KANDAHAR 3 : Schools

It is about 10:30 am. It is a clear and sunny day in the upper sixties, and I am riding into Kandahar in the backseat of a white Toyota. For precaution, I have wrapped my black and white plaid scarf around by head so that I don’t stick out any more than I need to. I am wearing a long white shalwar kameez and I keep my head down and my face covered when driving through the bazaars.

Within an hour of arriving in Kandahar we pull into a school that has been built with US money. Shelter For Life has overseen and coordinated the construction of this school, and I have come to share the results of this effort with America. The Marshall Plan that the US never implemented after the Russians left this country has finally come to Afghanistan. We could argue about it being too late, or about it being a flawed plan or say that it is rife with corruption. These are not my concerns. My concern is trying to tell the story of the new generation of Afghan children. To try to convey to you why they matter and why it is important that we help them.

I have traveled around Afghanistan a decent bit by this point and I have seen their situation. Most of them are still having class outside, on the ground, in the dirt. In the summer they are subject to heat and dust and they seek the shade of trees and high walls. In the winter they face the elements of snow and rain and seek the shelter of tents and small mud brick buildings.

Sometimes, a foreign government or NGO will fund the construction of a modest schoolhouse for them and the problem of shelter will be solved. However, in many cases they still face the problems of no desks, no water, and a lack of materials. Despite all this, the children come to school anyways. They walk kilometers over rough terrain – often without any shoes, they deal with heat and cold, and they get by with the little they have. They smile, they laugh, they horse around in class and play games with each other in between. When a foreign photographer comes to see them they are curious, excited, and always, always friendly and welcoming. They are, in a nutshell, typical kids.

The US-built schoolhouse in Kandahar is wonderful. It has furnished classrooms, big chalkboards, comfortable desks, and it is filled with eager students. In the younger grades, boys and girls are having class together, learning to read, do math, and studying Persian. The teachers are proud, the students are giggling, the administration welcomes me in for tea and discussion. The headmaster is an old man with a long white beard, a gray turban, and face that looks like it has seen twenty-five years of war. When I turn on on video camera and pose him questions, this is what he says:


“As we have seen have in Afghanistan, when a country loses its educational system, that country becomes poor and the people have to depend on other countries to help them. It’s clear to the world that once there is no education, a country loses its ability to progress and prosper. Countries that have a strong educational system are leaders in the world community and are able to help out other countries that are in need. When a country has a strong educational system, this contributes to a stronger economy and a better future for that country. We want to give this new generation a good education so that they can become leaders and rebuild this country for themselves, and not have to depend so much on other countries to help them out.”

This is just one man, however. Here is what another headmaster at a different school in a different village said:

“We have learned through experience, that without education we cannot do anything. So that’s why we are trying to educate these children”

and another

“We can see the progress of our country and the progress of our village in the future of these students, and that is why it is so important for us to try and educate these children.”
and yet another

“We feel that in the past, when there was no education, our country was in disarray, and we hope that by educating these kids, these problems of war and poverty will eventually go away and we’ll be able to progress as a country.”

Everywhere I have gone, in different parts of the country of Afghanistan, the weathered men who have seen the worst conditions imaginable have said the same thing. They don’t speak of vengeance, or bitterness, or hatred – they talk about educating children so that the next generation doesn’t have to experience what the last three generations has gone through.

It is too bad we don’t see these quotes in the stories about Afghanistan picked up on the AP wires and fed into your local newspapers. It is too bad the news channels mostly relay footage of Afghanistan where people are demonstrating, things are exploding, or soldiers are moving about in Humvees. It is too bad that Newsweek’s best photos from Afghanistan in the last year have been of tanks burning up in flames during the night. I can understand why this is the case. These stories are initially more interesting and more apt to grab our attention.

At first I was bitter about the news agencies that tend to report only this kind of news, but these journalists are doing their job. They are letting us know about real aspects and real dangers that still exist in this country. What I have concluded, though, is that despite the disheartening effects of this kind of news, we shouldn’t let it keep us from seeing the positive progress that is happening, however slowly.

Here are some pictures of good things that I have seen in Afghanistan – some kids are finally getting the opportunity to go to school in buildings that are consistent with the norms of human dignity that we expect for our own children in America. These schools were paid for with American tax dollars and as the United States Agency for International Development’s signs at the construction sites of these schools read, these buildings are “a gift from the people of the United States to the people of Afghanistan.”

KANDAHAR 2: DANGER

KANDAHAR 2: DANGER

What constitutes danger? How do you know when you are in danger or in harm’s way? If I was to base my understanding of Afghanistan off of what I’ve read in American newspapers or seen on the network news, I would think that Afghanistan was a country where it was constantly raining rockets, kidnapping of Westerners was rampant, and where crazy-eyed Muslim fundamentalists ran around blowing themselves up all the time. Fortunately, this is not the impression have of this country when I am here. True, all these things have happened in Afghanistan. But the problem is that the newspapers only report these things.

