First post

I got here two days ago, about 9am Friday morning. I knew from the plane, even before landing, that I was in a totally different place. All around the outskirts of town I could see thousands of mud-brick houses. These houses stretch precariously up the mountainside from the busy centers of the city, in a sort of reverse of the usual American formula: here, the poorest houses are nearest the top--lacking any basic services--instead of the richest.

After my plane landed, I was picked up at the airport by an employee of the organization I'm working for here, named Maiwand. Maiwand is Afghan, half Pashtun and half Tajik--the two largest ethnic groups in the country. We drove to the place I'm staying for now, called the American Institute for Afghan Research, located in the relatively safe area of Wazir Akbar Khan. It's a guesthouse funded by the State Department and about 25 American universities, for people doing research work like myself. I'm the only one staying here right now, and I don't mind having the place to myself. Three meals a day, a driver at my disposal, and it's got a nice patio and backyard as well as great security.

Speaking of security, there's a lot of it around here. Guys in uniform with AK-47 rifles line the street I'm staying on; they're paid to protect our place as well as a few other guest houses on this street. These machine-gun-toting security guys, both from the National Police force as well as private contractors, seem pretty standard all around the city. There are bunkered checkpoints on some streets, occasional military helicopters above the city, and sometimes you see groups of military vehicles rumbling down the street towards the airport. But people here seem to sort of tune it all out and go about their daily lives--shopping, walking to school, talking and laughing with friends. I guess after thirty years of the unrelenting waves of conflict this country has seen, the way things are in the city right now seem relatively calm.

Besides the security aspect, the weather and environment remind me a lot of Cairo, Egypt and Phoenix, Arizona. Phoenix for the dry hills, dusty high-desert terrain and the fact that the weather never dips below 80 degrees. But it doesn't get much above 80 degrees, at least not in early summer, and it's been pleasant and sunny both days. Also like Phoenix, the traffic here is pretty bad all over, and the air quality is maybe more like downtown LA--not so great. Kabul's like Cairo (the only other big city in an Islamic country I've been to) in the huge beautiful mosques that dot the city landscape, and the serene calls to prayer you hear five times a day all over the city. But even Cairo doesn't match the extreme poverty I've seen in Kabul over the last two days. For understandable reasons, Afghanistan is the fifth country from the bottom on the UN's human development index.

Yesterday and today, Maiwand and I have been driving all over the city looking for furnishings for the new Trust in Education office in an area of town called Karte Char. Driving here is a bracing experience, definitely an aggressive contact sport with no rules. Everywhere on buildings and posters are large pictures of President Hamid Karzai, who doesn't seem to garner a great deal of respect among a few Afghans I talk to. But there are also huge pictures of the mujahedeen fighter Ahmad Shah Massoud around town--he is held up as the virtual patron saint of Afghanistan. Mixed in with all the cars jockeying for position are many beggars, calling-card salesmen (usually kids), and donkeys pulling carts full of scrap metal and rugs.

Two memorable moments from yesterday; the first, lunch at Maiwand's house. We sat around drinking incredible amounts of tea and talked about the furnishings we want for the office. After drawing up the list, we talked about how he had gone with his family to Pakistan during the Soviet occupation, and had learned to be a computer programmer there. He returned to Afghanistan after 9-11 with his father, who did not want to go anywhere else, despite opportunities to go to Canada, the US or Australia like his brothers and sisters did. My favorite part of our lunch was when I got a chance to ask him about kite running: some of the intricacies of the sport I didn't understand, strategies for winning, things like that. I thought to myself, here I am, in Afghanistan, talking to an Afghan about kite running. Is this for real?

The other moment, not as happy but somehow hilarious. Maiwand and I were (illegally, apparently) parked in front of a shop buying furniture. An Afghan cop came around and started yelling at Maiwand about his parking job. Maiwand waved him off, and we went back to negotiating with the shopkeeper. Then the same Afghan cop came around two minutes later, screamed something in Dari, and stabbed our right back tire three times furiously with a phillips-head screw driver. Maiwand bolts out of the shop, gets in the cops face and starts shouting, but there's not a lot we can do...there's no repercussions here for clearly unbalanced cops like that. By the time we fixed the tire across the street and parked the car elsewhere, the shopkeeper had gone home for the day. Awesome. I just kinda laughed thinking about what would happen if one of those parking cops, who putter around Walnut Creek in their little three-wheeled cars, got out and started violently slashing a tire on some monster SUV parked in front of a Starbucks.