Kyrgyzstan

Since I wrote last we moved from a collection of villages where a car passing was an event to a city of a million people and seemingly that many cars (and horns).  For the first while we were perpetual deer-in-the-headlights but now we’re practically local, at least when it comes to dodging the cars on our walk to work.  Rural Afghanistan is different from urban Kyrgyzstan in almost every way.  Kyrgyzstan, it turns out, has pretty much more of everything than Afghanistan, except people and donkeys (where Afg has a significant lead).  And there’s not a war in Kyrgyzstan, although a coup and ethnic clashes in 2010 brought very tough conflict and a new (hopefully improved) government to the country.

We’ve gone from living in a mud house surrounded by wheat and potato fields to living in a 7^th story apartment.  Luckily we have a great view of the 15,000 foot mountains south of town.  We can also see the parliament building, national museum, and national stadium.  From our apartment we hear the call to prayers, church bells, and, amazingly, a lone donkey, which, like any donkey, hee-haws at any time day or night.  Here in Bishkek public life is abundant (a plus) but it’s more than a short walk to the mountains (a minus).  There are incredible mountains here, the Tien Shan, Pamir Alai, and dozens of smaller ranges.  92-96% of the country (depending who is counting) is mountainous and Kyrgyzstan has been called the ‘Switzerland of Central Asia.’  All these mountains just aren’t quite on our doorstep like they were in Bamyan.  We do, however, have a mini amusement park right across the street and the Kyrgyz are incredibly undeterred from riding roller coasters even in the cold and dark of winter.  Walking home from work tonight through the park it was 15 degrees F and snowing and although the rides were shut down, the music played, girls talked and laughed, and couples sat on frozen benches.

Bishkek has an impressive amount of infrastructure including a 17-story building.  There’s not quite the maintenance and public safety ethic to keep up with it however so there’s lots of treacherous icy steps and sidewalks, uncovered drainage holes that appear mid-stride, and elevators that make you want to assume some sort of safety position when they jerk into motion.  Outside Bishkek, there’s even more derelict infrastructure, crumbling concrete, bent rusty rebar, rigged and re-rigged electrical wires and poles, cracking bridges.  Anything metal (including irrigation pumps and pipes) got sold to the Chinese for recycling in the destitute years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  But the concrete is all still here.  Concrete walls, houses, roads, canals, and more walls.  I wish we could trade in all the gray concrete in this country for a few more irrigation pumps.  And do away with some of the sagging electrical grid in favor of local renewable power generation.

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A week later.  We just celebrated the Women’s Day holiday (a big occasion here) with three days of skiing in the Ala Too range above the Suusamyr Valley, an incredibly beautiful place.  We got up high, had lunch and tea breaks in the sun, and got back to the lodge one night in a snowstorm in the dark after a long tour.  On these days it’s easy to forget about all that concrete.  Now back in Bishkek spring has suddenly arrived—birds chirping, green grass sprouting along the sidewalks, and snow gone from all but the darkest shadows.  I’m continuing my work on climate change adaptation in rural mountain communities and Chad is laying the foundation for the University of Central Asia’s new Mountain Societies Research Center.  We have good colleagues and are slowly making some new friends (although none that can remotely compare to you!).  We’re studying Russian, a language with more grammar than any American should have to learn.  Even a person’s name can change in certain tenses.  For example, Chad becomes “Chada” when something is for him (dlya Chada).  At least I get some humor out of lessons like that.  We’ve got a spare room in our apartment so if you find yourself looking for an adventure, book your ticket and come visit yurt-filled summer pastures, glaciers and peaks galore, the second largest alpine lake in the world, and a people whose national drink is fermented mare’s milk.

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.

Christmas and New Year Letter to You

To our really wonderful friends and family,

Two thousand nine has been yet another big year for the Dear/Ashley duo.  We made it through our first year of marriage, sadly moved away from a beautiful island nation, and moved to a nation at war wand that ranks 181 out of 182 countries on the Human Development Index (at least we’re ahead of Somalia).  

We’re often amazed at our everyday life, the people we meet and the stories we hear.  It can also be pretty amusing.  Chad was recently asked some interesting questions at work including, “When was Jesus born?  Is this disputed by different Christian factions?  Why isn’t Christmas your new year?”  “Why then is your new year January 1?” (Keep in mind that these questions are from people who operate on two calendars:  one the Persian solar calendar when new year is the spring equinox, the other the Islamic lunar calendar when new year is the holy month of Muharram).   Needless to say, these questions forced Chad to repeatedly reference Wikipedia. 

