murambi

IN 1994, in the village of Murambi, in Rwanda, over 40,000 Tutsis were killed in four days. It was one of the greatest single massacres of the genocide. But that's not why I visited Murambi. I visited because of what happened afterwards, when the bodies were thrown in mass graves and covered with lime to mask the smell. Ironically, the lime preserved the bodies. It mummified them. And so when the survivors came back to identify their dead, they decided to leave some of the bodies unburied. On display, in the schoolrooms where they died.



15 years later, the memorial at Murambi makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Some say it's too horrific and divisive, and it's time to bury the bodies. Others say, no, expose more of them and never forget. Hear the story on the Nextbook podcast.

smuggle this

Alidad, the human smuggler/ part-time baker of Quetta, Pakistan, is the subject of another of my Marketplace "Working" profiles. Hear more about Quetta and an encounter with another smuggler who asked me to shoot his chicken on This American Life.

To my friends in Afghanistan, happy norouz and see you soon.

camel with flag (kogello, inauguration day)

Inauguration Vibration

Spent the inaugural day in the Obama clan village in Kogello, Kenya. Pre-inaugural festivities included cow-slaughtering and camel rides. I was out here for the new internet venture Global Post (www.globalpost.com), and while there, filed a short mid-afternoon report from a tremulous location:

T-4 Countdown to Obama, plus rain.

Wake up in my rented room in Nairobi, rain on the window. Outside I can see the uniformed guard at the front gate under a large bright red umbrella; surrounded by jungle foliage he looks like some kind of toy soldier. This is the neighborhood where Obama’s step-mom lives, or used to; it’s a wealthy neighborhood owned mostly by fifth and sixth generation Indian families. There’s a casino and a Thai restaurant across the street.

My roommate knocks on my door and tells me she’s stepping out, and did I want to come explore the neighborhood a bit, so I throw on a poncho and we walk through the puddles down a potholed road with no sidewalks, ducking for cover under corrugated tin awnings. Under one awning, a woman in a loose red top is scrubbing a painted plate, the kind sold to tourists, and stacking them on a huge pile of painted plates. Under another, a man in brown waits for a bus. But, there is no bus, no traffic at all, really, which my roommate says is really really weird, until we see why: jammed inside the rotary, blocking all cars, is a massive Russian-made mach truck with its back wheel stuck up against the curb and its front wheel in a pothole. Like a frustrated elephant it rears and roars, belching exhaust, while about a dozen Kenyans scamper timidly around trying to push without getting trampled. It is incredible the truck driver thought he could even fit in there; though I don’t know, maybe he does this trip every day. As we watch, the truck is suddenly freed, and momentarily heads straight for us, before veering away again. Mud flies everywhere.

We pass yet another casino, and two malls, plus a 24 mega-mart, where I stop in to buy some supplies and immediately feel underdressed compared to the other shoppers. Even the font is aspirational. Posters of couples with expensive looking watches glare down at me, smirking about financial security. I buy juice, some cheese and a loaf of bread and hit the checkout counter where I grab a Kenyan men’s magazine with Obama on the cover. The cover is a parody of men’s cool: Barack in Ray Bans, a crisp white shirt and grey tie, thrusting his index finger directly into the camera, so close to the lens that the fingertip is out of focus and in motion. Below him, in shadowed white lettering: “Obama: Our man in the White House.”

I buy the magazine expecting a gushing fan letter to American politics, but when I turn the pages I find an homage to American consumption; this mag, it turns out, is a Kenyan version of the most standard men’s mag fare: with sports-round ups, vicarious financial advice, motorcycle porn, aspirational gadget reviews (“we take a look at the best boy’s toys of the year”), style tips (“want to wear a jacket, but afraid of looking too formal? Team it with a simple t-shirt”), and lots of pretty girl photos (a four-page spread where a 22-year old “college graduate” is body painted, a feature profile of Hugh Hefner and another of supermodel Kimora Lee Simmons), plus plenty of ads for brandy, banks and shaving cream. It is a magazine targeted at the middle class Kenyan man.

And, if these glossy pages are any judge, middle class Kenyan men are a lot more concerned about relationships than politics. There’s exactly one article, a short blurb, really, about Barack Obama’s ascendancy. (The cover was a bit of a ruse.) Whereas there are 14 feature articles on handling the opposite sex, including advice on how affectionate to be with your woman in public (“three women explain the ‘secret’ rules”), how to know if a woman likes sex (“if your woman enjoys her food, chances are she’ll be good in bed”), what books to read if you want to seduce an intelligent girl (“the way to a woman’s bed is via her head!”), as well as advice on why it’s normal to feel somewhat emasculated by Kenyan woman’s feminism and how you can respect her emancipation while still ‘reconnecting with your inner caveman.’

Oh, there is one other mention of the president elect. In the style trends section, we’re told that “what’s hot” in 2009 includes sushi, smart phones and funky shades, whereas what’s “so last year” includes analogue TV, wallets, and “Ethnic or tribal acrimony: You’re a global citizen. Behave like one. Think Obama.”

T-5 Countdown to Inaugural: Nairobi

It has been four months since I was in Kenya the last time, and the season’s changed. I walk out of the airport in Nairobi and think I’m in Florida. That balmy breeze fringed with rain. Suddenly I feel nostalgic; I am part of me six years old and arriving in Fort Lauderdale the airport doors opening to the sunshine and my grandma, smiling, squatting down to press her wrinkled skin into my neck. The memory lingers, inappropriately, and I feel suddenly mournful, floaty and wistful and slightly lost. Maybe I’m just jet-lagged. I readjust my shoulder strap and scan the crowd of taxi drivers holding paper signs. I find my name near the back, on a piece of paper with just my first name in all caps. It stands out from the others. In a sea of signs for “Mr Khalihi” and “Mr Chan” and “Mr O'Donnell”, I am simply, GREGORY. I feel like a five year old. Or a rock star. Like Bono.

“You must be Gerald,” I say to the man holding my nametag, and he gives me the African handshake. Gerald is in his mid-30s with a blue-grey collared shirt. His face is scarred with pockmarks, clustered like little islands off the mainland of his mouth. Gerald kindly grabs one of my bags and then actually groans to himself at the weight. This is surprising because it’s my lightest bag, not really heavy at all, nevertheless I watch him valiantly struggle, switching the bag from right arm to left arm and back to right again, then left, almost knocking out one of his kneecaps in the process. Two minutes later we reach his parked Toyota and he heaves the bag into the trunk and we’re off.

