My trip to Nepal was exactly right. It’s a wonderful place in its own ways. The mountain views are amazing of course, if the light is right. And the family I stayed with, I found out in the taxi ride from the Kathmandu airport, is running a coffee shop there! It’s called “Top of the World Coffee” and it’s super awesome: in-house roasting and every non-espresso cup of coffee is a single-cup pour-over with just-ground beans. No drip, no French press, just pour-over. Amazing. Got to bust the camera out, too.
And I had great talks with a major mentor in my life who grew up in the Congo and then spent 21 years in Haiti, and whose daughter married a Haitian. She still lives there with her husband doing good work in remote areas.
Anyway, this guy knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the struggle of cross-cultural work. And he looked at my cultural and language progress, the way I am fumblingly trying to process my experiences, the ways I still can contribute to my NGO, and the relationships I have, and said: “I’m not worried about you. You’re doing a great job, man. And what started in you will come to a finish. Stay the course and persevere. It’s going to be hard and you’re confronting not only a new culture but the real you. And that’s hard. But I believe in you and I love you as a brother.”
Talk about exactly what my broken-down soul needed to hear. So grateful for that visit and the time we spent together.
… Blood & Sweat In Afghanistan
I gave blood today to a kid who has some sort of illness which requires a transfusion once a month. One of my Afghan colleagues knows his family and his condition and since I have a very donation-friendly blood type I volunteered.
The hospital was busy and hot but the actual experience was not bad. New needles and all.
When I shook this little ten-year-old boy’s hand and said, “Hello, are you well?” he said, “Thank God,” and kissed my hand. I said, “No, no, what are you doing?” and sort of laughed. Kind of an awkward moment but I understand his intention. I just hope that the credit doesn’t go to me and that through the process of this relationship (giving blood once a month to him) we will find something deeper than that.
I came and went on my bicycle and had no weird fainting issues or anything, as the doctors predicted once they found out I was from Texas. Haha.
In other news, here’s how to move a couple tons of brick and dirt from an Afghan yard (specifically my yard, the brick and dirt being the remnants of a month-long wall-rebuilding, which is a whole other story):
The first step is getting a parked SUV out of the way. Because of the configuration of the yard, walls and gate, the SUV has got to go prior to getting that stuff onto a truck and out of the property. The SUV belongs to a friend’s NGO so I shoot him a text the afternoon before the removal of the dirt is scheduled, expecting he will call one of the NGO’s drivers to come pick it up and move it before next morning.
Next morning comes and so does the huge work truck with an Afghan manager I know and two hired workers to remove the dirt. But the SUV is still there because I didn’t realize that my NGO director friend is in Kabul this week and not really paying attention to things like getting cars moved in another city. So I call another friend who works for that NGO and he comes over with a key.
The SUV, not very surprisingly, won’t start, even though it was apparently just at the mechanic’s a week ago. I run into my house, grab a screwdriver and a hammer and we try to bang the battery contacts around a bit. The manager I know lends a hand but the SUV still won’t start.
So my foreigner buddy sits in the driver seat and I and four Afghans (including my chaokidâr) push the SUV toward the gate and the narrow alley beyond. The alley has two short but fairly steep rises in it which repeatedly bring the vehicle to a halt despite our best efforts. It takes about 20 minutes of pushing, arranging bricks and wood, and pushing more to get the SUV all the way out of the yard, through the alley and onto the street.
At this point I leave to do other things (in my case, a meeting on an upcoming disability project). But here’s the rest of the story as told to me by the Afghan manager:
The manager and workers back the big work truck into the yard and start shoveling dirt and throwing bricks into it. They clear out a big chunk of what needs to go and then decide to back the truck up a bit more to get closer to the remaining part. When they do that, one of the back tires goes over an old, unused, unknown-about well whose concrete cap suddenly breaks—and in goes the entire rear tire of this massive work truck piled with hundreds of kilos of dirt and bricks.
The manager and workers have to jack the truck up, jam stuff in between the tire and the edge of the well, jack it up more, jam more stuff in … until a half-hour later it’s out of the well again.
They continue to load up the truck until, several hours later, the entire amount of dirt and bricks is off the ground. Then they start up the truck and start rolling out the gate only to discover that the truck is now not going to leave easily. The two steep rises in my alley, plus huge amount of brick and dirt, equals a very unhappy truck. They really have to waste fuel and put the engine under a ton of stress just to clear a tiny alley.
They finally get the truck out on the bumpy, unpaved street only to realize that it’s not going anywhere, again. The manager hops out and sees that the tires have almost completely deflated under the pressure. So somehow they manage to get enough air in to move it (I’m not sure how or from where or how long this took). They reach the end of the unpaved street and turn left onto the paved street to head back to the city—thinking they are finally home-free.
