Day 14 - Sightseeing

Woke up this morning to more snow – this made me strangely cheerful, as I’d felt bad about being a bit sniffy about Sahars offer to go up TV mountain today – mainly due to going up two days ago. So the snow meant we couldn’t have gone up anyway, well, not safely anyway; although “safely” is a pretty relative term here.

I was cold though, so I had the bright idea of putting the bukhari up to maximum for a bit to warm the room a little - of course, when I went to turn it down, the control knob had melted. So I spent a couple of panicked minutes convinced my room was about to burst into flames, until I finally got the thing under control – well, switched off, anyway. Of course, it takes quite a while for the diesel to burn off, so you’re not quite sure if you’ve succeeded until the flame is almost out.

So, disaster averted, I braved the snow (for 30 yards) to get to the office – where I had a bite of breakfast, and, in pretty short order, rescued a laptop which had had a user password changed accidentally to something unknown. Thankfully, the other account was an administration account, and I was able to change the user password from the control panel – otherwise it would have been out with the disk, off with the data, and on with a rebuild. Thankfully it didn’t come to that!

Anthony and I talked to S**** about his experiences of the conflict, and what his (and others) views were of the arrival and continued presence of foreign military troops in Afghanistan. We got a good lesson in the complexities of regional politics, and I had a fresh appreciation of how even a simple comment from London or Washington can have a profound effect on the security and anxiety of huge swathes of people totally outside of American or British sovereignty.

S****, as arranged, came round and made some cool suggestions about where to go over lunch – she managed to cram Anthony, J**** and K****, herself and I in the 4x4 – I got prime position up front with the driver (although there are different theories on the safety of having foreign nationals in the front – although as a male it was better for me to be up there) – where I got to get some good views of the city as we went through it, something I always enjoy. The driver was excellent as well – you get a feel very quickly for how good someone is at avoiding potholes whilst driving quickly, and this guy was excellent.

The first port of call was Darul Aman Palace, next to Kabul museum, both picturesque but somewhat sad places – the palace being a shelled out skeletal box on the top of the hill, a reminder both of the conflict of the last few decades, and the relative prosperity and world citizenship that Kabul held into the mid 70s – if there’s one thing you feel in Kabul, it’s the almost mystical seperation from the normal day to day business of the rest of the world. It’s like you’re stepping into a slightly nightmarish fantasy world, where the normal rules and conventions are just slightly askew. Like stepping back and sideways in time a few decades, or a couple of hundred years.

But enough melancholy prose, here’s the pictures:

Darul Aman Palace, looking forlorn in the snow

After we’d taken the requisite number of photos of the palace (I was getting a little snap happy and was in danger of gallivanting all around the area quite alone), we stepped into Kabul Museum. Even though the top floor was undergoing renovation (after being totally destroyed by the Taliban in 2000/1 and then being rebuilt), it was still an amazingly empty place. There was one, fairly large room with a collection of striking wooden Parun Kafir (supposedly descendants of Alexander the Great) figures, and not much else. Even these figures had been reconstructed after being hacked to pieces by the Taliban. There were two side corridors with photos of destroyed objects, and a few sad display cases; although there were a few Buddha figures, which, I suppose, had been reconstructed like the rest. Still, I think the museum is limping back to life, although with the deteriorating security situation, any resources are likely to dry up unless things get considerably better.

The outside, however, had a really interesting exhibit – propped up, in the snow, with their windows open to the elements, were a brooding gang of ex diplomatic / presidential cars, all with various (and historical) kinds of bullet proof glass – all shot out. The combination of black paintwork with polished chrome, with bullet shattered windows invaded by snow made an arresting visage, like a 50s American auto advert, subverted by the modern age.

After we’d been kicked out of the museum (because of closing time) we headed off to Qargha reservoir, by way of Kabul golf course. Apparently, its situated on a old minefield, and all the mines have been cleared, although you’d have to make a good case for me to get on the fairways there. Though, to be fair, you’d have to make a fairly compelling argument to get me on a golf course anywhere.

Kabul Golf Course – where landing in a bunker has a whole new meaning!

