is now a woman with a family and doesn’t look anything like that). Most of the photos seemed to be a minimum of ten years old, and most of them didn’t show anything of the Kabul I already loved, with its imposing mountains, fabulous mosques and shrines, and of course the scenes of everyday life in the streets.

Having said that, I managed to get a good stack of postcards and we met Rashid Poya, a son of Behzad’s, who was manning the shop. He seemed very fond of Pietro and spoke with us in almost fluent English, giving us extra postcards for free, pressing delicious candies on us, and pouring many cups of cardamom flavoured tea, which we drank in the little garden courtyard outside the store. It was really pretty idyllic.

All this time I was feeling slightly uncomfortable about how much I loved the place already. I felt like a nineteenth century Orientalist, gushing over the ‘quaint’ lives of the peasants, glorifying their poverty, extolling how simple or wise they were or whatever. I still feel that discomfort. I think I saw something real and beautiful in a city that I have repeatedly been told can only be pitied or saved somehow. I know I’m naive, I know that there’s a huge amount that’s not working there, and things that an outsider cannot see, but there is so much that works and is graced about the place. I don’t think it’s wrong to look at that. I can hear an inner sceptic at the back of my mind all the time though: “yeh, the people are really sweet and gentle until they BOMB YOU TO SMITHEREENS!!” or “of course the city is beautiful from the luxury of your safe clean guesthouse” and so on and so forth.

So nonetheless, on with the Orientalist idyll.

After that, we plunged ourselves into the crowds at Pul-e Khesti, the brick bridge, which is an area of town you seem to see on the news and BBC website a lot. It’s a fairly major stretch of road that has been more or less given over to pedestrians, and it’s become a very crowded open-air market. You can get bicycle tyres, cauldrons, lace, wiring, DVDs, bras, and so on and so on. The approach to selling meat was pretty scary. I saw folks pushing wheelbarrows full of carcasses, and then they’d be hung up with flies buzzing around all day. If you wanted to get some meat, they’d go hack off a piece from something hanging up. Most bizarre of all, I saw young boys cheerfully manning wheelbarrows filled with severed goats’ heads for sale. Twenty goats’ heads in a wheelbarrow, with their little tongues sticking out the sides of their mouths. The questions posed by that are myriad.

I was interested to see how many women were out on the street. Certainly there were many more men than women, but I would guess the ratio was about four men to one woman. Also there were many more burqas than I expected to see. Pietro had told me earlier that, with the departure of the Taleban, fewer women were wearing the burqa, but they seemed pretty common to me. I could understand why, too. If I were traipsing around central Kabul with two small children and armloads of groceries, I wouldn’t want to be worrying that my headscarf might be slipping. The burqas in style now are three-quarter length at the front, full-length at the back, and the women turn them back to show their faces when extreme modesty is not required (for example, when they are in their own neighbourhood). They are that lovely cornflower blue, and many of them have tiny tiny pleats which mean they can be made from a very thin, light fabric, and still maintain integrity of shape. I was interested to find that their effect is very intimidating. I guess I’ve always seen burqas as a shameful sign of women’s imprisonment, but when you meet them on the street, they have quite the feeling of power. I was surprised many times to see that close up, a burqa-ed woman was much shorter than I had thought at first, and I’ll never forget the weird feeling of hearing one of the women giggling at me under her burqa, and thinking “boy there’s really a person in there”.

The men were just gorgeous. Obviously it doesn’t do to stare, but there were so many beautiful men everywhere. They weren’t pumped up, even the guys with guns didn’t seem super-macho, but they were lovely nonetheless. It was interesting to see that they didn’t exude sex like the Italian vaporetto boys, but just a sweet male beauty. They held hands a great deal, hugged on the streets. One time I saw two twenty-something men locked in an embrace. One of them would pick the other up from time to time, shake him a little like he was cracking his back, then go back to just holding him, chin on his shoulder. It was superficially like the Castro, except it wasn’t about sexuality. There was also no anxious guarding of masculinity, just unselfconscious brotherly affection. I was delighted to see how naturally Pietro fell into this very different way of being, and it always seemed a good sign when an Afghan man would take him by the hand.

