by Sally Cooper
My burqa hung loyally on a hook next to my door but to wear it to work would only attract attention from the wrong quarters. It was probably ‘illegal’ for a ‘female international’ to wear one to work. The burqa was a symbol of oppression to the West yet, like so many Afghan women, I had grown to appreciate the security of its anonymity.
I wasn’t sure what my life beyond the Ghan would be like but one thing I knew for certain – I would never again run a workshop where the class dived under the table every time an F16 buzzed the compound. I didn’t know why the F16s had been so active lately; the pilots may have been bored or it could have been the latest strategy in Washington’s campaign to Leave No Mullah Behind. As the F16s approached, everyone in our class ducked; the sound terrifying, the vibration phenomenal. I was the only person in the room who wasn’t expecting a ‘boom’ that, for Afghans, had traditionally followed in an F16’s wake.
Despite the distractions, our workshop in Advanced Journalism was going well. IRIN’s original mandate was to train novice journalists but much had changed in the two years since then and some of the trainees we had worked with had outgrown their basic skills. When I started working with Afghan journalists three years ago, newly established radio stations were staffed by people who also held other jobs and had no previous media experience. Our advanced trainees were a sign of a changing of the times. There wasn’t a butcher or a baker among them. They were professional journalists working at well-regarded radio stations that brought news and information to the people in their communities. The advanced workshop would consolidate their skills and review some of the problems they’d encountered in the course of their work.
I’d like to have given myself a congratulatory slap on the back for the journalists’ success but I thought it might be a little premature. Like all good development projects, there were ‘lessons learned’. One day, someone will write about media development in ‘post-conflict Afghanistan’ and how little coordination there was among agencies. In this workshop our group was from four different radio stations from different parts of the country, each established by a different NGO, three funded by different donors and one with no donor at all. It was the first time the trainees had ever met and been able to swap ideas and experiences. Despite the fact Afghans were finding it increasingly difficult to believe anything a foreigner said to them, they were hungry for the knowledge such workshops brought.
The workshop followed in the wake of the publication of a series of cartoons in the Danish press depicting the prophet Mohammed. Much of the Muslim world had erupted into violence and the Ghan, never one to pass up the opportunity for a good riot, followed suit, incited by mullahs, sundry parliamentarians and, alarmingly, elements in the burgeoning media. The Ghan is a rocky country and there was no shortage of stones to be thrown at anyone who may or may not have been Danish, a list that quickly grew to include Americans, British and Germans.
One local newspaper added its two cents’ worth with an editorial trumpeting that if the editor of the Danish newspaper that published the cartoons lived in a Muslim country, he would surely have been stoned to death – and without a trial. Muslims the world over were prepared to sacrifice their lives for the Prophet, it proclaimed. Many in the Ghan did just that. The country’s rising ‘cartoons’ death toll was blamed fairly and squarely on the West’s lack of respect for Islam, its ‘permissive society’ and its ‘waning’ interest in religion. My time in the Ghan had made me very intolerant of intolerance. The Danish cartoons proved yet again how this country might once again be destroyed by the vocal – and violent – minority.
Much as I would have liked to avoid it, a session on freedom of speech and the Danish cartoons was inevitable. I set aside thirty minutes after lunch so the group could discuss the one topic on everyone’s mind.
‘Why did they do it to us?’
‘Don’t they know they have offended us?’
There was no separation of the person from the profession. As was so often the case with Afghans, the Danish cartoons were very, very personal, a slight on who Afghans were and all that they believed.
‘Why do more newspapers publish them if they know they are offensive?’
‘Because newspapers exist to make money. If they publish the cartoons, people will buy their papers,’ I replied. Rupert Murdoch hadn’t left the building; he’d never been in it.
They stared at me blankly, as if I’d drawn a picture of the Prophet himself. This one just didn’t compute. In a country funded by donors, the concept of media as a commercial business was as foreign as that of a female pilot. Journalism, free media, democracy, human rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, freedom of speech … it was all too much too soon. The timetable for Development Inc. was far beyond the gestation of the new Afghanistan. Add water and stir, tick the box on the spreadsheet and move on to the next country in crisis.