The reservoir itself is like a summer resort for the Kabulis – and, like every summer resort, looked like a ghost town in the winter. Undeterred, our driver took us down onto the “beach”, which turned out to be a sea of sticky yet slippery mud, in which we gallivanted for a while. We then decided to drive further along, a plan we abandoned a little while later when we found ourselves in a position where the wheels were moving in a way that would normally produce forwards motion, but we were moving gracefully sideways and backwards at an arresting angle down a mud bank. Thankfully, we got back to the road, eventually, although I did note the telling action of our driver putting on his seat belt. Always something to worry about in a city where the purpose of a seatbelt seems to be often unknown.

It was beautiful though, and good to feel you could get out and walk freely.

On the way to and from the reservoir, we passed though some pretty poor housing areas – pretty poor even for Kabul. Sahar pointed out a couple of forelorn tents in the mud, which were being used as housing. Perhaps more disturbingly, especially in the winter snow, was an open air tented school.

I can’t even imagine what it would be like to try and learn anything here – and this is something which has been provided by the international aid community – it just brought home how bad things really are out here.

Day 13 - Too much fun

OK, sorry about the lack of update last night - Don't worry, I'm still alive and well (obviously); I just like to inject a little artificial drama into my postings.

Actually, that's completely untrue; I actually was having far too much fun playing an crazy inversion of uno with the Pakistan / Indian expats - lots of shouting, and so much laughter that I thought I was going to throw up; anyway, we played right up to 11, which is when the generators get pulled. So, no update last night.

As last week, it was a pretty quiet day - though no security alerts, thankfully. We did have a fairly big event yesterday though - we had two new members of staff arrive - Jason and Kelly.

J**** and K**** are here for at least 6 months, and would like to be here longer, although they're self funding, but as a fellow couple of (low) 30 somethings, their personal resources aren't huge. anyway, they've given up their jobs to come over here, which is a pretty big deal, so I hope the funds come through one way or another that allow them to stay a bit longer - Afghanistan is full of NGOs that have a constantly rotating ex-pat staff - one of the real strengths of the operation of **** here is the long term commitment of the staff - at around 15 months, J**** and M**** are already the old folks (in a purely metaphorical sense!!) on the block; which gives them great relationships with the local staff, and helps them to become go-to guys amongst the larger NGO community - which helps us to have a healthy influence despite our comparatively tiny size.

Anyway, J**** and K**** seem to have settled in very quickly - in fact, they managed to learn lie dice and win convincingly after travelling for two solid days. Not bad. It's that sort of adaptability which I'm sure will be very useful here!

So, without further ado, here's a picture of everyone in the house last night (including the reprobates who kept me up) -

PICURE REMOVED

details removed

Day 12 - Top of the world

The day dawned clear and bright, so after lunch we headed up the mountain at the centre of town. It was covered in little dry stone and mud brick houses, which will all self destruct at the mearest hint of the next earthquake, and kids roamed the street in happy packs amogst the rubbish and sewage as we lurched up higher in our trusty Toyota towards the battle marked peak.

Starting at the top:

The red stones mark the edge of the area cleared of mines

Remember kids - it's not cool to mess around next to a minefield!

The debris of war

This was taken a five minute walk from the minefield

Seriously, this is how all meat in Kabul is displayed and sold

Back at street level

It's been good to have a SLR in my hands again - thanks to the O'Haras! Of course, this now makes me really, really want to spend large amounts of money on my own swanky digital SLR - I've been operating with a little compact for a while now, but today has really got the feel of a decent camera back under my skin!

Day 11 –

Today was full of action – and success. I finally got the wireless router configured, and I’ve just renamed its broadcast name to be something a little less obvious than the “**** wireless” I initially set up. And yes, I know I can set it up not to broadcast, but I need to make it as simple as possible for people to connect - although I have setup a password as well. So it’s good to get that out of the way.

Our lunch was the highlight of the day, as we were saying goodbye to W**** – and I had a visitor coming along as well – I talked to M**** about the girl I met on the plane, and she suggested I invite her to lunch, which would get the best of all worlds with none of the complications. After I emailed her and suggested this, (and after she’d accepted) it turned out that she was inviting me out to meet a few friends at a licensed place which, as a foreign national, I’d be totally fine in. Still, it was good to have her share lunch with us all – and it was good to introduce her to D**** and M****, who’ll be here a fair bit longer than me!

PICTURE REMOVED

S****, M**** & D****

After the meal, all the local staff got together to get a picture with them and Wahid – I just spotted them doing it and was able to take a photo for them all together, and a photo for myself – It’s not common for Afghans to smile in photos (in fact, a lot of the local staff here asked for their photo IDs to be changed because they were smiling in them) so it was nice to get the following picture with them nearly all smiling – and this is all the local staff – the doctor, engineer, housekeepers, security, logistics, deputy HR, drivers, and of course our fantastic cooks!