A major media outlet has no money to make in reporting headlines such as “Old Man Welcomes Foreigner with Camera and Invites Him in for Tea”, or “Impoverished Afghan Family Lays out a Six Course Meal for Traveling Photographer”, or “Wide-eyed Afghan Children Giggle and Laugh as they Play Games in the Streets”. No one dies in these headlines and nothing blows up. Instead of making the reader feel unsafe and suspecting about what is happening in some strange country overseas, these headlines would suggest that there are common strands of humanity that are woven in every direction all across the globe. As I said before, there is not a lot of money to make with these headlines. Yet these stories make up 99% of my experiences in Afghanistan.

When I returned home to the US after my last visit to Afghanistan, people would say things like, “thank God you made it home safe,” and “my gosh, that must have been scary.” I do appreciate the genuine concern of people who say things like this, and I guess I could try to play this bravery card for what it’s worth, but the truth is – Afghanistan isn’t that scary. Afghani drivers putting the petal to the metal getting where they need to go don’t scare me. Americans driving SUV’s with a Starbucks in one hand and a cell phone in the other scare me. Poor people living in mudbrick houses and living hand to mouth don’t scare me. Americans who are already rich and who will do anything and walk over anybody to get richer scare me. A semi-literate man with a deep belief in what he reads in the Quran doesn’t necessarily scare me, but a fully literate American who understands the world by what he reads in the headlines that scroll across the bottom of Fox news broadcasts terrifies me.

It is all relative. It is like a saying that I just read in a book, “the most dangerous animals in the zoo are the humans.” I think the same can be applied to the Third World. We, as members of the developed Western countries can and have done more harm to the Third World than they could ever do to us. Yet we are instilled with an overwhelming fear when we think of going to places like this - as if they constitute a threat to our well-being. I think this is a reflection of a collective guilty conscious.

When I visit one of these countries, I am faced with the canyon of inequality that is, sad to say, a constant that characterizes human life on the planet earth. What we understand as reality in America, is in a way a gross aberration of human history. Now I am not saying that I think life in America is wholly bad or is wholly good, what I am saying is if you are to understand American life in relation to the rest of the world, you should understand that our lifestyle is outside of the norm – tipping the scales to a common level of opulence that is more or less unimaginable in most other places on earth. I'm not telling anyone to feel guilty or bad about this, I am just telling you that this is how it is.

So when I travel to one of these places, how should I explain this inequality to myself? What should I tell myself when I look at a human being in a third world country who lives with next to nothing knowing that the money I have in my bank account back home, or the spending limit on my credit card is more than he or she will know in a whole lifetime? How should I explain this to myself?

Should I tell myself that this person just doesn’t work hard enough? That would be foolish, I can’t even having to work as hard as they have to . Do I blame it on their religion, on their government, on the lack of natural resources in their country? When I look them in the eye should I feel that they are less human than me because of how they live? What if when they look me in the eye they suspect that I am less human than them, because I am so obviously attached to my material comforts?

Maybe I should just be scared of them. Yes, that’s better. If I can just be scared of these people, I can let myself off the hook for being born luckier than they were. They pose a threat to me. I didn’t do anything wrong. I deserve to have grown up in comfort because I am worth more as a human being. There. that feels better now. This allows me to make all sorts of justifications as to why they live like they do and why I live like I do.

Seriously, none of this works. It’s a cycle of fear that makes you more fearful the more you think about it. I could be scared in going down to Kandahar, but it would mostly be for selfish reasons. So it is not bravery or courage that I am taking there down with me, it is just understanding.

I am going down to Kandahar to take photographs of other human beings who have much, much less than I do. I don’t believe that what I am doing is going to make a humongous difference in their lives. But, if what I am doing can make any sort of difference in closing this gap of understanding, I tell myself it is worth it. If my being there for one or two hours can make some kids in Kandahar smile and laugh and think – “an American came to our school today. He was gentle and kind and he took our photographs and then showed them back to us. He smiled with us and made us laugh. He was a good person.”

If I can leave this impression, maybe I can undo one tiny knot that exists in a huge tangled web of human misunderstanding. Maybe in one hour, I can undo the damage done by one bullet. This is what I'm trying to do.

The problem is, I don’t have many hours to spend, and we’ve all fired a lot of bullets at each other.

KANDAHAR - 1

KANDAHAR PART 1

My second day in Kabul, I was in the car on the way to the Pakistani embassy trying to get a visa for Pakistan when my SFLcell phone rang. It was Bill, the project manager. “I’m sending you down to Kandahar early tomorrow morning. There are a few schools that have students in them that you can film and take photos at. Ghulam the engineer is going down there tomorrow. He says it’s safe and I trust him.”

“Alright Bill. If you say it’s safe I’ll go.”

“It shouldn’t be a problem,” he continues, “you’ll leave Kabul at about 4:30 in the morning, spend the night in a hotel with Ghulam in Kandahar, then they’ll drive you back before dark the next day. Just keep a low profile and stick with Ghulam and you’ll be safe.”

