Mid-Trip Report From Voices' Delegation in Kabul
August 2, 2011
Kabul - Drop
someone off at the airport here and you’ll be searched three times
before getting into the parking lot. Kabul is a city of sandbags and
armed men, both on foot and in big, shiny, assertive, urgently-honking
vehicles.
In Kabul much life is lived opaquely — behind barbed wire and
thick metal doors and high walls.
Early
on we are told that, according to the Red Cross, the area is enduring
the worst security situation in 30 years. Those with a stake in how
things are dread the talked-about (and fanciful?) departure of
international forces – of the invaders and occupiers — for fear of civil
war.
Some seem to prefer the devil they’ve come to know this past
excruciating decade to other devils harder to predict, harder to
identify.
Our
little delegation is severely restricted in our movements – we keep a
low profile: we don’t linger outside those high walls. We stay inside
until our driver arrives and then quickly hop in the van. We may not
even be able to get beyond Kabul – a tan, dusty, decaying, sprawling
town with what must be some of the densest, scariest, least regulated
traffic on the planet. (Not once in our two weeks here have we stopped
for a red light.)
Do
we avoid venturing forth from the clipped lawns and rose gardens of our
guest house compound? Hardly. We are blessed with our unflappable
driver, who with preternatural reflexes plunges us into the swirling
traffic. And, especially, we are blessed with our interpreter and
mentor, “Hakim” – the Singaporean physician who for years has worked
among Afghan refugees and the rural youth of Bamiyan province.
Together
with our driver and Hakim and often with some of those youth, we visit a
primary school, a hospital, an orphanage, and a displaced persons camp.
We sit down with filmmakers, journalists, editors, social
entrepreneurs, and with the staff of various NGOs — internationals,
Afghan-Americans, Afghans young and old, Afghans high and low. Between
Hakim and delegation coordinator Mary Dean, both working their cell
phones, we somehow manage to have two, three, sometimes an exhausting
four, hastily arranged but often extended encounters a day, day after
day.
Whether
guarded or candid, perplexing or illuminating, depressing or inspiring,
each provides a piece (a figment?) of the puzzle. We glimpse
complexities and contradictions – and tragedies — perhaps beyond our
sheltered imaginations.