PICTURE REMOVED

I thought I’d be up for a concentrated afternoon of work, but D**** invited me out to observe a meeting at the Ministry of Public Health – the meeting was the Construction Task Force. At the moment, a lot of the projects that **** Afghanistan have are construction – D**** really wants to get a greater diversity of projects going – and we’ve certainly had a diversity over the years, but construction is what’s been happening at the moment – and these meetings happen once a week with the minister of public health and various major players in the international development field. There was a senior representative from USAID, as well as a number of other local and ex-pat members, all sitting fairly informally in comfortable chairs discussing quite a range of projects. It’s fairly impressive really, like me stepping into Patricia Hewitts office to be an informal observer. Anyway, the meeting was pretty interesting – I learnt that insulation can make the difference in hospital heating costs from an insulated figure of $80 / sq m / year to an uninsulated $300 / sq m / year. Now you might not find that particularly interesting, but I do. Fuel and heating is a very interesting thing over here – most places don’t rely on a centralized heating system, but on removable bukharis, like the one in my room, only larger. Or you have a big generator running, pumping out a fixed energy supply, consuming a standard amount of fuel per day, so the idea of fuel efficiency becomes a bit alien, - if you turn off all your lights when the generators still running, it’s still going to be using the same amount of fuel – so why worry about the way you use electricity? It’s a bit of a poser really.

The really interesting thing, however, was my feelings about having the US military in the meeting – it’s the first time I’ve seen any US military personnel (in fact, the only ISAF members I’ve seen on the streets was a lone group of black painted Turkish armoured troop carriers a few days ago) in Afghanistan – well, in the flesh; and at first I was a little uncomfortable – had the room just become a prime target? Suddenly the ease in which I’d sauntered in became a source of worry. The handgun strapped prominently to major Ready’s (yes, Major Ready) leg didn’t do me any favours either. Though after a while I started to warm to them – for a start, they were obviously keen to give out money and support to relevant projects, and seemed to have a desire to bend as much of the police focused work they’d been assigned to the civilian population. It also seemed that they had a personal involvement with the work they were doing as well, which was heartening. The other thing that helped was that the other guy was a good old fashioned computer geek. So we had a few things to chat about afterward. I have to admit I felt a bit conflicted about them – Though it would have been a lot worse had we been in Baghdad (Well, beyond the obvious levels of violence, anyway). At the end I just had to accept that meeting people in person brings a level of human complexity and subtlety that abstract, unengaged discussion cannot cover. I’m not saying that I approve of military intervention, but military people wanting to do constructive things? Well, that’s a lot more of a grey area for me.

On the way over, we’d skirted through the East side of the city, as security forces had blocked off a couple of streets (Its ironic that the more security forces there are on the streets, the less secure you feel), and as we didn’t think sitting in stationary traffic by potential targets was such a great idea, we swung round a part of the City I haven’t seen so far – and we went past old bullet pocked Soviet housing blocks with hundreds of lines strung between the blocks and adjoining trees, covered with brightly coloured washing, quite a festive sight as we flashed on by.

We went past the stadium where the Taliban used to conduct public executions – now the have little mobile threshing carts outside, selling lengths of sugar cane.

We crossed the Kabul River a couple of times – though sometimes their state of repair left something to be desired:

Troubled bridge over waters – mind the gap!

We also went past an aircraft “museum”, which had the distinct air of a glorified junkyard – but looked like a lot of fun nether the less.

After we got back, I was sure all the excitement for the day was over, but I was presented with my Shalwar Kameez – my afghan outfit of long shirt and baggy trousers. And when I say baggy, I mean that these things have a waist of about ten feet in circumference. It’s quite an art to get all the pleating right with the cotton belt. Those of you who know me will be heartened to hear I managed to spill half a bowl full of Dhal all over it within a couple of hours of wearing it. Typical! But at least it got christened. I’m determined to et a hat and waistcoat as well, and as the outfit only cost $20, I’m sure I can find something. No pictures until I sort out the entire look!

Day 10 - techno annoyance

Well, I’m sitting in the office rather than my room as even though we have city power, for some reason we don’t have power in our flat – good stuff, hey? And I’m meant to be skyping with my girlfriend at 11. What a palaver.

