OxTravels

by Mark Ellingham

  I proceeded to recruit staff. Even an uneducated Afghan who had attended a development training course and could speak passable English could earn more than a thousand dollars a month. I could not afford those salaries. My first employee had worked as a salesman in a Pakistani carpet shop and in the ‘informal export sector’ during the Taliban period, which seemed to involve carrying semi-precious stones across mountain passes. But an old friend had employed him as a driver and said that he had once risked his life to save her from kidnapping. Within a week I had added an Afghan woman, a young radio operator from the north, a fifty-year-old white-bearded engineer, a one-legged horseman, a high school literature teacher, a woodworker and a physically handicapped academic administrator. Thus, respectively, I had appointed my logistics manager, office administrator, finance director, chief engineer, guard, calligraphy master, woodwork master and office manager.

  The Wrestler – Parwan Aziz

  None had had senior jobs in an international organisation; none spoke fluent English; the majority had not completed a high school education and I suspect they would not have been employed in any formal recruitment process. But I believed I could trust them.

  Each employee began to build their own team. Within three weeks we didn’t have enough space for our growing staff. An Englishman called David suggested that I could occupy and restore a nineteenth-century fortress, set above two acres of gardens. The original owner’s widow now lived in Delhi and David and his friends lived in the only occupied wing. We replaced ceilings and windows, installed loos and repaired the underfloor heating system of the nineteenth-century bath-house so that we could bathe in the winter. In the garden we set up an office and the carpentry and calligraphy school and began building a new school to teach ceramics.

  The early staff came from different social classes and from ethnic groups that had recently been at war. Each favoured their own: the manager from the persecuted Hazara minority hired a Hazara cook and translator; while Panshiri Tajiks came to dominate the driving pool. My personal relations with each, stretching back over years or through mutual friends, made it almost impossible for me to fire anyone. I had to spend a great deal of time at weddings, lending money, trying to help relatives and paying medical bills from my own pocket.

  But it proved a wonderful team: each was bound to me by some form of personal loyalty, in a society where institutional loyalty was scant. Their eight separate origins meant that they kept an often jealous eye on each other, ensuring that as the organisation grew it could never be dominated by a single cabal. I decided to launch a cultural foundation by hosting a play and was delighted to see how everyone threw themselves into the preparations. Just before the start I watched the guard, the finance director and the driver each fixing lights and carrying plates of food.

  I HAD RESERVATIONS about appointing the tailor’s brother to oversee restoration work, not only because he had little formal education or knowledge of architectural conservation but also because he came from a different ethnic group and a different sect of Islam from that of the community. But when he walked over the rutted mud lanes of Murad Khane and met Parwan Aziz he seized him by the biceps and began a mock re-enactment of a wrestling match, laced with jokes and elaborate compliments. It was he who negotiated with the wrestler and who convinced me to follow the wrestler’s housing plans. We were rewarded by a petition signed by the fifty most senior members of the community asking us to work in the area. Henceforth, community support was our greatest defence against the municipality and mayor, international policy shifts, vagaries of funding and greedy developers.

  We decided it would be strategic to begin by shifting rubbish. The engineer conjured up a workforce and began. At this point the municipal director appeared with police and a document ordering us to stop. The police advanced with Kalashnikovs; the labourers fell back; I rummaged for dog-eared registration documents and the director wrote in bold strokes on a clipboard. Behind me, I sensed a gathering crowd. An old man who I had not met before stepped forward and shouted, ‘How dare you stop these men? I remember when you last cleared the garbage: I was ten years old and it was 1947.’ The wrestler shook the hands of the now-smiling police. The engineer put his arm around the director’s shoulders and walked him out of Murad Khane. The next day we received a letter from the municipality authorising us to proceed.

  Parwan Aziz went to the President’s office; the Minister of Urban Development was invited to a service at the shrine; and when the police intervened again, the community laid a new concrete forecourt for the police station. Foreigners had told me that Afghans were slow and inefficient. That was not my experience. Over the next eighteen months, the engineer cleared over 10,000 trucks of rubbish, dropping the street level by more than seven feet and creating near total employment. Then he levelled the streets, dug drainage and wells and laid paving, and began emergency repairs on fifty houses, making them water-tight, propping walls, installing lavatories.

  People began to come back into the area and drug pedlars moved elsewhere. But the engineer’s real genius was political, in defusing the conflicts over jobs for relatives, fights over wages and over which properties should be repaired first. He dealt with things in his own style, grabbing an angry mullah by the beard after we had accidentally brought down the mosque wall. Astonishingly, the mullah laughed and forgave us.

  Meanwhile, in order to cope with demand, our lack of funding and the shortage of professionals, I brought in more than a hundred international volunteers over two years. Enthusiastic amateurs mingled with serious experts. Many lived three to a room and we all ate together at a common table.