They were sending me to Kandahar because this is one of the only places where there are actually students having classes in schoolhouses that have been built by the Schools and Clinics Project. The rest of the sites are still awaiting inspection before they can be handed over to the Afghan Ministry of Education. If I was to get any photos or footage of kids having class in schools built with US backing during my time in Afghanistan, it would have to be in Kandahar.

The drawback in going down to Kandahar is that it is reputedly one of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan. Kandahar is the city where the Taliban originated and held court. Consequently, it is also one of the areas where resistance to the U.S. military forces remains the strongest and that most foreigners still avoid.

The same day I learned I would go to Kandahar, Reuters news services published a statement issued by the Mullah Omar, the former leader of the Taliban, calling for a renewed fatwa against occupying forces. It read in part:

"The people of Afghanistan and the Taliban should unite against U.S. and allied forces and intensify their jihad against the foreign occupiers."

Renee, a woman working for SFL and living with me in the SFL staff house alerted me to this and told me she didn’t think I should go. When I brought it up to Bill, he pointed out that the Taliban has been issuing press releases like this since they were overthrown, and most of them say the same thing and change very little for the majority of people living in Afghanistan.

It is true that since the recent parliamentary elections in September, security concerns have heightened for foreigners working in Afghanistan. However, I would be going down to Kandahar with an engineer who regularly worked there and knew the area well. He assured us that I would be able to visit some of the schools and stay overnight in the hotel with him without any great danger.

I liked the idea of finally being able to document the impact of the SFL’s work on Afghan school children, and I trusted the people I was going to Kandahar with, so I packed up my equipment and got ready to leave first thing the next morning.

ARRIVAL IN BROWN TOWN

ARRIVAL IN BROWN TOWN

Arriving in Kabul, Afghanistan is a shock to my American senses. As soon as the plane touches down on the tarmac, the evidence of the past twenty years of war is immediately evident. Bombed out airplanes and tanks lie rusting off to the side of the runway, the grass is all dead, dust floats in the air, and bullet holes pockmark the concrete all around. This is just the airport.

After a chaotic turn through the passport controls and baggage checks, I come out of the airport to find a whole parking area that is empty and divided off by huge concrete pylons, barbed wire, and armed guards. The airport building is adorned with twenty foot posters of the current president, Hamid Karzai, side by side with the assassinated former leader of the Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Massood. Each poster bears a slogan or quote from these projected fathers of the new Afghanistan – each a member of the the two major ethnicities that make up the country’s demographics – Karzai a Pashtun and Massood a Tajik. This is the new government’s way of forging a national identity that the people can relate to.

Doing photography and video means that I have to carry a lot of equipment and luggage with me, so I am always weighed down with a lot of baggage. I figure out a way to shoulder most of it and drag the rest. After making my way over 200 yards of busted concrete and gravel, I reach a rusted gate that is also lined with barbed wire and guarded by Afghan police holding old Kalashnikov machine guns. It is here that I meet the SFL driver who came to pick me up. He is an Afghan named Ismael. He doesn’t speak much English, so we go through the series of greetings in Dari and he helps me load my luggage into the SUV.

There are no traffic lights or marked lanes in Kabul. Driving can best be compared to riding along in a free-for-all urban road rally in a city where 60% of the buildings have been bombed into ruin. It is a videogame in a former war zone. It is an every-man-for-himself automobile culture where traffic backs up for miles and drivers take any advantage they can get in order to reach their destination – pedestrians and fellow motorists be damned.

The destruction of all the concrete and greenery has left behind a city that is composed of, covered in, and hovered over by a fine brown dust that permeates everything. The whole city lives in a constant haze of this stuff, and it only takes a day breathing it in before your throat dries out and your boogers turn black. Add to this the heavy diesel fumes that are constantly being kicked out by the automobiles and the generators and you have a perfect asthmatic’s nightmare.

The city of Kabul is a thriving hoard of humanity (4 million people) bustling it’s way up from the third world amidst the corpse of what was once the finest city in Central Asia. Ramshackle shops line the sides of the roads, pedestrians scurry about dragging huge pushcarts, men hawk cell phone cards, sell fruit, butcher meat, and generally carry on the business of trying to get by in a city that is clearly not easy to live in.

The first time I drove through Kabul I was fresh off the plane. Somewhere stopped in traffic, a young kid of about eight ran up and knocked on my passenger’s side window asking me to buy a newspaper from the stack he was carrying over his shoulder. I immediately felt down to my wallet. Not having had the opportunity to change any money over, I was holding five one-hundred dollar bills in my pocket. There was nothing I could give him. The driver soon grimaced at the kid through the window and waved him away. Traffic picked up and we pulled away. These things bothered me at first. Later I learned that there are over 20,000 homeless kids in Kabul.