The weather is perfect for driving. The sunshine is warm but not so hot that the car gets stuffy or the doors scald your arm. We cruise out on to the main road past wide savannahs dotted with concrete buildings, construction zones, billboards. A billboard for a brand of bleach features a 40-foot white baby with a baby mohawk and an ornery baby mouth and the phrase, “Topex: The Toughest Answer to Stubborn Stains.” We cruise on. The road seems improved since I was here in August. Gerald tells me he was born north of here, near Mount Kenya, a popular safari spot. He is used to tourists. He points out some giraffes grazing off on the grasses in the far distance. “That is Nairobi National Park,” he says. Around where the giraffes are, there is nothing else; no trees or buildings or other animals. Just 4 or 5 giraffes, silhouetted against the blue sky, their long necks raising and lowering like oil pumps.

The giraffes remind me of a conversation I was having a few days ago in New York with my friend Jonathan. He asked me what sound giraffes made and I said I didn't know. I ask Gerard. "I mean do they make any sound at all?" I say. "Do they speak?”

“Oh, no no no.” Gerald says, with a kind and patient smile. “They are just giraffes. They do not speak. They only talk to each other.”

I thought about his answer for a while afterwards. I think he actually thought I was asking if giraffes here could speak some universal animal esperanto. But after all, he’s probably used to stupid questions from white men, who arrive off the plane with their sun hats and their heavy luggage and their dumb assumptions. At least I didn’t insist on whistling The Lion King.

But of course, now everything is different, I think. I may still be an ignorant Westerner with white skin, but now we share something, Gerald and I. We have "Someone In Common." That Someone being, of course, the most famous man on the earth. The reason I am here, in Kenya, this week.

"I am headed to Kisumu for the inauguration," I tell Gerald, enunciating my words. Kisumu is the region of Kenya where Barack Obama’s father is from. Gerald smiles again.

“That is a not bad place to go right now,” he says. “They say if you can’t go to America, go to Kisumu.”

There is something rather unsatisfactory about Gerald’s answer and I ask if he’s an Obama supporter. He slips away from the question by arguing tautologically that because Obama “won the game” – the presidential race – he is the best. “Just like sports,” Gerald says. “The team that wins is best. It means he want it more. It means he is meant to be.”

I suppose in a way this is true, and in the end it’s all I can get out of him. We spend the rest of the car ride nodding to reggae on the car radio. Maybe tomorrow I should interview the giraffe.

photos from Rwanda

One legged cyclist in downtown Kigali. Took this with my cell phone from the back of a motorcycle taxi.



"FaLuJa 2008" Outskirts of Kigali.



Boys in Gsenyi. I asked them where they were going with the long logs they said, "To the marshes."



Kids screaming at me on side of the road. Ruhengeri.

we chased them from their homes and then they were died

Next day, in a Rwandan prison, interviewing former perpetrators. None of them admit to anything. The most they’ll say is that they chased people from their homes. Beyond that, the passive voice is utilized.

be the best

Spent the day at the genocide memorial in Kigali, listening to one of the guides tell his personal story. Serge was 14 when the genocide began. The genocide marched into his living room the evening of April 8th, 1994. There were eight armed men. They attacked his father and ordered him to kneel. His father knelt, immediately, as though he had known all along what was to happen. One of the men pulled a knife and Serge shuts his eyes. But then – a miracle! – the leader of the rebel group offers to take money in exchange for his life. Suddenly, the whole family is racing around the house, pulling bills out from drawers and pots and secret cabinets. The cash piles up in the bandit’s palm until he says, okay. He orders his men to withdraw, but not before warning the family that they’d be back in three days to kill them. “You know, I almost see them as kind,” Serge says. “For giving us a head start.”

Serge and family flee, first to relatives, then to another village, then finally back to their local school. The school is already packed with thousands of families, there is no room for them. So they continue on, are seized at a roadblock, and Serge’s father, and his older brother, are bayoneted and left on the road. Later, Serge is told that his father’s death probably took three days. Serge escapes by donning women’s clothes and fleeing with his mother and sisters through the marshes to the local church.

And it is a testament to Serge’s incredible powers as a storyteller that, remembering this moment, a wry smile plays on his face. “We thought if we could just get to the church, at last we’d be safe,” he says. The error of that assumption became clear when he saw the pastor, greeting them at the doorway of the church, a loaded pistol strapped to his hip, and a flak jacket in place of vestments. “Hello, cockroaches,” he told the women.

For the next month, they endured starvation and disease, and ambushes by soldiers. The soldiers would choose women and girls and drag them off to the bushes. The women would not return. For a while the Red Cross was providing some food but then more refugees came and the Red Cross could not get the food past the roadblocks. So then they had no food. “At this point we knew we were going to die,” Serge said. “So then there was no more fear.”

Some of the killers were superstitious. They didn’t want to murder anyone on church grounds. They would send in child soldiers to choose their victims. Serge remembers a boy came up to him, a boy probably eight years old, dressed in full battle gear. Serge was lying immobile on the church floor, next to a classmate from school. The child soldier smacked Serge in the face with a slipper.

A slipper?

“Uh, yes a slipper?” Serge says, “Like is on the foot?” He points to his own polished black shoes, then continues his story. “So I look at this boy, and he looks at me,” he says. They just… stare at each other. And then the boy points to his friend. “You,” says the boy. “Come.” The teenager rises. As he stands, he squeezes Serge’s leg goodbye.

If Serge is telling you this story, he will at this point lean over and squeeze your knee. His light fingers will make a spider around your kneecap. It will even tickle a little. “Like this,” he’ll say. “This is how he said goodbye.”

Serge tells his story – and there is much more – in an unbroken narrative. He never once takes a drink of water. He has told this story a thousand times, maybe more. He accepts questions gracefully and with humor. He is charming, sweet, optimistic, and forgiving. He is studying to be an accountant.

