A Burqa and a Hard Place

by Sally Cooper

  ‘Hello, I live here … I’m coming back in about an hour. Okay?’ I repeated.

  ‘Sure,’ sneered the goatee. I wasn’t sure if the sneer was meant to attract or repel me. I let out a small shiver as I passed through the gate and climbed into Steven’s car.

  We returned an hour later bearing a family-sized Jalapeño Special. Kabul was a city of indiscriminate paranoia so, on a dark night, it usually paid to shove a foreign nose against the windscreen of a car – which is exactly what I did when our car pulled up at the entrance to the laneway of the Karwan Sara. But it didn’t work. Between our car and the laneway stood two heavily armed goatees. I rolled down the window.

  ‘You talk,’ said Steven, whose American accent was cancelled out by his bearded, and therefore highly suspect, face. ‘You’re blonde, you’re a woman. You have a different accent.’

  ‘I live here. We have a pizza.’ I smiled at the goatee, sounding more like a Berlitz language tape than the head of a UN office.

  The goatee nodded at the box on my knee.

  ‘Show me,’ it growled.

  I thought better than to tell him he would probably see better if he removed his sunglasses. I lifted the soggy, lukewarm box up to the window and gave him my best smile. He took in a deep breath of our Jalapeño. ‘Mmmm,’ he said and nodded us through.

  At the end of the driveway, the Karwan Sara’s gates remained firmly closed. Again I unwound my window and spoke to the sunglasses staring into our car.

  ‘I live here. We have pizza.’ I want to add, ‘We come in peace,’ but I feared the joke would go over their heads and only add to our status as suspects in a crime we had no knowledge of.

  ‘Ma’am, you cannot enter the compound,’ a robotic voice responded.

  ‘But I live here. I have pizza. Ask the guards.’

  He stared for a moment and nodded to his friend. Mujeeb was brought forward like the chief witness at a police line-up.

  ‘This is Miss Sally, she is our guest,’ he confirmed politely before being promptly dispatched back to the guardhouse.

  ‘Okay, but the vehicle stays outside.’

  It seemed a small sacrifice for a slice of cold pizza. As Steven parked the car, I walked through the gate and across the car park to the foot of the verandah, ignoring the shouts that followed me from behind.

  ‘Hey. HEY! What have you got? Where are you going?’

  By now, I was beginning to feel like a dog that had just lifted the entire family dinner off the top of the dining room table. I turned to find another goatee six inches from my face. I was now officially annoyed.

  ‘I-live-here. We-have-pizza.’

  I could see my reflection in his sunglasses, a fish-eyed view of a woman wrapped in a red headscarf, holding a soggy cardboard pizza box and looking anything but amused.

  ‘They’re okay, bro,’ shouted a voice from across the yard.

  The goatee leaned forward, so close I could smell his breath. For good measure, he took a deep breath and bared his teeth at me, much like a monster in an alien movie, before walking away.

  Security, in many forms and guises, seemed to have colonised every crevice of my life, but I firmly believed that it didn’t have to be such a humiliating experience. Just as I was about to follow him and tell him exactly what I thought of his bad teeth and his smelly breath, the Karwan Sara gates swung open and the guard force bolted to position. The Suburbans that entered bore no markings but I knew they’d come from the American embassy. They screeched to a halt just as Steven and I went inside and quietly shut the door.

  The next day, I read that the recipients of the Karwan Sara’s hospitality – though presumably neither its runny omelettes nor kebabs – were Senators John McCain and Hillary Clinton.

  29

  Let the Games Begin

  After three long, miserable months, the snow finally stopped falling. In its place, came the rain, cold, hard and unrelenting. Kabul’s streets instantly became muddy cesspits and I was once again grateful to the makers of Blundstone boots, who would surely have a ready-made market in the Ghan, where the footwear of choice is so often the thong. When the rains stopped, the days had a clarity that words could never describe and to which a camera could never do justice; it was as if my hand could reach out and touch the snow-covered peaks of the Hindu Kush. The air was free of the dust that polluted the summer – probably because it was stuck in the bog under everyone’s feet.

