Oct 24, 2010

Is there a doctor in the house?

One of the good things about being an expat in a place like Kabul is that even the most banal of chores can seem exotic or take you down some unexpected paths.

Six months on and the 10-minute drive to work still enchants me with its seemingly endless display of life - bike repair shops; vegetable stalls; chickens in cages; dozens of young girls in school uniforms, Hello Kitty backpacks and loosely tied headscarves; the freshly skinned carcasses of i don't know what hanging up for sale; tailor shops with gaudy ball gowns in the smeared windows; mosques; cyclists; a Taliban in a black turban; taxis overflowing with passengers, or goats; young boys herding sheep with the most wobbly bottoms imaginable.

We shop for groceries and furniture, go to the gym, swim, play squash. We get our hair cut or go to the doctor. We make friends and date, we go out to bars and restaurants or have parties, yet none of these bares any resemblance to what they were back home, or anywhere else really.

No where else would I invite someone round to my house for dinner, who I have never met, purely on the grounds that a friend said, "you should meet so and so, they'd be a good contact". Nor would I have agreed to go on a blind date with a French bodyguard who spoke no English. I have been to parties where there are 200 people and a live band, and I have hustled my contacts to get on a guest list. 

Today, I met a friend for lunch. This entails calling a cab half an hour ahead of time, even though the cafe is just a 10 minute walk away. In the garden of the Flower Street Cafe, over a spinach, walnut and blue cheese salad, I whine about the dull thud of a headache that has now spread to my cheekbones.

My friend says that the head of her NGO is a doctor. It seems that getting a medical degree and then going into the better paid development industry is par for the course here.

I am slightly sceptical, but figure it can't be any worse than the Lebanese doctor I went to see for a breast lump scare who refused to examine me but insisted I leave for Dubai immediately, claiming there were no treatment facilities in Kabul. Luckily I decided to get a second opinion at the German clinic, where I sit for half an hour surrounded by women in burqas and their multiple children before I am seen by the lovely Doctor Maria, who  examines me, declares me fine but "knotty" and refers me to local hospital with a mammography machine (although most of the time it doesn't work).

So my friend gets her boss on the phone and he asks me the usual bunch of questions, where does it hurt, how long has it been like that, am I allergic to anything.
Cassie, I am writing you a prescription for some antibiotics and antihistamine, he says. Ann will bring it round.

When I get home that night, the guard at my front door hands me a large white envelope. Inside is my prescription.

For some reason, I had thought it would be written on a doctor's pad, with an authoritative sounding name imprinted across the top. Instead, it was a bit of scrappy paper torn from a small notepad with the names of two drugs scrawled across in thick black pen, and a line on how and when to take them.

Tomorrow, I might venture to the pharmacy.

Oct 20, 2010

Pumping Iron in Kabul

Today, I spent the morning editing a feature on how bodybuilders in Afghanistan are so desperate to gain the title "Mr Afghanistan", that they are taking anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing drugs, which are leading to severe health complications.

No one can really prove that they are taking the drugs, or indeed dying from them, as there are no testing facilities here. But anecdotal evidence from bodybuilders themselves, doctors and trainers all points to this being a worrying trend among the young. Those youngsters, always wanting to get somewhere fast, says one of the trainers, lamenting the days when athletes would bulk up with eggs, honey, dates and macaroni.

Yep, he did say macaroni. I asked the translators, and yes, they do have it here, although first they told me it was spaghetti but then showed me it's length, like a finger. Macaroni, all right. But then they said it was twisty, just a bit, and I was on the verge of saying, well if it's twisty, it's not really macaroni, but then decided that it wasn't affecting the nature of the story so left it. If there is an editor goddess, she will surely understand.

I also had to check with the reporter about the names of some of the drugs, none of which matched anything I could find on the Internet, and asked him to add a few lines about the popularity of bodybuilding in Afghanistan.

Apparently, it is one of the fastest growing "sports". Which is not surprising really when you look at some of the other popular sports in Afghanistan such as Bushkashi, polo with a goat carcass, wrestling, and warlording.
There are 200 gyms  in Kabul alone, and about 1,100 across the country, there is even one for women in a province outside Kabul. Most have posters of Arnold Schwarzenegger plastered across the walls, I'm not sure what's on the walls of the women's gym. Even during the Taliban era, bodybuilding was popular, with old Soviet tanks and weapons put to ingenenious use as weights. Men, however, had to work out in their shalwar kameez as nakedness was considered un-Islamic.

So where do they get the drugs? I ask. The reporter laughs. It seems any chemist will sell you a pack of outdated steroid pills intended to muscle up an old person - or anything else he has stashed in his shop.  But why do they do it, I want to know, why is it so important to have these gargantuan bodies? Is it to impress women? The translator giggles.

The reporter doesn't flinch. He also doesn't look me in the eye, but then he hasn't since I nixed his dream to become security correspondent by recommending he be given the sport and culture beat instead.

So back to the why. Is it money I ask, do they win a lot in competitions? No he says, it's fame; they want to be popular. So is this what it's all about then, the decades of war and this constant fight for power among jihadi leaders, powerbrokers and the Taliban? It's all because they want to be popular, a desire for adulation. 

As for bodybuilding, it must be for the fame, as when I do some research I find that last year's Mr Afghanistan, walked away with a tracksuit and plastic trophy.

So attached is a link to some wonderful pics, not ours sadly, of Afghan bodybuilders.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/22/pumping_iron_in_kabul