A fool's errand

Well sports fans after 14 months it’s time for me to leave Wonderland and move on to sunnier climes. Being here has been the toughest thing that I’ve ever done. I wish that I could say that I was leaving with a sense of renewed hope for Afghanistan and a stronger bond with my fellow man. Unfortunately, I just feel exhausted and happy to get out this place alive and with a few shreds of sanity. While I was here, the program that I managed distributed 3,000 metric tons of food, 70 metric tons of seeds and fertilizer, trained 400 community health volunteers, and pumped about a $1.5 million into the Afghan economy. It all sounds good on paper, trust me I know I write the reports, but after being here and seeing the desperate state of this country, the conflict, the poverty, and the corruption, doing development projects here kinda feels like trying to put out a California wildfire with a garden hose. If there is a way forward for Afghanistan then it is clearly beyond my four years of state college to discern.

Thanks for reading and taking this journey with me.

mercy

Ï was in the airport in Kabul on my way to Herat. It was a pretty uneventful morning, the waiting room was full but not crazy. I was reading my book and waiting for my flight. After a a while there was a bit of a commotion. I looked up and saw a crowd starting to gather around an old man who was seated and talking to an airport official. The man started to get very excited and seemed to be pleading with the official. I took a better look and that's when I saw it, the body of a dead child wrapped in a blanket. The old man was pleading with the official to be allowed to transport the child's body on the plane. No casket, no anything, just the body wrapped in a blanket. It was the most horrific and heartbreaking thing that I have ever seen. Somebody started to take up a collection to bury the child. I gave a few dollars worth of Afghanis. All I could think was I have to get out of this place.

your money or your life

We recently had two staff members robbed at gunpoint as they were leaving one of our program villages. They were traveling by motorcycle and about five kilometers from the village they were intercepted by two men, one with an AK47. The thieves took their mobile phones, the motorcycle, and about $200 in cash. Luckily, they weren’t injured. The incident didn’t appear to be ideologically motivated so no Taliban just bad guys with guns. Kinda makes me nostalgic for Baltimore!

We reported the incident to the police, the governor, the deputy governor, the UN mission, the NATO base, and my mom. They all promised that the perpetrators would be brought to justice, my mom was especially fired up! Unfortunately, it's like the wild, wild west out here, too many places to hide and not enough people interested to look.

Him Good Him Bad

I had the unique pleasure of recently being at the Kabul airport waiting on a flight. Inside the terminal is a small, simple dining area where you can get a pot of tea or a plate of a traditional Afghan dish of stewed goat, potatoes, rice, and bread. I was sitting and having a pot of tea when an older Afghan man in traditional dress sat down next to me. The dining area is communal style so you just sit wherever there’s an empty seat. I turned and greeted the man saying “Ruz ba kheer” good day, slightly nodding my head in respect as I’ve seen my Afghan colleagues do when they greet someone older than themselves. The man smiled and responded by saying “Salam” hello and touching his right hand to his heart as is the custom here. I went back to my book and the man went on to order a plate of food. As soon as his food arrived he turned to me and offered me part of his lunch. It was a gesture that moved me quite a bit (no, I didn’t eat the poor man’s lunch). I am ashamed to say that I have allowed my concern for the “security situation” here to cause me to start to generalize people in a fairly vulgar way. “These guys look ok, these guys look like they could be Taliban”. It is the type of prejudice and bigotry that is borne out of fear and it’s something that I thought that I was above. Sure there are bad guys of all stripes and persuasions but it took this old man to remind me that nine times out of ten when you reach out your hand with courtesy, general goodwill, and respect the sentiment will be returned and we are all better for it.

say what

I’ve finally found a tutor to start teaching me the local language which is Dari - a dialect of Persian. Over the years in this line of work, I have come across a number of brilliant people that speak four or five languages, they move from English to Arabic to Kiswahili without missing a beat. These people are a blessed and talented group, unfortunately, I ain’t one of them! Learning languages has always been extremely difficult for me so I have always quietly supported that “English first” initiative.

