Fall in Afghanistan

I wrote the other day that I've never lived in a place that I both loved so deeply and wanted to escape. And that luckily, it's more love, for the beauty of the place and the character of the people. 

I live in a place where it is inappropriate for a woman to walk alone outside her village.  Where doing so puts her at risk of harassment and accusations.  But where inside the village, three girls pack themselves onto a donkey, girls and boys shepherd together, women drag cows around by ropes, harvest wheat, potato, and alfalfa, skin trees, learn to read and write.

I live in a place where families are affectionate and loving with children.  Kids cuddle up to weathered men in beards and turbans during meetings.  Toddlers are often the center of attention.  Women nurse in front of me.  Babies are wrapped in layer after layer to keep them warm and comforted, their eyes painted with kol, and special necklaces put around their necks for good fortune.

When I visit a village for the first time, men may ignore me entirely during the initial greeting but will then welcome me to the house, give us tea and bread and yogurt, look me in the eye, ask and answer questions, and when it’s time to go, insist that we stay the night.  One man has twice dug carrots and Jerusalem artichokes from his garden as a send off gift.  Even during Ramadan, as a traveler I was offered sheep milk with sugar in every village.

In one village where over half the population have left for cities or other countries, an elder told me that money is like a miracle, like it has magical powers.  He explains how with money you can fly through the sky.  Pretty miraculous when you think about it.  In another village, sharecroppers explain how they live there at the whim of the landowners and that at any time they could end up like a kite cut from its string.

When I returned after being away for two months, the news coming out of the country had been particularly bad and I flew into the dusty smog of Kabul with some sense of dread and pessimism.  And the news hasn’t really improved, fraudulent elections, kidnappings, corruption, Karzai crying on tv about the state of the country, the terrible impacts of war.  But I also arrived to good friends, a sweet new healthy baby in my adopted family, Eid celebrations, the news that my friend Freshta is very likely to have the chance to go to university in the US, and the life of this place that just keeps going in the face of everything.  My pessimism was replaced with awe for all that this place is and bits of hope that come from everyday interactions, smiles, perseverance, and integrity. 

It’s fall time, harvest is everywhere.  Piles of wheat and alfalfa being processed for storage.  Donkeys and cows walking circle after circle after circle to compress the fodder or begin the process of wheat threshing.  Kids wander around with fat-tailed sheep trying to get them as fat as possible to survive long winter months which people say are still long and cold even though they get less than half the snow that they used to.  I am as impressed as ever at the way people get by in this beautiful but tough landscape with extraordinarily limited external resources. Wheat for bread, sheep for milk, wool, and selling, mud for houses, and prayer for Allah. These are the staples.

I live along the Helmand river (a canoe would be amazing here).  The Koh-e-Baba mountains in the north hold the occasional clouds and already have their first snow.  There was a hint of a rainbow today after an unseasonal thunderstorm.  I work with wonderful people, colleagues and people in rural villages alike.  People depend on pastures and are excited about the possibility of support to work towards restoration and sustainable management.  I drink from the well, bathe from a bucket, share a two latrines with a couple other women and twenty men.  We live together, eat bread and rice, beans and potatoes, sheep, and drink tea.

Late Spring Update

Afghanistan is a country at war with large issues of poverty, growing land degradation, and weak governance. The country has seen little stability in the past three decades and war continues to impact people every day. The decades of conflict have resulted in dramatic drops in human, social, and economic indicators through the country. Afghanistan currently ranks 181 out of 182 countries on the human development index, far lower than any of its neighbors. Communities experience repeated conflict-induced displacement and destruction of homes and fields. War has led many of those who are able, including large numbers of educated people, to leave. It is estimated that most Afghans are suffering from some level of stress disorder as a result of the trauma and loss of war. Using any measure of poverty, Afghans rank among the poorest in the world. Life expectancy is 43 years old, infant mortality is 129 per 1000 live births, 31% are food-insecure, literacy is 28%, and 42% live below the cost of basic needs poverty line. The country has poor health, education, and nutritional status; weak social protection systems; and vast gender inequalities. There is a high vulnerability to external shocks such as drought and even the death of a family member.

All of this raises a number of questions like in a place where almost everyone is poor, what is poverty? What can accomplish poverty alleviation and development? What does peace-building look like?

Reading through the Afghanistan national development strategy today, I came across these quotes from Afghans defining poverty.

The poor are the ones with an empty stomach; the poor are the ones who do not have enough milk to make yogurt; the poor can’t plan the future and can’t foresee what will happen tomorrow. One man in Bamyan province said, the poor are the ones who can be sick today and be dead the next day.

In Afghanistan eating means growing your food for most of the population.  In Bamyan, bread and dairy products account for the majority of food. In late spring, the wheat is getting tall and gaining seed heads. Working together, groups of women are out weeding fields, bringing the weeds home in overflowing baskets balanced on their heads to feed precious sheep and cows. Men are out moving more dirt onto the potato mounds. The cash crop. One group woke me up at 4:30 this morning smacking their shovels around, the tool of choice here. It was hard to complain.

