Panjshir tourism

I took a little road trip to Panjshir yesterday with a tailor from down the street, his relative (can't remember know if cousin or brother-in-law), and a female Indian grad student who communicated with the tailor in funny half-English Hindi (("depend kerta hai" "kaafi cute hai"--Bengali's her first and English her second language) that he sometimes kinda understood.

Trying to pass for local in New Balance sneakers:

The valley is mostly Tajik, and famous for its resistance to the Soviets and then the Taliban under Ahmed Shah Massoud. The tailor I drove up with told me the previous night that he thought partition would be a good thing: leave the Pashtuns to fight among themselves, he was fed up with them.

The road through most of the valley has been paved over the past decade but there were a few scrabbly bits:



We left home early and arrived in my companions' village for a huge late breakfast of homemade dairy products (yogurt, doogh, bread stuffed with the curds left over from straining the liquid for doogh, butter, and the cream crust skimmed from the top of the yogurt) at the guesthouse of a local commander. I wasn't sure if we were being treated because we were foreigners or because the tailor's relative was a VIP or because the local commander was obliged to provide hospitality to constituents as a form of patronage (see Fredrik Barth, Political Leadership among Swat Pathans).

At any rate the tailor and his relative were friendly with him but seemed to take the commander's generosity for granted and didn't make a big show of thanking him or taarofing off his offers of mulberries and talkhan (a sweet made from pulverized dried mulberries with a rock-like consistency that had me a bit worried I would crack a tooth, though they apologized that it was all soft because it was warm; it was much better when cold and firmer. They told me that when the Panjsher was more or less under siege during the Soviet occupation and then at the peak of Taliban power and flour and salt were hard to come by, talkhan was a staple. Local myth is that the Soviets observed them eating the stuff and threw up their hands: These people eat stones; how can we fight them?)

I took this below picture later, during our lunch picnic of meat and bread and mangoes:

The fruit around here is amazingly tasty.

Cutting watermelon with an improbable California license plate:

At the commander's house in the morning we were given a mound of some of the best mulberries I've ever had, though they kept apologizing that it wasn't quite peak season:

Preparing hash. A friend of the guys driving me joined us with a lump of the stuff the size of an eyeball and made not the slightest effort to conceal it when we passed by police checkpoints.

I'm sure my camera and having an un-burqa'ed foreign women in the car earned us more attention, but still it seemed like a lot of Panjsheris spend their Fridays gawking at people driving down their one main road.

I got a second chance to photograph the chicken salesmen because after passing them we were held up for a few minutes at a checkpoint, not because of the hashish but because one of the guys was suspicious of us foreigners, and they got ahead of us again. When the plainclothes cop (?) asked what we were doing here and for our ID's the friend who had brought the hash started snapped at him that we were his guests and it was none of the cop's business. That got the cop angry and he made a point of slowly flipping through scrutinizing each of my Indian friend's visa stamps on her passport (which he held upside down).

At Ahmed Shah Massoud's tomb:

Other tourists climbed on the broken down Soviet APCs and tanks parked near his mausoleum:

games

My ex-neighbor invites himself over every few days to escape from his wife and children and use my internet (his ulterior motive in helping me get wired up thus revealed). At my house yesterday with his brother--who had just returned from India on business that went unspecified despite my probes--he told me that I should get myself a girlfriend here for the summer. I asked him how you meet women around here and he said usually over the phone. Sometimes you get their number from a friend or relative and other times you just dial random numbers and when you reach a girl with a pretty voice say oh sorry wrong number but strike up a conversation anyway. Then you talk and talk and maybe arrange to meet somewhere private like a restaurant if things really heat up. Indeed a few expats have told me that they sometimes get calls from completely random Afghan men who apologize for calling the wrong number but then start asking all about their lives instead of hanging up.

I'm turning into the grumpy old man next door. My other neighbor's boys, the older of whom is maybe 10 and has Down syndrome, have come up with a new game of repeatedly throwing their soccer ball up onto their slanted corrugated metal roof with BANG and a CHCHCHCHCH as it rolls back down to them so they can (it sounds like) compete to catch it. About 2% of the time (so every few minutes) it rolls off the roof into my courtyard. At first the older boy just threw himself against my front gate repeatedly with all his might but after I told him off now at least knocks more politely.