But seriously, I think that it is an important sign of respect to at least be able to say a few sentences in the local language. People usually really appreciate that you have gone to the effort to learn their language and are very willing to help you. Plus it provides important moments of comic relief that endear you to your hosts, for example when I think that I have just said “you have a beautiful home” when I have actually just said “your house green tomorrow”.

So whenever learning a new language I keep it as practical as possible and focus on the words and phrases that are important to my everyday life. As a rule I usually start with the following two phrases that have served me well all over the world:

1. Where is the bathroom?
2. I would like another cocktail.


Nami man ast Frederick.

moving the food

Despite the best efforts of disaffected government bureaucrats, armed gunmen, and that saucy minx Mother Nature herself, we are finally distributing our food commodities. Let the church say Amen!

a soldier, an aid worker, and a one eyed Mullah walk into a bar…..

Things are feeling a little weird as of late, kind of like the calm before the storm. It’s been pretty quiet by Afghanistan standards meaning that there haven’t been any recent acid attacks on young girls walking to school or armed gunmen attacking any of the ministries in Kabul with AK 47s and suicide explosive vests. But everybody is a little on edge.

Last month the Taliban leadership made a formal declaration that the Taliban would now actively target foreign aid workers on the premise that we are all actually spies. If only this was the case, I would look fabulous driving an Aston Martin and drinking martinis. Miss Moneypenny where are you when I need you. The idea of aid workers, especially American aid workers, being spies is an old one. The idea caught new life when U.S. Special Ambassador Richard Holbrooke stated that 90% of American intelligence coming from inside Afghanistan comes from international aid organizations. There was a nuance to his comments that was lost in the mainstream press and basically the story became “Aid workers in Afghanistan are spies for the CIA!” When it rains it pours.

Across the border in Pakistan, the government signed a truce with the Taliban and essentially ceded the Swat Valley to them. This gives the Taliban a safe staging ground to plan and prepare for attacks. Now that the snow is gone and the roads are clear things should get interesting on this side of border sometime soon. President Obama has now deployed an additional 21,000 troops here and I’m guessing that they’ll have their hands full.

I figured that it was a good time to go visit the boys down the road at the Lithuanian army base. I met with their civilian military attaché officer to discuss formalizing an emergency evacuation plan for my team should the shit hit the Shinola. Until now it’s just been a general understanding that if things go bad in a hurry then all of us would just run like hell to the base and bang on the gate until they let us in. I’m trying to get them to agree to a protocol where they would actually send a couple humvees and come get us! These guys are awesome and want to help so I’m sure we’ll figure it out. The sooner the better.

Hey brother can you spare 6.7 metric tons of rice

We are getting ready to distribute food as part of the health component of the program. This food distribution is the most tangible part of the entire effort. Between the meetings, planning, coordinating, synergizing, negotiating, and signings, there is a lot that has to be done before anything actually gets done. These distributions are the first real thing that we can hang our hat on and say that we’ve done.

We will distribute a basket of commodities to children under five years of age, and pregnant and lactating women. The commodity basket includes rice, wheat flour, yellow peas, and vegetable oil. After making the long trip from America’s heartland, the first of our commodities is starting to arrive. After much haggling, pleading, cursing and cajoling of the Afghanistan Ministry of Finance we finally received 500 metric tons of rice into our warehouse in Herat. The rice was then to be trucked from Herat to our warehouse here in Chaghcaran where it will be distributed to beneficiaries, this is where it gets interesting. On the road from Herat to Chaghcaran our trucks were stopped by armed men who belong to one of the local militias. The gunmen actually didn’t take all of the rice which I thought was quite sporting of them, but they did lighten our load a bit before letting the trucks pass. We are now in discussions with the national police to see if we can get an armed escort for future convoys – at our expense of course. The old idealistic aid worker in me was briefly full of moral outrage about how every ounce of rice that was stolen was taken out of the mouth of a vulnerable woman or child, the realistic aid worker that has lived through people getting gunned down and shit getting blown up on a nearly daily basis thinks that losing 6.7 metric tons of rice out of a 23 truck convoy carrying 500 metric tons is a pretty good day at the office.