  Having survived one of the coldest Kabul winters in recent memory, I began to understand why so many people the world over got excited about spring. The birds were singing and the days were getting longer. Threadbare trees were beginning to take on a breath of green and, in the Karwan Sara garden, the blossoms were in full bloom. But the March nights were still cold and the snow on the surrounding mountains reminded Kabulis that summer was still a long way off.

  I could also tell the weather was improving by the number of security alerts beginning to bleat from my UN radio. Spring in the Ghan and a young man’s fancy turns to … brushing off the weapons he hasn’t fondled since the bleak snows descended at the beginning of winter. Kabul was on the lookout for a VBIED in the form of a white Corolla. (It was always a white Corolla.) The list of potential targets included all the usual suspects: the UN, ISAF, the Coalition, the US embassy, Hamid Karzai …

  It was still a little early for the Spring Offensive, but in the midst of the plethora of VBIED, IED and BBIED warnings, the fighting season began, literally, with a bang, when early one afternoon a small bomb exploded on the side of Jalalabad Road. Its target was a passing convoy from the Canadian embassy. There were many reasons why these things annoyed me – the insecurity that they brought to the fragile peace, the resultant restrictions they placed on my life but, most of all, they completely messed up my ride home. Jalalabad Road was in chaos. Mirwais and Faheem were in town, on the other end of the traffic jam that, by now, was snaking its way out of the city and down Jalalabad Road, so I told them to go home. The UNOCA compound was locked down, the usual barriers placed across the driveway preventing any white cars or blue ID tags from leaving.

  At 4 pm, my UN radio announced that Afghan staff were free to leave. Mahmood had no choice – he had to stay with the car and drive it back to the Karwan Sara when the all-clear was given – but I had had enough. The bomb was small, there were no fatalities, the worst was over and I no longer wanted to be trapped in The Bubble. Although I never wore a headscarf in the office and rarely covered my head in the car, I always carried one with me in case of emergencies. This I classified as an emergency. Slipping my black headscarf on and my blue ID off, I walked with Ismail, falling in behind a throng of local staff streaming through UNOCA’s front gate.

  To avoid attracting attention, I walked slowly, eyes down, and my cohort and I remained silent. Once past the guards, I smiled gleefully at my smallest of victories. The stream of Afghans was now milling on the edge of the dust and the potholes that made up Jalalabad Road. A single yellow and black taxi appeared and was instantly surrounded. I couldn’t tell how many managed to jump inside but their elbows must have been sharp. A huddle of disappointed commuters shook their heads in its wake. If more taxis didn’t appear, my presence as the sole foreigner would soon draw attention and there would be hell to pay if I was caught on the wrong side of the wall.

  I envied the blue burqa that walked through the UNOCA gate ahead of me, the ultimate anonymity in a country where the blue shrouds make women invisible. As I stood by the side of the road with Ismail, I pondered the wisdom of investing in one. I could go about my business, as much a part of the local landscape as the dust and the bombed-out buildings, the donkey carts and the jingle trucks – though I wondered how much practice I would need when walking in a simple headscarf had already proved such a challenge.

  ‘Excuse me, but there aren’t a lot of taxis,’ said Ismail. Like all Afghans, his patience was limitless, so if Ismail thought there were no taxis, then our hopes of getting away from the UNOCA gat
e were looking very bleak indeed. The UN compound was at the farthest end of Jalalabad Road, even on a good day passing traffic was scarce – unless you wanted to go to Jalalabad.

  I sighed. ‘What should we do?’

  ‘Maybe we should go back inside and wait.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can do that without getting into a lot of trouble.’

  As Ismail and I stood by the side of the dusty road and discussed our options, the UNOCA gates opened and a fleet of UN cars rolled out. The Big Green Car sat conspicuously in a mist of white Land Cruisers, the trusty Mahmood smiling behind its wheel. The lockdown had been lifted and, like fugitives, Ismail and I sidled up to the moving car, opened the doors and jumped inside. We were free but we didn’t get far, only deeper and deeper into a one hundred per cent, security-induced Kabul gridlock.

