A life of contrasts

I woke about 4am this morning to several huge rolling thunderous explosions. My first thought was that my landlord has not yet put the steel reinforced doors on the safe room downstairs; and that even if he had, would I have enough time to make it there. My next thought, as I heard the downpour outside, was  ... erm, I think it's thunder. I lay in bed for a while, trying to decide if each growling boom that seemed to be directly overhead were anything to do with the war being fought here. Was that a police siren; possibly, but only one. With the number of "explosions" surely there would be more than one police car. Eventually I thought that why would the Taliban launch an attack in the middle of a downpour - it makes no sense. And I drifted back off to sleep. This morning, as the rain cleared up - it left the sky beautifully crisp and clear and my garden a lush field.
A few nights before I had been kept awake by the clip clop of horses/donkeys as they wandered down my street. I couldn't see over the 20 foot wall and barbed wire that surrounds are place (and in any case, I certainly wasn't getting out of bed to take a look) but I lay there for a while listening, trying to imagine what it looked like as this column of hooved creatures were sheperded somewhere.

So long, headscarf – well in the office at least. After a week of seeing me tugging and pulling and twisting and shoving escaping tendrils of hair back inside its confines, one of my Afghan colleagues said, “Cassie, why do you wear a headscarf when it’s obviously so uncomfortable?”. Well , yes … good question. Erm, don’t I need to? I asked. No, he said, not in the office. So for now, I wear it loosely around my neck in case, just in case.

I really don’t understand the headscarf or Afghanistan’s attitude towards it and women. What is the point of wearing it so loose, as many women seem to do, that it barely covers their hair and leaves face and neck showing? Aren’t these all sensual parts of the body that we are supposed to cover up?

I ask an Afghan woman I meet at the juice bar in the gym I have recently joined but have not had time to actually exercise in yet. How is it I ask, that you can be here, among Afghan and foreign men, with no headscarf and dressed in a t-shirt and sweatpants? Oh, my family is not so conservative, she replies.

She was born in Bulgaria and her father worked in the Afghan foreign ministry so that they were “out of the country a lot”, she says. Of course she wears one when outside, but why is that different than in here at the gym among sweating strangers? This woman, who speaks fantastic English – and whose number I now have in my mobile - is working for the UNDP to reform Afghanistan’s bloated and inefficient ministries. She’s 25.

The gym is part of what’s called the Kabul Health Club and Spa. The gym has a couple of treadmills and some cross trainers and weights and a juice bar. At its busiest, there are about eight people in the room – not fantastically busy. It is better than joining the hash house harriers as they run through the city on a Friday with a phalanx of armed soldiers.

The health club’s run by an Afghan guy who spent three years in Dubai and 30 in London. He misses the dampness of England he says … people say some odd things here.

Last weekend during a trip to Chicken Street - where there are no chickens and barely a street – I was taken up three flights of rotting stairs, past piles of dismembered antiques and the plain-clothed security detail of the head of USAID and into really what can only be described as bliss.

There were tables made out of old carved wooden doors, lamps made out of brass water jugs, chairs covered with afghan carpets, wardrobes and cupboards carved in intricate designs and a lampshade made out of the same green raw silk as the Afghan president’s hat.

The owner of the shop saw me pick up a brass lamp. “Brass is very good for you,” he said. I perked up, something healthy? …really? …in Afghanistan?

“If you drink water from a brass jug, it will help to cure arthritis.” We later nipped across the road – leaping over clogged up sewers and piles of blasted rubble and dodging the persistent beggar boys with their demands for a dollar – and into another shop where I was told by the owner that bargaining was not allowed on the first visit and who then proceeded to raise the price every time I tried to knock it down.

You can get most things here though. There’s a supermarket round the corner from the house called Finest, and one called Spinneys. As long as there is ryvita and red wine, I can live anywhere.

So socially, things are looking up. I moved into my house, and as you’ve seen from the photos, it’s lovely. There are five of us; a motley crew of internationals all doing good work of a sort. We have three guards, a cook and a cleaner and the occasional gardener who is digging herb and other vegetable gardens for us. We even have a wine faerie – although perhaps he might take offence at that.

Workwise. Well, let’s say it’s a bit of a challenge right now. I failed miserably in my two weeks of silence but have managed to convince everyone that I can do what-ever task they give me – so I am now involved in phoning all our international subscribers to find out what they think; devising training plans for the English language editors; mentoring one reporter a day on their story; starting work on a style guide and getting new lamps for the office.