Today has been full of headaches – especially in the morning. It took three hours to try and fix a CD drive in one of the older computers – complicated by the fact that I spent about an hour trying to get it back on the net – and then I had to download some propriety utility which was written in some really poorly translated japlish; all for a CD drive – and the company only ever seemed to have made two. Talk about overkill. I was not particularly pleased. And then, in the middle of this, people kept asking me to do more and more jobs that were niggly – like fixing a couple of printers, taking a look at a misbehaving memory stick, sorting out online storage for files that could be downloaded from a blog, fixing a broken dictionary, copying a copy-protected typing tutor – and I still have a stack of things to do – creating a small network, arranging simple automatic scheduled backups, trying to stabilise the network infrastructure, sorting out a wireless access point, and doing a complete hardware and software inventory, as well as trying to do a little techie training for one of the more savvy guys here. I have to admit I had a bit of a sense of humour failure. But I suppose I should look at it on the flipside – what I’m doing obviously fills a need they have here, and people are appreciating what I can do, and how it can make their lives easier.

Anyway, I got the chance to unwind a bit after lunch – D**** invited me out, and I almost turned down the opportunity because I was feeling that I was running out of time fast – D**** then reminded me that he was the boss, so if he was inviting me out, then I could put a pause on the work – which was good to be told! What I really appreciated today was working in an office full of techies back home – if there’s something you can’t work out, then you just ask someone else – and the stuff gets shared around, or at least you get a break to think about a solution - and the problem is being looked at by someone else at the same time. At the very least you can bounce problems off each other, whereas here I’m on my own. Still, it’s what I signed up for, and I suppose a little harsh reality is good from time to time.

It didn’t help that the office was getting darker and darker as I was sitting in it – not from the effects of the weather, but because of the 4000 schoolbags that were being piled up outside – these are going to get delivered to seven schools somewhere in the **** region sometime over the next couple of weeks – obviously I can’t be more specific for security reasons, but I can show you the big pile of boxes containing the bags:

Anyway, I got to go grocery shopping after lunch, and I was in the mood for comfort food – so I went and spent my dollars on crunchy nut cereal, Marmalade, chocolate, biscuits, some delicious Afghan cookies, and honey flavoured cream in a can. I don’t intend to eat that, just take it home as a trophy, if they’ll let me through customs. The banana flavoured cream didn’t appeal, even though it seemed a tad more bizarre. (I still think my best travel food score was my can of “semtex” energy drink from Slovakia; which my brother annoyingly drank a while back). So yes, my prediction of appreciating foods from home (at least not from Afghanistan anyway) growing with time was certainly accurate.

The Kamiri supermarket, home from home

Welcome to the Kabul intercontinental! No guns!

On the way back, D**** and M**** took me to the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel – we went through three barriers and had (one side) of our car checked for bombs – though having five in the car (me, M****, D****, our driver (whose name I still haven’t quite got) and Anthony) would have made us pretty inefficient suicide bombers. Inside, the hotel seemed very empty – though the “bookseller of Kabul”s (the real character from the book) franchise was open, although with no-one to be seen. Some of the prices seemed frighteningly expensive, but I’m getting used to paying Kabul prices. We were surprised to see the shop open at all, because the last we knew, the guy was in a stalemate standoff with the hotel. There were more empty shops than open ones in the lobby, and the whole affair looked a little sad. There was a nice little Jewellery one open though, where I picked up a couple of things.

The bookseller of Kabul – one of his outlets

After we’d had tea, I got a few more pictures to add to the ones I’d taken before we went in:

Fancy a dip? This gets filled occasionally, allegedly.

Looking towards the HOPE compound, which is the other side of the mountain past the bread factory (the yellow building that looks like a brewery - the tall one)

Taking in the view



This used to be a vineyard, given recent political events here, I’m surprised it's lasted so long.

After my refreshment, the afternoon went much better – although I had my fair share of frustration as P**** and I tried to unlock the secrets of how an old A3 printer worked – or didn’t, as the case was. P**** was far more motivated than me, because he could really use it for his site plans, at the moment he’s restricted to using A4 print-outs, not good by any means. We managed to get some printing going, but the sheet feeder doesn’t work, and neither does the manual feed. We both ended up filthy, and a little frustrated, and so the evening events were a welcome relief!

Day 9 - Window Of Hope Orphanage

Quick as I can tonight – we’re on generator rather than city power, and I know it’s going to get cut at about 11pm. So I need to be nice and concise – what are the chances, do you think?