In a way, it seems like our year began when we arrived in Afghanistan.  Pre- and post-Afghanistan has been a big landmark in the year and in our lives.  But the beginning of 2009 was also memorable.  It included an ultimate frisbee tournament in Bali where we played for East Timor in its first tourney appearance; a visit to Timor by Laurie’s folks who managed to climb the country’s tallest peak, snorkel at the eastern tip of the island, volunteer at an orphanage and much more; beautiful days snorkeling, scuba diving, and hiking around Timor; and sad goodbyes to great people, stunning sunsets, and a fascinating tropical island.  We left Timor for Missoula and celebrated Chad’s birthday for 39 hours en route (24 hours plus the 15 hour time difference) between Singapore, Japan, Seattle, and finally Missoula where we had lemon cake. 

In Missoula, we spent a blissful few weeks in May and June where we got to ski in the mountains, float rivers, see wonderful friends, and have a BBQ almost every night.  On the way to Afg we visited DC and Pennsylvania (firsts for Laurie).  Highlights included the Einstein Memorial in DC, Little League baseball in Penn, and seeing Chad’s family from nieces and nephews to great uncle Chick.  From DC we flew to Dubai and then to Kabul where we spent a few (metaphorical) shell-shocked days before traveling to Ghor, Hirat, and Bamiyan.  Bamiyan has been an incredible place to land.  The 17,000 ft Koh-e-Baba mountains are out our front door.  Hiking and skiing there have been some of our best days in Afg.  It’s amazing to come upon a lake tucked into these dry mountains or hear prayers from a rural mosque as we ski through a village.

Some other notable events this year:  Laurie was hit by a motorcycle while riding her beloved bike, Avi, along the beach road in Dili and survived the hospital visit afterwards.  Before leaving Timor, Laurie gifted Avi to a sweet friend, Maud, saying a heartfelt goodbye to a great bike and friend she’d had since she moved to Missoula in 1995 (aww...).  She reveled in friends and mountains in Montana, became a natural resource consultant and worked five jobs for five international organizations learning a ton along the way.  And finally, along with Chad, Laurie skied Afghanistan.  Chad surfed Bali and Brennan’s wave and survived the resulting knee surgery (conducted in Dubai).  He acquired two chickens for our household, managed a field office of 40 Afghans, and oversaw the implementation of agriculture, natural resource management, and women’s empowerment programs.  And finally, along with Laurie, Chad skied Afghanistan.

During our stay in Afg we’ve also had amazing opportunities to visit Nepal and Turkey where Chad won a rickshaw race in Kathmandu and we backpacked the Mediterranean coast of Turkey.

Afghanistan is a place where we are constantly reminded of the joy and sorrow of humanity.  This year has brought us incredible joy, some tragedy, and many stunning moments along the way.  You all have been an important part of it.  We miss you and are wishing you a happy New Year on the 1^st of January because, according to Wikipedia, in 153BC, some guys in Rome decided that’s when it was going to be.

Love,

Laurie and Chad

PS Photos in the slideshow from our 2009 world tour include Timor Leste, Indonesia, Montana, DC, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Turkey.

Turkiye

For an extended Thanksgiving/Eid holiday, we slipped away to Turkey (Turkiye, as in Turchia) for a few days in Istanbul and nine days hiking in the south along the Mediterranean coast. The country has incredible and evident history all over and illustrates the meeting of Europe and Asia. In Istanbul we saw the sites: the Bacilla Cistern, Aya Sophya, Blue Mosque, Galata Tower, the Grand Bazaar, and more. All inspiring places. Along the coast we hiked a route called the Lycian Way (Likya Yolu in Turkish). We used a guidebook to follow the route through villages and stretches of remote coast. The book included landmarks like, old camel farm, lighthouse, orange orchard, carob trees, ancient ruins, and more ancient ruins. It was a beautiful and fascinating walk through historic and modern Turkish life and landscape. The first fall rains had recently started and all along the route whole families were out collecting mushrooms in the forests. Along the way we were gifted apples, tangerines (amazing), a lemon, and kind hospitality. The tangerines were so good and we walked through so many orchards that I eventually broke down and picked a few myself. Orange and tangerine peels were a common site all over the place. I really wanted to pick a pomegranate but the season was nearly finished so they weren’t as plentiful. We usually ate dinner at a café along the route, which always included beer (something sorely lacking in Bamyan!). And spent 5 of our 8 nights in B&B type places escaping the somewhat wet weather and the 5 o’clock darkness. For breakfast, Turks eat tomatoes, cucumbers, cheese, bread, boiled egg, and tea and we regularly partook. So we weren’t exactly roughing it. ;) It was a great trip.