A House in the Sky: A Memoir

by Amanda Lindhout

  Still, I had flashes of paranoia. Was the man I’d met traveling, with whom I was now traveling again, the more authentic rendition of the guy who not too long ago had a wife, a flat in London, and an entirely different future? Had I rearranged that, or was I merely an excuse for the rearrangement? I tried to shove off the doubts, but we were operating under some pressure: The wreckage of Nigel’s marriage became less horrid when repurposed as a true-love story, a meant-to-be affair so predestined that it couldn’t have been helped, in fact, shouldn’t have gone any other way, for if it had, we wouldn’t be narrating it to nine grandkids someday from our rockers on the porch, having long ago made one painful correction for the sake of a full, happy life.

  The whole premise worked if we ended up together, if I loved him and he loved me. We said these words to each other, but this time I made no promises to move to Australia. I tried to be bold in order to feel less weak. When I left Nigel, I did so on my terms. I told him I was going to end this next trip through Asia with a longer stay in Afghanistan, having banked some extra money during my last stint at home. Once there, I thought I’d try to get some paid work as a photographer. If he wanted to be with me, he could save his money and join me there. The next step belonged to him. Our lives, I said, could be fantastic.

  11

  Press Pass

  That spring, I made it to Afghanistan as planned, moving into the Mustafa Hotel in downtown Kabul, negotiating a monthly rate and landing myself a small room with dark carpeting and a twin bed covered by a soft pink blanket. The window overlooked a busy square.

  The Mustafa was famous, the place most journalists had bunked at the outset of the American invasion of Afghanistan, when foreign correspondents first poured into the city. It had been one of the first places in post-Taliban Kabul to start serving alcohol. The era when the hotel teemed with journalists, though, had passed. As the war in Afghanistan dragged on, some of the press had moved into fortified compounds or guesthouses that had been converted into news bureaus. Other media organizations didn’t bother to keep a regular correspondent in Afghanistan, funneling their resources toward the other dragging-on war in Iraq. As a result, I’d heard that Afghanistan was a freelancer’s paradise—rich in conflict but not overly populated with media. The barriers for people just starting out were far lower than they were at home.

  Kabul, in May of 2007, resembled a stripped-down rock garden, with whole blocks of half-destroyed Soviet-style buildings followed by blocks of sprouting commerce. The dust off the plateau sat like a second skin on the faces of the raggedy kids who sold chewing gum and old maps on the street corners, the crispness of the high-altitude air lacquered by the motor buzz and stink of hundreds of diesel generators attempting to make up for missing infrastructure.

  I had business cards that read “Amanda Lindhout, Freelance Photographer,” and listed my e-mail address and new Afghan mobile phone number, with the same words written on the back in Dari, the most common language spoken in Afghanistan. I pressed them into the hands of everyone I encountered. At the Mustafa, I met a friendly photojournalist from England named Jason Howe, who’d charted his own way through the guerrilla war in Colombia, through the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon in 2006, followed by a stint in Iraq. He was now en route to Helmand Province to embed with British troops.

  He explained the tenets of freelancing. You planned for yourself, paid for yourself, and assumed your own risk. You rode out the bumps, went without health insurance and long-term plans of any sort, and grew accustomed to being broke. When it came to assignments, you created your own, getting yourself to the most opportune spot.

  Nothing about this intimidated me. It did not, in fact, sound a whole lot different than the tenets of low-budget backpacking.

  I took pictures of everything I could, though I found it hard to photograph Afghans. Even women fully shielded behind burkas turned away from my lens. Men glared openly at me through my viewfinder. I had reconnected with Amanuddin, the rug seller I’d met a couple of years earlier. He’d relocated permanently from Peshawar to Kabul, where he’d opened another store. Thinking he might be able to help me, I asked whether he’d take me out to see the Kuchis, the nomadic people who camped in makeshift villages in the bald brown hills behind his extended family’s house on Kabul’s southern fringe, where I’d stayed during my first visit.