Afternoon Tea

Pietro wanted me to meet his friend Andre, who was working on a reconstruction project in the old part of the city. As we got deeper into the neighbourhood, things got a little funkier; more trash on the sidewalks, the ground a little more broken up. A man called out to us, asking if we wanted tea. I was stunned to hear Pietro say “actually, that would be a good idea” and I turned around to see the man’s tea establishment, which consisted of a little cart on wheels, and a wood-fired water heater, one very low chair, and a makeshift awning of tattered fabric. All of it looked like it had grown out of the pile of trash and dirt it was sitting on. Two feet away began a mound of garbage, plastic bags, various organic matter, with swarms of flies buzzing around. At the top of the pile stood a little boy, trying to use the slight elevation to get his kite off the ground.

The tea-man, who looked like a cousin of Scott King, gestured for me to take the chair and commenced rinsing out two cups in boiling water with his bare hands. I tried asking him “doesn’t that hurt?” but he just smiled at me. Pietro murmured “we would call that ‘nerve damage’” but I guess he just considered it part of his job. When prompted, I said I would like sugar, so he spooned in about three tablespoons of coarse-ground sugar into the bottom of a rather small glass. He poured the tea on top, and I drank it without stirring. It was delicious. The sugar lasted me for a second cup. We sat in silence as we drank our tea. Every time somebody came up to talk to us, our tea man shooed them away insisting “They won’t understand you, they’re foreign, go away!” Then he would turn to us and say “Don’t talk. Drink your tea”. The result was that we settled into a contemplative stillness, and despite the smell of the garbage and the flies buzzing, it seemed to me to be the most romantic cup of tea I had ever had. We sat peacefully in the crystalline air, watching the boy with his kite, the sun low in the sky glinting on the tower of the nearby mosque, the hazy mountains in the distance.

We found our way to the reconstruction project, an old traditional Afghan house called Murid Khaneh. Inside we met Andre, a good-looking man who looked Indian and sounded Australian. He was working late and seemed to be burning the candle at both ends and the middle too. He admitted he’d been working too hard, and showed us how much weight he’d lost in the last few weeks by holding his pants out, and then letting them drop back onto his hips. He said he was overdue for a vacation and would probably go to his family in Bombay for a couple of weeks. Pietro said “aren’t you worried your folks will arrange a marriage for you if you hang out for too long?” and Andre rubbed his eyes and said “I dunno. I could probably use the help.”

We walked back through the market to get a taxi. The sun was setting, glorious shafts of pink light bursting out through the clouds, over the mountains. The mood on the street seemed to thicken, intensify, as if something was about to happen. At that moment a startling, clear, man’s voice sang out strongly over the market streets: “Allaaaaaaahh hu akbar!” I was breath-taken by the beauty and passion in his voice, and the sheer act of defiant faith it took to proclaim that God is great over this broken, hurting city, which continues to see so much violence and fear. I found myself in tears from fatigue and the beauty of it all, and told Pietro “I think that God must really love this city”. He said “I may well quote you on that”.

We got a real speed freak of a taxi driver. His windshield was cracked clean across, and that could have been our clue. Even Pietro grasped my hand as the taxi pulled out into oncoming traffic and then accelerated towards stopped cars ahead. He knew his business, though, and we got home safely. Tired, a little over-stimulated by the thrill ride of the taxi, I got out and forgot our postcards in the back of the cab. It had been a day.

to be continued....

Continued from Part I....

The guesthouse was ready and waiting for us when we got there. Afghans for Tomorrow is a non-profit involved in re-building Afghanistan. They have various projects including two vocational training schools in Kabul. One of the ways they make money is by running this guest-house, where visitors can stay, get three square meals a day and have their laundry done. Although people came and went frequently, it had more a feeling of a small commune than a hotel, and that warmth was certainly due to the staff.

