by Sally Cooper
Each morning, when I walked into the office, the entire staff stood to greet me in much the same way I had greeted my first grade teacher in primary school.
‘Good morning, Miss Sally,’ was mumbled in my general direction as I made my way to my desk.
‘Good morning. You don’t have to stand up for me,’ had been my reflex response. I found it more than a little disconcerting, yet they were just doing what they considered to be the right and most polite thing. Just as there was a pecking order in the provision store, so there was a pecking order in our office, one which placed me, the boss, at the very top.
Each day began with a cup of tea prepared by Farhad who poured it from an enormous black thermos that stood on a wooden table next to the office refrigerator. It is almost impossible to put into words the importance of a simple cup of tea in everyday Afghan life. Every meeting, from social interaction between friends to political negotiations between enemies, began and ended with a cup of tea. Tea was either green or black, and never drunk with milk. It was always served with sweets, small sugary toffees held between the teeth while slurping in the tea. Tea drinking in the Ghan was a very noisy affair, second only to the loud, open-mouthed chewing of kebabs. I often wondered what my colleagues made of my carefully silent sipping.
The production team – Mirwais, Aziz and Zarghona – was relatively new to IRIN but not to radio. After finishing their tea, we gathered in the studio downstairs for our first meeting. Our project had committed to training sixty journalists over the next two years. I knew the team had the technical skills to put a radio program together – the ability to record, mix and edit – but I was keen to see how much editorial direction they needed and how advanced their journalistic skills really were. Technical skills were easily transferred, the craft of journalism – the ability to tell a story accurately, fairly and succinctly – less so. Without these skills, there could be no training.
In order to better understand their capabilities, I set each of them the task of making a ten-minute program. As neither Zarghona nor Aziz spoke English, Mirwais was the group’s spokesman and translator. Mirwais was from Logar, the province south of Kabul on the edge of Pashtunistan, the homeland of the Pashtuns. The Pashtuns were the largest and most conservative of Afghanistan’s ethnic groups and, traditionally, the Ghan’s rulers. Mirwais had thick dark hair, black eyes, a short dark beard and scratchy English.
‘Aziz, what will your program be about?’ I asked.
Aziz was, like Mirwais, somewhere between twenty-five and forty. He was thickset with receding hair, a moustache and an engaging smile. He cleared his throat, put his hand to his chest and answered in Dari.
‘Er … Mr Aziz would like to make his program about women and chickens,’ said Mirwais hesitantly, looking across at Aziz as if to check the facts.
From the perplexed look on Aziz’s face, I could tell his English was better than he was prepared to admit. A rapid exchange of Dari ensued, Aziz gesticulating with his hands and his eyes, Mirwais nodding vigorously, emitting the occasional ‘Bale’ (yes). Eventually Mirwais turned to me.
‘Excuse me. Mr Aziz would like to make a program about an NGO that gives chicken to women …’
Aziz nodded, satisfied.
‘One chicken or many chickens?’ I said.
‘Er, more than one chicken,’ replied Mirwais
‘Why do they give chickens to women?’ It sounded like a small business project but, in the Ghan, one should never assume.
‘The NGO by the name of CARE has a project for widows to make business.’
‘Okay. What about you, Zarghona, what will your program be about?’
Zarghona was that rarest of species, a female Afghan journalist, though like most of her colleagues, her skills were only recently acquired. She was in her early twenties, her slight build camouflaging a more robust determination underneath. Like most Afghan women, Zarghona wore heavy make-up. Her dark eyes were ringed with eyeliner and thick with mascara. Her pale, ivory skin was coated in heavy foundation, her lips covered in a dark maroon gloss.
‘Miss Zarghona would like to make a program about refugees,’ said Mirwais before Zarghona had opened her mouth.
‘Perhaps she can tell me that herself,’ I said to him, looking at Zarghona expectantly.
Her eyes darted from the floor to Mirwais and then to me. She fidgeted with her headscarf and cleared her throat. Her answer – in Dari – was to Mirwais, not to me. Unlike his exchange with Aziz, Zarghona had barely begun when Mirwais interrupted.