When I am in this city, I have the sensation of having arrived in a place where something hugely horrific has happened, but where I am far too late to know just exactly what that is. You can read about it in books, or you can remember back to the CNN broadcasts during the American bombing campaign following 9-11, but I know it goes deeper than that. Things go much farther back, and in order to even begin to understand just what happened here, you’d have to travel back in time over two decades until you reached 1979, when the Russians first invaded and took over the city. From that point on, it has been nothing but extreme hardship for the inhabitants of Kabul. If you follow the history, you will see that the situation went from bad, to worse, to horrible, to unthinkable before it got any better. And if a term such as “better” can be applied to the current situation, it is only because the recent past was so unimaginably bad, that the existing state of this city is wonderful in comparison.

Still, I love being in Kabul. Maybe this is selfish to say, I don't know. All I know is that it is exciting. It is challenging. I never lack for interesting things to see and I feel a closeness to humanity that I haven't ever experienced in quite the same way in the States. People here have so little. Compared to us, they have nothing. Yet there is a warmth and hospitality among the population that makes you feel differently about yourself. People here treat you like a guest, they put their hands over their hearts when they greet you with the Muslim greeting of a-salaam alekuum, peace be unto you. Wa-alekuum a salaam, one answers - and peace be unto you.

Kids fly kites in the streets and when they see my western face they come running up to practice their burgeoning English shouting "HOW ARE YOU, HOW ARE YOU!" Well, I'm fine and how are you? I'M FINE! WHAT IS YOUR NAME?

To see how happy it can make a couple of kids to interact with a foreigner, to maybe show him how to play around with a kite, or teach him some simple phrases in Dari - it is validating, not just for them but for me as well. I think of how much good there is to do by such simple things and feel like I'm wasting my life in so many of the things I am pursuing back home - wealth, success, possibly fame, I don't know. None of that really seems as good as playing a pick-up game of soccer on a cratered street with a bunch of kids from the neighborhood in Kabul.

But I write these lines from a privelaged position, as I am essentially on vacation and only visiting this place temporarily. In a matter of weeks I will be on a plane back to the US to recommence my cushy life there, and the kids of Kabul will be left to eek out an existence in a city whose primary resources are dust and diesel fumes. This is what I mean when I talk about ethical issues. Some people envy my being able to come here, and I will not hesitate to say that I feel extremely lucky to have this experience. But there are things that I see and realize over here that are changing me - maybe only temporarily, maybe permanently but in a slow manner. I don't know, I guess time will tell. I do know that if these experiences don't change me in some way, I'll be a hypocrite, but if they are to change me the way I feel they should - my life back in the US will have to change. These are things to think a lot about. For the moment I will enjoy my time here, breath deep breaths, and cherish the dust and diesel fumes that I am privelaged enough to experience as only being temporary.

GOD MUST BE SMILING ON ME

GOD MUST BE SMILING ON ME

The flights through Minneapolis and Amsterdam pass as expected. The airplanes are full, the airports are crowded, and the moving sidewalks never move as fast as you’d like them to. I grab something to eat along with a couple magazines in the airport shops, keep on continuous vigilance regarding my baggage, and constantly check and double check my pockets to make sure my tickets and passport are still there.

The Amsterdam airport brings with it a long wait of two to three hours, good European pastries and several cups of strong coffee. I have to change some dollars over into Euros and get killed on the exchange, but figure it is worth it to eat a good frangipane (a delicious almond-filled pastry) while I have the chance. Living in France taught me the value of a good pastry to boost your spirits when all else is looking bleak. Some speculate that this is what got the French through the occupation.

When I arrive in Dubai, I already know the routine. Go up and down a series of escalators and across a mile of moving sidewalks, then wait in line for thirty minutes at the passport control until I get to window where a guy in a long white robe with a red and white checkered sheik’s scarf on his head asks me how long I plan to stay in Dubai (“hopefully not too long” I’m thinking). He stamps my passport and I go through yet another series of x-rays and metal detectors.

Once my bags are cleared, I change some dollars into dinars, and catch a taxi to the second airport terminal where I’ll hopefully be able to catch the flight into Kabul. It is a strange feeling to be in one of the richest, most vacation-friendly, and luxurious countries in the world and all I am able to think is, “Lord, I hope I can get out of here as quick as possible and make it to Kabul, Afghanistan.”

Having already spent eight hours in the Dubai terminal the first time I came to Afghanistan, there are few surprises this time. In the bathrooms there are special seats in front of lowered faucets to perform ablutions before prayers, there are special prayer rooms to perform the prayers in, and at the appropriate times, the traditional Muslim chant of “Allah-aaaaaaaaaah – o – Akbar!” rings out through the PA system to announce that it is time to pray. These details that at first seem starting in Muslim countries, soon seem commonplace, and eventually finish by seeming comforting. There is something to be said about being in the presence of such relentlessly faith-filled people.

