out with the boys

passing for Turkish

You know you've been in Afghanistan for a while when your solution to being electrocuted by your shower is to go switch off the circuit breakers and continue the shower cold.

I usually tell taxi drivers and the like that I'm Turkish--a less polarizing nationality than American or Iranian--and I have been able to pass even with Uzbeks who speak their own Turkic dialect. But yesterday's driver back from a ministry way on the other side of the city got all excited and called up his nephew who had been living in Turkey for the past five years and was in med school there on his cell phone and then handed it to me. I hadn't had an actual conversation in Turkish in months and I garbled, then explained to the very friendly nephew--from whose voice I could tell was puzzled by my funny accent--that I was a Kurd from Diyarbakir and my Turkish wasn't great. Oh, I'm in Diyarbakir right now, he said, where in the city are you from? I tried to remember my geography from last time I was there 3 (?) years ago and then told him I was from a bad little neighborhood he'd have never heard of and changed the subject to his studies. We agreed that I'd give his uncle my contact info and maybe we could meet up when we got back before I handed back the cell phone. Whew.
But then the driver decided that he would avoid traffic by driving through a restricted area where several embassies including the Turkish one are located. Just tell them your going to your embassy, he told me. Crap I was sure they'd ask to see my passport and the jig would be up but the soldier at the checkpoint just gave me a long look up and down and decided I was Turkish and we were through.
Luckily the driver forgot/neglected to get my contact info on his nephew's behalf.
Not that there would have likely been any real consequences if I had been revealed as a fraud--it would just have been awkward.

I'm back in Kabul by the way.

conversations

Nobody around here seems too convinced by my little consent form and its guarantees of confidentiality. Today one of my interviewees seemed to take my promise that I wouldn't use his name in my report as an accusation of cowardice. "I'm not afraid of Americans or English or Germans or Taliban. I'm only afraid of God," he bristled.

The tiny fish-shaped thing in the background sky is the surveillance blimp of the American Provincial Reconstruction Team.

Research aside, I had a long and slightly surreal talk with the head of the provincial council here, Hajji Ehsan Noorzai, who succeeded President Karzai's half-brother Ahmed Wali after the latter was assassinated last year. We sat on huge pillows in the guest room of his straight-out-of-an-Ikea-catalogue mansion, located behind the scarred earth construction site of the private hospital he's building, and he told me through my Pashto translator all about the ills of corruption here in Kandahar.

My experience in Kabul was that when asked about politics people mostly told me what they thought I wanted to hear, depending on whether they categorized me as American or Iranian or Turkish. But here was one of the top US-allied politicians and tribal leaders in the region blaming the US for corruption and outright robbery to an American he'd just met. Ehsan told me that the Soviets had been more honest (a few people have told me this kind of thing--that the Soviets at least believed in what they were doing and in their development ideology, while Americans are just interested in power and money) and the Taliban better because at least they weren't corrupt, much as it pained his heart to say so because he hated the Taliban.

Just yesterday, he told me, he'd gotten a flurry of phone call complaints that US soldiers had detained a bunch of shopkeepers, tied their hands, and made them stand out in the sun for four hours and then let them go without charging them with anything. The Americans had stolen money right out of the pockets of those they tied up. Then (this is all by Ehsan's account) local police had showed up and the Americans had asked them to sign a paper confirming that their operation had been carried out successfully, provoking a stand-off that Ehsan said could easily have turned into a firefight. He called up one of the men who had called him saying that the Americans had robbed him and put him on speaker phone to have him rehash the story (in Pashto), the translation of which verified Ehsan's summary. The guy claimed they had taken 35,000 Afghanis--$700--from one shopkeeper.

He added that just recently a friend of his (also a friend of my translator) had his house raided by US special forces, who stole a wad of money and some golden jewelry.

Yesterday was a flurry of interviews. Today I've got nothing to do but transcribe and enjoy the surprisingly zippy internet until 5pm. Below, my first royal-blooded friend:

Note below the lack of a steering wheel on the left side of the car. Most of the vehicles here seem to be from Pakistan. My host has a little Japanese flatscreen something (GPS unit?) beside the stick shift on his SUV, and explained to me that he and his brothers buy their cars for cheap in Japan and then have them disassembled and shipped in crates labeled "auto parts" to avoid paying customs duties.

All in all Kandahar seems a much cleaner and more spacious city than Kabul, with good roads and solar powered street lights--the latter a pet project, I was told, of the previous mayor (who before that was an accountant in Virginia) who was assassinated last summer.

in Kandahar

aerial of Kabul:

One of the flight attendants looked exactly like a tanned Amy Winehouse.

