by Dayna Curry
On weekday mornings, we left the house a few minutes before eight o’clock and walked around the corner to our regular Shelter Germany prayer meeting, usually held at the home of one of our coworkers. The minute we stepped onto the street, we were besieged by the mob of street kids who worked the residential blocks of Wazir. Many of these children walked great distances over the course of a day. From time to time, we would spot one of the ragtag children from Wazir wandering somewhere miles across town engaging in his perpetual, often one-sided dialogue with passersby. “Bakhshish?” he would ask. Alms? Thousands of children, some young enough to be wearing diapers, made the same petition all over Kabul on any given day.
Our first encounter on the way to our meeting was with a pack of shoeshine boys who daily vied for our business: “Can I shine your shoes today?” they would all ask at once.
Dayna: Because there were so many boys, I gave guaranteed work twice a week to one—a boy named Omar. I let others spontaneously do my shoes, but I gave Omar the most work. He was the most polite and least pushy of the bunch. His dad recently had died, and I knew his family desperately needed the money. Heather invested a good bit of her energy in the shoeshine boys. She bought them shoe polish and sometimes bought new sandals for the street children. She was a hot item on the street; they called her “the compassionate one.”
Heather & Dayna: On our walk, we passed a large lot that looked like a trash dump where children grazed their goats and sheep. Other kids gathered paper and twigs out of the rubbish for their mothers’ cooking fires and carried their finds in burlap sacks. Often as we passed by, some of the children would approach us and say, “Khaarijee, bakhshish?” Foreigner, alms?
Afghans were always looking for something to burn—most of the trees in Kabul are naked of branches all the way up to the tops of their trunks. With so many trees all but stripped bare, we often wondered if the city was headed for a serious environmental problem.
The ICRC office and the compound where the organization’s staff lived were on the route to our meeting. Other aid organizations also had offices on the street. The street was full of foreigners, perhaps explaining why a large number of beggars worked the area.
An older man in a wheelchair often followed us in the mornings asking for help. His wheelchair was in good condition and had a turn handle to make the wheels operate. In a society where women and men never publicly looked one another in the eye, this disabled gentleman’s advances made us very uncomfortable. We urged him to approach other men rather than ask for alms from two young single women.
Women beggars in their burqas approached us in the mornings, too. One in particular always greeted us with enthusiasm and, in typical Afghan form, with a flurry of questions: “Good morning, how are you? Are you healthy? Are you fine?” Then she would say, “Bakhshish?” or “Komak?” Help? We normally did not give help on our way to and from the Shelter Germany meeting to discourage crowds from waiting outside the meeting door. But our coworker, Peter Bunch—a friendly, easygoing Australian in his fifties—almost always handed out money after the meeting, so crowds usually assembled anyway.
At other times of day, we gave bread, fruit, or juice to the beggars we encountered. A small shop and produce stand were located at the end of our street, and when women beggars approached us, we would ask them to follow us to the shop and pick out the things they needed. If a woman said, “No, I need money,” we usually apologized and renewed our offer to buy her something.
Heather: After the morning Shelter Germany meeting ended at eleven o’clock, street kids would follow us back to our home. We would have scheduled appointments with Afghan women from 11 to 12:30, and at 12:30 we would hand out bread and fruit to the street kids and let the boys shine our shoes again. We made it clear to the kids we would only be available at 12:30 and not before; otherwise, they would press on the doorbell at the gate until someone answered.
Khalid would help me deal with the kids. He was a stern disciplinarian and could easily determine which among the bunch were troublemakers. The kids listened to Khalid and followed his instructions. He would sit them all down in a row on the curb opposite the door. Then Khalid and I would go down the line and give each child some help for the day.
I wanted to be able to help as many kids as I could, but in the case of the shoeshine boys, I simply did not have enough pairs of shoes to support their multiple small businesses. The market on shoe shining was overexhausted—too many entrepreneurs and not enough consumers. Usually, I hired the kids on rotation. One day I would let two or three boys polish shoes, and the next time some other boys would have a turn. Often I would dole out one shoe to each boy and split the pay.
