by Sally Cooper
At the foot of the mountains, where the green fields met the hills, was a sheer, dusty cliff face stretching almost half the length of the valley. Bamyan had come to the world’s attention in early 2001 when the Taliban destroyed the two giant Buddha statues that had been carved into these cliffs sixteen hundred years earlier. Each Buddha had stood at either end of the cliff face – the larger to my left, some distance away, and the smaller across the valley from where I stood – overlooking the town like silent custodians. Now nothing remained but two enormous cavities. The statues had been carved out of the porous stone but encased within the caves that now stood empty. On the cliff face between the two giant caves were scores of pockmarks, smaller caves that had once housed legions of monks. They were now home to hundreds of people made homeless by the war. Long before the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas, they had destroyed Bamyan and, as the Hazara were Shiites in a country governed by Sunnis, they also destroyed many of its people.
These days, life in Hazarajat was peaceful, far removed from the stresses of Kabul. Because Bamyan was in the process of being rebuilt, it looked and felt like something from the Wild West: the hammering of nails into newly timbered wood, its raised sidewalks and the jingle of dusty horse carts passing by. Fortunately there were no spurs and, being a ‘dry’ country, there was no saloon. There was, however, the Zuhak Hotel, which my colleagues and I moved into later in the morning. The Zuhak stood on the main street. Unlike Bamyan’s only other inn, it had glass in its windows, a front door, a bucket of hot water in its bathroom and a bottle of Cinzano in the office filing cabinet. A small building of two storeys, downstairs housed a compact dining room furnished with plastic picnic tables and decorated with white lace curtains and two pictures: one of Mecca and the other of a verdant Swiss Alpine scene, a stark contrast to the view outside. A basic kitchen doubled as the office and was used to prepare the Zuhak’s only three dishes: kebab, rice and pilau, a concoction of rice, sultanas and meat. Upstairs were seven bedrooms of various sizes and one small, narrow room with a tap, a white porcelain sink, a small mirror and a roughly cut hole in the cement floor with raised foot steps on either side: the bathroom. Each bedroom had two or three beds, old-fashioned metal hospital frames with thin foam mattresses and, if guests were really lucky, more pictures of Swiss Alpine scenes. The Zuhak was always full. Bamyan was a popular destination not only for Afghans and expats but also for the occasional intrepid backpacker keen to see the Ghan ‘before the crowds’.
I had come to Bamyan to work at the newly established Radio Bamyan, which was housed in a new, though somewhat flimsy, two-storey building on the eastern edge of town. The station was on the first floor and access to its front door was via two narrow wooden planks forming what I always hoped was a temporary bridge while the rest of the building gathered form. The station itself consisted of two small rooms, the studio being only slightly more soundproof than the control room. Soundproofing was achieved by the usual Afghan method: a combination of foam mattresses covered, in this instance, with bright blue nylon fabric held in place by a series of carefully positioned sewing pins. Radio Bamyan was the town’s pride and joy and every radio on the main street was tuned to what had become known as ‘our radio’. The station played a lot of music and the occasional interview. An old man in a turban appeared each afternoon with a weather forecast in his hand, though I never found out where he got it from. It was summer in the highlands and his forecast was always the same: warm and sunny during the day, cool and clear at night.
Each day, I watched as Mr Ibrahimi, the owner, and his team of burgeoning journalists got the station on the air. It was very much their radio station so I intervened only when I thought it necessary. Silence was the bane of my Radio Bamyan existence as technology, generators and human error repeatedly connived to remove the station from the airwaves. In most places, prolonged silence is the death of a radio producer, but in the Ghan it simply meant that someone had tripped over a wire, forgotten to buy fuel for the generator or, most of the time, didn’t much like the song they’d been playing and pulled the pin before rummaging around to find another.
‘It might be this,’ I said, giving the wire at the back of the mixing desk a twist.
‘Thank you, Miss Sally,’ was the predictable and ever-polite response to my input, but it didn’t always result in the removal of recalcitrant electrical cords, the purchase of fuel for the generator or seeing the station as anything other than a personal jukebox.