So, let’s be orderly about this – the main highlights of the day were:

A) Going to the **** Orphanage
B) Going to the tailors.

B was after A, but I’ll deal with it first as it was extremely short. At about 4, S**** whisked me off (with a driver, of course) through the snow (we had a blizzard which started about 12 and has been going all day) to a tiny shop about 5 minutes away – the shop was so small that the patrons didn’t bother to take off their shoes, even though they were in various stages of relaxation on a battered old sofa in the murky interior. There was a big cloth cutting table which took up most of the space, and slightly disconcertingly, a number of brightly coloured dresses hanging from the walls – in fact, the shop sign was a woman in a bridal gown. Anyway, I was instructed to remove my fleece (on top of another jumper) and I was measured – fairly differently to the UK as well – no inside leg measurement, for a start. It was all over with about six measurements. I’ve no idea when I’ll be back, if I’ll need a fitting or if it’ll just get delivered to me complete.

So, on to the orphanage.

In the morning, before going down to the orphanage, which is currently housed in the old **** offices – donated when the **** orphanage (****) original building faced demolition, I got to see plans for a brand new, purpose built orphanage which is at the proposal stage. **** Afghanistan and ****, despite their similar names, are tow completely separate organisations, whose similarity in names is just a happy coincidence. They came into contact about a year ago when the original building housing the 14 or so kids was almost demolished during a slum / wasteland regeneration drive (and it was right on the verge of being flattened by a JCB before someone inside noticed just before they were about to be flattened). They issued an urgent cry for help through the NGO community, and **** Afghanistan sacrificed their offices to house the orphanage. Then a call for external funding was made, and the organisation I’m in back in the UK decided to make a donation last year.

PICTURE REMOVED

From this rather ad-hoc starting point, things have stabilised a lot – the old office has been converted into a fairly comfortable house for the gaggle of teenage boys and handful of special needs children – the stability has really helped the health and care of the special needs kids, and there hasn’t been any need to take them for expensive hospital treatment over the last year – and about 8 months ago they were able to take in a child abandoned on the street with pretty horrible head injuries (and undoubted psychological issues); and there has been remarkable progress in their health and mobility. The teenage boys are a good bunch as well – when we arrived, they were having an English lesson from a hired treacher – and we got to sit in on some of the lesson. It reminded me of how much I don’t know about the structure of my own language. Not that this will come as a great surprise to any of you who have suffered reading this blog.

And to be honest, the orphanage was the main reason I came – I decided to actually check out one of the projects I’ve given money to – I wanted to make a more meaningful connection than just a signature on a cheque. So it was good to finally be able to make the connection, and be totally happy about how it was being used – as well as being happy about the use its been to the operation of **** out here as well. To give a little bit of a breakdown of the situation; there’s a two year commitment to funding the operation – the basic housing rental is $750 a month. On top of this are the staff expenses – the director, the security guy (pretty much a requirement here), the special needs carer and any teachers they employ. Then there are things like food, heating, and all the other day to day expenses that occur – fuel for heating over the winter cost $1000 alone.

So, yes, the money gets used. But everyone was happy – well, except one of the special needs kids, who we were told was Mr angry – mind you, by the end we almost got a smile. And it was more of an intense cantankerous nature than anger, I’d say.

It was good to see how closely D**** and M**** - and the other **** staff – are tied to the orphanage and the kids – it’s fairly close, about a five minute drive away , and the kids regularly come over for dinner, and parties, and volleyball (when the front isn’t a sea of mud or snow!)

After seeing a bit of the English lesson, I was told that when the boys are at a sufficient standard, they can start some computer training – which will really strengthen their vocational education, and increase their chances of getting decent work. I met the lads after the customary photo shoot – though I spent a lot longer with the special needs kids, who were a real joy.

The proposal for the new centre is very exciting, and it would certainly be great to have purpose built accommodation with long term planning, stability and family-like support for these and other orphans – and it would be great to be able to provide the kids and staff of **** with this. It would also be great to have an ongoing project that **** could provide it’s considerable worldwide experience to; and be able to produce a centre of excellence in Afghanistan. Dan gave me a fly through of the proposal – the building plans and projected budget, and it was exciting stuff. I’ll be taking a copy of some of the plans to show the folks back home!

