Weaving a Curious Life

This was originally posted on http://www.pomegranateveils.com

The first is a gardener at a guesthouse in Kabul. The photo was take over the shoulder of the driver and escort while we were waiting on the person we were picking up there.

This one was taken while I was sitting on the steps of the house where I was living waiting on transport to arrive. The boots for the guards were lined up under the shed they have for shelter and a stray ray of late afternoon sunshine seemed to be spotlighting them.

Finally I have been hearing the “ice cream truck” tune for a week or so and finally saw one of the sources. This photo was taken from the balcony for the second floor of the house where I now live. It is a bit scrunched in terms of framing because I had to shoot through an opening in the metal grilling that surrounds the balcony.

Kabul is an exhausting place to be. At least it is for me and most of the people with whom I work. Sure part of it is the security situation; this is especially true since the supermarket bombing a few weeks ago. Mostly the exhaustion stems from the fact that almost nothing is easy and  you can’t take anything for granted. People ask me what life is like here and I suspect they imagine constant threats of violence and fighting in the street. That isn’t the case. Here are some examples of the kinds of frustrations and challenges that do fill my days.

1) Kitchen Headaches — This morning I went to the kitchen to make a cup of instant coffee (yuk! but better than nothing), it had, as usual, been trashed by the four, 20-something male interns with whom I have to share the space. The staff who are supposed to bring up water bottles (we can’t drink the tap water) from the basement had not done so. I managed to drain the last of the bottle in the kitchen which was just enough for coffee. I closed the cabinet doors, picked up the trash, and moved the dirty dishes to the sink while waiting on water to heat and toast to finish. The electrical current in the house is weak enough that toast takes 5 minutes or more.

2) Laundry challenges — Laundry requires lugging things down two flights of stairs while hoping that the washer is empty and working. The washers are not working much of the time and 16 people must make do with two washers when each small load takes two to three times what a larger washer in the US would take. So working and available machines happen maybe 25% of the time. Assuming I get lucky and find an open, working machine, I can start the load and hope that the power doesn’t go out for even a moment until the load is done. The washers are digital so any power interruption means you have to start the cycle over. Given that power goes out multiple times on most days, this requires still more luck to successfully wash a load.

3) Adventures in Shopping — Since the supermarket bombing, the university transport will not take us to Finest or Spinney’s on Fridays which is my one day off. They will take us to some of the nearby stores used by Afghans. I  make do with that most weeks. However, today there were some things I wanted/needed that I can only get at places that cater to expats. J (the other woman in the house where I live) and I planned to take a taxi from a company that caters to internationals this morning. Neither of our university supplied cell phones would connect for outgoing calls. For some reason this was also true for some but not all of our housemates. Oddly incoming calls are fine and text messages would go out. J finds a someone with a working phone and the taxi was called. After some confusion that takes multiple calls to sort out, the car arrives. We get in the cab but the driver speaks virtually no English and we can’t get him to understand where he needs to go which was another guesthouse to pick up S, the third person going with us. He drives off in the completely wrong direction. So here we are two women (without passports which HR has) in a place where women are less than second class citizens with a driver that doesn’t speak English and almost useless phones. We eventually get a text to S who calls us back. He has a guard at his house explain to the driver where we are going. Given that we are headed to a house next to the compound of the vice-president of the country you wouldn’t think this would be all that hard. We start heading in the correct direction. We stop multiple times for our driver as random people on the street for directions. Eventually we find our destination and pick up S. Next is getting the driver to take us to the supermarket. S manages to guide him to where we need to go. We get to the supermarket and S, being male, is patted down and wanded for weapons. J and I are waved through the door — one advantage to the sexism and norms against male/female physical contact is not getting patted down most places. The lights are out in the market but we start shopping anyway. Thankfully the lights come back on because you have to watch expiration dates very carefully and those are hard to see in the dark. By this point I am exhausted after a week of fighting pneumonia and the adventures of the morning. I grab some random things which total $97 US. We make it home with less hassle. I had hoped for a stop at the bakery but at $5 per stop and the chaos it just wasn’t worth it. So a few overpriced groceries took two hours and cost $30 in cab fare.

3) I come home to put away groceries only to find the kitchen trashed again and that one of the boys had dug through my cabinet and used cookware that I bought for myself because I got tired of the shared cookware always being dirty. This makes me grumpy. It is bad enough that groceries are disappearing and the boys store food in the few pans we share. I gathered up the clean dishes that I have purchased and moved them to my room. I know that sounds petty; it even feels that way to me.