I always made sure no one walked away empty-handed. To those who did not get paid, I gave fruit or, occasionally, a bottle of shoe polish or a pair of sandals.
Distributing plastic sandals turned out to be a far larger enterprise than I had imagined. I gave out the first pair to a kid who owned no shoes. Afterward, children came to me constantly with the top ten reasons why they, too, needed new pairs. Some kids truly did need the shoes. Others, however, just liked the idea of getting something new. Interestingly, with one exception, I never saw any of the kids wearing the shoes I had provided. Some gave the shoes away to relatives as a tactic for getting more; others sold the shoes for money. It was difficult to discern the kids’ true intentions. Eventually, Dayna and I learned how to gauge which kids were sincere. But most times, we just risked being deceived in order to help them.
Dayna: Just before one o’clock Heather and I would get ready to go to our respective Shelter Germany activities. Heather usually left before me and took a taxi to the downtown neighborhood of Shar-e-Nao, where she spent the afternoon at language school. The language school was in the Shelter Germany office compound on the same street as the Afghan passport office and about a ten-minute ride from our house in Wazir.
Meanwhile, I would finish up with the Afghan women who had come to our house, and Khalid would go out to find me a taxi. The nice taxis were yellow Toyota Corolla station wagons. Less comfortable were the old Russian-model cars. None of the taxis were equipped with seat belts. A few drivers regularly took us places. One of our drivers, Abdul, would park on our street until we came out needing to go somewhere. Waiting for us likely proved more lucrative for Abdul than driving all over town in search of random passengers who might not have the means to tip him.
Driving around town, we would often pass buses or vans packed to the gills with people and carrying men or boys on the rooftops or clinging to the sides. No traffic laws seemed to exist in Afghanistan. Especially when we traveled to Karte Se on the non-electricity side of town, we would pass several bombed-out buildings with shattered windows and cars on the side of the road punctured with bullet holes. We would have to be deliberate about telling ourselves, “This is not normal.”
On weekday afternoons, I had the taxi take me to the Shelter Germany street kids project building, located just past Shar-e-Nao and only a couple of minutes from the United Nations guesthouse. Many of the street kids who participated in the project walked to the building from Sherpur, a neighborhood of mud houses on the hillside behind Wazir.
When Heather and I arrived in Kabul, Shelter Germany’s projects in the capital city were smaller in scope than the work it was doing elsewhere in Afghanistan. Shelter Germany factories in Kandahar, Helmand, Jalalabad, and Khost produced concrete roof beams and roof slabs, which were provided to Afghans at a subsidized price. In Logar, a small village outside of Kabul, Shelter Germany helped rebuild hundreds of houses following an earthquake. In Ghazni province—where Heather, I, and our six fellow Shelter Germany prisoners were jailed just before our rescue by the U.S. military—Shelter Germany helped repair thousands of wells and built a medical clinic. The organization’s Ghazni office was ransacked, we learned, following our arrest.
In Kabul, Shelter Germany administered a winter distribution of food, blankets, and firewood for two thousand famil
ies, and helped repair water systems and two orphanages. The organization launched the street kids project in May 2001 after one of our coworkers, a young German woman named Katrin Jelinek, could no longer handle the numbers of kids turning up at her home at lunchtime for fruit and bread. Kati, a hardworking, cheerful woman in her late twenties, designed a program to provide street kids with a hot meal and then a number of job-training classes, which the kids would be paid to attend. The Taliban allowed us to open the program only to boys, the vast majority of whom did not attend school.
Lunch was served to the boys around noon—usually beans, rice, fruit, vegetables, and maybe some meat. I couldn’t make it to lunch at the project because so many women gathered at our gate in Wazir at lunchtime, and I could never get away earlier than just before one o’clock. After lunch the boys played soccer outside in the big courtyard. We filled a small, concrete, basinlike area with water so some of the boys could swim. And a few others helped us tend the garden for a modest income.