  There were Kuchis all over Afghanistan. Most were of Pashtun heritage; some were more nomadic than others, moving across the highlands over seasons. You’d see the Kuchis walking the sides of otherwise remote roads with their sheep, the women wearing bright wool dresses with beaded bodices and wide sleeves, the men wrapped in scarves and topped by mushroom-shaped Pakol hats. The few hundred living in the furrowed valleys beyond Amanuddin’s house slept under a patchwork of woolen tents. The locals—the Afghans with land and homes—tolerated them, but mostly with distaste. The Kuchis reminded me a little bit of the First Nations people back in Canada, independent and unintegrated and pretty much worse off for it.

  Having packed all my camera gear and all my ambitions as a newly minted, not-exactly-making-it professional photographer, I proposed to Amanuddin that we spend the night at the Kuchi camp.

  His response was sharp: “Why do you need this?” Amanuddin’s idea of a good time was listening to Bollywood music or bringing a picnic of lamb kebabs wrapped in newspaper and eating them on the shady banks of Qargha Lake. It was clear there were limits to what he would do in the name of tour guiding.

  He did agree to walk me out to where the Kuchis were staying and make an introduction. The sun was beginning to dunk behind the hills as we approached, softening everything to a dusty plum. People were driving their herds of sheep and goats in toward camp for the evening. The scene had looked pretty and pastoral from a distance, but now I could smell the shit stink of hundreds of animals as they rivered closer. A turbaned man dressed in loose white clothing and a brown vest was moving toward us from the tents—the headman of the group, who introduced himself as Matin.

  After some conversation in Pashto with Amanuddin, Matin took me to the tent belonging to his sister, saying I could sleep there. Amanuddin continued to insist it was not a good idea to stay—not safe, he said—but I was set on it. Giving me a suit-yourself shrug, he said he’d return for me in the morning and then loped back over the hills just ahead of the darkness.

  The headman’s sister was in her forties, with a sun-weathered face and her hair in two matted braids. She wore a red dress patched with pieces of green wool. Matin loudly pronounced her name for me. Maryam. He then pronounced mine for her. Almond-a. By way of bidding me good night, Matin touched his hand to his heart. I touched my hand to my heart in return.

  Maryam lifted the flap to her tent and waved me in. A small fire burned inside. Her two children wrestled on a carpet laid over the gravelly ground. Their possessions were stacked neatly in canvas bags against the tent’s far wall. Maryam set about making us a dinner of rice and thick yogurt and naan, which we ate right out of the cooking pots, washed down with sweet, warm tea.

  After the meal, she swept the dirt floor and hauled several thick woolen blankets from the back of the tent. She took me outside so we could pee, side by side, on the hillside. Then the two of us lay awake, lit by the orange embers of the cooking fire, each propped on an elbow, talking in our respective languages, aided by hand gestures, somehow never tiring of the effort. We discussed our families and the war, converting a thumbnail’s worth of actual comprehension into something that, in the moment, anyway, felt significant. When she couldn’t make herself clear, Maryam laughed and reached for my hand, as if to say, Whatever. We are having ourselves a little bit of fun. From time to time, she leaned over and pulled the blankets higher over my shoulders.

  In the morning, stepping out of the dark tent into the white blare of sunlight, I was rewarded for having spent the night. Maryam and her Kuchi sisters-in-law—older women who clucked their approval of my presence—stroked my hair and pinned beaded amule
ts to my shirt. They showed me their own adornments—chunky stone necklaces from Saudi Arabia, bracelets inlaid with bits of lapis lazuli, silver earrings in the shape of crescent moons.

  I waited a while to pull out my camera, and when I did, it was not an event. The first time I lifted the viewfinder to my eye and pointed it at the women, nobody flinched. Nobody turned away or hid her children from me or gave me a single hostile look. Any assessment of me had already been done, perhaps the second I’d stepped out of the tent with Maryam and her kids, all of us intact and no worse for the wear. The men drank tea in the shade of a tent. The women lined up goats for milking. A wizened grandmother type squatting outside one of the tents looked at me squarely and frankly with what felt like centuries living in her eyes, and in that split second, I let the shutter close.