And that’s when, as if scripted from a slapstick, the gear-shifter breaks off in the driver’s hand. It’s late afternoon at this point. After cursing his existence, the manager takes the broken off stick and takes a taxi to a mechanic while the workers hang back with the truck. The mechanic analyzes it and sells him the necessary part, which needs to be welded.
So the manager calls his welder friend who, thankfully, offers to do the job for free. The welder friend’s shop is fairly close to the immovable truck so he drags a long extended chain of extension cords all the way across this 20-meter-wide busy road and welds the piece in place inside the truck.
Hours after leaving my place with the dirt, they finally make it back to the drop-off place and the manager gets a bunch of crap from the day-laborers for more payment due to all the problems. He negotiates out of it and fortunately doesn’t get too ripped off.
Welcome to life in Afghanistan—where problems don’t just get “solved at Wal-Mart,” they get murderously beaten into the ground by brute force until they stop producing more problems, which they are exremely wont to do.
(I now have a gaping hole in my yard that would probably kill me to fall into—so that’s another problem, with its inevitable multitude of associated problems, to be tackled.)
From a great Wilco song, to someone special whose name starts with G:
I’d give this world just to dream a dream with you.
This entry was written by admin, posted on May 15, 2012 at 5:30 am, filed under Bicycles, City, Friendship, Hometown, Khaana, Photography and tagged Bicycles, bikes, blood, coffee, DM, gratitude, Health, journey, kathmandu, nepal, Panasonic DMC-GF1, passion, Photography, Poetry, problems, struggle, vocation, work, zaman.
It’s good to be here again. My whole body feels so much more relaxed even after a long taxi ride by a guy who made jokes about bringing me to the Taliban. I joked back, told him not to kidnap me because nobody would give even one rupee for me and he’ll get more money just dropping me at the right address. Then he said of course he wouldn’t kidnap me because I’m familiar with Afghanistan and know Farsi. Which wasn’t exactly comforting, but that’s just how life is here: I know he’s joking but at the same time there’s no guarantee that he is, and there is precedent for exactly that happening in this city.
You know that feeling of walking alone through a dark street at night? All your five senses are hyper-aware of everything, your body’s already busy anticipating fight-or-flight and you’re managing to suppress fear and anxiety but not without concentration an a certain amount of resignedness to the future? That’s life here quite often. Sometimes it’s in your face and alarm bells are going off; most times it’s just a quiet but still very much present trickle of adrenaline that keeps you on your toes and eventually wears you down.
On the other hand I sat next to a really nice guy who had studied English for two years under my friend whose house I’m renting. It was his first flight. We had good talks and he extended typical hospitality by offering a place to stay with his family in Kabul and asking me to drink tea with him at his curtain shop when I get back to our town.
Anyway, I think I’ll go get some ice cream or something. Loving the gorgeous brisk mountain weather and the bustle and life of Kabul.
Through everything I’m thankful to be here. Life is rich here, full of blessings even when I can’t see them. Now to go soak that up and be a blessing to others.
This entry was written by admin, posted on April 30, 2012 at 4:41 am, filed under Uncategorized.
Life is too rushed and public, and Internet access is too slow and, more limiting, too rare, to keep up with personal things online for now.
Here’s just a little update: Heading to Nepal this next week for a short trip with a mentor from back home, whom I will then usher back into Afghanistan for a visit here.
It’s been a good six months, very productive in terms of finding stability, relationships and language, and somewhat productive in terms of being able to help the NGO, but I can feel myself drying up, so to speak. I need to move out and enjoy life for a bit. My goal is to rest and enjoy things and see a change of scenery enough to travel back to this dry, fearful and religion-paralyzed land of shame ‘n’ blame, prying eyes, surface-level righteousness, police checkpoints, boy-rape/wife-prostitution mixed in with hyper-religious finger-pointing and showboating (all done by the same people), soldiers of my country intentionally killing sleeping Afghan children, wives being murdered by their husbands for giving birth to too many girls, this government simultaneously claiming to be Islamic while dragging its religious ideals through the cesspool every day, the absurdly abysmal state of women’s rights (a word which, translated into Dari as “women’s laws,” doesn’t mean anything here), etc. … to take a break from all the bloody mess that religion, violence, the dehumanization of women and the destructive burden of 24/7 social paranoia have slopped around this entire country and its people … then get a grip on life again, come back in and manage to love Afghans for their good qualities—of which there are many—and despite the things about their culture which are regrettable—from which they also suffer, even if they do also propagate them directly or indirectly.