Najibullah Sidiqi is the in-country manager for A4T, and was there to meet us when we arrived. A bright, slightly reserved man with thick glasses, he greeted Pietro by kissing and hugging him, as did almost every Afghan man who knew him. I didn’t know what to do so I stood there beaming and bobbing up and down a bit. Also there to meet us was a handsome man with long eyelashes and a shy smile called Abder Rahman. He took our bags up to our room, and brought my first cup of Afghan tea; weak green tea that you drink instead of water against the dehydration and the dust. I was to drink an average of twenty cups of that tea per day.

I was transfixed by the cook, Khaleh Zia Gul. She is a tiny woman in perhaps her late forties, a humble, snaggle-toothed lioness of a woman. She seemed almost fiercely self-assured, but there was no aggression in her smile, just a gentle sort of amusement at everything we did. I adored her. She also cooked like an angel.

We were almost asleep on our feet, but it was too early in the day to nap, so we squared our shoulders, and ventured out into the street. We stood outside the guest house for a few moments while Pietro called England to tell my folks that we had arrived safely. I tried to adjust to the glare, and watched as centimetre long ants with long long legs sprinted to and fro at alarming speeds. The road outside the guesthouse is unpaved, as are most of the smaller roads in Kabul, and I can tell you it’s a wonderful deterrent to speeding. The craters and humps in that road could take out the undercarriage of a car at 15 miles an hour. As we stood there, small boys approached and stared at us, not trying to start a conversation, just looking.

We caught a taxi immediately, and headed to a two storey clothing mall or “bazaar”, as the guidebooks would probably have it. Before we went in, Pietro changed some money. He did this by approaching a man on the side of the road, who was holding an enormous stack of bills. He told him how much he wanted to change, the man told him what he’d get for it, and they did the transaction. All over the city guys like this are hanging out with massive amounts of money in their hands. They also have phone cards for sale, hanging down in long strips. They don’t seem at all troubled that someone might come and take their cash from them, and their body language is very open and unguarded. Pietro and I speculated that anybody who tried a hit and run would be stopped by the crowd: there’s a strong sense of honour among Afghans. Some of the money changers have up to $10,000 in cash on them, and very little visible security. It’s a trip.

So we went into the mall and actually bought two pairs of shoes for me for $11. The flip-flops, which I loved, fell apart after five days. I noticed that there are a lot of shoes for sale in Kabul. It’s not a very forgiving environment for shoes. Most people wear rubber or plastic sandals, and take them off inside. I saw cartloads of shoes for sale that looked like they’d already been worn a couple of years and then run over repeatedly by an SUV.

We were looking around for another taxi, when Pietro pointed at a little white minibus, said “you go hop on at the front” – and he jumped on at the back door. Right at that point, the van started pulling away, so I took a deep breath and launched myself into the bus. Inside found myself surrounded by women, some in burqas, all staring at me in shock. I bobbed up and down and murmured happy how-are-you mutterings, held on to a pole and acted like I thought everything was fine. After a few moments Pietro reached over from where the men were at the back, gave me some bills and said “tell him it’s for two people!” I didn’t know who the “him” was. I tried giving it to the driver but he didn’t even look at me. The women around me told me with signs to hold on to the money. After a few minutes, the bus slowed down and a teenage boy got on and started taking money from people. “Bara-ye do nafar” I told him earnestly, giving him the cash. He laughed. “Bara-ye do nafar!” he chortled merrily. We found that people laughed at us frequently, especially on busses. The best we can guess is that it was odd for the Afghans to hear the foreign-sounding Dari coming out of our mouths, and it just made them laugh, like hearing a sophisticated sentence coming from our four year old. The laughter was never contemptuous or menacing, always merry and inclusive. Often I was also struck by the bizarreness of the situation, and I would laugh along with them.

more to come tomorrow.....

Preface

As I am coming to the end of my first draft about my glorious, transformative trip to Kabul, I hear the news from Pietro that a German woman was abducted today from a restaurant one kilometre from his guesthouse. She was eating lunch with her partner in broad daylight, just like I did ten days ago, when four armed men came and took her away.