His tone was sharp and condescending, and was accompanied with multiple shrugs and shakes of the head. I had spent enough time in the Ghan to know that Mirwais wasn’t being a bully, he was just being an Afghan man. Afghan women were the lowest of the low. Chattels traded between families, most spent their lives behind closed doors, producing children and doing whatever their husbands told them. Zarghona was one of the few who had gone to school. Although I was also a woman, I was a foreigner and belonged to the ‘third gender’ the Ghan ascribed to all foreign women, somewhere between a man and a woman. I didn’t want to see Zarghona’s spirit flattened so early in my tenure, nor did I want her to think I saw her through Mirwais’s eyes. My ‘third gender’ brought many privileges so I decided to step in and play traffic cop.
‘Zarghona, why don’t you tell me, not Mirwais,’ I suggested.
I suspected that Zarghona, like Aziz, spoke more English than she was prepared to let on. She bit her lip, lifted her eyes from the floor and started to speak. Her answer was in Dari but because she was looking at me there was less room for Mirwais to butt in.
When she finished speaking, Mirwais, who was now on his best behaviour, announced, ‘Miss Zarghona would like to interview some of the people at UNHCR. The ones who have come back from Pakistan. She will talk to them about their situation and how they will solve their problems.’
‘Okay, that sounds great.’ Confident the programs were on the right track, I was keen to get the team moving. ‘Think about your interviews tonight and we can talk about them tomorrow.’
The United Nations was the biggest gig in a town that, in 2004, was almost wholly owned and operated by donors, aid agencies, NGOs and the UN. This often disparate group was collectively known as ‘Development Inc.’ Aid, like the media, is a business and, in post-Taliban Afghanistan, it was a business worth billions of dollars. All the major UN players were here in a dictionary of acronyms: UNICEF, UNHCR (the United Nations High Commission for Refugees), WFP (the World Food Programme), the FAO (the Food and Agricultural Organization), WHO (the World Health Organization).
A few days after our editorial meeting, Zarghona and I visited the UNHCR processing station just off Jalalabad Road, one of a handful of arterial roads leading from Kabul to the provinces. The road followed the course of the Kabul River, one hundred and fifty kilometres east to Jalalabad and from there across the Khyber Pass into Pakistan. Once upon a time, long before the war, Jalalabad Road had been home to Kabul’s fledgling industrial area. Now it was a bleak and potholed highway of bombed-out factories and roofless, rusting warehouses. It was also home to UNOCA, the largest of the UN’s compounds, a smattering of military compounds and the UNHCR’s processing station for returning refugees.
Twenty-three years of war had led to the single biggest exodus of refugees in modern history and now they were coming home. As we pulled into the compound, a convoy of returnees had arrived from Peshawar, just over the Pakistani border and long known as Little Kabul for the number of Afghans living there. They travelled on large Pakistani ‘jingle trucks’ – so named for the collars of small bells that decorated their chassis – loaded with whatever possessions the returnees owned. More often than not, the sum total of their worldly goods was no more than a handful of cooking utensils and a dusty plastic bag full of clothes.
The returnees were divided into two groups, men on one side and women and children on the other. Each group was led inside two large white canvas tents to begi
n their ‘orientation’. Item one on the agenda was how to identify landmines. By 2001 there were an estimated ten million landmines laid across Afghanistan in farms, orchards, pastures, roads, footpaths, canals, streams – wherever they would inflict maximum damage. With a population of around twenty-eight million, there was one mine waiting to injure, maim or kill every 2.8 Afghans.
I followed the women into their tent. Zarghona darted in and out of the line, interviewing mothers and recording the sound of their crying babies being jabbed with a nameless vaccine. The women were given sachets of oral rehydration powder and everyone was sent on their way, their homes long destroyed, their fates uncertain.