There was a knock at the door.
‘Excuse me, is it time to go?’ It was Ismail.
It was 4.30 pm and the trainees’ gate passes had long expired. As we piled into the car for the drive home, I wondered what conclusions the trainees – and Mirwais and Faheem, for that matter – would draw from our conversation. For them it was lose/lose. In a country of little education, few Afghans had been taught to think beyond the boundaries of their lives and their religion. My time in the Ghan had indelibly marked me with a fundamental belief in the importance of teaching people to think for themselves.
46
A Glass Half Full
Because I’d spent the last four months in denial that I really was going to leave the Ghan, I had yet to book my departure when one morning in March I opened up my email to learn that IRIN’s replacement of me had gone according to plan and my successor had been found. I looked across to Ismail, who sat squinting at his spreadsheets. At my insistence, he’d gone out and bought himself a pair of eyeglasses, though they made little difference sitting in their smart brown case at the side of his desk. He may have bought them at a local pharmacy, an ‘apothecary’ who dispensed medication by weight and colour rather than medicinal value, making squinting an infinitely better option.
‘Ismail?’ I said.
‘Yes please?’
‘Can you please go to the flight office and book my ticket for Dubai?’
‘Oh, really?’ His tone reflected what we both felt. I really was going to leave.
With my departure set, I finally began the process of extraction. As I slowly packed up three years of my Afghan life, I reflected on the changes that had occurred in the Ghan in that time, and the changes that had occurred in me. By now, I’d given up all pretence of finding a job, and even my freelance reporting career had run aground on a reef of media indifference to any story that didn’t feature Nicole Kidman or Paris Hilton. I needed a holiday, some time to take stock of all that had happened to me – I needed a verandah. My exit strategy was the World Verandah Tour, six months of being able to walk down the street without having to worry about being stared at, leered at, shot at, spotted by colleagues, blown up or falling into a three-metre ditch. The World Verandah Tour was to be an excursion through First World shopping malls, cinemas, theatres, sports grounds, bookstores, Starbucks, sushi bars, French baguettes, wholemeal toast, real milk, solid omelettes, chocolate milkshakes, fresh fruit, moist croissants, swimming pools, beaches, lakes, rivers and steaming hot baths. The uniform would be a summer dress. Two-way radios were not included.
But the World Verandah Tour would be only a break, a brief respite from bedbugs, dodgy electricity and potholed roads in destinations yet to be determined. The Ghan had opened up my mind to countless realities and hundreds of possibilities. From this moment on, I knew anything was possible. If I could navigate a life through bombs and kidnappings, security guys and suspect pizzas, the Karwan Sara, Kool-Aid and Afghan logic, I could do anything. The Ghan wasn’t a country you ‘survived’. It was a country that picked you up by the scruff of your neck and forced you to think about every
thing you saw around you, everything you were and everything you did. I’d gone through the portal and crossed the line. I’d been tested in ways I never thought imaginable, and discovered new levels of strength and resilience I never thought I had. I wasn’t sure what would happen to me at the end of the World Verandah Tour but one thing was certain, I was a long way from my life in Sydney. Like Thelma and Louise before they headed off into the Grand Canyon, I knew I could never go back.
Although I was no longer the earnest would-be aid worker I was when I had first arrived, my fundamental belief in the importance of development was unwavering. The heady sense of obligation – that from ‘those to whom much has been given, much is expected’ – remained, even though the Catholicism that spawned it had long since fallen by the wayside. I still believed in making a difference, though I now had a better idea of how not to go about it. Little could be achieved from behind high walls or from within the locked doors of air-conditioned cars, in dividing foreigners into a world of ‘us’ and ‘them’, by complicated agendas formulated in distant conference rooms far removed from the lives of those they affected, by adding water and stirring. The reconstruction of Afghanistan into a functioning state, able to take its place on the world stage, requires more than bandaid solutions. ‘Nation building’ is a hefty term, and one that requires a greater commitment, from the world beyond Afghanistan’s borders and, most importantly, from the Afghans themselves.