The terminals, interestingly enough, are full of roughneck, redneck American construction workers waiting for their flights to Baghdad – where they’ll go to work on some God-forsaken project that is part of America’s latest attempts at nation-building. I have on several misguided occasions attempted to strike up conversations with these men who look like they have just stepped out of a biker bar only to find themselves listening to the Muslim call to prayer in some airport in the Middle East. Of these experiences I can say this – they are not happy campers, and the last thing they want to do while waiting for a flight back into hell is talk to some young guy with a kid’s face and a red beard about what they’re doing. However much money they are making in Iraq, it must be just barely enough to make the ordeal worth it. When I study their weathered faces, furiously sucking in the smoke from their Marlboros in between flights, I see another visage of the American venture that is the war in Iraq. They are not soldiers, but like soldiers they have seen some bad shit, they have lost comrades, they carry out their duty in constant danger, and they more likely than not doing what they are doing because it is how they make a living.

My desperate plight to get to my own adventure in nation building takes an unexpectedly positive swing when I meet three other people that are in the same situation as me – guys who need to get to Kabul but don’t have a valid ticket. One is a middle-aged American man who works construction in Afghanistan. He had a ticket, but left it out where his grandkids got a hold of it and tore it up thinking it was Monopoly money. I find his story almost too ridiculous to be true, as Ariana tickets don’t look anywhere near as classy as Monopoly money. The second is a young French guy named Fabien. Tall and blond wearing a white Adidas soccer jersey, he is stone drunk and the life of the party. He works for a company that controls the virtual switchboards of cellular phone networks, and this work has taken him all around the world. In a drunken mixture of French and broken English, he excitedly tells me of all the girls he has had sex with on various continents (Asia and Africa receive the highest marks). He doesn’t have a ticket, but doesn’t seem the least bit concerned as he is well-supplied with enough cash and hashish to make his stay in Dubai pleasurable no matter what the duration. His constant talking is interupted only by his attempts to hit on passing Arab women who are working in the airport terminal. The third, and most likeable one of the three is a street-smart Afghan guy in old jeans and a beat-up brown leather jacket who lives in Australia and speaks good English. Like Fabien he is planning on buying his ticket at the counter, and he reassures me that I will have no problem with Ariana – all I need to do is explain my predicament and they will let me board the flight without a hassle. He turns out to be right.

The man at the Ariana check-in counter does not even bother to look at the date
on my ticket, so I don’t bother to tell him that it is a day late. I go through the routine baggage checks and enter into the waiting lounge along with the street-smart Afghan guy. As we sit waiting for the flight, I take the opportunity to ask for some help with my limited Dari – the Afghan dialect of Persian (famalee chetoor ast? = how is your family?, a culturally useful question to ask my Afghan friends when I see them again in Kabul). At one point, he asks me to watch his bag and then disappears for what seems like a half hour. A tinge of paranoia starts to creep in, but I do my best to suppress it. Soon our flight is called and I am sitting holding the bag of some man that I only met a few hours ago. Then I realize where he must be and walk in the direction of the nearest prayer room. Sure enough, in five minutes he emerges amongst a group of traditionally-clad Muslim men from varying countries.
“Sorry about that man,” he says to me, “I was praying.”
“No problem friend”, I smile to him, “I figured as much. Come on now, our flight is boarding.”

The bad circumstances of my trip have more or less vanished, and I'm filled with the good feeling of knowing that within a matter of hours I will be safe in Kabul. God must be smiling on me.

GOD MUST BE TESTING ME

GOD MUST BE TESTING ME

There is that moment when you are having a nightmare, that the events you are experiencing in your dream become so traumatic that your mind stops and realizes, "wait a second, this is too horrific to be real - I must be dreaming." When the airline worker told me that the flight I was supposed to be on had left a half hour ago, I had one of those moments. My mind stopped, things turned tingly, and my brain desperately grasped around for signs that this was only a dream. Unfortunately, the TGI Fridays sitting undigested in my stomach reassured me that, no, this in fact was real.

7:38 pm would be a great time for a flight to leave out of Appleton. Unfortunately, the time that I had seen on my flight itinerary and accepted to be the time of my flight's departure was in fact the time my flight was to arrive in Minneapolis. The flight actually left Appleton at 6:28 pm, about the same time I was shoveling pork ribs and shrimp poppers into my mouth at TGI Fridays.

The young woman working the Northwest Airlines desk, although not overtly hostile, seemed more or less unsympathetic to my plight. To her credit, there was really nothing she could do. I had just missed the last flight of the day, and there was no way I could make my connecting flight to Amsterdam short of sprouting wings and flying to Minneapolis myself. She handed me a brochure and circled the 800 number for Northwest customer assistance. "Call them, they'll tell you what to do" she told me. She turned around and heading into the back to finish eating her combos, leaving me alone in my predicament.

I stood there with my worthless ticket in my hand, my heavy rucksack on my back.
"Hmmm. I feel pretty stupid right now" I was thinking to myself.
My friends were looking at me incredulously.
"Hmmm. You look pretty stupid right now" they were thinking to themselves.
There wasn't much I could do. I decided to stay the night in Appleton with my female friend and try my luck calling the airlines.

