I counted 63 volumes of Kansas State Board of Agricultural biennial reports. "USA gives 20,000 books to Kabul University," proclaimed a 2002 headline.
Very different notions of privacy and propriety: there's little effort to hide men's bathrooms behind purdah. (highlight the 2nd para to read--this site is all buggy all of a sudden and for some reason is deciding to put some of my white text against a white background and I can't figure out how to fix it)
One thing I've found odd is that though a house isn't complete without a high wall and razor wire, once inside a house nobody seems to knock before entering bedrooms or bathrooms. When I had an Indian woman as a roommate, male visitors opened her bedroom door and walked right in on a couple occasions (on both occasions she wasn't home but they didn't know that--should this have raised my indignation?), and when Mina walking in on me just after I had finished changing one day and I told her she should knock, she said Oh but I thought you might be busy and didn't want to disturb you.
I found just a couple shelves of books from the pre-communist era among the stacks:
This is one of five US-funded Lincoln Centers in various cities. They provide free photocopying and internet (the only place in Bamiyan to do so, I was told), of course used mostly for facebook, and are well stocked with TOEFL and GRE study guides. Iqbal on the left who sat at the reference desk explained that Lincoln Centers observe casual Wednesdays.
In the Iranian reading room:
'casual wednesdays'--hilarious!
ReplyDelete