safe as houses

Since I’ve been in Afghanistan friends on many occasion have asked me “are you safe?” The simple answer to that question is…..no. But I look at it like this; growing up in northwest Baltimore wasn’t all that safe so I’ll be OK. Over the past few months, I’ve come to understand that security in Afghanistan is a complicated thing and it is largely dependant on where you are, what you’re doing, and who you’re doing it with.

In Kabul, there is no security period, you just have to trust in the numbers. That is to say, that on any given day there are roughly two and a half million people in Kabul and the odds are that YOU in particular aren’t going to get blown the fuck up. It’s kind of like playing Taliban roulette where you’re standing at the table as the wheel goes round hoping that the little white ball doesn’t fall on random person # 835,642 – YOU. “come on baby, daddy wants to keep all his limbs!”

In Herat, the calculus changes a bit. The population is much smaller than Kabul so technically your odds get worse since there are fewer people to get blown up meaning that your number is more likely to come up. However, there are apparently fewer things of interest to blow up in Herat and thus fewer bombings. Generally speaking, in Herat if you stay away from the airport, Governor’s house, U.N. compound, hotels, bazaars, bike shops, ice cream parlors, hospitals, restaurants, private homes, electronic shops, mosques, schools, parks, tailors, office buildings, garages, fruit stands, police stations, DVD shops, dry cleaners, and public buildings of any sort then you should be OK.

Out in the provinces like where I live it gets even more interesting. A little background, after the NATO led invasion of Afghanistan that toppled the Taliban, the country was essentially divided into security zones with different NATO member states responsible for the security of a particular region of the country. The area where I live is under the military protection of a contingent led by the Lithuanian army. That’s right the Lithuanians. Now I don’t want to malign these boys too much for two reasons; firstly, they recently invited me to their base for dinner which was much appreciated because there’s only so much stewed goat a man can eat, and the Lithuanian army cafeteria comes complete with fried chicken, lasagna, and an ice cream station, secondly, should the proverbial shit hit the fan I’ll be counting on these boys to save my ass and get me out of here. But since there is absolutely nothing out here worth going to the effort or expense of blowing up, paired with the fact that I live about ¼ mile from the Lithuanian army base so unless the Taliban actually decide to attack the base itself I should be OK.

So while the 82nd Airborne they may not be, let’s give it up for the Lithuanians – keepers of the peace and givers of the double scoop of chocolate!

Kabul - a thousand words

Help Wanted

I’m back in Afghanistan after going home for a too short Christmas break. Yes, I am part of that noble core of do-gooding souls ready to stand arm in arm with our less fortunate brothers and sisters, living as they live, eating what they eat, forgoing creature comforts and risking life and limb - just not on major holidays or during our children’s school breaks.

The snow has started to fall and that is both good and bad. Good because insurgent related violence goes down during the winter since apparently the Taliban haven’t figured out where to buy good snow tires. Bad because access to the people that we are trying to reach with services becomes severely restricted. We are planning to distribute food as part of the health intervention but we are having trouble getting it into the country. It was the same way when I worked in Indonesia. Bringing in free food ain’t as easy as one might imagine!

I recently met with the provincial Governor and members of the Provincial Council and they all pledged the support of their respective good offices. These meetings are mostly ceremonial but occasionally the phrase “when I was speaking to the Governor about……” does come in handy when dealing with a less than helpful civil servant as you’re trying to get a copy of this or that government regulation / policy statement / strategic planning document.

We’re still having trouble recruiting staff, both Afghan and expatriate but for some reason I'm hopeful that things will turn around. I’m thinking that in this shall we say challenging economic environment that maybe people will give old Afghanistan a second look, she ain’t so bad!