KABUL, AFGHANISTAN—It was about 5 p.m., and I was struggling with jet-lag. Still, I was coherent enough to remember I had promised to call a new acquaintance. I fumbled for the oversized business card:
TheWashington Post
Pamela Constable
KABUL BUREAU CHIEF
Still groggy, I punched the number into my mobile.
“Hi, it’s Nathan …”
“Can you help me?” interrupted the voice on the other end. “I’m rescuing a dog. Meet me across the alley from your guesthouse at Chez Ana—they pronounce it shayzanna here—I’m with my driver and I’ll be there in 10 or 15 minutes.”
There was no time to argue. I dutifully dressed, put on my boots, and headed to the alley.
Constable’s car rolled up Passport Lane, a dusty alley in Kabul’s Shahr-e-Naw district that conceals some very smart guesthouses for foreigners. The passenger door opened, and out stepped a lean, sandy-haired woman in a blue linen blouse. She handed me an open can of tuna fish and strode purposefully toward Chez Ana, small green cellophane packet in hand.
Pamela Constable is on a mission: She is trying to launch Afghanistan’s first shelter for cats and dogs. The injured animal at Chez Ana is just one of her patients.
We entered the courtyard of Chez Ana. Like many of the guesthouses in Shahr-e-Naw, Chez Ana has a nondescript walled exterior that conceals a serene little garden.
A smiling dog bounded across the lawn and into Constable’s arms. He had dirty white fur with a few black patches, a soulful brown face, and a floppy ear. He came over to greet me.
“Hello, Kuchi!” said Constable. “We love you!”
We’re just in time, she explained. The poor dog had a deep, nasty bite on its rear and needed treatment.
Kuchi followed us over to the patio table. Constable settled into the wicker/rattan settee and emptied the contents of the packet: Tetracycline, anti-bacterial powder, and iodine. She briskly went to work.
First, she administered the antibiotic. She opened a packet of Tetracycline and poured it in the open tuna fish can, briskly mixing the medicine with the tuna.
“This is the magic stuff,” she said.
Kuchi—the name means nomad—had a deep, nasty wound on his rump, and Constable explained that we needed to hold the dog and keep him muzzled while we cleaned the gash and applied some antibacterial ointment. The coffee table was now the center of a bustling surgical theater. A staff member brought hot water; another Afghan friend of Constable’s arrived to help. Politely and assertively, she issued orders to the team.
“Can I borrow that?” She pointed to the cord on my small pocket digital camera. “We need to muzzle him so he doesn’t snap when we put on the ointment.”
I handed the cord over.
“I’m becoming shameless,” she laughed, describing a Post colleague who had innocently asked if there was anything he could bring when he arrived to help cover Afghanistan’s upcoming presidential elections.
“I told him [to bring] two leashes with collars and ear mite medicine,” she said. “People kind of get into the spirit of it, y’know?”
Constable seems possessed by that spirit. As the Post’s bureau chief for South Asia, she has a reputation for being a fearless reporter—filing from Afghanistan under the Taliban, embedded with the Marines in Fallujah.
But the shelter is her passion. She got the idea for opening Kabul’s first animal shelter a year ago—and since then, she has sunk a considerable amount of her own money into the project.
“I really wanted to do something,” she told me during a tour of the house, where a team of workers was refurbishing the shelter. “I started to investigate, and I realized it was going to be difficult and expensive and impractical, and there seemed to be many obstacles. And then, you know, I eventually just decided to do it anyway.”
The obstacles? Afghanistan’s nettlesome bureaucracy, for one thing. But a bigger hurdle is Afghanistan’s desperate poverty: It’s hard to convince people about the importance of animal welfare when it’s a struggle to feed your own family.
During my tour of the shelter, I watched Constable as she pored over a list of items the animal clinic would need with Dr. Mohammed Yasin, who will be the head veterinarian. She haggled expertly with a carpenter—he wanted 1,500 Afghanis (about $30) for some kennels he had built. She paid him 1,000 and promised another 250.
Through Constable’s translator, I asked Yasin if he expected Afghans to import the habit of keeping pets.
“At this time, most Afghans don’t have food, and they are very poor. They cannot take care of their own families,” he said. “So how is it possible for them to take care of animals like dogs and cats?”
Curious, I asked Constable who in Kabul would adopt animals from the shelter.
“You,” she said, meaning journalists, relief workers, and other foreign do-gooders. As with so many things, it comes down to politics.
“If this election is a success, the flow of foreign and Afghan foreigners—Afghan returnees from abroad—is going to intensify,” she said. “And there’s going to be an increasing population of … the kind of people that like pets.”
During the operation to save Kuchi, Constable laughed as she looked at the medicine cluttering the Chez Ana coffee table.
“We’re ruining their table!” she said.
It was time for Kuchi to get his rump soaped down. I hold the leash around his muzzle. The thought flashes through my head, briefly: Am I risking rabies for Constable’s mission?
Kuchi squirmed under the soapy water, trying to snap at my hand. I volunteered to fetch a pair of thick leather gloves from my room. Kuchi ran out ahead—the courtyard door was open, and a wild chase ensued down Passport Lane: two weedy Afghan men and one clumsy American trying to catch a dog. The guard at the Gandamack Lodge, pump-action shotgun in hand, looked on amused.
When Kuchi was back in his cage, Constable appraised the situation: The dog’s wound is still not clean, but he has ingested antibiotic.
“Semi-botched, she says. “But it’s better than nothing.”