  Where we had no expertise we had to be inventive. I had started with a few prejudices: I wanted the repairs to buildings to be visible but not too obvious. But that was hardly a coherent conservation philosophy. I thought the high temperatures in electric kilns eliminated all that was intriguing in the low-fired pots but that didn’t help us win contracts from suppliers who wanted less fragile glazes. I didn’t think we should pay too much for international volunteers but what about providing life insurance? Should the financial year start in January or April? Should we have a substantial document detailing our plans for urban regeneration and who should lead it: an architect? A planner? A property developer? Me?

  It was clear we needed to work quickly to prove to the government that the area and crafts were worth saving and to the community that we were serious, competent and serving their needs. Our initiatives multiplied, responding to sudden crises or the shifting expertise of our volunteers or the community’s demands. We produced a traffic plan for the northern bank of the river, took an exhibition of calligraphy to a museum in Bahrain, built different designs of self-composting lavatories (one under a ‘Nubian vault’) and fitted earth buildings with new types of mud brick, solar panels and elaborately carved calligraphic doors. We created factory management systems around new carpentry equipment; launched IT and business courses for students; developed partnerships with Pakistani art schools, opened a rural museum for potters and sold an Afghan-carved suite to the Connaught Hotel in London. Anna, our plucky development director, recorded the recipes of the old city and designed a restaurant in a historic building which would provide employment and draw Afghan visitors back to the old city with good, affordable food.

  Some of the best ideas came from the community itself. Like the primary school. Education is bad in Afghanistan: perhaps a quarter of teachers are illiterate and as recently as 2001 girls were not permitted to attend. Children in the old city needed a safe-haven during the day from homes often marked by domestic violence and drug abuse. But we were overstretched and I was reluctant to launch a new initiative. We compromised: the community provided the space while we focused on the teaching.

  We began in a single room with a couple of teachers and within an hour of opening the doors we had 160 boys and girls, most of whom had never been to school before. Their smiles alone made me feel our project was worthwhile. Yet it wa
s no easier than anything else in Afghanistan. The school would have remained second-rate if we had not hired better teachers, negotiated with the Ministry of Education, built new classrooms and introduced local history and art classes, city tours, adult literacy classes and mathematics. And much of this depended on foreign staff. The curriculum was reformed and the teachers were trained by the head of science from an inner city school in Boston.

  The Institute for Traditional Afghan Arts began as little more than an apprentice workshop with people huddled on rough benches watching Master Abdul Hadi. A year later, there was a full timetable for the students including IT, English, business studies, Islamic art history and design. Our new business development section launched catalogues and websites of our work, won commissions from embassies, represented us at international trade fairs, sold coasters in Canada and a wooden library to Japan. Monsoon had given us money to train women in embroidery to sell in their stores. We had begun to plant trees to make our timber source sustainable. We had built a girls’ school for a fraction of the cost of a concrete building. At the start of the second year we had 650 applicants for 33 places.

  It was only once we had succeeded in each case that the relevant Afghan ministry began to support us. A new Minister of Education recognised the degree certificates from our school and registered us as a national higher education institute. Two decrees were issued to register the area as a protected historical site. Our architects provided training for the Ministry of Urban Development and they in turn worked with us on land-use plans for the site. The media became excited and flattering profiles appeared. We were often on the Afghan evening news.

  I WAS THE ONLY PERSON aware that we were dangerously short of cash. I needed to raise thousands of dollars a day. I began to lend more of my own money to try to keep things going. Many had trusted us: donating land for our schools, working long hours, enrolling to learn complex skills in traditional crafts and architecture. But we had to slow the building projects, which meant laying people off at the onset of winter. I began to wonder what might be raised by selling our mini-van or carpets.

  By November 2006, I had two weeks before I would have to give everyone a month’s notice. I woke at three in the morning and felt very afraid. No one was used to giving to a brand-new organisation that had grown at this pace or was operating on this scale. Most donors required two years of audited accounts. As I walked to work, I was greeted by people – the gate-guard who had lost his leg to a landmine; the receptionist who needed a heart operation and the driver who had been the first to leave his job to join us – and when they smiled or thanked me, I felt like a fraud.

  An objective examination of the costs and probabilities suggested we should shut down. Continuing was a gamble: an attempt to bend the world improbably to our dreams. I continued through stubbornness not reason. I flew back to Britain and left behind the conversations and the crises that I had loved in the old courtyards of Kabul in order to fundraise around the world. I made it a rule to return to Kabul every fortnight but I was on almost three hundred flights over the next two years.

  In countries I had never visited I waited for meetings that never happened. Once, when I made it past a secretary in a Gulf state, I was accused of terrorist financing and shown the door. Some of the wealthy would only support us if we changed what we were doing: to advocacy for women, or schools for the blind. If by luck they would support something we were doing, they could change their mind and suggest something that we were not. I was hopeful about our chances with foundations created by young dot-com leaders and dedicated to ‘social entrepreneurs’. But they wanted synergies and income streams and compared us on cost per unit metrics. They did not want to be distracted from their ‘core mission’.

