Captain Cat's Diaries

The people in between

 

Collective high-level efforts and strategies to rebuild this broken country seem to be as scattered as the fat dust-filled drops of September rain, which the sky threw down last night and did a good job of almost drowning our mulberry trees. The night’s deluge left wailing roots to wallow helplessly in thick viscous pools of clay mud.

This Indian summer rain has brought with it a freshness and the roses in our garden glistened this morning, grubby petals washed clean in the downpour. For a brief moment, they were given a new lease of life under Kabul’s unforgiving dust skies.

Whilst we endlessly debate whether Karzai is friend or foe or fit to lead, and discuss the possibility of peace deals led by men who will probably never have to answer for their own crimes or for the lives they have destroyed; whilst we avidly read news articles in the half-belief that someone, somewhere must surely make a breakthrough about what must be done, the country’s quiet majority will continue to live with their ghosts, hopes for some kind of justice for past abuses vanquished. Dreams will bow their heads in silent resignation, the world will continue to turn.

Kabul’s traffic will continue to infuriate everyone, kites will be flown from rooftops and local imams will call the devoted to prayer and continue to offer divine guidance to hungry souls. We will buy autumn’s giant fire-coloured pomegranates, now jostling for space in the capital’s fruit stalls, to be snapped open with large knives and served red in blue-green ceramic bowls.

Whilst we continue to be consumed and overwhelmed by a country that is not our own, I wonder at the people in our lives each day, drivers, cooks and cleaners, the unspoken folk who make our days so much more comfortable, whilst their own families probably live in cramped houses on the fringes of town. These are the people who time and again make this ragged, shambolic place feel like home.

Here, thousands of miles from our real homes, hours can turn with alarming speed into days, weeks and finally years. Time with our own tribes is lost and this can carve a hole in the pit of your stomach. Daily interactions with people take on huge importance, perhaps as a result of a longing for human closeness.

Every day, a softly spoken young man in our office, whose name I don’t even know, discreetly feeds a scrawny calico cat, which hangs around by the rubbish bins beside our office dining room. He is the only person who does this and for some reason I find this gesture incredibly touching.

The office gardener, a tall thin man who wears a pakool, tends to the flowers and plants with such care and attention and spends hours pruning and watering. From an almost bare patch of land some months ago, he has gently nurtured this arid plot of land back to life and built the most beautiful empire of green, interspersed with dazzling patches of yellow, pink, orange and red flowers; a garden to rival Eden’s. (Kabul is full of secret gardens. Behind the high barbed walls of this city, there is sure to be a carefully tended yard).

A thimble-sized woman with long black braids, soft around the edges with a face round as an apple and skin soft as a peach, comes to our house each day to wash our clothes and clean our kitchen. She has a glass eye and there are wide gaps between her small front teeth, which look as though they have been filed down with an emery board. I don’t understand her Dari accent, and she talks too quickly for me to keep up. Yet for the miles between us and each other’s words that we don’t understand, she hugs me each morning before I leave the house. I love the sensation of wrapping my arms around this small round woman, gently squeezing her soft fat frame, and I feel loved.

Searching for Buddha on Orange Mountain

 
Children in Khost

I read a while ago that archeologists had found the remnants of a large 5^th century reclining Buddha on a hillside on the outskirts of Kabul. Pieces of Afghanistan’s treasure were slowly being uncovered by excavators so eager, they would come to a country that was still in the ravages of a war.

Soft ivory combs and heavy pendants encrusted with garnets and turquoise have been found in tombs dating back to the 1^st century.  Dragons carved from lapis lazuli have been dug up deep from within northern mines, fat incense-carrying gold birds and rusted daggers uncovered alongside them.

The veil of time is being lifted and dried mud removed from Persian, Scythian, Hellenistic and Chinese inspired riches from the Bronze Age to the Kushan Empire, revealing how a myriad of cultures have helped shape this country through the ages.

One hot day just before autumn, somewhere beyond the mountains, a blue faceless crowd assembles outside a house, clasping bouquets of fake sherbet-pink roses wrapped in plastic. A young man wearing dark shades drives past them on a red scooter and three young girls in rainbow headscarves make their way along the same street, laughing. The sound of their excited chatter runs up a crumbling wall and over the back of a miserable dog looking dispassionately through a pile of rubbish festering in the midday heat. Their laughter is carried down the road to where a man squats with his back to them, and on past a fruit stall on wheels, filled with small browning grapes. Then it evaporates.

Two streets away, the Jalaluddin Haqqani mosque sits basking like a lizard on a rock, its blue dome roof glinting in the sun.