14 years later, I stumble out of the memorial, dazed, sunburned, dizzy. Billboards rise monumentally over a city that seems to be all of it under construction. “Picture Success,” shouts a bank ad showing a smiling bespectacled young woman with chin upraised. “We’ll Help You Achieve It.” An ad for a local beer bills itself as “The Taste of Success.”

Out that night, drinking the same beer with a young man, Jean Marie, who is also studying to be an accountant. “I have over one hundred American friends,” he brags. The television plays Bob Marley tributes and the bar is called Copa Cabana. “That’s my friend,” Jean Marie points to a guy next to me at the bar. “Be The Best.”

Excuse me? His name is…?

“BeTheBest”, says BeTheBest. “Nice to meet you.”

“We also call him Cheezo,” Jean Marie adds.

Bethebest wears a black and white checkered shirt streaked with yellow with an enormous collar and a shtetl hat like my grandfather’s; he looks like a cross between a Chicago bootlegger and a pro bowler.

“Why are you called Be The Best?” I say.

“Because I want everyone to be the best at what they are,” says Bethebest. “The best it can be. Just like you are smiling? Now? And we are talking? This is best. Just like this.”

jogging with machetes

Morning in Gitwe. I go for a jog and the people come out from their houses to watch me. I wave to everyone and they wave back, machete in hand. “Bonjour monsieur!” Machetes are so common, I shouldn't be concerned – no one is very hostile, just surprised and shocked to see this white guy in shorts (well, boxers, actually, I forgot to pack running shorts) huffing past them on their way to work... but it is unsettling to realize how this everyday work tool was turned into an murderously efficient instrument of genocide. “Ça va bien!”

the jungle is louder

The jungle is louder than I ever imagined. First day in Rwanda, out in Gitwe, 2 ½ hours southwest of the capital. Spent the day with a village boy who made good and moved to America, he returns every few months to help out and start projects. When he does, the prodigal son is welcomed with song.

Tonight the welcome song will be sung by 19 children and a cow. The youngest child is five and the oldest about 16. The cow is in its pen. There is a bonfire in front of the children. The moon is quite full. On either side of the fire is a raised log where the older folks sit. We are told that the children have been waiting. We apologize that our interview went so long and we are here after dark. Okay don’t worry just sit. Now the children aren’t ready. They confer amongst themselves. They don’t want to sing! They are too shy. The older folks shout. So the song begins. Slowly, haltingly, with sloping harmonies that slope at different speeds. It is a kind of cacophony that resolves itself unexpectedly into a rousing chorus. The oldest child sings a solo, then there is another chorus, then the youngest child sings, shyly, with lots of encouragement – I think I’m at Passover – then another chorus, and so on. The cow joins in in the pauses and everybody laughs. Later, the prodigal son translates the song. “The first verse,” he says, “tells the story of a woman who poisoned her husband because she was bored. And then she found that after he was dead, she was not only bored but lonely too! The second verse tells the story of a man who went to the bar to find love. But when he found her, he couldn’t afford to marry her, because he had spent all his money on drink!” and so on.

Afterwards the kids sing more and I walk among them with my long foam-covered microphone. Unfortunately they all hog the microphone like would-be rappers, distorting the sound, so the only solution is to hold the mic over their heads where they can’t get so close. Four little boys crane their necks upward, singing, like little birds. It is one of my favorite recordings I think I’ve made all year. Then the older girls start dancing and then everyone is dancing, I am dancing a little bit or at least moving side to side and they are clapping and the cow is mooing and the moon is looming and it seems not quite possible that some three days before I was in the back of a cab in new york.

technology defeats me

My first morning in Kigali. I spend the morning arguing with airport personnel about some lost luggage, meanwhile my cell phone is running out so whichever airport exec I’m arguing with, I try to position the argument next to an outlet where I can plug in. It is a bit like having a baby without cutting the umbilical cord, but then again, not. I teach another airline guy how to use his dot matrix printer, the old technique of pulling up on the page and circumventing the feeder. None of this matters, since no one calls and what comes out of the printer bares no relation to reality. I give up and drive westward.

the singapore of africa

Rwanda is much cleaner and safer than I expected. "The cleanest city in Africa," I’m told. “The Singapore of Africa” another says. My first night here, I go for a walk down the streets until quite late, jetlagged, staring at the moon and the rolling hills and the lights of the city beyond the banana trees. I take a motorcycle taxi back to the hotel.

rWaiting for Rwanda

stranded in an airport lounge in Nairobi, waiting for a plane to Kigali, Rwanda. Souvenir giraffes as far as the eye can see. A woman’s voice comes over the loudspeaker to signal missing passengers. She’s very polite though. She never uses last names. “Mary S., and Janubu B., please report to Gate 4. Mary S., and Janubu B.” Her voice is tinted with a British accent. There is almost no one here awake. Everybody is splayed in plastic chairs, some sleep right on the floor, newspapers covering their faces. “Joseph K., please report to the transit desk, Joseph K.” On CNN they are interviewing the hostages. I fall asleep and when I wake up the channel is changed to a cricket game. England vs South Africa. I fall asleep again and wake up again. Now a man is sitting at my table, also watching the game. He wears a lycra sweatsuit in the colors of the Kenyan flag. "Is it a good game?" I say. He mumbles. The score is something dream-like, 524 to 208, but the announcers gamely insist that South Africa still has a shot. When I wake up again, the ‘first boundary’ has been penetrated, ‘putting an end to the aching tension of the 5th over.’ Or something like that… apologies to my Pakistani readers. I stumble up with a crick in my neck and wander over to the duty-free. I’ve gone through all the books I brought for carryon so I lurk by the books section. It is all dime novels and self-help books about achieving personal wealth. “Come closer!” says the salesman with the nametag Mike. He asks me what I’m looking for and I don’t know what to say so I say, “Something classic.” (Which may be from now on my go-to answer. Seems that it services pretty much most questions I don’t know how to answer.) Anyway, Mike scans the shelves and hands me “You Can Do It” by Richard Branson. Actually I don’t know if it’s called You Can Do It – this whole blog entry is seeming highly unreliable… but I do know that it’s by Richard Branson and since I took a Virgin Atlantic to get here on the air journey which has gone on forever and forever I just shake my head, quietly, disturbed. Mike shrugs. His favorite book is The Secret, the ultra-best-selling self-help book that I first encountered on a flooded-out street in New Orleans, and since then have had recommended to me a dozen or so times. But Mike gives me a different formula. “God comes first,” he says. “Then read The Secret. Without God, the Secret is nothing. With God, and The Secret, all your prayers will be realized. Eventually.”