  But we didn’t just do one core activity. We believed, for example, that to regenerate the bazaar we had to clear garbage and develop attractive sites for visitors, we had to train craftsmen to manufacture products to sell, teach the shopkeepers to read and write and count, give incomes to women, provide shelter, water and electricity. Our strength was our local knowledge: we had been in every house, employed someone from every family, worked alongside them, negotiated, tussled, shaped their aspirations and were shaped in turn. But there was no universal model: what worked for us might not work elsewhere.

  The only way to convey our work was to get donors to visit. One of our best supporters was an eighty-four-year-old American woman who almost immediately on arrival forced senior ministers and generals to act: establishing an orphanage, providing razors for troops, bringing equipment to eliminate water-borne diseases. She clambered up stairs, over dangerous gaps in the roof, trudged through mud, interrogated our female students, watched the customers buy the products that provided the income to sustain the project and listened to the community itself. But very few people dared to come.

  One foundation boasted to me that after an exhaustive analysis of proposals he had ignored us and instead allocated hundreds of thousands of dollars to an Afghan woman who was running thousands of girls’ schools. I knew these schools did not exist.

  In the end we were saved by private generosity. An Afghan nightclub owner crossed a street in Washington to give me a thousand dollars because he had heard about our work from his family in Kabul, a Swedish woman cycled up to our office to give us fifty dollars, our English volunteer did a skip-a-thon with an Afghan friend in Dorset. And Prince Charles remained our chief supporter and champion.

  Our largest donors gave from their private accounts, because their foundation bureaucracies were too restricted to be able to support us. Some had heard of us, others gave randomly with no prior contact. A lady talked to me about Afghanistan for twenty minutes over lunch in California and later sent a million dollars. Then she visited us and sent another million. The Afghan government is now putting its own money behind us and we now have 350 employees.

  Recently, I stood in the central square of Murad Khane. I could move without sinking into the mud because the drainage and stone-paving has worked. I noticed that the carving on the windows of the upper gallery needed to be redone: the Nubian vault had been removed from the loo because of a rumour we were building a pagan temple. I heard that the Mayor might have agreed not to build the threatened road. There was a new community box, outside the women’s clinic, and people had put in thirty dollars which would cover prescriptions for the next two months. Three streets had agreed to take over the cost of garbage clearance from us; one had not. I noted that the students at the primary school had new uniforms.

  Western bureaucracies seem to exist to stop this kind of project. If it succeeds, it will not be a neat lesson in ‘social entrepreneurship’, in management, or a new model for international development. Rather, it is a story of sudden expressions of faith, acts of generosity and amateur flair. Ours was a local project in a mud city spun by an ageing wrestler, teased by volunteers, tugged by a grey-bearded engineer, deconstructed in conversations around a table at mealtimes. My hope is to return in thirty years and admire the old city’s arts and architecture and encounter a community which is more just, prosperous and humane. There is no guarantee.

  In Mandalay

  COLIN THUBRON (born London, 1939) is a travel writer and novelist. His first books were about the Middle East – Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled by car into the Soviet Union, a journey recorded in Among the Russians. From these early experiences developed his classic travel books on China, Russia and Central Asia: Behind the Wall: a Journey through China, The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia, Shadow of the Silk Road and most recently, To a Mountain in Tibet. He has won many prizes and awards. In 2010 he became President of the Royal Society of Literature.

  In Mandalay

  COLIN THUBRON

  It is thirty-five years ago now, and the time has faded to a sepia strangeness, lit by a few sharp surviving details: a man’s pained smile, a shelf of mouldering books. It was a time when Myanmar – old British Burma – was even more constrictive tha
n now. Travellers were permitted seven days in the country, and in that tense span might attempt the gruelling 450-mile railway journey from Rangoon to Mandalay, returning down the Irrawaddy by steamer past the long-ruined capital of Pagan.

  I had driven out from Europe through countries which were less dangerous then – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir – and across northern India. But the Burmese border was where the overland journey had always stopped dead. I ditched my car in Calcutta and flew south-east, bypassing the jungled tribal hills of northern Myanmar, to land at last in a sequestered Rangoon.

  I remember the city in grand decline: shrubs sprouting through the Victorian stone, a black market thriving among people who lived by a private economy, the otherworldly beauty of worshippers processing round the Shwedagon pagoda, as if nothing for centuries had changed. It was a land and people whose infinite appeal to the camera barely softened a harsh poverty. The junta of General Ne Win looked set to rule forever. The democratic heroine Aung San Suu Kyi was still a wife in Oxford. The country lay in a time-warp, charming the fleeting foreigner, who knew nothing.

  The only domestic air flights had been commandeered by the army, so it was by the steam-train that I laboured north to Mandalay. I cannot remember how long it took, or how often it broke down. The train was so crowded that people clung to its foot-rails and squatted on its roofs. For an interminable night I sat wedged among betel-spitting farmers above the clanking buffers linking two carriages. Whenever we stopped, the villagers waiting on country platforms stormed through the windows (the glass had long ago gone) or charged through the jammed doors; while those inside – already half suffocated – slammed down the window shutters and fought to keep them out.