  That picture—a close portrait of her spiderwebbed wrinkles and gorgeous clear eyes—became my first published image. An editor at a local magazine for expats called Afghan Scene accepted it a few weeks later to run as a cover photo. She liked the image so much that she asked if she could print a copy to hang in her living room at home. She then commissioned me to go back and report a full feature-length story on the Kuchis. A three-page, eight-photo spread, written and photographed by me.

  By the standards of big-time journalists, it was nothing—a couple of sales to a low-budget magazine, a slim English-language monthly containing restaurant reviews and culture stories set between ads for everything from Visa cards to dog adoptions and armored cars—but for me it was a score. It was an actual assignment, a little bit of money—the reward for going and an excuse to stay.

  *

  Encouraged now, I studied the websites of newsmagazines and newspapers. I paid attention to what people photographed, how the stories read. I forced myself to be extra-outgoing and introduced myself to pretty much everyone passing through the Mustafa, asking questions about where they’d been and what they’d seen. I e-mailed editors in Toronto and New York, attaching photos I’d taken as I made short trips to different provinces, traveling with aid organizations or other freelancers from the Mustafa. Sometimes I got responses and requests to stay in touch, though never a commitment to publish what I’d sent. Most seemed to want only photographs of the war.

  One tactic among enterprising freelancers is to get letters of intent from editors or photo editors—a few short lines written on official letterhead, or an e-mail with an official-sounding address, saying that he or she is interested in seeing, for example, your story on opium farmers who’ve taken up growing pistachios or images from your trip to the Tajiki border. The letters are vague, with no guarantee of publication, but when they’re forwarded to press officers or other gatekeepers, they function as gold.

  The only letter ever written on my behalf came to me by way of one of the Mustafa’s many strange barflies, a pale Brit with a pronounced stutter named Anthony Malone, who, like a lot of the buzz-cut men in desert boots hanging around the downstairs lobby area, referred to himself obliquely as a “private security contractor.” He lived in a ritzy Kabul neighborhood, in a mansion with a staff. He knew people. He threw parties. He talked in a low voice into his cell phone.

  One night over a beer at the bar, he told me that if I wanted to get an official military embed, he could help me out. Within a few days, he’d procured a letter from a buddy of his, an editor at a magazine called Combat and Survival, saying that he’d like to see any photos I could get of the Canadian troops in the field. The letter did the trick. Within a week, I was off to Kandahar.

  Combat and Survival is a publication geared toward soldiers—current soldiers, retired soldiers, and people obsessed, for whatever reason, with war and soldiering. Its pages, when I checked them out, featured reviews of monstrous-looking patrol vehicles and offered manly-sounding frontline reports from places like Serbia and Central Africa, the world’s buzzing hot spots. I had no business working for it, but in truth I was long past worrying about where and how I belonged. After eight weeks in Afghanistan, I’d convinced myself that all I needed to do was to maneuver myself into a place where something newsworthy was going on.

  I touched down in Kandahar on a 115-degree afternoon in late June, lugging my photo equipment and a peacock-blue flak jacket, several sizes too big, which Abdullah, the friendly manager at the Mustafa, had dug out of his lost-and-found closet. Showing up at the Canadian press tent at Kandahar Airfield, I felt my nerves flutter. There was a team from Global News Television and CanWest Media and another guy from CTV. Serious reporters, doing serious work, with their Pelican cases full of equipment, their satellite phones and ballistic-proof sunglasses and combat helmets. Shortly after my arrival, a dark-haired woman in a long white shirt breezed into the tent behind me, looking freshly showered and very much at home. I recognized her instantly as Mellissa Fung, a national reporter for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. I’d seen her on TV plenty of times, but now she was just ten feet away from me—petite, confident, and not nearly as sweaty as the rest of us, busily conferring with her cameraman over a tripod-mounted video monitor.