For days on end, I sat in the corner of the control room, answering any questions that came my way, whether technical inquiries requiring my professional expertise, or others borne of politeness. ‘Miss Sally, I want to interview the governor, what should I ask him?’ ‘Miss Sally. Please, why is called Cool Edit?’ ‘Miss Sally, is it summer now in Australia?’ These questions showed me they were happy that I – a foreigner, somebody, anybody – was there. I couldn’t tell them why the editing software was known as Cool Edit though I was confident that August definitely wasn’t summer in Australia. I’d like to have been able to refer them to the internet, but in a town run on an arsenal of tiny Chinese generators and whose communication with the outside world was via the occasional minivan to Kabul or a passing visitor’s satellite phone, it would have been futile.
By far my favourite question was the polite inquiry ‘How is Mark East?’ Few Afghan women go anywhere without their husband’s permission and are almost always accompanied by a male relative. The staff at Radio Bamyan couldn’t conceive of me as being anything other than the wife of the Internews Country Director who had graciously dispatched me to their radio station to help out for a few weeks.
Each afternoon, we spent a few hours sitting in a circle on the floor of the studio in ‘formal’ classes in journalism, or something like it. Beyond the window, the late afternoon sun caught the light of the dusty hills, turning them yellow, then pink and finally grey as my charges and I drank tea and discussed the gamut of radio-making, from how to record an interview to how to write a script and edit out unwanted material. Traditional Afghan culture places great importance on an ‘educated’ man who speaks ‘good Persian’, as the more formal version of the local dialect, Dari, is known. To an Afghan ear, a good radio program is therefore one in which the (male) speaker talks at length, with little interruption and no other use of sound. While I didn’t think it was my place to reinvent the Afghan radio wheel, I did believe that variety and choice were important considerations to throw into the mix. Afghans had had little of either in the previous decades. A culture unquestioning of authority had reached its nadir in the Taliban, a regime that had spectacularly removed any sense of choice and colour from the national conscience.
Adventures in the ‘use of sound’ often proved the most challenging. Nadjia, who described herself as a housewife but had worked as a reporter at a magazine while living in Iran during the war, proposed a story on child malnutrition, endemic in the area as it was across much of the country. Her planned story was based on an interview with a foreign doctor from an NGO working in the area.
‘Perhaps you could also record the sound of babies crying,’ I suggested. ‘And talk to some of the mothers at the clinic.’
She was far too polite to rebuff my suggestion outright although her briefly startled face reflected her surprise. Why interview women when you could record fifteen uninterrupted minutes of educated medical speak? But the Ghan is a country where society dictates that those lower down in the pecking order must do what those higher up say and Nadjia dutifully packed her recording equipment, organised a translator and headed to the clinic.
The finished product, incorporating the foreign doctor, the sounds of the clinic and the voices of local mothers became Nadjia’s benchmark for future stories. Her beaming smile on hearing the finished program proved that talking to ordinary people really was just as good as talking to the ‘important’ ones.
Each afternoon, I set the same homework, which was to come in the next day with another
news story. They were diligent students and would always return with a paragraph or two they had heard on the BBC’s Persian Service – a sure bet when discussing ‘news’. Hassan, the local soccer star, was the exception. Hassan comprehensively proved the theory that sportsmen don’t always make good sport reporters. ‘Bamyan City beat ICRC by three goals to two. This result happened because Bamyan City is the best,’ announced Hassan, grinning from ear to ear. I had no recourse but to smile. What Hassan lacked in journalistic talent, he more than made up for in charm.
Despite its small size, Bamyan boasted two soccer teams. They played every Friday on the town soccer pitch, a dusty, rock-strewn square of land by the river. Someone had gone to Kabul and brought back two sets of team jerseys: one for Bamyan City and the other for ICRC, the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose precise role in the local soccer scene remained unclear for the duration of my time in the highlands. A small crowd of onlookers, all male except for me, assembled where I stood beside Ali, my translator, one of the few men from Radio Bamyan who wasn’t collared into playing. If the action on the pitch was slow, the smattering of fans would turn around and watch me. Pitch invasions consisted of a stray donkey wandering by, though the game always carried on around it. On more than one occasion I saw a match abandoned after a scuffle between the two teams broke out into a large-scale brawl engulfing players, referees and spectators alike.