When I worked at the ABC, I produced three hours of live ‘news-talk’ a day, five days a week. The production team consisted of me, a senior producer, a technical operator for the studio desk and the presenter. It was a hard slog; in the advent of breaking news, scripts were typed live onto the presenter’s screen, often no more than three words ahead of their voice. One lost phone call or a studio guest wandering off to the bathroom at the wrong time could ruin your whole day.
Two weeks later, the team’s programs were finally ready. They had been delayed by everything from flat tyres to Mirwais not having enough credit on his phone and waiting for Ismail to go out and buy more. Initiative and the ability to solve the raft of logistical problems that were thrown at you were an immutable reality of every journalist’s job. On that score, the production team had failed badly.
As in Bamyan, I had emphasised the importance of the use of sound. The producers seemed to have taken me literally. Aziz’s program didn’t tell me much about CARE’s small business project apart from the constant soundtrack of chickens coming out at me from the speakers – in stereo. Zarghona fared better, mixing the sound of children crying with the authoritative tones of UNHCR staff explaining their work with returnees.
By far the best program came from Mirwais and centred on people smuggling. Most Afghans had a people-smuggling story to tell, either from their own experience or that of their uncles, their brothers, their cousins or their neighbours.
Mirwais had interviewed two people. One was a doctor who paid eighteen thousand US dollars to take his family of four from Iran to Germany, where he stayed until the fall of the Taliban. Like many Afghans spurred on by the excitement of the new Afghanistan, he and his family chose to come home.
The second interview was with a young man, Dost, who paid four thousand to travel to Australia. His boat from Indonesia to Australia sank, and its passengers were picked up and taken to Nauru, an island that he and many Australians had never heard of. In 2001, Nauru became the centrepiece of the Howard government’s Pacific Solution whereby asylum seekers were processed in offshore detention camps as a deterrent to ‘back door’ arrivals. After two years, Dost’s claim for asylum was rejected and he took up the offer of repatriation, returning to the Ghan. When the plane touched down in Kabul, he said he cried with joy, so happy was he to finally be home.
In the process of discussing his program, Mirwais expanded his English vocabulary to include the words navy, Tampa, Nauru and hunger strike, while I added a few more pillars to my job description: traffic cop, English teacher and logistics coordinator. I had a feeling I was going to be in for a bumpy ride.
5
What Not to Wear
Two weeks after I’d moved to the Karwan Sara, I walked into Reception one morning to find the male cleaner wearing my clothes. Reception – which consisted of a desk, three chairs, a sofa and a computer whose sole function appeared to be playing Hindi movies for the entertainment of the Karwan Sara staff – was located in a prefabricated glass office in the corner of the guesthouse car park. Straw matting was strewn haphazardly across the roof in an effort to provide shade from the already penetrating May sunshine.
I’d handed the cleaner a bundle of washing not three minutes earlier – no smalls, of course, just my shalwar kameez, carefully wrapped in a headscarf – and returned to my room. I had bought a number of female versions of the shalwar kameez tunic and trousers while passing through Islamabad on my way to the Ghan. They were stylish and kept me cool and, while they lent me a certain respectability in the eyes of my Afghan colleagues, I wasn’t convinced that someone actually wearing my clothes, particularly a male someone, should be taken as a compliment.
The cleaner, a small bearded man with slightly crazed eyes, was now parading around Reception wearing my scarf around his waist. Like an ‘actress’ from Shakespearean times, he was spouting forth in high-pitched Dari, batting his eyelids and waving the remainder of my shalwar kameez – the trousers and tunic – above his head with uncertain intent. His appreciative audience, the Karwan Sara staff, was exclusively male.
I stood still in the doorway and for a while no-one noticed I was there. I wasn’t really sure what to think, though for a fleeting moment I was grateful I hadn’t included my smalls. On the one hand, it was pretty funny, inexplicable but funny. On the other hand, Afghan culture was supposed to be extraordinarily respectful to visitors and guests. I decided a fair display of anger and disgust was in order. Drawing on my journalist’s training, I kept it simple.