  I felt like a kid standing alone in the school lunchroom. As I filled out the obligatory military paperwork, including an ominously worded next-of-kin contact sheet, one of the Global News reporters walked over to introduce himself. His name was Francis Silvaggio. I did what I could to sound experienced. I was a photographer based in Kabul, I said. I had flown down to shoot for Combat and Survival. As I was speaking, I saw his gaze settle on my Superman-blue XXL flak jacket, which sat propped like a deli sandwich board on the ground next to my pack.

  “What is that?” he said.

  I sheepishly explained that it was body armor, old and too big and on loan from my hotel in Kabul. He lifted his eyebrows. “I’m a freelancer,” I said, as if this weren’t obvious. I waited for him to say something condescending or find a quick way out of the conversation, but he didn’t. “You know,” Francis said, “I think we’ve probably got an extra vest that’ll fit you better.”

  Before long, courtesy of Global News, I’d been outfitted in a snug and comparatively sleek Kevlar vest the color of dry leaves. In it, I felt less loserish. After being issued a helmet by the military public affairs officer, I seemed to fully blend in. A handful of us media people were heading to a forward operating base at a place called Masum Ghar, in one of those areas that got referred to in the news as a “Taliban stronghold.” We would drive an hour and a half in a convoy of light armored vehicles to get there.

  We got a procedure briefing from a commander before continuing. He reviewed the threat of roadside bombs, his instructions clipped and shouted. “If we’re hit by an IED and there’s no damage,” he said, “we move on. If we’re hit by an IED and there’s a vehicle down, we will cordon it off and fight our way out if we need to.”

  Taking advantage of what could be the last strong cell reception, the other reporters jumped on the phone with their editors, discussing story angles, arranging deadlines. I stepped out of the tent and called Nigel in Australia. I was feeling afraid.

  We’d grown distant already. Our rekindled relationship seemed to be waning quickly. One phone call between us would be exuberant and loving—full of aw babe exclamations and ideas about the future—while the next would be terse and detached. Nigel’s divorce had become official, but instead of feeling like he had a new life and a fresh start, he seemed mostly depressed. Though I understood it, I didn’t want to understand it.

  It was late afternoon in Australia. “I’m going out with the troops,” I said to Nigel, launching into a description of my day thus far, explaining about my helmet and flak jacket, about the Taliban stronghold and the IEDs.

  Maybe it sounded like a boast. Maybe I knew that. We’d had a phone fight earlier in the week. He’d been saying he was coming to join me in Kabul, but he’d made no move to book flights. He’d accused me of being pushy. I’d accused him of being docile.

  “You won’t hear from me for probably ten days,” I told him no
w. “But don’t worry, okay?”

  There was a pause. I pictured Nigel at work at a desk in a clean shirt, editing his photos of whatever had gone on that day in Bundaberg.

  “Okay, then,” he said coolly. “Just don’t get killed.”

  We hung up without a single endearment.

  *

  I spent the next eight days in the field with Canadian soldiers, mostly men my age and from rural parts of Canada. It took only a brief dip in to understand that war was not just dangerous but also a grind. The sun over southern Afghanistan roasted everything—the liquid soap in the latrines, the toilet seats—to almost scalding. Gear was heavy, the dust ubiquitous. I met a classical pianist who was worried about hurting his hands. I met a young father who kept laminated pictures of his children strung on a chain next to his dog tags. I met a couple of guys who passed their patrol time trading fantasies about the singer Nelly Furtado.

  On my second day at Masum Ghar, word came down that three Canadian soldiers had been killed by a roadside bomb during a patrol southwest of Kandahar. The embedded reporters immediately cranked into gear, waiting out the necessary blackout period while the families were contacted before shooting the news out into the universe.

  Soldiers lived inside the wire—within the protected confines of the military camp—but roamed, as needed and as ordered, on the outside. Inside the wire, there was a library, satellite television, and eggs cooked to order at breakfast. Outside the wire, the threats multiplied infinitely. The Taliban operated from the nooks and shadows, from the brown folds in the uptilted mountains, and inside the thick walls of little villages, un-uniformed and therefore indistinguishable from innocent civilians. They attacked with rockets and by laying IEDs along the roads.