RadioLab: The Podcast

So, um, hello again. It's been oh a month and a half since my last post from Pakistan. So here's a quick recap. Since that post, I returned to Afghanistan to file this story for The World about an Afghan journalist who has been in jail for the last 6 months for insulting Islam. (The reason I'm posting the story is that, well, he's still there. Nothing's changed.)

Then I went to Iran with a bunch of American magicians and Canadian poets to meet poets from Iran. It all culminated in one balmy evening in Kashan where we performed our magic and read our poetry and the Iranians read their poetry, and no one quite understood each other, so it was sort of like farce, but oddly beautiful too, given the political realities, like some last-ditch diplomatic effort choreographed by Lewis Carroll. I'll write about that more real soon, but meanwhile, while I was in Iran I met up with a French cartoonist friend of mine who drew these pictures of one of the events:







Well so the artist's name is Nicolas Wild and I strongly recommend his two-part graphic novel, Kabul Disco, as well as his blog, which is great if you read French and even if you don't. Kabul Disco is being translated into other languages as we speak and is ripe for an American publisher.

So, after Iran I flew home to New York, just in time for the podcast debut of the"Radiolab: Pop Music" episode, featuring lots of amazing stories as usual, as well as a story about what happened when I took my accordion to Afghanistan and encountered the ghost of the late great Ahmad Zahir, a/k/a the Elvis of Afghanistan.



For the record, since some of you have asked, the youtube video of my Johnny Cash-inspired accordion performance in Afghanistan is still up. It seems that some servers say the video is "no longer available," but then again about a thousand more people have watched it since then so that's not universal. I'm not sure what's going on, maybe some smarter minds can weigh in on this. Meanwhile, try it from a different computer is my lame advice. Or cross your fingers and click below:




Oh, one more thing. Since I opened this post with a piece of mine that seems to have had no impact at all, here's one that seems to have had a modest one: a few months back I wrote an article for the Washington Monthly, "The Schools That the Taliban Don't Torch," about a neglected program for aid delivery called the National Solidarity Program. Last week Senator Dick Durbin gave a speech on the floor about aid in Afghanistan, and he quoted the article, and at least I'm told by Durbin's office that we'll now see an increase in funding to that program. I think that's a good thing.

target practice

One last Quetta story. My last day in the city, I was in the business district waiting for someone when I saw a kid come out of a shop and stand eight or ten feet away from me. He had a sparkly red cap and dirty clothes. His shaved head indicated he was probably Wahabi, a particularly militant sect from Saudi Arabia. I guess he was about 15. But his expression was what stopped me. I would write that he looked at me with hatred but it was more dead than hateful.

He pulled out a toy gun, took aim, and shot at a railing. A little yellow pellet emerged and made a pinging sound. I watched him, this young radical, with the (fairly realistic looking) toy pistol, and thought “I should really get my camera” which is when he turned to me and pointed the gun at my chest.

“Hey,” I said in Persian, which was probably a mistake because he maybe only spoke Pashto. Then he pulled the trigger, and shot me.

"Excuse me,” I said. Then I tried to think of what to say next. “I’m here as a guest in your country.” He shot me again. I tried out various arguments asserting my right not to be fired upon, but none convinced him, and since I wasn’t going to actually shoot him back, or go find his mother, I gave up. I walked away, not quickly so he’d think I was scared, but hey, who was I kidding. He'd won and he knew it. As I passed, he nodded and smiled, making his eyes seem even more reptilian.

The story unsettled me - well, the kid did too, but also my story about it - because I felt I was missing something. Some hours later, I considered another way of looking at it: At least he didn’t shoot me in the face. Because as I walked casually (not too fast now, expression firm) past him, it would have been quite easy for him to point his pistol at my eye or something where it would actually have caused damage. As it was, the pellets just bounced off my chest – I didn’t even feel them.

Only target practice.

afghan star

It’s 10pm and we’re walking through the abandoned streets of Quetta like the last five men on earth. Shop windows are shuttered; political posters flap in the breeze. The distant sound of a motorcycle fades into infinity. Everyone’s inside. Watching TV. It’s Friday night. And the final episode of “Afghan Star” is on.

It is said that during this hour all crime stops in Kabul. Bored young policemen stand idle at their checkpoints, no cars to check. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do notice that the normally crowded streets of Quetta are sure quiet. Our footsteps echo. I’m with my translator, JD, and four of his best friends. All of them were former translators (“terps”) for the marine special forces.

Suddenly other footsteps, other young men appear. Our band of 5 becomes 10, 20, 40. All of us streaming in the same direction. JD gives me the frantic ‘cut’ sign with his hand, meaning: no more speaking English out loud. Mutely, I follow the crowd into a large dust field. There, an 18-foot Scandinavian man in a doctor’s uniform is projected against the brick wall of the tallest building. He is talking about sunblock. His visage is replaced by bottles of lotion. Then that commercial ends and another one begins, this one for a local airline. The square is still filling up with people staring up at the screen. They crowd around cars, motorcycles, pushcarts. By day this field is the town vegetable market. Tonight the empty pushcarts sit like dumb stubborn animals under the gleam of a full moon. Behind the screen, far in the distance, the mountains of Quetta slice the horizon in a squiggly line of dark and less dark.

Now the commercials are over and the screen shows a guy who looks like my 7th grade math teacher singing under colored lights on a stage. He turns out to be not one of the competitors but one of the judges. For those who aren’t familiar with Afghan Star, it’s a singing competition fashioned after American Idol. Viewers use text messaging to vote for their favorite singer. Each episode someone gets eliminated, and tonight there are only two left. Unlike American Idol, though, Afghan Star has a tribal flavor. Every warlord has their candidate, who they shower with money and support. Votes tend to fall along ethnic lines. Tonight’s singers are named RafÈ and Hamid, but everyone thinks of them as the Tajik and the Hazara.