Flash ahead twenty three hours, I'll spare you the details of the pleading phone calls, the frantic emails and the constant wishes to be able to travel back in time. All in all, I was able to get credit for the ticket I had, but I had to pay extra to change the date by 24 hours. I had little choice but to fly from Appleton to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates without knowing if I would be able to exchange the day-late ticket that I was holding from Dubai to Kabul on Ariana airlines.

For those of you who don't know, Ariana Airlines is the official airline of Afghanistan. If that doesn't sound dodgy enough, it is common knowledge that Ariana: A) was for several years run by the Taliban; B) flies used airplanes, some of which were "given" to them by Air India; C) has been affectionately dubbed "Scary-ana" by international travelers who regularly have to fly with them into Kabul. I was not able to secure a new ticket for the Ariana flight from Dubai to Kabul, partly because their North American office was closed for the Muslim holiday of Eid. I knew this because when I called their number, a man picked up the phone and told me - "the office is closed!"

"But wait sir, just hear me out, I have an urgent problem" I pleaded. I told him of my misfortune. "There are no available seats until the 10th of November", he replied with annoyance,"...click!"

It is 6:28 Central Standard Time a day later and I am boarding the flight from Appleton to Minneapolis. Having already purchased my flight to Dubai for the 4th in hopes of taking the flight into Kabul on the morning of the 5th, I am about to fly all the way to the United Arab Emirates with no idea of whether or not I will be able to get all the way to Afghanistan. The alternative will be to spend five days in Dubai waiting to get a seat on a flight into Kabul. I have taken nearly all the cash out of my bank accounts in anticipation for the worst. I have brought this on myself, so there is really no reason to get upset. Fear is replaced by acceptance. There must be a deeper reason for this. God must be testing me.

A BAD START

A BAD START

I made a mistake. A big one. I have traveled before. Some might say a lot for my age. And I have come to take a certain pride in the amount of knowledge and savvy that I have gained in my experiences as an "international traveler" (those last two words, by the way, are intended to jump off the screen at you in 3D and to be spoken out loud by James Earl Jones - just to let you know how cool I am for being able to give myself such an appellation).

But I am also a flighty bastard. There, I admit it. Not that anybody who knows me well needs to hear me say this to know it's true, but I am trying to own up to my faults here. Part of what makes me who I am - someone who sits to write a whole page on how he has come to find Oshkosh, WI beautiful, who spends 30 minutes with a camera in front of stone monuments waiting for them to reveal their best angles to me, or who learns entire Edith Piaf songs in their native French and then sings them in the car - well part of the characteristics that give me those qualities also take away from me in certain other areas. This sounds like a prideful excuse perhaps, but trust me - what I am about to reveal is going to show you just how ashamed of all this I am.

I missed my flight out of Appleton. Appleton, Wisconsin. This is not one of those hectic traveler's stories like "I only had 45 minutes to make my changeover in Amsterdam, and my flight out of Minneapolis was running 30 minutes behind..." No, this story is much more boring and a lot more embarrassing. It goes something like this: I am so retarded, that after having a month and a half to prepare for returning to Afghanistan, I was able to keep track of all the details about my trip except the exact time my plane left out of Appleton, WI. There. The cool photographs I take don't seem so cool anymore do they? Welcome to my life.

The first time I received the email of my flight itinerary I did this: looked up to the top line that listed the flight from Appleton to Minneapolis, scanned my eyes directly to the right hand side of the page, noted the time listed, felt satisfied. The time I read was "7:43pm". The second time I looked at my itinerary was when it arrived in paper form by mail. I took it out of its envelope, scanned my eyes to the upper right hand corner of the page looking for the numbers “7:43pm”, saw them, felt satisfied. The last time I looked at my flight itinerary was the day before I left (or was supposed to leave as it turns out). I pulled the paper out of it's envelope, looked to the upper right hand corner and once again saw the numbers "7:43 pm".
Good enough, let's travel. My friends arranged to drive me up to Appleton and to take me out to dinner beforehand.

Before leaving to spend any extended amount of time in a Muslim country, it is always a good idea to get a last dose of pork products, alcoholic beverages, and pleasant female companionship, as there is a little chance you will be enjoying any one of these three things during the time you spend in your destination country. Keeping this in mind, my two buddies, myself, and my female friend met up in Appleton and did what anybody would do in this situation - we went to TGI Fridays.

Oh the laughter. Oh the 22 oz. of Newcastle beer. Oh the pork ribs and whiskey sauce. Oh the smiles and "I'll miss you's" shared with my beautiful female friend... sadly, it all had to come to an end as we looked at the clock and realized that it was time for me to leave and catch my flight. We all jumped into the van and drove over to the airport. I hopped out of the vehicle and dramatically shouldered by heavy rucksack - a rugged, international traveler. I gave a purposeful handshake to my one friend and thanked him for driving me, I breathed in my last breath of crisp American air and headed into the terminal.