Six weeks after arriving in Bamyan, it was time to honour my commitment to another radio project in Tanzania, two continents and several centuries away. I was very sad to leave my colleagues at Radio Bamyan. The sun was sparkling the morning I left, with just the barest hint of autumn in the air. As we stood on the Bamyan airstrip and spotted the tiny UN plane coming in above the mountains, the staff of Radio Bamyan bade me farewell. Showing their best Persian manners, they thanked me for my ‘kindness’ and sent their regards to Mark East, my family and my friends. I climbed aboard the tiny eight-seater, strapped myself in and dusted the dirt and the fingerprints from the plane’s window, greedily taking in my last glimpses of Hazarajat. The airstrip was empty, my colleagues had disappeared into the backdrop of dust and caves, freshly milled timber and Chinese generators. I had pressed my nose up against a window on a world I had never dreamed of. I had caught the barest of glimpses and I wanted to see more.
Africa seemed dull by comparison to my three months in Afghanistan; the Ghan had hooked me. So when IRIN, the United Nations’ humanitarian news agency, offered me the position as manager of its Afghan radio training project, I jumped at the opportunity to return.
2
Welcome to the Karwan Sara
The Hindu Kush in spring is a sight to behold. The mountain range, whose name in Dari literally means ‘Indian Killer’, may have kept Afghanistan’s neighbours out in the past but man has long since managed to circumvent nature. On this clear April morning, I flew high above its snow-capped peaks in the UN’s DC-9 on a flight from the Pakistani capital Islamabad to Kabul. Beneath me was fold after fold of rugged mountains, isolated by snow, geography and, most of all, time.
When I left Kabul seven months earlier, I never thought it would be possible to return. But if there was one thing my short stint in the Ghan had taught me it was that nothing in life was ever certain. Both personally and professionally, my return to the Ghan in April 2004 was an opportunity too good to refuse. IRIN is an unusual presence, a tiny flicker of light in the vast United Nations galaxy. The Integrated Regional Information Networks is a news agency that reports on humanitarian news via its website and, in Afghanistan and parts of Africa, was training local journalists to bring humanitarian news to their communities through radio. IRIN may not immunise or feed people but, in times of crisis, it tells people who does.
Kabul International Airport had changed little in my absence. There were no air bridges here; passengers disembarked via portable steps that were wheeled out by a single pair of hands. The motley string of aid workers, Afghans and diplomats then dodged cars, buses, bicycles and small planes as it snaked its way slowly across the tarmac to the terminal. But in what was surely a giant step for mankind, the airport had managed to install a functioning baggage carousel. The carousel, so often taken for granted at most other airports, replaced the chaotic scrum of passengers that had once gathered to collect their bags via a hole in the wall behind the immigration desk. The airport’s bottlenecks were notorious and required more than a little ducking and weaving to get past the ancient porters whose collective grip on the country’s few luggage trolleys ensured no human being or their luggage was going anywhere unless they proffered the requisite tip.
I emerged from the airport terminal in what felt like record time, shading my eyes from the stark spring sunshine. The car park was as I remembered it: a treeless expanse of dusty asphalt, white Land Cruisers and LL Bean duffel bags watched over by a giant poster of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the long-time mujahideen leader. Massoud, the ‘Lion of the Panjshir’, had fought a long and bloody war against the Russians, other mujahideen and, later, the Taliban until his death at the hand of an al-Qaeda suicide bomb on 9 September 2001.
I spotted a shortish man in a grey suit standing by the terminal entrance. Rotund with a Charlie Chaplin moustache, he was smiling at me intently, revealing two rows of almost entirely silver teeth.
‘Hello, Miss Sally. How are you? How was your trip?’ he said. ‘I am Ismail,’ he continued, as if it was an afterthought – ‘Miss Sally’ being the only person in the airport who didn’t know who he was. Though I’d never met him before, Ismail greeted me like a long-lost friend. Despite the country’s well-documented history of violent xenophobia, Afghans are famous for embracing visitors and taking them into their care.