I have been living in a Hazara neighborhood in Quetta, so for the past few days, well-dressed boys with clipboards have been accosting my friends on street corners, drumming up votes for Hamid, the Hazara singer. The guys with clipboards are Hazara nationalists, members of the Hazara Democratic Party. “A minute of your time, brother,” they cry. One is wearing Malcom X-style glasses.

Why is it so important that the Hazara singer win? “Still the war is not finished in Afghanistan,” explains Triple H. Triple H is one of the former marine terps, a handsome musician-type with curly hair. He once taught singing lessons to the Hazara boy that now stands poised to win. Next year, Triple H plans to enter the competition himself. To do so, he’ll have to get the support of the various Hazara political parties and former warlords. Then he has to hope the show’s judges choose him. If he’s chosen of them, his warlord sponsor will then buy thousands of phone cards and hire companies to make text message calls in his favor. Doesn’t this seem a little undemocratic? Triple H thinks more practically. “They used to fight with guns,” he says. “Now they fight… with us! And we are getting the benefit!”

More singing. More colored lights. I am freezing and waiting for the end. Still we must sit through the standard speeded-up montage of Hamid trying on various blue shirts and ties. Hamid getting a haircut. Hamid walking through the hallways of the TV studio. Then more commercials. Actually, the same commercials recycled. “What is SPF?” asks one of the terps, and I’m embarrassed to see how quickly I answer “Sun Protection Formula.” Why can’t I have that kind of instant recall with, you know, books and stuff?

Finally, at long last, the envelope. We all know what’s written there, though. The Hazara guy is going to win. We have it on good intelligence (the show is taped the night before in front of a live audience). This public viewing, this projection screen in the vegetable market in the Hazara part of town, has all been set up last minute so that the community can watch en masse and then celebrate. I wonder how they will react. After a century of persecution, victory! After the massacres, the land grabs, the forced servitude, triumph! Afghan Star style! I have no idea what they’ll do. Will they riot? Will they lift torches and march? Stand atop pushcarts and howl? I am so focused on these eventualities that I don’t even notice when the Tajik guy wins it. The crowd, quiet, immediately disperses. The headlamps of motorcycles illuminate their sad, drawn faces.

“Wha---” I say. “I thought you heard for sure that…” Even hearing myself speak I realize how silly I sound. This is Afghanistan, after all.

On the cold walk home, only recriminations.

And this paradox: In a land of constant rumor, it’s easier to keep the truth secret.

blogging in quetta

Me, and JD.

hawoooooooo karachi

Happy afghan new years. Am writing from a net café in Pakistan where the air is loud with the sounds of Doom, the video game. The volume is on max so I hear every cocked gun, every rushed footstep, and, whenever the character gets shot, a computer voice saying: “The terrorist has won.” This seems strangely funny to me at the moment and I chuckle quietly to myself while waiting for an achingly slow internet connection in my little private booth. Private booths: the big thing now in net cafes here. Is it like that everywhere? Is it so we can view porn with greater privacy? My booth has a frosted plastic window and a seat covered in fake fur. Mrao.

So, a bit of a recap; I arrived in Karachi 10 days ago on assignment for Marketplace. Much like in Kabul, one divides one’s time in opposite worlds; the days I spent in the industrial quarter with the poorest of laborers, the stench of chemicals and butcheries and poverty and decay; my nights out at some restaurant or party, including a soiree at the island yacht club hobnobbing with consulates and former ministers of health and a air-force-pilot-crooner named Johnny who recounted New York stories from his second book. (One of them was rather funny involving three Irishmen, a raincoat, an off-duty mugger, and a pub on St Paddy’s Day.)



But it was nice to leave Karachi for a smaller town on the outskirts, where I’m now living in a house we rented for $50 a month. We have electricity half the time and a gas lamp for the rest of it. The kitchen is a room with a bench. The house has no furniture. The living room has two mattresses, one in each corner, with pillows and blankets and a rug beneath. That’s it, oh and a bound copy of the Koran on a shelf just above our heads. We remove our shoes when we walk in. When we leave, small children peek out of their doors, which are corrugated aluminum cut from the side of shipping containers.

The town is small and people feel safe to walk after dark. The streets are narrow and winding; the houses nuzzle up close to the road like curious but blind animals. It feels like a shtetl – with many little grocery stores, and a few beauty salons, many tailors with their window display of vests (called here ‘waistcoat’, perhaps some piece of European fashion imported centuries earlier). There are sheep in the road splashed with pink paint and a young boy selling bags of yoghurt mixed with green spices. At dusk the vegetable stands are lit by gaslight, while the man with a pushcart and a pot of chicken soup is just wiping down, but willing to serve us two last cupfuls; for 25 cents you get the cup, the soup, and as much pepper as you can take. (“With egg or without?” he’ll ask, and with your consent, he’ll sprinkle chunks of hard boiled egg on top of the soup.) During the day the soup cart functions socially as a barbershop; a clearinghouse for rumor and information. You see two or three men at a time standing at the cart sipping soup.

Today the rumor is me.




NOTE: Tune in Friday in NYC for Radiolab, featuring my accordion and the triumphant return of the Afghan Elvis... Ahmed Zahir. Also in the story is Najib, who you've read about in these pages. Here's a little video teaser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5nvg0_FfjU

Bush bazaar

There's a little market in a seedier section of Kabul where you can buy almost anything that fell off a US supply truck. The so-called "Bush bazaar" is basically a few muddy alleys lined on either side with large metal shipping containers that serve as kiosks. You walk down the narrow lane stepping over little kids and squeezing past wheelbarrows loaded with washed-up items: tins and tins of microwave lasagna in a rice-eating country with no microwaves, also lots of Dr Pepper, A-1 steak sauce, instant mashed potatoes, ketchup-flavored potato chips, bodybuilder protein powder in gallon-sized plastic jugs, dime novels, zit cream, lime-flavored tortillas, and applesauce in single-serve containers.

i bought a can of Snapple for my translator. He studied the list of ingredients for a long time before opening it and sipping tentatively. "How do you like your Snapple?" I finally asked, and immediately felt like a moron. Like some high fructose ambassador.

