Back in Nepal

So I am back in Nepal

The first thing I noticed? The colour and the smiles and the freedom...

I also noticed that Kabul is still in my system, I was shocked by some of the outfits the women were wearing, I felt nervous the first time I walked alone down the street, and when getting in a car i still immediately lock the doors.`

Truthfully, I miss the rent a crowd of friendship that exists in Kabul but it still feels good to be 'home'...even though the monsoon is playing havoc with my hair!

14 and an arf words to sum up Afghanistan

1:Eyes. So many beautiful eyes in this country, the greenest green, set in dark, angular, beautiful faces...Also as a women, especially a western woman, you pretty much always have eyes following you.

2:Inshallah: God willing, used in response to almost every request, invitiation, suggestion...can you do this? Enshallah. Shall we meet again next week? Enshallah. I guess in a country which has seen so much war and death, people did put their faith in God that they would still be alive the next day.

3:Stories: Everyone here has a story, which surfaces nonchalantly in conversation and stops you in your track.

4:Dust: I'm not the tidiest person, I've seen dust in my life time, but nothing like this. It gets everywhere and in to everything, coating you and everything near you.

5:Innocence: Questions I was asked by my young, male Afghan colleagues..."So have you ever drunk alcohol Gemma Jaan?" (my response...ummmmm yes, once or twice I guess). In wonder..."Is it true that in Britain you can marry whomever you want Gemma Jaan" Asked by one of my colleagues who has had a secret girlfriend (they've never been alone together but speak on the phone lots) for 3 years, but he knows his parents won't ever accept her, they have already decided he will marry his cousin...even though she doesn't want to marry him either.

6:Family: Just like in Nepal, family and religion come first.

7:Traffic jams: I have been on a single carriageway into Kabul and at one point counted 6 extra lanes that people had made, most of which involved bumping across the central reservation and trying your luck on the other side of the road.

8:Unexpected beauty: Bamyan...

9:Parties: In houses with bars, in houses with swimming pools, on rooftops, in gardens, worlds of wonder and throbbing music and flirtation all hidden behind high walls in Kabul.

10:Beards: So many beards of different sizes, descriptions, lengths and textures. The head honcho of beards is one that you can grab in your fist and it pokes out the other end.

11:Headscarves: Turns out there are two kinds of women, those who can look effortlessly chic in headscarves and those who like a crazy, old, flustered peasant. I fall firmly into the latter...

12: Meat: There is only 2 choices here, embrace meat or go home. I embraced meat on sticks, on bones, in bread, with rice.

13:Laughter: Afghans love to laugh and although sometimes the humour is lost in translation...sometimes they have you in stitches.

14:Cynicism: So much cynicism amongst the ex-pat crowd here...

141/2 : Goodness...but luckily so much goodness too

Bamyan

Who knew. Somewhere this beautiful could exist in a country renowned for war, terror and dust. It takes your breath away...











and you can hire pedalo swans! He was the happiest man!

The Foreigner and the Human

(I started to write this a while ago but only just completed...I am acutally back in Nepal now, not in Bamyan)

Can I tell you a story? The past week I have been in Bamyan, a province just to the West of Kabul, that in ....ooo about 50 years or so, when people flock back to Afghanistan to relive the Hippy Trail days, will be a veritable tourist haven. It is stunning. I was there for an event I organised (with UNDP) to bring together local media, civil society organisations and the Bamyan parliamentarian representatives who were back from Kabul on their first recess. Because Bamyan is pretty remote and very few organisations have telephones, one morning my Afghan colleague (Abdullah Fahim) and Heidi (who is working with Equal Access here for a couple of months) set out to invite all the different CSOs (civil society organisations) to our event. They knocked at one door, which creaked open and an old woman peered out, looked at them both sharply, closed the door again and yelled out in Dari to her fellow workmates "there is a foreigner and a human at the gate, should I let them in?"

This, I think, perfectly sums up how Afghans see the international community here. We don't speak the same language, have the same culture, Afghans it seems, don't even think we are from the same human race! It's no wonder there seems to be a constant 'them and us' battle. The other week I went to a workgroup meeting, chaired by UNAMA and UNIFEM and attended by a mix of International Legal Aid lawyers and INGO workers alongside Afghan judges and members of the Afghan Ministry of Justice. It was a total farce. The UN people had come armed with a heavily laden agenda, carefully planned out matrixes and workplans and tables and strategies for this work group to fill out in the hope of doing a needs analysis, which might lead to a strategy, which one day may become a recommendation, which will then need some other analysis, before one day something is 'actioned' to provide a 'workable solution' to Legal Aid in Afghanistan (see how I have all the blurb!!!) . The Afghans around the table couldn't give two monkeys about any of this, they just wanted to gripe about the international Legal Aid lawyers and ask for money. And so it began. A beautifully constructed presentation by the UNIFEM lady, at the end of which she eagerly opened the floor for questions, which led to about 1hour of what can only be described as gridlock conversation. And gridlock in the most perfectly Afgan way, where a one lane road quickly becomes a 5 lane road as people just keep making their own lane, ignoring the fact that all lanes will have to merge into one again and with no idea that it is the 'lets just make our own lane' theory that is causing the roadblock in the first place. As this debacle progressed, I looked around the 'roundtable' and saw the UNIFEM lady literally banging her head on the table, the UNAMA chair biting his hand, the lawyers getting all antsy and trying hard to say the same point again without yelling, and the UNDP guy next to me lent over and said "their all f***ing a***holes"...I didn't know whether he meant the humans or the foreigners, but it didn't really matter. In they're own way, they're all crazy