4) I go to my room which is no longer warm as they turn the radiators off during the day which has not been helpful in getting well.

5) I try to download a file I need for work that should have taken a couple of minutes but has now been downloading for 45 minutes thanks to the fact that the university doesn’t pay for sufficient bandwidth.

6) While waiting on the file, I try to figure out the logistics of getting tax related documents to the US. There is no reliable way to get mail from the US to here or back other than expensive shipments through DHL. I spent part of the morning trying to figure out ways to print forms that I could sign and then have them scanned back into electronic form to email to a friend in the US who can print them out and mail them for me. Not sure they will be accepted without an “original” signature but I am going to try.

7) I debate whether to give up on going away for a long weekend in a couple of weeks. Over two weeks ago human resources took my passport to renew my visa which expires on March 19th. I checked yesterday to see if it was back. I was told that they aren’t even going to submit it until the 15th because my visa is still good. The cost of a visa works out to about $3 a day and so they don’t want to renew it until the last possible moment. The irritated questions in mind include: (A) Why take it two weeks ago then? and (B) What are the odds of it being back in time for use during spring break?

While it is true that these sorts of frustrations are small things in the grand scheme of things, they are very, very tiring. On top of the security situation and the isolation from people I love it makes being here a challenge. I am tired. I am physically under the weather and very homesick.

I arrived back in Kabul on January 15. I put up with two weeks of almost no heat because they weren’t willing to run the radiators when the faculty weren’t back. I was one of only a couple people in the house. I am on a twelve-month contract and only get 24 vacation days a year so I had to be back much earlier. So far this semester, we have been under far more security restrictions than last fall. We are all ready for spring and warmer weather. I personally am ready for the interns to go back home. Between six-day work weeks and the fact you never really leave work when living with coworkers where the university controls virtually every aspect of your life, I need break.

I plan to go back to the US in June but the date on which I can leave keeps getting pushed later and later in June and I have to be back to start teaching again on July 10. Mid-June seems very far away and only two weeks in the US does not feel like it will be nearly enough. I had hoped to take a week of unpaid time to stretch the trip out. have tried to keep things mostly positive here but I thought I would share a bit of the darker side this time. I will find a more positive attitude soon. This weekend is extra hard with not feeling well and missing a special event taking place back in Madison. In the meantime, I am allowing myself a couple of hours to wallow in frustration and grumpiness.

This photo was taken during an extra snowy day in Kabul. The gate and razor wire are at the end of the drive to the house where I live. The number of trees in the background are rare; they are part of a school yard across the road.

Close up

The building blocks of my life here in Kabul are not that different from those in my life before Kabul. I go to work and spend too much time on the trivial and in meetings and not enough on the things that really matter. I must deal with food and laundry and all the little tasks of life (though the list of those tasks is shorter here). I occassionally go out to dinner. I stay connected to those I love via technology and long for more face time with them. My eyes scan the trees and sky in hopes of spotting a new bird for my life list and I dream of the future and fret about the past. I read (even more than before) and meditate. I take photos when I can.

Yet a constant stream of things both trivial and not so trivial, never allow me to forget where I am. Here are a few of those things — some good and some not along with a few photos I have snapped over the last six months (many from a moving van through dirty windows so the quality is not great but they capture a bit of what life is like here).

I am reminded that I am in Kabul by . . .

