Ultimate Frisbee and the Art Prize

I played ultimate frisbee today, which was so great. It's been kinda hard to go out and get exercise in the past week, I can't really just go out for a run around the neighborhood like I'm used to. But I met some people today who know how to go about it in a smart way. We met on a big field at a local high school and played for a couple hours, it felt really good to run around despite how hot it was today. It was a pretty interesting grab-bag of people from a bunch of NGOs (by the way, "Non-Governmental Organization") and the UN, most of them people around my age from the US and Europe who have been here a while. I think one person started it up over a year ago, and today there were forty people, so many that we had to split into two games. I met a lot of people who are doing similar stuff to what I'm here for, all with really interesting backstories about what brought them here.

I had met one of these frisbee players at an event early yesterday evening at a beautifully-restored event space in the middle of a huge park in the Old City area (I'll put up pictures of this place soon). An NGO called Turquoise Mountain was hosting an event celebrating the first-annual Afghan Contemporary Art Prize, for young Afghan artists all over the country. What a great idea, and a lot of the art was really surprising and revealing. There were traditional musicians playing, and a few government ministers attending too. The crowd was about half Afghans and half internationals, and there were a huge handful of young people from NGOs.

It was my first night out in Kabul like this, and the sun was going down over this space in the most amazing way. After a generous round of speeches, an eighteen-year-old Afghan girl got the prize for her work--an over-sized check for 100,000 afghanis (about 2,000 dollars). They called her name out as the winner, and everybody clapped loudly as she made her way up to the front. She stood nervously at the mic, and cried while making a short speech full of thank-yous and heartfelt appreciation. It felt great to be part of an event that counts as one of the many good works the international community can do here.