"Quite delicious," he said diplomatically. For my part, I'd drunk my can too quickly, hoping for a rush of nostalgia, a sense-memory back to the basketball courts near high school, or the back seat of certain cars, or old Sal's Pizza, or the tuna-on-pumpernickel sandwich at the deli around the corner from my first office job. But, nothing. It was, well, just iced tea. I was thirsty.

God bless it.

let us introduce... (Marketplace story link)

This story aired a few hours ago on Marketplace.

bonus just for 'waiting for afghanistan' readers: the first character in this radio story is the same Mahbub on whom the blog entry 'the uses of laughter' is based.

the uses of laughter

last night
i interviewed a boy, tall, and so thin his friends
say that shaking his hand is like grabbing nails.
he laughs and and they laugh.
his thinning hair covered with a knockoff yankees cap.
The Y is too small.

We were sitting on a bed
drinking tea and the boy was telling his story of losing his life savings to a guy he still calls his friend. Meanwhile, the TV behind him played "Wedding Outtakes
Volume II"
And he says that the worst part of being robbed of one year and a half's
worth of salary
was not the money
or his future
or having to see
the faces of his children
but
knowing that he, duped, had duped his friends and cousins too.
And he is telling the story and he is laughing
in the moments of the story where you might expect
outrage
and/or sadness and/or shame
He is laughing. He doesn't know the word Yankees.
There are looseleaf poems in his pocket
addressed to the abstract hypocrite
and behind his ear, hypoglycemic bridesmaids
are collapsing into the furniture
into the grooms
into the priests
and i ask him why he is laughing he says:

"in every job
one person become rich
one person become not rich.
it is not also your idea?
in the school
it belong to the person to first position
it belong to another person to last position.
Every person want to approve. But every person
cannot approve. This is how the school, the job, this is how the life.
and in the last part it belong to God."

oh my god,
i think.
he still doesn't
even
know
he was
scammed.

And then
his tale told,
my microphone put away,
he starts to sing.
And my friend, whose
bed this is, and tea this
is, tells a story about this boy:

how he had a tailor shop
during taliban time
and he would sing and tap his fingers on the loom
the taliban heard it
and burst into the shop
and started to search
saying 'where is the tape, the tape'
and the boy said:
my dear brothers,
there is no tape.
no tape in here.
the sound you hear is just me singing, and drumming on the loom.

and then he sang and he drummed for the men until they cursed
and left the shop and he sighed.
And breathed.
And thanked God
They hadn't searched his drawers
and found the porn.

birthday candies

it's my birthday today. i spent a chunk of it with the poorest family i've ever met. They live in the bombed out grounds of the king's old palace, in what was once the royal stables. The windows are plastic sheets covering holes in the brick. To keep warm they all lie in a circle and put their legs under a big group blanket with a few hot coals in the center.

So there i am, my 33rd birthday, playing toesies with five little girls and boys under a polka-dot red blanket and all of them begging me to take their photos, me no me no me first. Really I was only there as a favor for a friend who used to work in Afghanistan. She'd asked me to pass on some money on her behalf to this family she'd pretty much adopted here four years ago. I'd seen her photos and I'd heard some stories "Now Fareed is ill and can't get help" "Arzoo is just getting her big teeth in" but the stories didn't mean much to me until today, when all of a sudden it's real kids crowded around my real head and the real stink of the real blanket and we're talking through pictures, basically, making faces and striking poses. I should print some of the photos and bring them back for their walls. The mother was so hard-bitten, her daughters so giggly and fun, you felt that she'd tried to absorb most of the blows. All of them were illiterate; they don't go to school or do anything during the day except play games with each other. It was only the eldest daughter who seemed worn.

(She's the one below with the kefiyeh wrapped around her face.)

We stayed for tea, so as to make the exchange of money feel less nakedly colonial, but for a long time the tea didn't come. I mean we just sat there, coughing under the blanket, talking and taking pictures. I saw there was a lot of secret whispering between the mother and the eldest daughter. And I realized what was happening but was powerless to stop it; I knew they were scrounging up something special for us guests; I just prayed it wouldn't be too extravagant, like they'd gone and pawned their only shoes so we could eat chocolate biscuits. In the end they served tea on a tray with two tiny bowls of Pakistani candies. The children eyed the candies interestedly but when I tried to pass them out only the very littlest one took one. The rest were too polite, or too proud. The candies were just for the guests, apparently. So me and my translator dutifully downed two of the sweet stale white things and washed them down with questionable tea. Then the littlest and cutest girl coughed twice and sneezed right into my face. After it happened we just looked at each other, then she gave a big smile as if she'd just learned a new word.

phobocracy

I love this word coined by Michael Chabon in his Washington Post op-ed for Obama. If you didn't read it, here's the money graph:

The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy.

It reminded me of something that I heard on the news just yesterday. We were driving through downtown kabul in a taxi listening to the radio. The woman announcer told us that Mullah Omar had ordered his Taliban fighters no longer to slit the throats of Afghans accused of working with foreigners. He said that slitting people's throats, even if they were working with foreigners, was barbaric and against Islam.

"From now on," he said, "Just shoot them."

Why did Omar say this? Why now? No one could say, though one humanitarian worker mag covered it this way:

Video clips showing horrific scenes of human decapitations and other forms of severe physical torture had been circulated by the insurgents, apparently in an effort to threaten people who support and/or work with the Afghan government and its international supporters. Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) and other international rights watchdogs have repeatedly accused Taliban insurgents of deliberately attacking civilians and systematically violating international humanitarian law. "No more beheadings."

"Mullah Omar's order is effective immediately and there will be no more beheadings by the Taliban," said Zabiullah Mujahid, who claims to be a spokesman for Taliban fighters. About 100 people have been beheaded by Taliban insurgents on charges of espionage in the past 12 months, a leading Afghan news agency, Pajwhok, reported on 4 February.

The implication seems to be, Omar picked up his morning copy of Pajwhok news, saw how many local folks they'd beheaded, and finally saw the light. Right. Since Taliban has never ever as far as I know bowed to the complaints of human rights activists, I feel like this can only mean a few things. One, Omar really hopes to be president of this country again, and so wants to assume some pretense of civility. Or at least not seem like a totally sick and bloodthirsty savage. Two, Omar wants to compare his strong hand with Karzai's impotent one. Karzai makes speeches, Omar makes change. (I wonder what will happen if some Taliban don't follow the rules? Will the beheaders get beheaded? Or shot?)