So that should hopefully keep me busy for the next few weeks.

I woke this morning to what I was told was a beautiful Kabul spring day – but all I could think about was the lack of water – hot or cold – in my small guestroom. After an hour of running up and downstairs to talk to the management, a trickle of water creaked and groaned its way out of the ancient pipes. Brrrr! Now I’m beginning to see the beauty of a headscarf (will i wear a burqa when I run out of clean clothes?).

Down to breakfast then where I have now become addicted to Nescafe with powdered milk (that is all there is) and slabs of Afghan bread with carrot jam (I kid you not!!). It’s a mixed guesthouse – mostly Afghans with a few foreigners. I am always stared at, but I can’t remember a country I have lived in where I was not, so it’s par for the course these days. I guess they could be staring at me not because I am a foreigner, but because I am wearing a bright green tunic, a pink sweatshirt and a reddish pink headscarf. Is this what they mean by being low key?

This is a phrase that almost every foreigner I speak to seems to claim describes their life here. The American who shouts out the car window at poor Afghan drivers and joins a bunch of hash house harriers for a roof-top party says he is being low key. The European woman who refuses to have anything to do with foreigners, and walks around town disregarding security concerns says she is being low key. The British guy who stays in a guesthouse full of Afghans says he is acting low key. I would love to know, what then is high profile.

I have found a place to stay. A lovely house with a garden and fig trees that has all the right ingredients for my stay – friendly, respectful, hardworking people who are into steamed vegetables and dinner parties! What more could I ask for, expect maybe a couple of cats?

*******MUM, STOP READING HERE ************************************

The house also has a safe room – an underground bunker that we are expecting to spend a couple of days in this summer. With the military surge, the Kandahar assault approaching and elections in September, another targeted attack in Kabul is all but written in the papers. When I told one of the Afghan editors where I will be living, he said “that’s good, it’s safe there”. So we are hoping that it won’t come to that and I won’t need to be in a bunker with steel-reinforced doors and four flat mates, three security guards and housekeeper.

*********OK YOU CAN START READING AGAIN NOW *************************

It was my second day at work today, and while I think I may be winning the staff on side - we agreed on the term store house instead of go-down and they are respecting my ban on the words perished and eliminated for “killed” - I am tearing my hair out with the patchy internet connection (headscarf to the rescue again). For hours on Monday, my first day, I could neither access the web nor the English language server, where most of the Dari and Pashto stories drop for the translators here in the English language section. On Tuesday I left at 6 as the internet and the local server were down again and there was nothing I could do. I wanted to walk the 10 minute journey home, but no one would let me. It is not safe round here, apparently. So I took the car back to my guesthouse – nose pressed up against the windows inhaling the sights like a prisoner – and then sat in my guesthouse garden reading about the CIA’s folly in Afghanistan in the 80s.

I chatted with one of the cooks, Amim. He is leaving Kabul in just over two weeks to go to Mazar-i-Sharif to look for work. Kabul, he says, is just becoming too expensive. His landlord recently increased the rent on the house where he lives with his wife and two children, parents and younger brother, to US$150 a month from US$100. Amim makes just $200 a month at his job at the Kabul Inn, cooking, cleaning and generally running the place. For that he works every day from 6am until 10pm with a half day on Friday. His wife, a former English language and computer science teacher, works with USAID as an office manager and makes $400 a month (yay sister!) but that job will only last another few weeks.

So he is heading to Mazar where he will build a house and look for work, and where, Amim says, it’s safer, the air and streets are cleaner and the quality of life is better.

One of my colleagues here, a young, very enthusiastic and clipped British English speaking Afghan, has come down to Kabul from Mazar, much to the dismay of his parents who are desperate for him to settle down and get married. So worried are they by his decision to live alone and work as a journalist, that they are moving down next year when his sister finishes school to live with him in Kabul. I told him that parents the world over worry about their children’s life choices, no matter what country they are in.

Every morning at 9am I attend the morning meeting where the editors discuss the stories for the day. I am not allowed to make any comments or to say anything to anyone at all for the next two weeks. In this stage I am building trust among my Afghan colleagues, although I’m not sure how I do that without talking to them. As no one told me about this no talking rule for the first day – I was able to piss pretty much everyone off, suggesting changes to headlines, copy, battling with the head English language guy over archaic use of language. So for now I am demure Cassie in the corner waiting and plotting for the right moment to speak. God I need that glass of wine.