May 14 and 15

NOTE: These posts were written on the day indicated but I didn’t have internet until just now. If you can make it all the way through them, enjoy.

Friday, May 14

Last night, at dinner, after about thirty minutes of being the only non-Dari speaker at a table full of 10 or 12 of them, it turned out that the guy immediately to my right and immediately across from me both spoke great English. The one across from me, Mohammed, tutors AKF staff in English and the one to my right, Abdul Nasir (who, funnily enough, had better English) teaches IT skills to AKF staff. They both grew up in Pakistan, I assume as refugees although I didn’t ask. Anyway, they were both extremely friendly and engaging. The conversation ended up running for two and a half hours; we talked about everything from the 9/11 conspiracy theory that the US government did it (apparently quite widely accepted in Pakistan) to homeopathy to health care reform. The guy to my right had studied homeopathy in Pakistan. The internet is an amazing thing. At any rate, it was a really stimulating conversation.

I slept pretty well and woke up at the entirely reasonable hour of 7 AM. Breakfast was pretty plain, even by Afghan standards: flat bread and honey and Nescafe. Then Iqbal came by and we were off to see some School Emergency Response Team (SERT) practice sessions, first at Ishkashim Girls’ School and then at a coed school at a small village about 30 minutes away. Basically, what happens in the drills is that everyone assembles as if they were at school (today is Friday, weekend here) and then a school leader calls out through a megaphone that there’s been a disaster. Everyone assembles in their various teams –information, logistics, search and rescue, first aid– and snaps into action. The search and rescue teams go into a classroom that has been upturned for the purpose and finds someone lying on the ground. Some of the members have shovels and picks in case they need to get something heavy off. They put the “victim” on a stretcher and carry them outside to the waiting first aid team, which does a quick triage and then applies disinfectant and bandages and so on. Once their done, they carry the body to the logistics team, which has arranged for a vehicle to take the victim to the clinic. The information team is running around recording everything: age of victim, types of injuries, etc.

The girls had learned much earlier, under CBDRR I and practiced a lot more, so they were quite impressively quick and well-organized. The coed school had just been trained, under the DIPECHO grant. So they were a bit more discombobulated, but had a couple of very good actors as “victims.”

We took a quick detour to a craft shop of items made by hand by materials found in the hills around here (lots of semiprecious stones) and then I got dropped back off at the guest house for lunch.

After lunch, we piled back in the Land Cruiser and drove off into the Wakhan Valley. It’s dry, dusty and rocky. Even the cultivated land is full of rocks. The people up here are subsistence farmers and shepherds for the most part; although AKF has recently started to help some people turn their houses into guest houses (basically bed and breakfasts) for adventuresome tourists. Apparently this is starting to catch on. Anyway, our ultimate destination was the first major village in the Corridor, about 60km (2 hours) from Ishkashim. There we saw a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) demonstration of a more complex emergency: earthquake plus rock fall. This team had drilled quite a lot and was very impressive and fast. We also saw a mitigation project there, a flood retention wall built entirely by hand from local materials.

After each drill and visit, Iqbal introduced me to the assembled people and we had a chance to thank each other: them to Iqbal and me basically for caring and helping them learn things that have made helped them enormously, and me to them for allowing me to visit and providing me with hope and encouragement that the work I do in an office in DC actually makes a difference somewhere. It hit home these past couple of days why field visits are so important: Our offices in the US are so far removed from the purpose of our work, and that can make it difficult to find motivation and easy to get cynical or discouraged. But coming out here, seeing everything that I’ve read and written about actually happen, is just an amazing experience. It’s also quite humbling to watch Iqbal and the other staff here. Not to take away from what I do at work, because without that the rest wouldn’t be possible, but what I got to see today was the really important part of the whole chain. Very cool.

Hopefully I’ll get to continue my conversation with Mohammed and Abdul Nasir tonight at and after dinner, and then tomorrow it’s back to Faizabad. So much time in the car for such a short trip, but it was worth every second, every jolt as we crossed a stream or shuddered across some rocks.

Oh, and rest assured: there are photos and videos of everything.

Saturday, May 15

So last night, sure enough, the conversation picked up where it had left off with my new friends. We ate dinner and then watched a bunch of TV –Korean soap operas translated into Persian and censored (women’s bare legs, arms, and anything below the collarbone), Afghan Idol (what a trip that was), Al Jazeera and BBC in English– and just kept up a patter the whole time. A bunch of the other men at the guest house joined and it was just a “nice time,” as Mohammed kept saying.

This morning, woke up, ate, packed, and then after some goodbyes to Iqbal, Mohammed and Abdul Nasir, it was off to Faizabad. Didn’t take as many pictures this time, but it was surprising just how different the view was A) from the other side of the car and B) from the other direction. Pics would generally have been the same, though. But we crossed the place where the road had been completely washed out utterly without incident or even my noticing it. I was kind of disappointed, to be honest, haha. The trip was shorter, 6.5 hours on the dot, and after a quick lunch here I am back in a bedroom at the FOCUS guest house. Gonna try to get some exercise in a little bit, the thought of how out of shape my already-out-of-shape self will be when I get home is mildly depressing. Oh, and take a shower. No running water in Ishkashim. Tomorrow it’s back to Kabul around mid-day. My flight is scheduled for noon but we’ll see…