I find myself angry because it seems to give the lie to the beauty of my stay there, the gentleness and sweetness that I was treated with the whole time. As I’m writing now the cynical voice in the back of my head is ever louder, sneering at my love for the city, my affection for the people we met. I feel like a fool.

I also find myself running Bourne Identity scenarios in my head where, with a few well-chosen words in Farsi, I single-handedly overpower and blow away the four men with one of their AKs, while Pietro hides under the table. Then I lead him by the hand and run out of the restaurant, hop into a taxi to the airport, hijack a plane and fly to safety. Maybe I take down a helicopter or two for the hell of it.

Both reactions just seem to point to how impotent I am with relation to Afghanistan. I don’t want to believe the violence is possible, and when I imagine it I send it into cartoon land.

Intellectually I know that stories of terrible things happening in Kabul don’t negate my experience. Even if those men had come for me, it wouldn’t erase the good experiences I had had. Life everywhere is complex: it’s almost so obvious it doesn’t bear saying. But still I hear my old school friend’s sneering superiority. “Yes. This doesn’t surprise me at all. I’m glad you had a nice time, but this is a War Zone we’re talking about” - and that is how you sum up and write off a whole city of beautiful, sweet, frightened people who are full of longing. Or rather, “I’m sure they are beautiful, but that doesn’t mean I need to go there. There are lots of beautiful people in the south of France as well.”

And the only answer I have is the desire that I could open up my mouth so wide that my head could split in two and the whole experience could surge out intact in living colour, exactly as it happened, exactly how I felt it, with no intermediary. Instead I have this piddling little scribble of black on white. Frustrating doesn’t begin to describe it.

Four Days in Kabul

Kabul is dirty, broken, overcrowded, and buried in several feet of shit, dust and garbage. I fell in love with it on contact.

We arrived after an overnight flight from Istanbul which stopped in Ankara and Baku. At Baku, at God knows what time of night, I looked blearily out of the window to see that the plane had come to rest on open tarmac, no airport in sight. Nobody got on or off the plane. A large tanker had pulled up from out of the syrupy dark and we were refuelling. The smell of toast filled the plane, followed by paraffin oil, and then, unaccountably, the sweet smell of roses. Pietro thought that might be insecticide. Always the romantic.

Early in the morning, we descended through hazy air, into the steel-blue embrace of the mountains which cradle Kabul. I was disappointed that the many wrecked airplanes I had heard about had been cleared away from the runway, but was instead treated to the sight of many military aircraft from all over the world. Kabul airport, like most of Kabul, is under construction. Huge slabs of gorgeous marble are made treacherously slippery by the fine dust of construction. Doors are replaced by floaty tattered net curtains. There were no “pardon our dust” signs. I guess they figured that visitors should get used to the dust straight away. I had my first sight of the Afghan security police, wearing slate green uniforms and gendarme-style caps, they gazed evenly at us, meeting our eyes, strolling coolly up and down the queues as we waited to have our passports processed.

Everyone who goes to Kabul is treated to their own Damascus road experience. Stepping out of the cool, dark interior of the airport terminal, you are blinded temporarily by the sun which is refracted through layers of light yellow dust, and reflected off the light tan buildings and street.

Waiting outside for the driver to come, we fended off several offers of taxi rides. A man pulled up seats in the shade, and insisted we sit down (the Afghans who were hanging around were not offered the same). Pietro heard music and wandered off to investigate, and I fiddled surreptitiously with my headscarf. I had worried about the whole hejab issue. Pietro reminded me that I was showing respect for a tradition, rather than trying to pass as Afghan, but I wanted to look like I belonged. I had gone to a Pakistani neighbourhood near my parents’ house in England, and bought baggy pants and a long over-shirt with matching scarf. They were a dreamy dusty blue, like the pictures I’d seen of burqas, with little beads sewn into a floral pattern. I wrapped the headscarf around my head and shoulders as I was getting off the plane, and pinned the slithery fabric into place. I said to Pietro “So, do you think the men of Kabul are safe from my dangerous beauty?” and he, God love him, said “Not yet; they can still see your eyes.”