Day 8 - Man about town

Where do I even start today? At one point I had so many ideas jumbling for attention in my head I had to start taking notes – in a car!

Well, as you can probably ascertain from my introduction, I got to leave the cosy environs of the compound to go into town – I grabbed the loan camera (i.e., the big, conspicuous one) and hopped into one of our cars with P**** (a VERY slim Pakistani guy, who’s a great guy but not the most secure defence against violence) and jumped into the car with our slightly burlier driver to head into town to pick up the computer bits and bobs, and to visit a construction site that HOPE is overseeing.

Before I go into the adventures of town, its worth saying a couple of things about the morning meeting – Sunday here is the first working day of the week, so we had our customary transport (ie, who’s going where) meeting, and then we had the start of week “big” meeting. This was a bit of an emotional affair, as D**** had to announce the laying off of one of the engineers here. One of the reasons for the laying off is financial – the are simply not enough ongoing projects that can support the guy (a local, and one of the highest paid of all the staff) - which meant that D**** had the tricky task of explaining the layoff in financial terms whilst trying to assure the rest of the local staff that his priority was to keep their jobs secure – and try to avoid getting them panicked and start to go look for other jobs for themselves. It went fairly well, and the Engineer (****) was told by the local staff that he was always welcome to come and eat lunch with us, and that he would always be a friend – and it was also said that as a professional – an engineer, that finding a new job should be relatively easy. Still, a tricky meeting nonetheless.

The issue is that there are two sorts of funding that **** Afghanistan receives – restricted and unrestricted. Restricted is the type that generally means fairly large money, but it’s all tied to very specific projects, and can only be spent in explicitly prescribed ways – and they generally don’t cover administrative or ongoing costs. Even things like IT components can be recalled at the end of a restricted budget project. Unrestricted funding is the sort that comes from individuals donors, or group donations like church collections – this money can be used far more flexibly – from the slightly boring day to day ongoing costs, which tend to keep the local workers employed and secure beyond the limits of a restricted budget project, to the more attention grabbing projects which present themselves out of the blue – things like the rescue of the **** Orphanage, and various other little - but important – things that come up – things along the lines of the prison initiative I’ve mentioned earlier. It’s easy to hear the big numbers involved in the restricted budget awards and wonder what difference a small personal donation can make, but the flexibility of unrestricted funding means that sometimes a lot more meaningful and long term – and personal assistance can be given to projects and people that might just otherwise slip under the radar.

Ok propaganda over, back to the adventure of the town trip – we took the back (i.e., more bumpy) way into town as we had to inspect the progress of a maternity unit that P**** was responsible for. The sad fact was that there wasn’t much – Peter was understandably annoyed at the lack of progress and cut through the excuses of the local foreman who was there, but without his workforce. He did offer us a cup of tea. I’m glad to see that some things are the same in Afghanistan and the UK. The offer was refused – quite a show of annoyance in this part of the world. I’d taken my camera out to get a picture, but I felt a bit bad about picturing a scene where I’d just witnessed another sort of a scene. So no scenic building work shots here. Just imagine unplastered fairly rough brickwork of a light mud colour, placed between concrete uprights and lintels, and you won’t be far off.

Slightly unsettled, we headed into the chaos of the city centre, where all the joys of street life represented themselves to me – fish hung up on boards on the pavement, bicycles parked hub deep in filthy water in the open gutters along the side of every road; street vendors cooking pretty much anything on tiny portable chimneys, people on underpowered motorbikes negotiating the traffic in suicidal fashion with 40 gallon battered drums of oil (or similarly flammable material) bouncing around on homemade jigs behind them; occasional women, occasionally dressed in blue burkas drifting along like ghosts, invisible – unknown appearance, age, ethnicity, comfortably anonymous amongst the hustle and bustle. In fact, it was only when I happened to see someone with her burka pushed back over her head (for some reason or other) and I saw a deeply lined, totally characterful face, that I appreciated the anonymising power of the burka – who knows what you’re like underneath? It’s almost like a personal invisibility cloak. I’m not saying that I’m all in favour of them, or that everyone who wears one wants to wear one; but I can see how some people might actually appreciate some of the things it gives them – especially in such a male dominated place as here. Of course, the problem is just that, if you want to take a sociological view – male dominated. I have seen, however, groups pf women walking comfortably together as friends, some wearing the burka and others not. There seems to be a slightly more relaxed attitude than we traditionally associate with Afghanistan back home.

