I arrived at work this morning to be presented with a small camel. It’s stuffed, but it’s a camel nonetheless. To explain, the Afghan ritual greeting goes, slowly, like this:
Greeter: Salaam Aleikum
Respondent:Walaikum Salaam
G: Chitour Hastain? (Are you well?)
R: Chitour Asteem, Khoob Hastain? (I am fine, are you fine?)
G: Khoob Asteem, Sihat-e-shuma Chitour ast? (Yes, I’m fine, Everything is really fine with you?)
R: Tashakur, Shuma Khoobastan (Thanks, Really well)
G: Khana Kairat Ast? (And is your family/house well?)
R: Kho, Tashakur (Yes, Thank you)
At which point, the respondent repeats the last two questions. Then, after this is conducted at breathtaking pace for Afghanistan (about three solid minutes), the interrogator will ask again, “Shuma Khoobastan?” which in this case means, “Now that we’re through with the ritual, is everything really all right?” At this point, but not before, you can confess to serious illness, death, and other such news.
Unfortunately, during my first three months, I would say “Shatoorasten,” which means “You are a camel,” instead of “Chitour Asteem.”
Last night I trickled out of work at around 9:30 and wandered over to the U.N. guesthouse to meet my housemates for a little libation. We sat around the fireplace and chatted about the mechanics of setting up our new house (“Curtains? You were getting the curtains! I had to buy the carpets!”) but also about returning and life here in general.
Quite a few people have chosen not to come back. It’s somewhat crippling for our various programs, because figuring out how to get things done in Afghanistan takes a few months. There’s also the body of knowledge, the contacts, and the relationships that you lose. There’s no real resentment though—contrary to the picture painted in the New York Times a while back, life here isn’t a picnic, and everyone has regular moments of “What the hell am I doing here?” (I must admit to feeling slightly betrayed by Mr. Ignatieff, as I was hoping for a land full of frolicking young people, and I’m still looking hard for the frolics or the young people. …)
We expend a lot of emotional effort trying to replicate our lives at home in small ways. There’s a degree of alienation here that, even though the people are warm and welcoming, is hard to overcome—the physical, linguistic, and cultural environment is completely different. One of the most charming of these efforts was before the holidays when the Swedish ISAF held a Santa Lucia festival. Santa Lucia normally involves small children dressed in white and wreathed in candles singing Christmas carols in a small parade around an office. The Afghan version had burly blonde ISAF soldiers in white kurtas singing in deep bass voices—almost comical, but more touching. Most of the Swedish diplomatic staffers were teary.
Our former accommodation felt more like a barracks and less like a home, and I can’t wait to move in to our new house and throw dinner parties. I know it sounds slightly ridiculous—but to cook, have wine, get politely drunk, and just have a place to hang out with people without always being on-stage will be a huge stress relief. Whenever you’re in public there are always eyes on you, and you have to act as a “representative of the international community,” which is exhausting.
Work today was mostly meetings, but a little troublemaking. There are significant constraints, normally, on what I can do and say as an employee of the United Nations. In the coming months, however, I will be working at a ministry—as a result, I have spent most of the morning drafting terse and critical letters to people with whom I’d normally not be allowed to speak.
Most of what I am working on nowadays falls under the nebulous heading “capacity building.” Everyone has heard how Afghanistan has been decimated by 20 years of war, but most people don’t realize how this extends beyond physical destruction. It is rare that you would crave a bureaucracy, but that’s exactly what a lot of what my work over the next six months will be built around—helping a Ministry to develop the procedures and processes required to create policy and function as a ministry. The challenge and the fear for me is, again, making sure that this will be sustainable. It’s easy enough for me to sit and draft letters requesting or demanding greater cooperation; it’s much harder to make sure that I am working with counterpart staff closely so that this will happen after we leave. I need to ensure that I devote time to training, but there’s a lot of work and only so many hours in a day.
Thursday is technically a half-day here, so I managed to sneak out in the afternoon and play a little street football with neighborhood kids a few blocks from the office. The two sports of choice here are kite wars, which involves cutting down your opponent’s kite by way of the ground glass attached to your kite string, and football. I was graciously allowed to kite-fly once but lost the battle in about 30 seconds, resulting in hastily concealed disappointment and reclamation of the kite. They do, however, let us play football, and we like to think that this isn’t just because we sometimes buy them Cokes. As we played, we were watched by a group of girls who were working in the stalls nearby. They were all between 6 and 10 and seemed quite fascinated by the game but kept a healthy distance. When I walked back past this area an hour or so later, I happened to see into a courtyard through an open door and saw the same girls playing their own game inside.