Sharing Kandahar airport with military planes:

Not too many people seem to speak Persian around here, so I'm completely dependent on guides. I just met with a fixer/translator who's giving me the bargain day rate of $120, and will be driving around all day tomorrow doing interviews. For today looks like I'm confined to my quarters, which at least gives me time to catch up on transcribing other interviews and if I'm feeling ambitious to begin to drag my data into some kind of order.

updates

I got my files back but not yet my money. My ex-neighbor isn't answering his phone. I'll ask my new roommate to call him tomorrow, see if he answers an unknown caller.

Shopping for used motorcycles with the new roommate. His plan is to have one shipped to Herat, then drive it to France.

Manners

Iranians are the least politically correct foreigners in expressing their views of Afghans: both my absentee roommate and another Iranian photographer who's staying in my house's spare room for the next month have told me that Afghans are all liars. Several Afghans have for their part told me that they are the one and only Afghan I should trust.
It seems to me that a lot of this comes from the combination of a culture that puts enormous emphasis on the performance of hospitality and selflessness and a people in whom a generation of basically continuous war and unpredictability has instilled a survivor's distrust in others and a short-term looting rather than long-term investing mentality.

Yesterday my former neighbor's brother, who had given me his laptop to use with assurances that he never used and didn't need it, showed up at my house and asking if he could borrow back his laptop just for an hour or so because he had to scan and print some documents. I saved what I was doing and handed it over and repeated that if he needed it I would of course give it back to him and find another laptop. He assured me that he only needed the laptop for this one quick thing, and would come back with his brother (who was at a NATO base working on a contract to build a row of showers and toilets whose completion had been delayed repeatedly--he blames his workers for laziness--and so he hasn't been able to yet pay me back the $500 he owes me) and maybe we could go out for dinner.
I waited for Iftar time and then another half hour and then called my ex-neighbor, who knew nothing about his brother taking his computer back or dinner plans. He called the brother and then me back to explain that his brother wasn't yet done with his work and would bring me back the computer tomorrow or the next day, and gave me the brother's number.

The ex-neighbor called again this morning to say that his brother actually needed to keep his computer but he my ex-neighbor would find me another laptop. I said it was no problem I could find my own laptop, but I had 3 months of research on an encrypted drive (only partially backed up for complicated reasons) on the laptop and I just needed the brother to bring the laptop so I could transfer files. The ex-neighbor said he and his brother would come later today with both te laptop I'd be using and a new one for me. I called both of them a few times over the course of the day--they either didn't pick up or had their phones off--until finally I reached the ex-neighbor, who said he had tried and tried but hadn't been able to find me a new laptop. No surprise, I just wanted to know when I could transfer my files from the old laptop. He didn't know so I called and eventually reached his brother, who sounded delighted to hear from me (no sarcasm) and said it was really lucky because his flight to India has been delayed until the day after tomorrow so he can bring the laptop for file transfer first thing tomorrow morning. I said if he just gave me directions to his house I would come tonight and copy the files but no no he lives way on the other side of town ins bad neighborhood that I should avoid.
He wasn't the least bit apologetic for telling me one hour when really he intended to fly the laptop out of the country (dunno how long he's staying in India) and I figured expressing annoyance would only decrease the chance of him coming tomorrow morning. 

So hopefully he'll show up and I will be able to get a summer of research back. And hopefully his brother my ex-neighbor will pay me back that $500, now that I no longer have any collateral. He's still going to want to come to my house to Skype with his Internet girlfriend(s); I've got that at least in my favor. And hopefully I won't get ripped off too badly buying a new laptop tomorrow.

I guess the brother felt it would be more impolite or show him off as inhospitable to demand his computer back. Somehow the best way to avoid impropriety was simply to lie and continue the performance of hospitality to my face and so avoid the "confrontation" of openly asking for his laptop back that would be an embarrassing unmasking of him as not living up to the ideals of taarof. Or maybe he just thought that if he told me he was taking it for keeps I would make excuses and not give it back.
But goddamn it he could have saved me a lot of worry and a day of getting no work done and himself a trip back to the other side of town.

Does this one work?

kickboxing club

Here's a first rough cut:

Apologies for the very low quality--anything else would have taken too long to upload with Afghan internet
It doesn't really need subtitles, except for the pep talk at the end. Some quick explanations/translations:
The guy holding the kick paddle is saying "In the name of God" repeatedly
The guy in the wife beater pulling the little kid in front of the camera is telling him to introduce himself
The kids who runs away during sparring keeps saying that he won't fight, which the ref doesn't accept

negligence

Yes I've been neglecting this blog, not out of laziness but because I've been busy doing interviews and such for two different articles.
I also shot a little video of my kickboxing club, which I'll hopefully get edited and bandwidth allowing post here on Friday.
In the meantime, a few photos of what I've been up to lately (ignore the stupid horizontal bars that this website for some reason adds in this country):

This guy had the old Taliban official gazette full of Mullah Omar's decrees in his private library. The first page I flipped to was the law banning shaving and the cutting short of beards.