When we got to the Northwest Airlines counter, there was no line. Awesome, I'm thinking - no wait. Oddly enough though, there was no one working the counter, but instead a small bell, the kind you tap down onto to sound. The bell was flanked by a sign reading "Ring Bell for Assistance". How odd and irresponsible, I thought to myself. "What is this, 'Bob's Storm and Screen Door?' " mused my female friend (she's always so funny). "Yeah," I added, trying to up the comedic ante, "they're probably sitting around in the back chomping on pieces of watermelon"... (I don't really know what that means).

Finally after a minute or so, a very midwestern young woman with a tired countenance came sauntering out from the back. "Sorry we were eatin' Combos" she announced lazily, "can I help ya'?" She was looking at me like I was in the wrong place. I laughed it off. "No, no, Combos are great," I offered, "you got the pretzel, you got the cheese filling, how can you go wrong with Combos!" I waited for my charm to take its usual effect but noticed it wasn't getting me anywhere. Okay, time to get serious. I plopped my ticket and passport down on the counter (an old pro), "Yeah, I'm on the flight to Minneapolis."

The young woman stared at me as if I had just said I was on the next flight to Venus. She paused for a moment and said, "You mean the one that just left a half hour ago?"

DESTINATION AS DEFINED BY POINT OF DEPARTURE...

DESTINATION AS DEFINED BY POINT OF DEPARTURE,
POINT OF DEPARTURE AS REDEFINED BY DESTINATION

"Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage"
-Joachim du Bellay



Any journey is necessarily defined by its point of departure. The ways in which we understand and experience the places we travel to are largely informed by the way we understand the place we are traveling from.

In travel, we seek contrast from the place that we have become accustomed to, and in may cases - that we have become bored with. My original inspiration to travel was boredom - a vague dissatisfaction with the place I was and the society I was a part of. I knew I wanted to go somewhere different, but didn't know exactly why. I knew I wanted to see what else was out there, what other ways of thinking existed, and of course what other physical sensations there were to experience outside of my home surroundings - but I wasn’t sure how this would make me any better off. Most of all, I just wanted to escape the place I was at for the time being.

But there is something that happens to you through travel. First, you find the excitement of the new places you travel to. You see the contrasts and they light up something inside you. Your senses are stimulated to a new level because they are taking in information that is wholly new to them. New color schemes, new landscapes, new smells, new foods, new languages, new people, and new ways of thinking. In forcing your senses into this heightened state of awareness, travel makes you feel more alive - as if you are finally using a potential that you always suspected existed inside you, but that you hadn't been able to fully attain at home. Colors seem richer, food tastes better, girls look prettier, landscapes are more picturesque. You feel more alert, more aware of your surroundings, in brief - you feel more alive.

One becomes attached to this idea that when you travel you become better than you usually are. I can attest to this because I am guilty of it. I have become hooked on the rush of this feeling. But now I am also reaching a point where I'm realizing that I don't necessarily need to travel to attain it. Paradoxically, this realization that I can attain this state while staying at home has only come about through travel.

When I first went to Afghanistan, the excitement and the heightened senses that I experienced were possible because I was seeing things with the eyes of someone who had just spent a year in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. This is normal and is a common experience to almost anyone who travels. But what is happening more and more with me is that when I return home I am able to see the place I originally left through the eyes of someone from the place I traveled to.

In this way, a cup of coffee on Main St. in Oshkosh becomes more than what it used to be - it becomes a cup of coffee as experienced by someone from Kabul, Afghanistan. Likewise for a night at the bars, a dinner with a close friend, or a walk through the city streets on a Sunday afternoon. Simple things like green grass, 19th Century American architecture, rock bands, or conversation in Americanized English become these wonderful things that make you realize how great the place you came from can actually be.

This is something that I have been focusing on a lot in the last month before my return trip to Afghanistan - if you can take the sense of wonder and heightened state of awareness that you normally only experience when you travel and apply it to the place where you actually live, there are whole new layers of sensations available to you every day of your life. The most simple, mundane things can take on new meaning and provide you with insight and amusement that you weren't aware of before. This is what I have been experiencing in Oshkosh, WI since I last returned home from Afghanistan.

So while in essence this entry could be seen as a warped sort of love letter to Oshkosh, WI that begins something like this,

"Dear Oshkosh, it took spending six weeks in a third-world, war-torn, desert-covered Muslim country where alcohol is illegal to realize that you're not so bad after all..."

in reality it is an apology to a lover that I have slighted, but have recently come to realize the beauty of,

"Dear Oshkosh, I am sorry for all the bad things I have said about you in the past. Recent experiences have shown me the error of my ways and I have come to see just what a wonderful, beautiful, and unique individual you are. I want you to know how lucky I feel to be a part of your community."

"Happy, he, who like Ulysses, has made a grand voyage..."