Yesterday, walking through the fields to my office, groups of people working all over, I came across a boy lying on his back, perfecting still, tucked in the furrow between two rows of potatoes, looking at the sky.

Ski Bamiyan

We've been having an incredible time skiing the Koh-e-Baba and working with communities and aspiring tour guides on the potential for future ski tourism here.  Spring is now in full swing now, lots of ploughing and planting, and budding leaves, but still good snow in the mountains.  Check out some Bamiyan ski photos in the slide show (FYI- if you click on the pics to the right they should get bigger).  I'm also continuing with UNEP and Chad has taken another consultancy with AKF developing curriculum for the new Sustainable Land Management Institute, a cooperative effort between NGOs and Bamiyan University.  The problem with this other work is it's getting in the way of skiing, something I know you can appreciate.  Photos include lots of skiing, community mapping to identify place names, explaining skiing to communities, kids trying skiing, researching routes (GPS, lots of notes), a big avalanche that closed a local road for 3 weeks (and that people dug out with shovels), kids and their sleds (kids love sledding, called yakh molak, and we've joined in a few times), skis that we had made here in the bazaar by local carpenters, the New Year ski competition which attracted 200-300 folks along with the one Afghan family that has skied consistently for the last 40 years, a pair of this family's skis from the 60s, migrating geese, and a 3-day ski trip to some great terrain including small but impressive glaciers.  We're planning a few more multi-day trips for the spring that we hope will include donkey support.  We loaded up donkeys with skis for the first time last week to head back to snow (spring melt at lower elevations now), which was great.  We've had some good publicity from Afg radio and TV as well as German radio and print, and last week, the UK Guardian.  Get your calendars out for your 2011 Bamiyan ski vacation.  Or maybe 2015.

Bamiyan Winter

Winter in Bamiyan has brought snow, then mud, then snow, leaking roofs (more mud in the mud house), great days in the mountains, and some transitions for us.  After a year and a half with CRS (including nine months in Afg), Chad left the organization.  Despite great appreciation for the programs and his colleagues, the management-heavy job was not a good fit for him.  We made the decision in early November to give CRS plenty of time to plan ahead.  February 15 was Chad’s last day at CRS as well as the last day of my contract with the UN Environment Program (UNEP).  The next day we moved across town from the CRS house to an Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) house and began a joint consultancy working with the AKF tourism program.  The aim of the consultancy is to develop winter tourism opportunities and to train members of the newly established Bamiyan Tourism Association. 

As one of the most peaceful areas of the country, there is hope that reviving tourism here can bring further stability and economic opportunity in the coming years.  As we’ve begun to meet with people in remote mountain villages, it’s been amazing to hear them recount stories of tourists visiting these places over 30 years ago before the Russian invasion and subsequent years of conflict.  In a country that has so many needs and continued instability, we’ve questioned the appropriateness of promoting tourism.  In a discussion with a friend who is the regional public health advisor, I mentioned that this work is “not exactly saving lives.”  His encouraging response was that even the development of tourism is about saving lives since anything that promotes stability and opportunity here does just that.

As we explore Bamiyan through our new work, we’re increasingly impressed with the mountains and the people.  The mountains have incredible hiking, climbing, skiing, and snowshoeing terrain and are beautiful and accessible.  And the people living in these mountain villages are industrious, largely self-sufficient, kind, and welcoming.  From where the winter road access finishes, we’ve traveled (primarily on skis) 30 minutes to two hours to reach snowed-in villages. When we arrive we’re offered tea and lots of curious looks.  Yesterday, as we tried to leave the village to head deeper into the mountains, we were turned back by an adamant group of elders explaining to us in mime (really great) and Dari that the avalanche danger was too high for us to go further.  We decided not to argue with them.  Avalanches riddled the valley coming all the way down to the village and last month they’d lost eight sheep, two donkeys, and a cow in an avalanche right next to a house.  We’re quickly learning the snow and avalanche conditions here and we continue to be cautious. 

UNEP asked me to extend my contract so I’m continuing to work part-time with them researching aspects of local natural resource management traditions, land tenure arrangements, and options for a future inhabited protected area (IUCN Category V) in the Koh-e-Baba.  We both really enjoy our colleagues at AKF and UNEP and, although it was sad to say goodbye to CRS folks, we now have fun running into them almost every day.  Having now worked with three organizations here in small-town Bamiyan, we know a fair number of people who we see in the neighborhood and bazaar; we’re starting to feel just a little bit local. 

Check out some Bamiyan winter highlights in the pics here including: our airport coffee shop, sledding in our neighborhood, a community school room, CRS farewell, our new office, visiting the Red City, a community meeting on the mosque roof, shoveling snow off of mud roofs, old Russian weaponry, skiing, and more.

We miss you and can’t wait to be in Montana in June.