We offered the boys only two classes when we started the project: a printing class, in which we taught the boys to make stationery depicting various Kabul scenes; and, for the smaller children, a paper-flower-making class. Afghans use paper flowers for decoration in wedding ceremonies. We talked about adding carpet weaving and tailoring classes eventually. Days before Heather and I were arrested, we opened a carpentry class.
For most of the summer an Afghan man and I taught the printing class. Later we trained another Afghan to take my place, and I became more of an administrator for the whole project. I interviewed boys who wanted to participate and kept data on which boys were getting shoes, medicine, and clothing from us. At the time of our arrest, the project was feeding and training about seventy boys every day. A typical interview went like this:
“Akmal, do you have a mother and father?”
“Yes.”
“Does your father work?”
“No, he is sick at home.”
“Do you attend school?”
“No.”
“Did you attend in the past?”
“Yes, for one year.”
“Why did you stop?”
“The Taliban came.”
“Which class would you like to take here?”
“Printing!”
“Right now that class is full, but we will be starting carpentry soon. Would you like to do that?”
“Yes.”
“Do you need chaplacks?”
“Yes.”
“Let me see yours.” The boy would show me his tattered plastic sandals sewn together in many places.
“Okay, let’s go next door and get you some new ones.”
“Thank you, Miss Dayna-jan.” Afghans add “-jan” to a name as a term of endearment.
Heather & Dayna: Our evenings generally were booked with meetings. On Sunday nights, we met at a foreigner’s home across town for prayer; Tuesday nights we had Shelter Germany worship meetings in Wazir; on Wednesday nights, our small clan of Waco friends gathered at the Masons’ for dinner; and on Friday nights, Shelter Germany held a gathering open to all foreigners in the city.
Whenever we could carve out time for social activity, we usually visited with foreign friends in one another’s houses. We shared meals and sometimes watched movies. A number of the longtime Kabul residents in the foreign community owned enormous video libraries. Afghans were not permitted to watch movies, though the law didn’t keep anyone from doing it. Many Afghans with money hid TVs and VCRs in their homes and continued to see films in secret. It was common knowledge that the Taliban watched movies and satellite television. The warden in one of our Taliban prisons actually wanted the satellite dish from our Shelter Germany leader Georg Taubmann’s house, as Georg could have no use for it in prison.
Weekends—Fridays and Saturdays—we usually reserved for appointments with our Afghan friends and errands in the bazaars. There were numerous bazaars in Kabul—some covering dozens of blocks and city streets, others stretching out along single streets. We often traveled to Kabul’s largest bazaar, called Mandaee, which sprawled alongside the barely flowing Kabul River and surrounded the famous mosque Masjidi Puli Khishtee. Stands were set up just outside of the mosque for selling prayer beads, white skullcaps, prayer rugs, and other Islamic paraphernalia. Women often sat with their babies near the mosque, its blue dome towering over the scene, and begged for handouts.
Branching out from the mosque were areas of the bazaar designated for spices and songbirds. In the spice bazaar, the air was always thick with exotic aromas. Nearby, men would stir-fry vegetables and meat in heavy black skillets, adding to the olfactory experience. Walking through the snaking pathways of Mandaee, you also would come upon a sprawling money bazaar, where people sat by the side of the road with stacks of Afghani bills waiting to make exchanges for dollars and rupees, Pakistan’s currency.
Rows of shops extended as far as the eye could see. At Mandaee, you could find most anything you needed—burqas, appliances, dishes, cosmetics, linens, destarkhaans, teapots and serving trays, flour, sugar, and more. You might see merchants with blankets spread out on the sidewalk and piled high with shoes or other goods. Countless rows of stands were divided into sections for carpets, fruits and vegetables, shoes, makeup, used clothing, plastic buckets and basins, and other items.