Scrolling through the address book of my mobile phone, I began to delete my way through three years’ worth of contacts, reflecting on the friends I’d made here, second, third, fourth-generation colleagues and housemates who had come and gone on the great roundabout that is Development Inc. I seemed to have outlasted them all. Kabul years were like dog years, yet I wondered how my time in the Ghan, which so often seemed to drag at the pace of the Ghan itself, could have ended so fast. Others had managed to get out, presumably to places with flushing toilets, footpaths, functioning bathrooms and equally functioning governments. Soon it would be my turn.
In between thoughts of verandahs, I packed up my room at the Chez Ana. The Things I Leave Behind would include an electric kettle, an iron and an ironing board with Peter, my teapot for Majid and a box of sundry books and household items, including my map of the world, with Ismail. The winter coat, the clothes, the shalwar kameez and the burqa would all come with me.
One of my biggest dilemmas was how to dispose of a gun I’d been given as a birthday gift some time ago. A useless piece of local craftsmanship guaranteed to blow up any hand that fired it, it was given to me by an Afghan friend who thought it had a multitude of potential uses against dogs, mercenaries, bad cooking and potential kidnappers. To throw it out onto the street would have been unwise, given the growing armies of street children who rifled through the city’s ample piles of refuse. Responsible gun disposal wasn’t something I’d had much experience with, so I figured the gun should be left with the only people I could entrust with responsible gun use, even if they did have a habit of leaving their pistols under the cushions of the Chez Ana sofa. The gun would go to the mercenaries, who no longer lived next door.
For my final workshop, IRIN once again gathered four ‘advanced’ journalists from the provinces. One of the biggest hurdles facing Afghan journalists, particularly those attempting to gather humanitarian news, was the repeated inaccessibility of the UN and international NGOs. Press briefings were almost always conducted in English and requests for interviews, particularly in the provinces, were often either refused or referred to Kabul and eventually lost. Even a fact sheet on bird flu – directed at the UN’s Afghan staff – had been issued in English medical-speak. Fortunately, by now the UN was beginning to realise that the majority of Afghans knew little about its work, and it was keen to correct the problem.
At my request, two UN Afghan staff had been sent to field the trainees’ questions. One was an older man from the UNAMA (United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan) press office and the other, Amarullah, was a young spokesman from the World Food Program who had been training as a doctor before the war interrupted his life and sent him on another course. I admired their professionalism. As the session was in Dari, there was no need for my presence and I left the room, shutting the door behind me.
The workshop also covered the reporting of HIV-AIDS, a disease that, at least officially, barely existed in a country where no-one, equally officially, had sex. At the time, the Ministry of Public Health said there were thirty-four confirmed cases of HIV in the Ghan, though how any illness could ever be traced in a country with almost no functioning health system was something of a mystery. All thirty-four, we were reliably informed, had come from ‘outside’. It’s a tricky thing talking about AIDS in a culture that thrives on the judgment of one’s neighbour and where genders never mingle.
While going through my ‘HIV in a nutshell’ session, I could only attribute my faux pas to having spent so much time in Africa, where the transmission of HIV is – gradually – being more openly discussed. With great certainty, I told the class that one of the ways in which HIV could be spread is by ‘sexual relations’, as opposed to the broader and less culturally confronting ‘exchanging bodily fluids’. As the words came out, my brain did a back flip. I waited for the sharp intake of breath but it didn’t come. Perhaps the class was choosing to ignore it, perhaps they thought me yet another ill-mannered foreigner. It may have been quickly saved in Faheem’s translation, though even he didn’t bat an eyelid. Or maybe they thought I was talking about something that would never happen to them. There are many charms to Afghan life; denial isn’t one of them.