I decided to think of my hejab like a costume for a show..When you are in a play, you are given clothes to wear. They aren’t your clothes, but you accept them eagerly, and try to give the impression that they are yours. As you walk around in these new clothes, you pay attention to see how they make you feel and what they can teach you about your character. The clothes definitely grew on me. By the time I got back on the plane, I wasn’t bothering with the pin, and the flowing voluminous fabric of my shalwar and headscarf felt powerful and feminine.

The ride to the guest house was breathtaking. I couldn’t take pictures, couldn’t even speak for a while afterwards, just trying to process all the new things I’d seen. The streets in the city are all packed with people, donkeys, children, horses, cars, street vendors, bicycles, handcarts, all going in various directions. Traffic cops, some armed, stand at major intersections and roundabouts. They have little ping-pong paddles that they supposedly direct traffic with, but I didn’t see many people paying attention to them. The people of Kabul perform a kind of miracle dance in the roads, surging forward, slowing, shimmying to avoid each other. It’s as if there’s a communal mind they’re all tapped into, a rhythm they all understand. Mothers with small children walk straight into the path of moving cars, halt centimetres from the side of the car as it passes, and continue their path the second the space is free in front of them. Bicycles swoop out into the middle of intersections, people go the wrong way around roundabouts, busses stop abruptly to let people on and off, and throughout all of this the traffic keeps moving, invisible buffer-shields repel the vehicles from each other, the laws of physics bend and snap back and everyone passes each other unscathed. (Of course this is not true. Apparently, there are accidents all the time: the cracked windscreens and crumpled fenders of the taxis bore witness to that. Apparently, motor accidents are a leading cause of death in Kabul. It’s just I never saw an accident, and it seemed like they ought to be occurring all the time.)

The images from the streets flashed at me as we hurtled through downtown Kabul. The hundreds of fruit and vegetable sellers crowding the sidewalks. The enormous, four foot long watermelons, mounds of apples, apricots, tomatoes, eggplants, potatoes and onions. Horses and donkeys pulling carts, their ribs sticking out and heaving in the heat. Little children, unattended, everywhere. Two little boys eating fruit under a flatbed trailer, parked by the side of a busy main road. Girls in black dresses with white headscarfs all over the place – Pietro told me they were school uniforms, which gave me a little thrill of pride. Young boys pulling carts and pushing wheelbarrows at full pelt, running their little arses off. Two little four year old boys walking along with their arms around each other.

Then as I raised my eyes from the streets I saw the hills, and behind them, faint in the bright hazy air, the mountains, thousands of feet higher, cradling the city. To my tired eyes, the nearby hills seemed like magic eye pictures. At first glance you see the tan brown hill, apparently barren and unformed. As you stare longer, the houses swim into view: houses built from the same rock and earth as the hill itself, unadorned except for the occasional heavy metal gate or flapping red curtain. At night, those same hills look like enormous ocean liners, dark hulks against the luminous night sky, the regularly placed florescent lights from their windows showing just how populated the hills are.

Drinking all this in, unwilling to blink even, I was dimly aware that Pietro was on the phone to his guest house. “Yes,” he said “we’re in the car now and we’re on our way over. Tell me, Najibullah, have you got room for us? Will it be all right for us to stay there?” I goggled at him. As he hung up, I asked in what I hoped was a calm voice, “Am I to understand that you never arranged our accommodation until now?”
He grinned happily and said “That’s right.”
“Okay.” I said. “So that’s the kind of party we’re at.”

to be continued......

This month Dave Cowen interviews Sunday School children about their experience at St. Gregory’s.... On page 4.

Visit the Christmas Corner and learn about the Wreath Sale, Family Fun at the Christmas Faire, Baking opportunities and more! See page 2.

October concerts at the church.... See page 3.

New: Writers & Artists Spotlight.... On page 5.

October Nyssa News