But I have a third theory, and it gets back to this idea of fear. When the Taliban controlled this country, they were a phobocracy. They ruled by inspiring fear. (Even their fighting technique was designed primarily to intimidate: black Range Rovers barreling full-speed through the dust.) And, well, everyone knows that if you want to really scare someone, you hold back. You don't do the thing you most do show. Not... yet.

I've written to you already about how we're living through grim days in Kabul. Foreigners are spooked. Restaurants have closed. The nightlife, such as it was, is limited. They have us cowering. Everyone's waiting to see what the Taliban will do next.

And, for the moment at least, they do nothing. They sheathe their knife. Slowly bend down to clean some snow off their boots. Even old one-eyed Mullah Omar himself steps out of his cave to give a little papal wave to his people. My good children, he says, no longer will we cut your throats like dogs. Now, if you don't listen, we'll just kill you. Capiche?

And then he winks.

If this was a movie, the audience would be squealing.

prom night

Weekend morning. Bright sunshine. The pushcart peddlers hollering about potatoes in the quiet street. I eat my cereal in the cold then light a stove and open my laptop. At noon a friend stops by; she seems happy at first but once in the house she slowly crumbles down onto the rug. "Not too good," she says in response to the obvious question. She's a party girl by nature, now having to spend nights in her rented room watching reruns of Lost. Since the Serena hotel got attacked, all the restaurants are closed. Every bar but the bars on the embassy are off-limits. Her days are spent keeping development projects afloat as expats back out of their contracts. Everyone is spooked.

She tells me about her two friends that were in Kabul’s luxury hotel the night it was attacked. One felt bullets wizzing around her head and saw a man shot in front of her. Another hid in the women's locker room but when they came to rescue them he had to jump over the dead Filipino woman. "He told us the story cheerfully, laughing" she says gnawing the ruby stone on her middle finger. "He'd fucking lost it." Both of the friends had left Afghanistan, never to return.

We meet another friend at a restaurant, a reedy Canadian journalist with blue eyes and red beard. The last time I saw Red, he was planning to stay a year and write a book about the Canadian experience. Now he's put in notice. He got another job in Sierra Leone and leaves in two weeks. He'll be running to the airplane when it comes.

"I'm done with this country," says Red. "Done done done done done." We are eating the restaurant's specialty bolani, a sort of pastry stuffed with potato cut into bite sized squares. There are two dipping sauces for the pastry, a green one and a red one. Both are delicious. Red says he’s done trying to figure out the Afghan puzzle. He doesn't want to know anymore.

The rest of the meal arrives. Mung beans smeared with yoghurt and cardamon, comforting and succulent, also a kind of ravioli stuffed with leeks and parsely, some south asian-style meatballs, plain rice and fresh cucumber salad. Baklavah for desert. When we put on our coats it is almost four o'clock. We've been here three hours and the restaurant has had only two other customers.

The grocery store where we go next is the only crowded spot. I buy 10 boxes of juice, four jars of pasta sauce and four kinds of pasta. I buy so much food that the store owners laugh at me. I joke back and do not tell them that I have been hungry for four days.

That night I have dinner with three more friends, one of whom just broke her contract and another of whom is thinking about it. The third is sick since Christmas vacation. We are sitting in a living room on couches and cushions whispering on the edge of the circle while a British guy is holding forth to a Bulgarian woman on how when he went to Africa he failed to fix the bloody special setting in automatic cameras that you need to adjust to photograph black people. A christmas tree is in the other corner and a gas stove is making us lightheaded.

It might have been the fumes or perhaps nostalgic longings that drove me after dinner to a party at the US Embassy. The taxi drops me off at the barbed wire and concrete gate and I walk the rest of the way on foot. The concrete path is swept clean and well lit. I walk deeper into the compound. I see no one, just me and my breath under the spotlights. I wonder if there are snipers watching me somewhere in the darkness. Then out from the concrete wall steps a guard with a kalashnikov.

"Ho there!" he shouts. (He doesn't actually say 'ho there,' but the Dari phrase he uses sounds so ornate and old-fashioned. And the cold concrete platform feels like a stage.)

"Hey," i say.

When I finally arrive at the party I hear it before I see it. A guy is screaming into a microphone, something about a queen and a kiss. “It’s prom night!” someone says.

The embassy people, the USAID people, the people that pass out multi-million dollar development contracts several times a month, they're here, quite literally Playing That Funky Music (White Boy) in a cafeteria strewn with paper streamers and string lights and Betty Crocker cake. Someone hands me a slice, on a paper plate.

back again.

Hi again.

So, I’m back. Back in Dubai, waiting for a flight back to Kabul. Back after almost a month away from Afghanistan. My extended absence was a bit of an accident; I took a holiday in France with some friends, which led me to a brief trip to New York, which became a longer trip, and then there was a mix-up about the planes which took another week to resolve.

Obviously, much has happened in Kabul since I’ve been gone. Kabul’s premier hotel was attacked. (Thanks to those who wrote to ask after my safety, though your concerned emails and skypes had the unintended effect of making me feel like a complete poseur, a flak-jacketed frappacino-sipping sideline warrior.)

Also this month in Kabul, the coldest winter weather in 15 years. This is less newsworthy to the West though vastly more important to Afghans than the hotel attack. People are dying. I just got this email from a friend yesterday in Kabul:

from hamida aman
to hamida_aman@hotmail.com,
date Jan 28, 2008 8:07 PM
subject The chain reaction
mailed-by hotmail.com


Dear Friends,

As most of you will have surely noticed, Afghanistan is currently facing one of its harshest winters in living memory.
You might have also noticed that thousands of women, kids, and men are struggling every day to heat and feed their families.
The point here is certainly not to make you feel guilty but very simply try to do something at our very modest level.
Of course, most of you are working for international organizations involved at some point with large-scale humanitarian aid or development projects.
But in our personal and more modest scale, we are a group of friends who want to apply what some call Zakat, some other charity or just compassion by giving what we can.

A donation of 50$ will allowed a family to survive during one month and receive flower and coal to warm their house.