‘WHAT are you doing?’ I said. My tone made it clear I wasn’t nearly as amused as the rest of the audience. Five pairs of eyes were now feigning interest in their feet, their shoes and any spots, real or imagined, on the concrete floor.
‘WHAT are you doing? WHY are you wearing my clothes?’
This was going to be a one-sided conversation. Even though everyone in the room spoke English, my lack of Dari wasn’t an excuse. I decided to take an Afghan approach.
‘Is this how you treat your guests in this country?’
Still no-one said a word, not even a glance was cast in my direction. Through the corner of my eye, I saw the IRIN car arrive to take me to work.
‘You make me sick!’ I exclaimed as I headed to the door. The phrase didn’t really sum up what I was feeling but I was completely at a loss as to what to say. For good measure, I slammed the glass door on my way out, the entire glass edifice shaking in my wake.
As I walked towards the car, I could see the looks on the faces of my colleagues, who had seen the fashion show through the glass walls of Reception. I had worn the red shalwar kameez the day before. Now it was slung around the hips of a strange and emotionally suspect Afghan man. There was something rotten in the Karwan Sara.
The cleaner was the only topic of conversation for the entire drive to the office and most of the day. While Afghans may engage in some unusual cultural practices to a Western eye, men wearing women’s clothing wasn’t one of them and the IRIN staff spent much of the day shaking their heads and wondering why.
Ismail, ever the uncle, insisted on chaperoning me home that afternoon. He told Mujeeb, the Karwan Sara manager, that this was not acceptable behaviour from anyone, particularly in front of guests – and where, by the way, were his manners? But the cleaner had already been fired. And the Karwan Sara looked the better for it. Fewer stains lined the toilet, there was no more sidestepping cockroaches in the shower, and no-one walking in on me in the bathroom.
As I was leaving for work the next morning, the entire Karwan Sara staff was gathered in Reception. Mujeeb, a shy man in his early thirties, had suddenly found his manners.
‘Miss Sally, good morning. How are you today?’ He smiled, head bowed ever so slightly.
‘I’m fine, Mujeeb. How are you?’
‘I am well. Miss Sally, excuse me but I would like to apologise for the cleaner yesterday. He is a very uneducated man. He is gone now.’ Mujeeb flicked his left hand in dismissive gesture. ‘Is there anyone else you would like me to fire?’
There was a small intake of breath across the room.
‘Ummmm …’ I said, jiggling my room key and casting my gaze across the garden as if in deep contemplation. I knew I was making the boys nervous. I felt like a Roman emperor about to give the thumbs down to a hapless gladiator. But I decided a
clean toilet was compensation enough. ‘No, Mujeeb, not right now.’
‘Okay, Miss Sally. Let me know if these boys are behaving badly.’
‘I will do that. Thank you, Mujeeb.’
With one last glance at the Karwan Sara staff, I walked out, got in the car and went to work.
The laundry I’d given the now-departed cleaner was eventually returned to me, though minus the headscarf. My search-and-rescue expedition to the laundry downstairs brought me no joy. Located in the dark, damp basement of the building, the Karwan Sara laundry was a bottomless pit, a quagmire of clothing, lost and rarely found. It was the exclusive domain of the only women who worked at the guesthouse, three babushkas – all Hazara – whose wizened moonlike faces made their ages impossible to guess. They spent their days sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by mountains of clothes which I could only assume belonged to guests long since departed.
They seemed cheery enough when I walked in, probably because unless someone showed up looking for their shirt or a stray pair of socks, the three had little or no contact with the outside world. After the ritual ‘Salaam aleikum’ I lifted a headscarf from a nearby pile. It was damp and smelled like it had been in the laundry even longer than the babushkas. Miming usually worked better than anything I could manage linguistically but the women just stared, giggled and replied in a barrage of Dari. I wasn’t sure if they were talking to me or about me until one of them reached out and ran her arthritic fingers through my short blonde hair.
To avoid further laundry problems, I invested in a bucket to ensure safe passage for what was left of my shalwar kameez, my socks and my smalls. Living in the guesthouse, like living in the Ghan itself, required some adapting.