It wasn’t the first cultural faux pas I’d made and, despite being so close to the finish line, it wouldn’t be the last. The Ghan is a country of labyrinthine etiquette and boundless social mores, which most foreigners never saw coming and, if they did, often dismissed them as being of no great consequence. While recovering from an ‘only-in-Kabul’ cold, my constant nose blowing caused great offence to one of our trainees. Apparently, such displays were generally regarded as a sign of very bad manners indeed. After so many colds, spanning so much time and involving so much nasal clearing, I was horrified that none of my Afghan colleagues has ever thought to point this out to me and I cringed at the thought of the other hideous social and cultural faux pas that must have unknowingly littered the last three years of my life.
On my last Friday in Kabul, Jane and I went out for a farewell brunch. Once upon a time, in a guesthouse long departed, Friday brunch was a runny omelette served to me by Mohammed, but in April 2006, the newly opened Kabul Serena was the place to go. Nothing embodied the optimism of the new Afghanistan more. Built at the cost of thirty-five million US dollars, the hotel had been opened with great fanfare six months earlier by President Karzai and the Father of the Nation, the title the new Afghanistan bestowed on its ageing former king. For twenty-five US dollars, an all-you-can eat buffet brunch attracted expats and wealthy Afghans alike. Previously unseen and long-forgotten food groups ensured a busy crowd. All and sundry networked at the fresh fruit platter, exchanged the latest security ‘information’ while eagerly spooning smoked salmon and prawns onto their plates, or, best of all, stood completely gobsmacked as an Afghan woman in a chef’s uniform prepared fresh sushi. While much could be said about the pace of Afghan reconstruction, a Hazara woman making perfect sushi was surely a sign of better times.
Before launching ourselves back into Afghanistan, Jane and I stopped for a tour of the hotel’s rooms. Others may take for granted the Serena’s luxury, but after three years of dubious electricity, creative plumbing and rampant bedbugs, I could only stand in awe of the marble bathroom with its pristine shower, the thick white carpet and the large comfortable bed whose mattress, unlike those at the Chez Ana, fitted perfectly onto its heavy wooden base. Although it had happened in front of my eyes, I hadn’t really registered the magnitude of Kabul’s transformation since I first stepped off the UN plane on that warm, dus
ty morning in July 2003. That day, I entered a time warp, into a country that time – and the world – had long forgotten. My Internews colleagues had taken me on a tour facetiously described as ‘The Best of Kabul’, in which we drove past street after flattened street of bomb sites, crumbling walls and cratered buildings. The tour took in most of the city, including west Kabul, the Hazara quarter which had been so comprehensively flattened by warring mujahideen factions in the early 1990s. The Russians had left Kabul intact; it was the internecine mujahideen war which followed that so comprehensively trashed it.
By early 2006, it had become more and more difficult to spot the physical scars of the war – even those in Passport Lane were disappearing. One afternoon in March, I watched two workmen demolish the remains of the anonymous ruins that had once been the building next door to the Chez Ana. For as long as I’d lived there, the view from the backyard had been of a shot-up two-storey building minus its roof and enough of its walls to make it a suitable home for no-one except the passing pigeons. But now the shell had gone and by summer’s end a fine piece of Afghan architecture would have replaced it, complete with multiple balconies and gaudy lighting, and far too big for the block on which it had been built.
While nothing emphasised the physical changes in Kabul more than the Serena, conditions across much of the rest of the Ghan remained the same, if not worse, than they had been before 9/11 so infamously brought the country to the world’s attention. Afghanistan’s poppy production had risen to record heights and anti-government activity, usually in the form of the Taliban, was on the rise. Nowhere was the Taliban more prevalent than in the south and the east of the country, where battles were being fought, military convoys bombed, aid workers killed and, in the previous few months alone, fifty schools torched and three hundred forced to close. The Taliban’s targeting of schools had been deliberate, calculated and successful. Families simply stopped sending their children, especially their girls, to class. More children were staying at home or working to help support their families, their dreams of becoming a doctor or a pilot as incarcerated as their lives, victims of a war that simply wouldn’t go away.