Please write below your name, phone number and the amount you would like to donate and send back the list to the sender. Please forward this e -mail to those you knows who would like to donate.

Many thanks for your generosity!

Meanwhile, here in Dubai, they're offering a free bmw or bentley with every purchase of a new Damanc property.

More soon.

-G.

the schools that the taliban don't torch

(From The Washington Monthly, December '07)

The road from Kabul to Azra, a mountainous district in Afghanistan's central Logar Province, is, in places, not a road at all. At some points it's a rocky riverbed, at others an open desert. For one terrifying stretch, it's a twisty gorge known as the Dubandi Pass, famous for carjackings by Taliban bandits. The steep terrain and treacherous roads have always made this part of the world remote, even by Afghan standards. Tribal ties are stronger than national loyalties, and the unguarded border with Pakistan makes the region an easy access point for insurgents. Azra is the kind of place that both Kabul and Washington worry about most.

As violence has risen, development in this area has floundered. The United States Agency for International Development is funding a much-needed new highway in Azra, but work crews have been repeatedly evacuated because of insurgent threats. This past summer, the murder of two aid workers in a nearby district led Azra's only local nongovernmental organization (NGO) to shut down its office for a month.

But there is one project here that's proceeding relatively unimpeded. One sunny morning in July, I visited a small hydropower facility under construction in the village of Dadi Khel. There I watched a few dozen villagers building a small channel, slapping together stones and mortar beside a riverbank. When the project is finished, river water will spin a turbine that will bring electricity to about 300 village families. It will be enough power to allow those residents to turn on lights, iron clothes, and watch Bollywood soaps—a small advance in the face of their many problems, perhaps, but also the first development project that any villager here can remember. And it's remarkable that it exists at all.

Read the rest of the story here.

lowered expectations

Refugees in the little town of Barikab. Click here for story on The World.

if you're a journalist, help us

I am walking to my favorite kebob house for lunch when I see an old woman sitting on the sidewalk, screaming. She is well dressed and she is clutching another woman who seems helpless and embarrassed. There are many leather jacketed men moving in and out of a furniture store like bees after their hive has been cracked open. I know this store. I bought a desk chair there once. But they don’t want to talk to me and so, after standing around for a while with the other gawkers, I go in to have my lunch.

Inside I am seated directly in front of the TV which is loud enough to make my teeth rattle. The program is a talk show in which we are shown tight close-ups of bearded men talking about the corruption problem in government. Then an ad comes on which shows a turbaned genie perched on a village wall. I know he is a genie because there are video-effect bubbles hovering around his head like swollen luminescent gnats. The genie is telling a farmer to warn the police about IEDs. The man seems surprised. It’s the right thing to do, says the genie. OK, says farmer. He runs and flags down some approaching police jeeps. “Look!” the farmer shouts, and points to a landmine which looks something like a lime green bicycle gear embedded in the dusty road. “Thanks!” say the police. The farmer’s son thanks the genie who promptly snaps his fingers and disappears. It's like the persian version of those subway posters.






Outside the screaming woman is gone and the crowd is dispersed and the leather jacket crowd at the furniture company are more amenable to speak. In fact. they spot me and flag me down. “We have big news!” they say. For a moment I wonder if they are trying to sell me another chair. But then I see the manager has blood on her hand which has spattered onto her shirt. “If you are a journalist, please help us," she says. “They came in, they kicked everybody they kicked everything." It takes a while to get the story. They are subcontracting a cell phone project to a shady dude in the east who came in this morning to demand more and more money. An hour after he left, the ‘special crimes unit’ police arrived. They wore no uniforms. They dragged away the owner, and smashed his cell phone when he tried to call for help. “He has a heart condition,” says his daughter.

As I'm sitting listening to this story, one of the "policemen" come back! He says he needs the man's heart medication. His daughter screams and jumps into the car to go home to get the medication. The cop sits looking bored. I fear the worst.

I am writing this while sitting on the desk chair he sold me.

I’ll call tomorrow to see what happened.

christmas in kabul

let me start with some sorrys. first for the title of this post. i really didn't want to begin on such a cheesy note. But it's a holiday with a lot of gravitational pull. Second for falling off the blog for a few weeks. i don't exactly know who i'm apologizing to, but you know who you are, my bench team.



Somewhere in the mess on my floor, among the multivitamins and DV tapes and old saucers, among the notebooks and paper scraps and alka seltzer and flak jacket and wasabi peas, pepper garlic flavor, among a selection of bagged tea and the collected stories of Barthelme, my dusty sneakers, my little red accordion, wires, cords, memory cards and baum de tigre and some long underwear, somewhere amongst the junk is a christmas card from Waheed. Festive Greetings, it says, Especially For You.

There is an odd feeling one gets at christmastime in a strictly muslim country. I suppose its a bit like being a Jew in Kansas. The holiday differentiates you from your neighbor. Today I got a text message from an Afghan friend which read: "Christmas is a special occasion for you. Hope you are enjoying it in afghanistan any way."

It's the opposite of christmas in new york, where the collective spirit might either epel you or sweep you up. here, christmas makes you the object of attention, so you end up feeling a weird sense of ownership towards the day. it's like a little crumb of holiday. But somehow it tastes quite sweet.

anyway, my power is about to be shut off. so, merry christmas, and enjoy.

g

meat of human

There are big warlords, and there are little warlords. Big bombs and little bombs. Suicide attacks are happening with increasing regularity in Kabul, but when you consider that 3 or 4 people die out of a city of 4 million, the risk of actually getting killed by a bomb is very small.

The bomb up north last month, though, was one of the big ones. Not just because more people died than in any blast in Afghan history. Not just because there were six delegates (the entire economic committee) and 70-odd schoolkids that died. But because no one took responsibility. And thus the bomb is like a question mark for Afghans - was it Taliban? warlords? Even Karzai himself gets blamed in the furious rumor mill that has its own aftershocks and casualities.

That is the significance of the bomb up in Baghlan. I went to Baghlan a few weeks ago and did this story for The World. You'll understand the title of this blog if you hear the piece. If you don't have time to listen, I'll just say that 10 days after the bomb the trees were still red.

(And yes, for those most loyal readers, this is the same story I talked about doing with Dr. Daud up north, i'm just a dork and forgot to post it until now.)