Even if Ismail hadn’t introduced himself, he would have been easy to distinguish by the white Land Cruiser with IRIN’s logo emblazoned across its door that was parked at the kerb four feet from where Ismail stood. I had always regarded the white Land Cruiser brigade with a degree of suspicion, their occupants insulated from the reality of local life. While wandering around the backblocks of Rwanda in 2001, a pristine white Land Cruiser had pulled up alongside me. Did I know the whereabouts of any decent restaurants? the European passengers asked me, their sense of urgency punctuating their polite French. I was in Kibuye, a small town barely recovering from the genocide. I doubted Kibuye had a ‘decent’ restaurant scene and said simply, ‘Non’.
In the excitement of returning to Kabul, I hadn’t thought much about where I was going to live. On my previous visit, I’d stayed at the Internews house, though I knew of two or three decent guesthouses recommended by friends. But Ismail had reserved me a room at the Mustafa Hotel in the centre of town.
‘It’s on the list,’ he said confidently.
‘What list?’ I asked. I doubted the writers of travel guides had made it to Kabul, a city in which all accommodation could best be described as ‘rustic’.
‘The UN security office. They have a list of the places where the UN people can stay. Do you want to see it?’ He took one hand off the wheel and began rummaging in his pocket.
‘No, no … you can show me another time.’ Ismail seemed like a good driver but I didn’t really want him scratching around in his pockets for lists I wasn’t sure I wanted to read. From my previous experience in the Ghan, I knew the UN to be big on high walls, well-guarded entrances and shatterproof glass, enough to discourage all but minimal contact with the natives. One friend had called it ‘institutionally mandated paranoia’, others called it ‘The Bubble’. Last year, in the unfettered world of NGOs, I had been given a satellite phone and banished to the provinces. ‘Call if you need anything and we’ll send it on the next flight,’ they promised as they waved me goodbye. But for people with blue ID tags, life in the Ghan was more restricted.
The Mustafa, with its ample windows facing out onto the busy intersection below, seemed an odd addition to ‘the list’. Its dingy bar, one of the few in Kabul, attracted every gun-toting m
ercenary and ‘geographic bachelor’ in town – men whose marriage vows, like their wedding rings, got lost in transit. Two nights later, after almost no sleep, I decided it was time to look for something else. It was hard to say whether my insomnia was due to the thumping all-night music from the bar downstairs, the cacophony of the traffic below or the three men loudly reciting the Koran in what appeared to be a large closet across the hall from my room. All I knew was I needed space. Some trees would help; silence, or something like it, would be great.
I collared Ismail and together we set off on a tour of the guesthouses of Kabul. It seemed that owning a guesthouse in the post 9/11 Kabul was a licence to print money. With an abundance of foreigners and their equally abundant cash, most charged in excess of fifty US dollars a night for a rickety bed, a brick-like pillow, greasy omelettes and the joy of sharing a bathroom with four or five of your soon-to-be closest friends.
At my suggestion, we stopped at the Chez Ana, an eleven-room guesthouse on a dusty side lane in Shahre Naw. Shahre Naw means New City and forms the heart of Kabul’s downtown. While it was anything but new, its name distinguished it from Kabul’s Old City, a labyrinth of narrow alleyways and ancient bazaars on the other side of the Kabul River.
Ismail, ever the company man, shook his head. ‘Excuse me, but it’s not on the list. Here I can show you.’
‘No, it’s okay,’ I said as he again began to rummage in his pockets. I was beginning to feel like I was back at school.
As it turned out, the Chez Ana’s lack of approval was the least of my worries; it was full.
‘How about UNICA?’ asked Ismail, firing up the engine of the car. UNICA was the main UN guesthouse in Kabul, a sprawling warren of buildings close to the centre of town.
‘No, let’s try the Karwan Sara,’ I said optimistically.
The Karwan Sara, one of the few British-style colonial buildings still standing in Kabul, was just around the corner. Its name comes from the term caravan serai, a resting place for travellers. With its expansive green lawns, the guesthouse was a quiet oasis in a sea of almost complete chaos. We were shown a large room with a dark timber ceiling, thick Afghan carpets of rich reds and golds, and light, lots of light, pouring in through three enormous, deep-set windows that looked out onto a verandah and the rose garden below – a vast improvement on the sight of the butchery across the street from the Mustafa Hotel. Best of all, there were trees. Ismail assured me that since the Karwan Sara’s restaurant was on the list, the guesthouse must be too. With that, we unloaded my green metal trunk and my backpack – the sum total of my possessions – and I settled into my new home.