• The beauty of the mountains on a clear morning after a few days of rain and snow to clear the air.
• The constant craving and the almost unconscious search for the tiniest bits of green — the sight, the smell, and the taste of it. The landscape here is very brown in both summer and winter. I miss the smell of fresh cut grass and of the scent released as I tend the herbs in my garden. I miss the fresh taste of green that is best captured by baby spinach and really fresh asparagus. Heck at this point I would even be overjoyed at the sight of nasty invasive plants like kudzu. When I look back at my flickr stream and the photos from Indiana the colors now look like something from a fairy tale.
• The extent and severity of poverty here — you can never really forget about it and it can be hard to see. Compared to many people in the US I had a pretty good idea of what poverty looked like and of its consequences but here I have gained an entirely new perspective. Every shower, every drink of water, every trip to campus, every day reminds me how incredibly privileged we in the US are. At the same time I realize that I can in no way imagine what living in the poverty here would truly be like. I live in a sheltered bubble. I complain when the power goes out rather than rejoicing that I have it at all. I complain about the quality of the water when I shower but many here must carry there water from community pumps that are found along the roads.
• The beauty of the people here; they are among the most beautiful that I have ever seen. Not the polished and artificial beauty of Madison Avenue and Hollywood but a beauty that is greater because it shines through the hardships. This is especially true of the oldest and the youngest. This makes me even more frustrated with the image consciousness of the US and the way that we allow an unrealistic ideals to define ourselves and those around us.
• The depth and breadth of adaptability among expats and especially among the people of Afghanistan. Despite 30 years of war and armed conflict, despite the poverty and the lack of infrastructure people here still keep striving, keep hoping, and they keep seeking and injecting beauty and sweetness into life at every opportunity. Despite the horrible conditions for girls and women, our female students keep dreaming of a better life for themselves, their families, and their country. As for the expats, it a bit unnerving to notice how quickly the unthinkable becomes almost ordinary — whether that involves sewage contaminated showers and redefining what “clean” means or the constant presence of men with guns and the screens and metal detectors that are a part of buying groceries or going out to eat or the increasingly frequent reports of suicide bombers attacking places that I go/have been or living with more than a dozen of my coworkers or  traffic that includes both military convoys and herds of goats/fat-bottomed sheep or the sound of military helicopters,or the power outages.
• The honesty and a human scale to life here. It reminds me how small I am as an individual in the world and how small humankind is in the greater scheme of things. Being here I have come to appreciate how useful technology is as a tool and how modern western life sometimes treats it as a god rather a tool and as an end rather than a means. I have come to have an even greater appreciation for the fact that mindless devotion to any cause destroys our humanity regardless of whether that cause is rooted in religious dogma or a mindless pursuit of wealth.
• The over abundance of cheap plastic items and the lack of access to nature and fresh produce/dairy that I can safely eat. The lack of produce is made more frustrating by the fact that road side carts are stacked with produce though security will seldom allow me to stop and purchase said produce. Even when to they do, to keep from getting sick I have to cook most produce far more than I would like (I prefer my fruits and veggies as raw as possible). Fresh dairy is even more limited to a bit of local cheese and yogurt.

• For me, the lack of contact with nature and gardening are among the hardest parts of life here.  I miss wandering in the woods. I miss observing nature up close. As a point of comparison, I saw about 40 different species of birds from my bedroom window back in Indiana. Here I have seen a total of six species of birds in six and a half months the most colorful of the six is the rose-ringed parakeet pictured below.
• The limits on movement and choices. I miss being able to come and go when and where I want. I miss being able to feel the sun on my skin and hair. I miss being able to be open and honest about who I am and what I believe. I am a guest here and will respect the cultural constraints and I generally abide by security restrictions but I miss freedom and control over my own life.
• The fact that I feel stupid and rude here. I have not picked up much Dari and no Pashto. This means that I don’t understand much of what happens around me and I can’t interact in a meaningful way with many of the people who are part of my daily life (cleaning staff, guards, etc.).

A few days of rain and snow had cleared the air and today was sunny and quite lovely as long as you looked up. February and March are the wet months here and the ground is a muddy mess.

This shot is of an area that has become an outdoor market in the last few months. It is not far from the location of the suicide bombing that took place on January 12.

Surrounding the city are snow capped mountains. This shot is actually from my guesthouse. I wasn’t able to get a good shot of the mountains from the moving van.

So the explosion at Finest in Kabul hit rather close to home as this is one of the places we often shop on Friday. Thankfully everyone from campus is safely accounted for though some were in or near the store just before the explosion and several others were at training at the near by British Embassy.

More info at this link.

Life in Kabul often has a surreal quality that is partly related to the nightmare of what has been and may be again, the reality of what is, and the dreams and desires for what might be. Sometimes you find a summary of the situation in the oddest places. This billboard near one of the grocery stores where we shop captures that disconnect well. Whether armored vehicles (referenced on the left half of the billboard) are necessary is up for debate but luxury sports cars (pictured on the right half of the billboard) are clearly not reasonable given the horrible state of the roads here.

There are some places to get gas from pumps like you might have found in the the US about twenty years ago but many local people buy their auto fuel from vendors such as this.

I spend most of my time in Kabul in bubbles that are only marginally “in Afghanistan.” I move from campus, to the guesthouse where I live, to grocery stores and places to eat that cater to expats. It is in the van traveling from one to another where I see the most interesting things. The faces of the people here are so amazing — especially the elderly and the young. This little guy was squatting at the very edge of the road one chilly December day.