  The Afghan capital was built for half a million people. In the three years since the fall of the Taliban, the city’s population had expanded to an estimated two million people – with the requisite number of cars, carts, bicycles, donkeys, taxis, trucks and buses in which to carry them. As security wobbled, more roads were closed, making the drive across town – even on an average day – an arduous journey.

  It took us over an hour to travel a distance that usually took ten minutes. The traffic shunted, edged forward, ground to a halt and stayed there. No-one was going anywhere. Desperate times called for desperate measures. I watched as car doors around me began to open and hordes of Afghans climbed out of their cars and started walking.

  ‘How are you with a walk?’ I said to Ismail, whose expanding waistline defied his stories of physical prowess.

  At first he said nothing. Surveying the activity around him, he sighed and shrugged. ‘Yes, I think we can.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, Mahmood,’ I said, grabbing the door handle. ‘Call me when you know what’s happening.’

  ‘Okay, boss.’ Mahmood smiled as we once again abandoned him to the mercy of the UN radio and Arman FM.

  I climbed out of the car and adjusted my headscarf. Beside me, Ismail hunched his shoulders, put his head down and began walking. His pace was fast but steady. Ahead of us was a road full of stationary trucks, cars and buses. The only movement was the weaving of pedestrians in and out of the disabled traffic, edging their way towards the shoulder of the road where they became a single stream. It was an odd feeling, being on the loose in a crowd of silent Afghans. It was strangely liberating, marching forward, following in the footsteps of the crowd surging towards the city. If anyone was startled by my presence, they didn’t show it, such was everyone’s determination to break free from the gridlock and simply get home.

  You wonder if you may have been in Kabul too long when you walk past a severely dented armoured car perched on the edge of a two-metre crater, surrounded by heavily armed ISAF soldiers and fail to bat an eyelid. I cast a glance in its direction, keeping pace with my fellow walkers, and moved on.

  30

  The Matriarch

  IRIN’s next group of trainees were no strangers to burqas. The six women came from a Kabul radio station called Radio Women’s Voice. Since Afghan women had little voice, at least publicly, this might sound like a small operation – a radio station in the cupboard of a cellar perhaps. But as a result of its being relaunched on a raft of donor funding earlier in the year, the station was now well and truly oversubscribed and chronically underheard – a classic development tale.

  The station was the personal project of a well-known Afghan matriarch. There was no program schedule and its broadcast hours were irregular. The station played a little music but not much else, making it an irritating scratch on the dial while Kabulis searched for Arman FM. Radio Women’s Voice ran no advertising and raised no revenue of its own so the odds of its sustainability beyond the donor’s teat were slim to say the least. But like so much else in the new Afghanistan, because it was Radio Women’s Voice, it had attracted a great deal of attention from the West and the Matriarch’s passport was well worn from her many speaking tours to the US.

  The Matriarch, a tall thin woman of advancing years, had contacted us some time ago, asking if we were interested in doing some training with the station’s staff. By now, Mirwais, Faheem and I had a standard template for our workshops: a week of class-based training followed by a week of program-making in which the trainees were divided into groups, each group producing a ten-minute radio program with assistance from Mirwais and Faheem. Once the programs were completed and passed muster – by me – we had a small ceremony with all the important elements: cake, certificates and minidisc recorders that IRIN donated to the stations.

  Because IRIN was a small outfit and the training quite intense, we usually took only four students – preferably four who worked regularly at the station with which we were working – and were not just walking by at the time, as I suspected may have happened on at least one occasion in the past. It was hoped the trainees would be able to pass on their newly acquired skills to others once they returned to their stations. The workshop was further consolidated by a week or two of mentoring in which Mirwais and Faheem worked with station staff – IRIN trainees and others – while they produced their own programming. Negotiating IRIN’s training program could be an exhausting business and there was much haggling. For us, it was about the training. For station managers and owners, it was often about the gear and the certificates.