Meanwhile indoors, fragments of lives are being shared over cups of tea, punctuated by loud slurping sounds, dark naswar-induced gobs hitting the bottom of a spittoon being passed around, and a languid bluebottle droning vacuously in the heat.

Some days ago, I set out to meet representatives of some of the major tribes in Khost (a province cradled in green, gently rocked by the cadence of crickets, and still defying the onset of autumn). I had the opportunity to chat to female school teachers and university students as well. Each has generously shared their time and stories.

I could tell you about the all-too familiar grievances, about foreign forces and night raids, and how people are adamant that security will not improve as long as corrupt government officials continue to exact bribes and people’s dignity at police check points or over tables in shabby provincial government offices.  About how insurgents menace people at dusk, threatening them for talking to the government and to the international military.

I could dwell on one man’s story in which his son was shot during a night raid and he and his other sons were beaten in front of their wives and children, about how their hands were bound and they were forced to walk barefoot all the way from Sabari district to the provincial centre, at which point they were handed over to the NDS and later to Bagram. About how his children still wake up screaming at night, haunted by memories from the blast that blew down their door on that cold night, and the nightmare that ensued. As he talked, he thumbed a string of well-worn prayer beads.

But you’ve heard it all before, it’s getting old; this record is well and truly broken. Sadly, those who could do something about this are not hearing these stories loudly enough, and don’t see that things might simply be getting worse because people feel powerless and are reeling from the abuse and humiliation at the hands of their captors (or liberators, it’s all the same).

Yet for all the scratches on this particular record, people are desperate to tell their stories. The stern unsmiling burly man sitting beside me this morning from Sabari, who purposefully sat on my side of the room to avoid having to make eye contact with a woman, softened after he’d told me what had happened and I expressed sympathy and said I was sorry about his son, and thanked me for listening.

It’s such a simple thing, to recognize when you’ve hurt someone and to say sorry, to publicly recognise that sometimes you end up arresting innocent people, wrongfully detaining them for months on end. Let people talk and grieve and recount their stories, let them feel they are being heard. These simple acts can’t bring people back or make up for destroyed families and homes; but I believe they are necessary steps and could have an immeasurable impact.

I read this recently, written shortly after the invasion of Iraq. I think it partly holds true here: “Entire tribes feel embarrassed that they supported the invasion, only to be left out in the cold by the coalition's myopic vision of how Iraq should be run. Never, ever underestimate a people's pride, no matter how broken they might be. It is very easy for Iraqis to hate Saddam and resent America for overstaying. Tap into people's dignity and they will do anything for you. Ignore it, and they won't lift a finger. Which is why, a Pakistani friend tells me, that what the U.S. needs most in Iraq is a strategy of "dehumiliation and re-dignification."  (Thomas Friedman, The Humiliation Factor, NY Times November 2003).

As I type, our little Soviet era helicopter is bumbling clumsily over clouds and rumpled beds of pale brown; these peaks are about to get a lot colder and will soon be covered in snow.

Instead, I want to tell you about some other interesting things I’ve heard this past week. For example, there are people wandering down echoing provincial government corridors with names that aren’t their own. Back during the Soviet-backed regimes, a certain number of children from each village or manteqa had to attend school. Certain more conservative, land-owning tribes were suspicious of this and did not want to expose their children to something they did not trust, which might get in the way of their Islamic instruction. So they asked people from poorer areas who did not own land, to instead send their children under false names to make up these quotas.  The Zadrans used to pay the Tanis and Zazis, for example,  to send their children to school under false, Zadran names. “I wish our fathers had realized the benefits of education”, a Mandozai elder tells me. “If I had got an education, I would be able to have a discussion with you in your own language”.

This also partly explains why certain districts were more pro-Khalq or pro-Parcham than others, which in turn explains why the Tani tribe in Khost, for example, hold more government positions today, and why other more conservative tribes feel marginalized.

The women I met told me that if the Taliban came back to power, they wouldn’t object to their daughters going to school. “Look at the former (mujaheddin) commanders now; before they opposed us going to school, but now they send their own daughters to the Shamshato camp schools set up by the ICRC. The Taliban might do the same and give some chances to women”. They might. They also might not.

I’m finishing this on a crisp evening in Gardez, in my old office. Beside me are the sweetest people in the world, my friends and former colleagues, who welcomed me back to the Southeast like a sister, and whose gentleness and humour I miss almost every day. It is soul-warming beyond words to know that tucked away in a little pocket of this isolated region, these kind people are here.