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