My browser history after letting my ex-neighbor use my laptop:

cantonments and conferences

The UN and western embassies have cordoned off a big chunk of town, in fact the same area where the British set up their military cantonment during the 1st Anglo-Afghan War and which is now call Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood after the man who personally killed the British Envoy in 1841. Karzai has conferred the Ghazi Wazir Mohammad Akbar Khan Medal on successive US military commanders and ambassadors; I wonder if they appreciate the irony.



You pass the Iranian and Turkish embassies on a road that Google says is called Jade-e Solh (Peace Street) but that the only street signs I've noticed in the whole city label as Ankara Caddesi (in Turkish), and then reach blast walls and a heavily defended gate. Past the guards and you have to go down a long corridor, essentially a kill zone covered by heavy machine guns, before you reach the UNAMA compound.


At UNAMA they were in fact the most friendly and helpful of government people I've consulted about my research. So far my research has consisted just of social networking, trying to meet the people who know the right people who were working on the dam development project I'm studying back 4 years ago during the period I'm studying. And so far I have little to show--the turnover of international staff of government agencies and NGO is even faster than I had expected. Surprisingly it seem like journalists are the only ones who have been working on the same long-term projects for years--the Afghan government people and employees of aid organizations I've talk to have also shuffled around from office to office every few years.

The previous couple days I stopped in at the Second Conference of Islamic Cooperation for a Peaceful Future of Afghanistan at one of the 5-star hotels here. Maybe a hundred people, mostly clerics, had been invited from provinces across the country with a few foreign guests and a number of defectors from the Taliban. The only panel I listened to in it's entirety was the one on women's issues. All the panelists followed the line that Islam, real Islam (and what constituted real Islam was unsurprisingly the biggest point of debate of the conference), is the fundamental basis for women's rights and violence against women and denial of their education is un-Islamic. The first and only male speaker said something to the effect of We all know and say the first names of the Prophet's wives, but how many of us know the first names of each others wives (apparently it's a dishonor to have other men say one's wife's name)? Do we think we're better than the Prophet?
Since it was a gather of a bunch of preachers, the question-and-answer sessions were mostly just answer sessions, and the answers to the panelists of the women's rights session were mostly hostile. One mullah said that he thought the panelists were too vague about what they meant by violence against women, because after all if a woman was disobedient her husband had the right to refuse to sleep with her, and if even that didn't work, to beat her. Another cleric said that whenever there was violence against a woman there was actually another woman behind it, most likely the husband's wife or mother. He started to give an example of how foolish women stirred up trouble: in his town a woman wasn't letting her daughter marry because she was holding out for a better bride price and it was creating tension between families. One of the female speakers cut him off rebutting that if it was the case that women were thusly ignorant and foolish it was the fault of men for denying them a good Islamic moral education. That silenced him. A cleric from Al Azhar seminary in Egypt had the final word on women with a long argument in Arabic that nobody understood because there weren't translators on hand to give Arabic-English or Arabic-Persian or Arabic-Pashto simultaneous translations over our headsets.



Women came up again when they debated what revisions to make in the official statement of the conference, which was done by rough consensus--they would ask for a show of hands over who objected to an article or it's wording and if a bunch of hands went up they would go back to revising without counting who was in the majority (which I think makes much more sense than majority rule). One of the female speakers proposed an article specifically on concern over women but the counter-argument that won out was that many of the articles talked generally about society and violence therein and it went without saying that women were a part of society. The angriest debate in the revision session was actually over the confusing grammar of a sentence that read something like "we are concerned that violence and....will contribute to an increase in violence and discord..."


During one of the tea breaks I sat on the floor with a recently defected Taliban commander from Kandahar who was talking to a female Indian grad student through a translator. He claimed that he had left the Taliban because it was the Pakistanis directing them, though he had only defected last year after 17 years as a military commander so there must have been more to the story than a suddenly realization that Pakistan was using the Taliban as a proxy, but he was sticking to this safe talking point.
He joked that India and Afghanistan should partition Pakistan between them. Later the Indian grad student told me that the former Talib had confided in the translator that he felt hatred her when he first saw her because due to her dark skin he'd assumed she was Pakistani or Kashmiri. Apparently she's always reassuring people that she's from India and not Pakistan--just goes to show how nationalism very much trumps any kind of pan-Islamic sentiment among most people around here.

kickboxing

I just attended my first kickboxing class today. It was held in the sweat-smelling basement of a bodybuilding gym half-lit by a couple bare lightbulbs. Which is awesome--feels like a real fight club. The huge guy upstairs apparently ripped me off taking double the monthly rate of about $8, but my new coach, who's maybe 30 and very martial-looking and unbelievably flexible, is honest and seemed embarrassed until we decided the huge guy must have just taken 2 months up front. I kinda wanted to pay double though.

