Arrival in Kabul

Our second morning in Kabul and the jet-lag is still kicking. I’m up at 3:15am with the imam’s singing from the megaphones and an occasional rooster. By 4am it’s getting light out, birds are chirping and the praying coming from the mosque is quieter and intermittent. Yesterday we drove around the city to and from the CRS office, the university, and the city center. It’s hard to write about first impressions knowing how naïve we are. But observing from the car window as we crawled along in traffic what I’ve read over and over finally really hit me, that this is a segregated place, men in one world, women in another. On the streets are groups and individuals walking, lounging, talking, selling something, perusing the street stalls full of fruit, vegetables, sunglasses, sandals… but never together and barely seeming to acknowledge each other. It was felt good though to see how many women are on the streets, dressed in anything from jeans to suits to burkas, always with hips and heads covered but many bright faces. Hard lives are also apparent, a woman in a burka trying to sell two packs of cigarettes on the edge of traffic, street children giving us beautiful smiles and grabbing our hands to walk with us wanting to sell dirty beat-up cards.

Yesterday we received a long security briefing from an Afghani who stayed here through the Taliban years, met with well-versed men and women at the Center for Policy and Human Development at Kabul University, registered ourselves in a dilapidated office full of worn registries at the Ministry of Interior, and bought me my second piece of Afghan appropriate clothing at a crammed shopping center. We’ve been advised not walk on the streets but at the University we walked through a large and green campus with trees, flowers, and grassy areas with benches. It had the feeling of any other University, students walking with books, relaxing on the grass, conversing on the benches. There are other parks and overall Kabul is much greener than I imagined. And we can see snow in the mountains from the city, an amazing sight. There is also an abundance of dust colored buildings, walls, streets, rubbish piles, and steep hills rising from the edge of the city that all blend together.

Highlights of our travel here were meeting a group of Afghani high school students who had just studied in the US for a year and seeing the huge snow covered mountains of central Afghanistan from the plane. One of the high school girls is from Bamiyan and we exchanged emails and look forward to meeting again. She went to school in Scott’s Bluff, Nebraska and was both nervous and excited to be coming home. I told her we felt the same was about coming to Afghanistan. It’s going to take awhile to figure out how to get around here and after just one day in Kabul we’re looking forward to getting to Bamiyan and the mountains. I spent my first day in a headscarf, definitely a little awkward and always a relief to take it off once inside. Tomorrow we leave for Chagcharan in Ghor province, then to Herat, each for about a week to learn more about CRS’s programs, then to Bamiyan. We haven’t pulled out the camera yet but when we do I’ll post some photos.