The largest section at Mandaee was for cloth sellers. Often, if you bought something from the cloth sellers, they would offer you tea. Some foreign friends of ours once joked that they could spend an entire afternoon at the bazaar going from shop to shop drinking tea.
The bazaar was almost always wall-to-wall people. Covered women beggars, street kids, and men on bicycles clogged the streets and narrow passageways. In the air hung the scent of boulanee—fried potato pastries—commingled with the smell of sewage running through the streets. You could hear merchants shouting out lists of their offerings. “Come here!” they would call. “Look at this!” Or they would practice their English: “Hello, can I help you?”
Children walked around the bazaar trying to sell things. Once we bought several squares of toilet paper from a little boy for a few cents each. We liked to encourage the children to work instead of beg.
Heather: Shortly after we moved into our house in Wazir, we traveled to Mandaee to buy material for the toshaks and curtains in our saloon. Young boys seemed to be stationed every few feet begging. We decided to help them and stopped at a fruit stand to buy a dozen oranges. I did not want to create a mob scene handing out the fruit, so I waited until we got deeper into the bazaar. With a knot of boys in tow, we made our way through a maze of narrow mud walkways tightly lined with booths and came to a spot near the fabric sellers where I could hand out the oranges one at a time.
Almost immediately after I began passing out the fruit, the boys went berserk and started grabbing oranges out of my hands. Oranges fell to the ground. The boys shouted at one another. Some of the boys took more than one. We looked at them disapprovingly. “Your behavior is extremely poor,” we said.
“I did not get one,” exclaimed one of the younger boys, so angry he was close to tears. A nearby shopkeeper made a remark that provoked the boy, and the boy threw a rock in reply. Then the shopkeeper bent down and picked up a rock. We held our breath. Thankfully the man restrained himself, perhaps due to our presence. We were so relieved. Even when we were trying to help Afghans, we sometimes caused problems—the people were so desperate.
Heather Dayna: Near the Shelter Germany office compound in Shar-e-Nao was a smaller bazaar street famous for having the best meat selection. The meat markets were gruesome places to be in the mornings. Bloody animals would be piled up outside the butcher shops. We might pass a sheep, goat, or cow lying in a pool of blood with its throat cut. Carcasses also hung on hooks and played host to swarms of flies and bees. The air would be rank with the smell of dead flesh.
Chicken Street, a frequent destination for foreigners in search of handwoven carpets and lapis jewelry, was also located
in Shar-e-Nao. On nearby Flower Street were shops offering Western products like Oreos, Pepsi, Pringles, Frosted Flakes, and Campbell’s soup.
We frequented one Flower Street shop called Chelsea’s, where the owner, who spoke excellent English, would serve us ice-cold Capri Suns or juice boxes. A lifelong citizen of Kabul, the owner had seen the rise and fall of several Afghan governments—trails of hippies, Russian invaders, and Arab Al-Qaeda terrorists all had walked the aisles of his store.
Every time we would go to pay the owner for our purchases, he would say, “If you don’t have enough money, no problem—you can pay later.”
The owner kept a record of charges for foreigners who didn’t have enough money, and he trusted them to come back and pay for whatever they took.
When he offered to spot us, we would reply, “Thank you, we think we have enough money this time.”
Then he would say, “Where are you going? We will get a taxi for you.” His brother would insist on carrying our items out to a taxi for us. Often we would try to carry the things ourselves, but to no avail. The brother would sweep up our packages and escort us to a taxi.
Dayna: At the bazaars, we foreigners attracted attention. When I lived in Karte Se on the non-electricity side of town, I had to walk through the bazaar every morning to catch a taxi. I would pass by the shops, the bread bakery, and the hanging meat. As I walked, men and some women would turn toward me and motion to their friends to look: “Khaarijee!” they would exclaim. Kids would call out “Khaarijee, Salam!” Hello, foreigner!