The students from boys of about 8 to men of about 30. There was brief sparring at the end, and they (including the eight-year-olds) fought hard, full-on head kicks and multiple stoppages for bleeding. Two of the young'uns were reduced to tears. Offense seems to be prioritized over defense at this club: hands low they just charged and destroyed each other without blocking anything. When someone landed a particularly resonant head kick or dropped their opponent everyone applauded, but there were none of the constant reminders from the audience to keep hands up and keep up evasive head movement that I'm used to from my gym in the US.
This might be a bad idea--black eyes will likely be frowned up in interviews I conduct and at the archives. But for the moment I'm very much enjoying the endorphins and kicking back with a non-alcoholic beer.

I managed to commit the big old faux pas of stepping on a prayer rug in my sambo shoes right in front of a guy who I hadn't noticed was praying, and another, who had been kicking the heavy bag (literally a giant sack bulging with I don't know what) in a shalwar kamiz, jumped forward to lead me off the rug shaking my hand saying No problem no problem as I stammered an apology.
Still I think I made a decent first impression as foreign novelty, though my Persian anatomical/athletic vocabulary needs--and will get--a lot of work.

Afghan Mobile Mini Circus for Children

Last night I attended a movie night/fundraiser for a Kabul-Istanbul rickshaw journey by Annika, German anthropology student, and Adnan, an Indian-Canadian journalist. They both work for the children's circus that was founded here in 2002 and trains local kids as performers. The idea is to stop in refugee camps and collaborate with children's aid organizations along the route to perform and plant the seeds for more circus franchises.

They had the rickshaw custom made in Jalalabad (with the steering wheel on the left, which will make driving harder in Pakistan but easier elsewhere, though rearview visibility is I think be the least of the rickshaw's problems driving on Iranian and Turkish highways).

What was different and welcome was that most of the people working for the circus have been doing so for 5 or 10 years--Annika at 8 months was I think the newest recruit and she's stayed the whole eight months without the frequent R&R or international conference hopping of most NGO and foreign government people. Without exaggeration, the majority of the NGO people I've talked to have been here for less than 6 months and are already thinking of moving on to other countries.

Annika swinging flames:

The woman next to me put a hundred dollar bill in Annika's cap after the performance, just to spite me. They're collecting donations for the trip here as well:

http://www.indiegogo.com/rickshawcircus

They seem to be really into weird artificial energy drinks around here. At least at the convenience stores I've been to so far, there's been more brand variety to energy drinks than to just about anything else.

Speaking of drinks, one sector where in my opinion the Iranian label has foreign competitors, including the Germans, beat for quality is non-alcoholic beer. If marketed well as a less sickly sweet more full-bodied alternative to soft drinks I think Delster could make it big in the US.

a few bazaar pics

 The best kebab I've had yet in Afghanistan:

          

Money market. The guys up on the balcony haggling with the guys below over ever-changing exchange rates.

The guys with the pimped out Pakistani taxi on the left were good enough to help us fix a flat. I looked and couldn't find a non-Toyota out of hundreds of cars parked along the river.

Back in 2008 a professor who'd spent years in Afghanistan commented to out class that it was a disgrace that nothing had been done to clean up the Kabul river hadn't after 6 years of foreign aid. Now it's been 10 and it still looks and smells like a cesspool. My friend who was guiding me around said that the people working at the bazaar have nowhere else to use for a latrine since there are no public toilets to be found and they're stuck there all day.

Of course as a former USAID employee (who was very critical of her past employer) pointed out, Kabulis don't seem to remember that there didn't used to be near constant electricity or perfect cell phone reception.

I'm amazed I haven't had any stomach problems yet in Kabul, especially after drinking a glass of the roadside ground sugar cane juice being made below from a communal roadside glass.

zelzele

Apparently there was an earthquake yesterday morning in Kabul that I managed to not even notice. Everyone else has stories of what they were doing when they felt it and how they initially thought they were crazy. Dozens died in Baghlan to the north. Electricity has been out since then, but apparently only on my block.