One thing that’s made it hard is that I tend to talk to people about things that most Afghans and most foreigners do not. I have had a full explanation of bacha bâzi from multiple people, a full explanation of prostitution and how the police protect brothels for payment from sons whose policemen fathers did this; I’ve seen guys toying with girls both over the phone and in person in a country where a girl’s reputation is all that keeps her head from a bullet and her body from the grave, guys whose explanation as to why they keep doing this even though they know it’s wrong is, “I would miss toying with their hearts.”
And yet the people who kidnap orphan boys and dress them as girls and sodomize them are the same people who pray five times a day and make the Haj and say that it’s a horrible sin for a woman to play soccer or ride a bicycle. They quote an old proverb, “God is in a thousand ways,” to legitimize or deemphasize their enslavement and abuse of defenseless orphans. But that same presumption of divine mercy isn’t extended to a woman riding her bike to the pharmacy.
This government, which claims to be religious—not just religious, but Islamic—also protects the owners of whorehouses, is neck-deep in the heroin trade and would immediately crumble if bribery were put to a stop. And yet people’s blood boils when a corner of a page of the Qur’an-e-Sharif accidentally burns—even though they themselves burn it in spirit in constant, institutionalized and deeply entrenched ways.
So when someone looks at me and makes comments on my beard or my clothes or my tattoo, which is about my brother’s survival of cancer and not just for kicks because I’m a heathen, or comments about how America is evil because its laws allow consensual homosexuality, it makes me want to scream. When someone tells me that drinking alcohol is always wrong and all those who have ever had a drop of alcohol will burn in hell, but refuses to agree that bacha bâzi—the celebrated tradition of the rape of orphan boys!—is really wrong, rather just distasteful if done incorrectly … I just don’t know how to interact: either shut down or start a conflict. I don’t know how to navigate this life sometimes in a way that engages while loving.
What is scary is that my fury at religion can boil up in a way that isn’t all that dissimilar to religious hate itself. And yet I can’t just turn off my brain, especially as I want to dig in deeper into culture here and really be a student of this place. It is hard to keep things objective and impersonal as I discuss hard topics with personal people I have relationships with.
Okay, now I need to go do stuff before going to Kabul. Bye.
This entry was written by admin, posted on April 29, 2012 at 5:25 am, filed under Culture, Hometown, Khaana, Language, Politics, Religion, Women and tagged bacha bazi, corruption, drugs, heroin, hypocrisy, love, nepal, soccer, struggle.
Bed at 1am, up and groggy at 5am. Aeropressed 1 liter of fresh-ground coffee into a thermos. Tossed it into my panniers and rode to a friend’s house. Hopped in his van with his family. Drove to the mountains with two other cars full of foreigners. Had a sunrise (or, slightly post-sunrise) Easter service out there in no man’s land.
Came back and hopped on the bike, rode to another friend’s house. Rode together to the “Bush Bâzâr” (real military surplus market) where we each bought about 15-20lbs of German MRE food, which I tied down to my bicycle rack. Rode back to his place and had lunch with his family.
Had a tire puncture, or so I thought, but couldn’t find the puncture after looking all over. Pumped it up and rode home, unpacked the MREs, vacuumed, washed dishes, organized, cleaned, read a bit, prayed a bit. Fought off sleep, because …
Two days ago I invited my friend NQ to come over for dinner tonight. He’s a friend I’ve written about before—he is here from Kabul studying at the university away from his family; we’ve become good friends but he left for Kabul for a month and just got back last week, and is one of the guys I’ve been reluctant to hang out with even though he is so nice.
Anyway at 6pm NQ came over. We sat outside for a while on the porch chatting over tea as the sun went down. He did the sunset namâz (call to prayer) and then we continued chatting.
Ate dinner with him and my night chaokidâr. Had a lot of fun. Five hours passed quickly and suddenly it’s 11pm.
Honestly after feeling such a lack of energy over the past few days, plus only getting four hours of sleep before a day of going to the mountains and then riding all around the city and then cleaning up the whole house, I was (and am) exhausted and therefore was not 100% excited about what tonight might have brought. It was a very conscious, deliberate act of faith to open my house up to a potentially taxing cross-cultural experience tonight … and it took a lot of grumpy prayer beforehand.
But the cool thing is, I really don’t have to be “ready.” I don’t have to change myself. The burden of how the whole thing goes isn’t really up to me. I’m just a vessel for love to pass through. All I have to do is have enough faith to be there and be open and literally just open the door, and love just happens. I didn’t force it tonight; in fact, I felt forced (or at least compelled) into it, by a voice I couldn’t quiet. So it wasn’t “my love” at work at all—and yet I feel like my friendship with NQ has gone from good to way better, and I feel confident it will continue to go that way as long as I just make the conscious effort to throw myself under the bus of hospitality even when I don’t feel like it at all. Even as love demands to burn up everything I have, love will carry me through.
This entry was written by admin, posted on April 8, 2012 at 2:10 pm, filed under Uncategorized.