  ‘And what about equipment?’ said the Matriarch, her Pashto – the Ghan’s other official language – translated by Faheem, as we sat in her office.

  ‘We offer training,’ I explained. ‘We have no money for anything else.’ Hard to believe coming from a foreigner.

  ‘But we are poor, we are women,’ she bleated, vaguely waving her hand towards one of the Ghan’s better equipped radio studios. ‘We need more computers.’

  I had already seen three in my short station tour. As far as I could tell, Radio Women’s Voice wasn’t in need of much, except for an audience – something that I hoped our training would assist in bringing.

  The conversation went on, ducking and weaving, in and out, circling back until we agreed. I traded two minidisc recorders for four trainees, our usual package. I shook the Matriarch’s hand and smiled. Her pinched face and icy gaze gave nothing away. My self-congratulatory mood lasted all the way till six trainees walked though office door at the start of the workshop. I hadn’t seen any of them on my visits to the station and their familiarity with radio didn’t extend much beyond listening to it on the occasional taxi ride.

  Now seven days later, we were going nowhere. Some were quick to learn while others struggled with basic concepts like what constituted ‘news’. An excursion around the UNOCA compound to practise voice recording brought back the sound of a stiff Kabul breeze and not much else. I had warned the Matriarch that we may require more time. I didn’t have the energy for another round of haggling so I dispatched an envoy, Faheem, to ask her for a few more days.

  ‘She is going to America on Saturday and says the women aren’t allowed out while she is away,’ he reported back.

  ‘She what?’ I made an executive decision. ‘Tell her that’s fine but the workshop won’t be finished by then so no-one gets certificates. Or equipment.’

  Faheem returned an hour later.

  ‘She said she doesn’t care. Really, I think she doesn’t care.’

  The Matriarch had called my bluff, and I was saddled with six absolute beginners who weren’t interested in radio and who, despite her protestations about their being ‘allowed out’, I was almost certain didn’t spend a lot of time at the station. If they had shown promise, I would have persevered, but with the exception of one young girl, most spent their days studying their fingernails and playing with their hair. With time running out, I was forced to wrap up the workshop later that afternoon, telling the women that because the Matriarch was going away, we had to end the training. At first they looked confused, then resigned, so used were they to a world where their fate was forev
er in the hands of someone else.

  It was one of the worst days of my development life. I had made the leap from radio producing to radio training because I believed in the importance of passing on skills. In helping Afghan journalists make informative, entertaining radio, I naively believed that I was helping them reshape the future of their country and somehow making their lives better … but that wasn’t always the case. I still believed in development, but my rose-coloured glasses were rapidly starting to fade.

  For much of the previous few months, Development Inc. had been under fire from various voices in the Afghan community that accused foreigners and their organisations of pocketing the millions of donor dollars intended for the Afghan people. The mantra was the same each time: foreigners were overpaid, drove expensive cars and had contributed little to the lives of ordinary Afghans. Roads remained unpaved, sewers gaped open, electricity was irregular and, at times, non-existent, and water in many parts of the capital was still carried on the backs of donkeys.

  The argument was valid – to a point. Many Afghans had done well on the back of Development Inc. but carpetbagging of the local variety was ignored in an increasingly populist argument six months ahead of the country’s first direct parliamentary election. The result was more us-and-them-ing, this time from the rapidly growing bubble of the local community.

  31

  Age Shall Not Weary Him

  Ministry of Interior Road was strangely quiet when Mahmood and I pulled into the driveway of the Karwan Sara. I had spent the afternoon at a meeting organised by IMPACS, the Canadian NGO that had established four women-managed radio stations around the country, including Radio Sahar in Herat. Unlike Radio Women’s Voice, the tiny network had been thoughtfully planned and carefully nurtured. Today’s meeting was a get-together for anyone working in media development. While there were a handful of organisations involved in training journalists in the Ghan and we all knew each other socially, the afternoon had been a rare chance to compare notes on what we were doing professionally.