Colin Crowley
6 November 2005
Kabul, Afghanistan

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION : GROWING A BEARD FOR FUN AND PROFIT/or HOW I QUIT MY JOB IN A CUBICLE AND MADE IT TO AFGHANISTAN AS A PHOTOGRAPHER FOR AN INTERNATIONAL NGO

For those of you who don’t know, never really got the full story, or whom I haven’t been in touch with for too long, here is a brief description of what this blog is all about:

I grew a big red beard. Even though my hair is dirty blond, somewhere in my Irish genes, there was a chromosome that determined that should I grow facial hair, it would be bright red. But I did it anyways. Yes, the first few months were difficult, I felt stupid, self-conscious and a bit hypocritical. I have always thought beards are creepy. I used to ask female friends how any girl could possibly kiss a guy with a mustache and a beard. I once even sent an email reply to a woman who was considering hiring me to photograph her wedding that read –“ I don’t charge much, I take good pictures, and this would prevent you from having to hire some lame photographer with a beard.” So as you can see, pre-Afghanistan, I was pretty anti-beard. Now I have a bushy red beard that is completely different color than my hair, and if you didn’t know better, you’d think I was wearing some bad theater prop for a production of Oliver Twist.

Shelter For Life (www.shelter.org) is a faith-based international aid organization that specializes in reconstruction projects in areas that have been devastated by war or natural disaster. SFL, as they are often referred to, has projects in Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, but their world headquarters are in a small building on East New York Avenue in Oshkosh, WI. The PR director of SFL knew me because I had done some volunteer work for their website, and he was aware of the fact that I had lived over seas before, and that I did photography projects while I was abroad. Sometime around the end of 2004, he approached me and asked me if I would be interested in going to Afghanistan to do a publicity documentary on a project that they have been doing there building schools and clinics. A month or so later I had a phone conversation with the guy who was the Project Manager in Kabul, “Yeah, I don’t see a problem with you coming” he said, “just grow out your beard and we’ll put a turban on your head.”

Now,I must admit, at the time I was already sporting a bit of scruff. Not much to speak of, but just enough to take give my features a hardened edge. It wasn’t long, and I was kind of looking forward to shaving it off once the snow melted and the weather warmed up. I was also, at this time, working full-time in a cubicle doing customer service over the phone with French Canadian distributors of Gillette products. I had to bus an hour each way to work every day, so I was pretty much putting in fifty hours a week at a job I hated. I had to wear a tie and comb my hair – the whole bit, it was just like Office Space, only worse because it wasn’t funny.

I had originally learned French so that I could go to France and meet French girls, and now I was stuck at a desk in Wisconsin handling complaints of guys running shipping departments in Quebec. It seemed like sad way to use my education, but for the time being it was the only way to pay the bills.

So when the possibility of quitting my job and going to Afghanistan for a month to do a photography/video project presented itself, I was faced with a dilemma : I could shave the beard and stay at my job in the cubicle, or I could quit the job in the cubicle, but that would mean I would have to grow out the beard. Despite my previous aversion to facial hair, the decision was ultimately easy. I hated my job, and I could always shave the beard off after the trip.

In the middle of July 2005, I traveled to Afghanistan for four weeks to carry out the project. SFL also sent me for a week to Tajikistan to document a project they were doing there, so in all I was gone for five weeks. Some of the experiences and photographs from that trip were documented on a previous blog that my friend Justin Mitchell set up for me. Unfortunately though, I didn’t really take the time to communicate much of what I was seeing or thinking, so the entries on that blog are pretty insignificant compared to my overall experience.

Now SFL has sent me back to Afghanistan to finish documenting the Schools and Clinics Project, and also to take pictures and video of the earthquake damage in Pakistan, where they are considering carrying out a reconstruction project. This blog is an attempt to share a small bit of this experience with anyone who is interested in knowing what I am doing over here. I must admit, that I am walking a fine line, as I am battling the urge to internalize all the conflicting emotions, ethical issues, and excitement that I am feeling and just keep it all to myself – later to be spilled out as half-baked bravado after a couple pints of beer. But I am realizing that I will never amount to much if I don’t start trying to communicate my experiences in a more professional way. So this is sort of a half-embarrassed attempt to start sharing some of these things.

And anyway, last time around people got excited about my stories about pooping in a hole in Taloqan, so I figure this time I should try to offer something with a bit more substance.

-Colin Crowley

Colin is Heading Back!!

Our friend Colin Crowley is heading back to work with Shelter for Life on November 2, only this time he will be documenting SFL's work in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The ABV will be working with Colin to maintain a regular blog of his experiences, including regular journal updates and an extensive photo library. For those of you who haven't checked out the updates from Colin's last trip to Afhganistan, go to Life In Afghanistan. You can read about the Afghan elections, landmines, and interesting ideas such as "The flies congregate on the shit, then move to the meat, then back to the shit, then onto your face, then back to the meat. It doesn't do much for the appetite."

A special thanks to Colin for taking the time to share his experiences with us.