Of course, to see evidence of the (sometimes quite cheeky) individualism of the Afghans, you really need to start looking at the vinyl decals they’ve attached to their white Toyota Corolla. And believe me, it’s going to be a white corolla. Unless it’s a Taxi, in which case it’s a yellow and white corolla. They’re all pre-owned (I suspect referring to them as second hand would be being a bit too generous) and the majority of them come from Germany. There’s the occasional Town Ace MPV (Toyota again), but any other make is more than likely to be an NGO vehicle. Of course, you’ll know its NGO because it’ll have the NGO (or army or police) logo in huge letters on the side, it’ll be a new vehicle, and, crucially, it’ll be clean. They’re usually very big as well, and if you’re lucky, it’ll have a huge antennae on the front bumper. Needless to say, I was in a dirty old white Corolla – nice and anonymous, just the way I like it. But I was talking about decals, wasn’t I? Yes – the cars have all sorts of decals on the back windows – eagles are popular, as are wildly inappropriate claims (in English) about the power, or ability of the vehicle – or, as I found particularly intriguing just after going past a group of burka clad women, a particularly attractive woman’s face. I say face, but it was really the eyes and top of the nose, because you’ve got it, it was a decal of an attractive woman wearing a veil. I couldn’t quite get my head around it.

We got to our first computer store – the one in the courtyard tower, and the guy had managed to get us a genuine Toshiba power lead – good news indeed – not the usual Chinese generic product they get over here. The first thing people ask when they buy something electronic over here is “is this western Chinese, or Afghanistan Chinese?” – because there are two, quite different standards of manufacture for the same brands. Like Sony – there’s the good quality “Japanese” (and you can bet it’s actually Chinese) Sony, and then the far more dubious “Chinese” Sony – so beware of any real bargains. Mind you, the adapter we got was a fair bargain at $30 – I’d be pushed to get a genuine charger replacement for the same price – but I do suppose the chances of getting a new one would be higher. Still, I was pleased. And I managed to get some street scenes from the first floor – hanging over the balcony, hoping that I wouldn’t fall.

I may not get the pictures up tonight – the power got cut at 11 last night and I’m cutting it pretty close right now) (ok, so this is obviously out of date now, and I did get the pics up, but I think I'll leave it right threre as a reminder of what it's like here!)

One of the many street food vendors - though I think I'll stick with the food back in the compound. For a start, at least I know how to ask for it!

I hate to think what happens when it rains. I'm guessing these things don't come with a worldwide warranty.

Then we went to City Centre, where I was convinced I’d spotted that bargain RAM – and it was still there. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit. We found a 1Gb card that did, and when I tried to use the 512s ridiculously low price to lever the price of the 1Gb card down, they spotted their mistake! Still, they gave us a good price on the 1Gb module – but we had to stay for about 40 mins whilst a utility I’d hooked off the net did a through job of testing the RAM – I didn’t want to fork out other peoples money on something that wasn’t going to work. I made a bit of a deal about looking at their laptops; which I think might have helped the price to come down that little bit more. I also exchanged a couple of photo opportunities with the young sales assistant you see below:

Hello sir, how may I be of assistance? Perhaps you need instructions with your camera?

I think this kid may have a future. Nice composition!

On the way back, I managed to snatch some pictures of Kabul, though I chickened out in the market again – I was determined to get at least one picture, but I never felt quite confident enough, though I had been very jaunty with Peter when we had been waiting for our driver to turn back up, standing around waving laptops and cameras around with an air of unworried bonhomie. I swear I’ll get at least one meaningful picture of the market before I go! I was pleased, however, to get a couple of close-ups of the crazy hill clinging houses on the side of the road.

I know I said I got two pictures, you only get the one. Only the best for you guys!

Yeah, strolling across the road is like a national passtime here. No rush, mind you.

The afternoon was a lot more laid back, although I had a lot of work to do in the office – and it turns out that at least one of the voltage stabilisers is probably up the spout. Probably Chinese. Afghan Chinese, that is. It looked like I might get out the **** Orphanage this afternoon as well, as the director showed up for a meeting with D**** – unfortunately, we didn’t have a driver available, so I’m going to be going tomorrow.


There was a bunch of other stuff I wanted to talk about today as well, like small buisiness advertising, the meaning of adverts in English with high production values scattered round town – i.e., who are they really for; and the idea (and reality) of NGO branding – a good or bad thing? Have a guess what I think.