Our Little Neighbors

We decided to go for a short stroll outside our house to give you a glimpse of our lovely neighborhood. In a country where the average family has seven children, kids are everywhere and their little voices chirp constantly throughout the day.

In front of the gate of our house with our guard.


Landry plays ice cream man. The ice cream vendors usually have cute little jingles that they play as they pedal around the streets here, but one of them has the theme of the movie "Love Story" -- not the cheeriest ice cream music.

Popsicle girl enjoyed hamming it up for the camera.

A little neighborhood stroll -- a common sight around town.

Almost every evening and all day Friday (the Muslim holy day of Friday is the weekend here), we can sit in our yard and see dozens of kites flying in the air. It's mostly boys flying kites, at least on the streets. Here are three kites in the above picture, and below, one boy tries to launch his kite made of a simple plastic bag. It's not as easy as it looks -- my roommates have broken many a kite just trying to get them off the ground.

Home Sweet Home

We live in a two-home compound with about a dozen roommates, a lovely garden and two dear cats.

Landry's Sanity: Stop Motion Animation

Landry bought this Chinese-made doll set at a busy market in central Kabul. It was in a box labeled "Sumptuous Dinner." Click on the video link below to see how Landry busies himself at home in Kabul, where we're sometimes at a loss for entertainment around town.

Girls as Currency

My latest story stirred a lot of sentiment and an outpouring of generosity from dozens of readers wanting to help a teenage girl, Malia, who was given away in marriage because her father could not find the funds to pay back a loan of nine sheep.

Drug Widows

WIDOWS VILLAGE: While working near the Iranian border on a story about Afghan migrant laborers, I heard about a village that has hundreds of widows. Their husbands were killed during decades of war and strife, and by the latest plague to hit this village, drug smuggling. For lack of any other jobs in the area, the men in Bunyat turn to the lucrative, but extremely dangerous job of carrying drugs across the border into Iran. Several smugglers are killed each year.

Tales from Afghanistan

Some of my latest stories...

MIGRANTS DEPORTED: At one border checkpoint between Iran and Afghanistan, I met several Afghan migrant laborers who were being forcibly deported from Iran. Many complained of abuse at the hand of Iranian authorities _ one guy said he was beaten, thrown into the trunk of a car, then held at a detention center before being kicked out a week later.

WOMEN UNDER FIRE: Farida Nekzad began receiving menacing calls on her cell phone a half hour after arriving at the funeral of a fellow female journalist assassinated by gunmen. "'Daughter of America! We will kill you, just like we killed her,'" the caller told her as she stood near the maimed body of Zakia Zaki, the owner of a radio station north of Kabul. Part of Zaki's face was blown away by three attackers who entered her home and shot her seven times with pistol and automatic rifle fire in front of her 8-year-old son this month.

And a bright color story on BURQA FASHION: Some women have decided to doff their burqas for more comfortable, lightweight scarves, but many families still want their women covered _ to maintain the family honor, lest she is seen by a male stranger.

Tiles at Herat's Blue Mosque

Go West

In the western city of Herat.

A village on a plateau near the border with Iran.

Porters at the Afghan-Iran border wait to assist those coming home.

Going Native: My First Burqa

Warning:
Some may find the material below offensive,
in which case...
don't look.
Otherwise, click on image below to see larger version.

Climbing Day Trip

We went with some friends on a little day trip, about 40 minutes from Kabul, where we went on a short little walk along a river, had a picnic and then tried our climbing feet.

The Kabul Wall

Last week, we went on a one and half hour hike along the Kabul wall, which provides majestic views of the city in the valley below. Kabul is surrounded by mountains and its residents seem to have filled every square inch of the valley with buildings and houses -- most of them made of mud and thatch, which is why the city looks brown from above.

Note that I'm properly dressed -- bum covered with my long bittersweet brown blouse -- even for a hike. It was a warm day, but I kept the black scarf so that I could cover my hair when we descended into neighborhoods.
Along the way, we passed boys bringing water to their home. Donkeys are a common sight in Kabul, even on the streets below. Young boys and men will ride a donkey, urging it along with little kicks of their heels. Many homes lack plumbing and water, so Kabulis have to walk good distances to get their water supply.
Our roommate joined us on the hike, but stopped along the route to take photos... or was she knackered from too many cigarettes?
You cannot see it too clearly here, but we were disturbed to see Kabul covered by a thick, mucky haze. Sure, cars are always driving through a thick cloud of dust -- kind of like Pigpen on Charlie Brown -- and everything in our house is covered in a layer of dust despite Landry's weekly vacuum-cleaning raids.
As we descended into the valley again, we entered neighborhoods where more children did their daily chore of fetching water. Kids come from all the houses with their plastic buckets to the neighborhood source, where they pump the water. They then lug the buckets home -- with a donkey's help, if they're lucky.

Mulling Beauty: Universal or Relative?

I took a day trip to Jalalabad recently, about 45 minutes away by helicopter. I was fascinated by the view from this flying bus, which lifted off the ground and just hovered. It's a strange feeling for those accustomed to flights -- that association of speed build-up with lift off! Not so with a helicopter -- it can be just a still hover. The sound is so loud that I was lulled into a still, meditative state.

The landscape from Kabul to Jalalabad is breathtaking, with rolling green hills that change into gray boulder outcrops, then to a large river-carved gorge that resembles a mini Grand Canyon. My mind wrestled over the concepts of beauty and love -- universal or relative? Looking upon these sights, my heart told me universal. Remembering the women I've met and heard about -- beaten, killed by their families -- my mind says it must be relative.

Part of the trip was to witness opium poppy eradication -- Afghanistan is the largest producer of opium poppy in the world, with a crop of 6,700 tons last year, enough to make 670 tons of heroin. That's more than 90 percent of the world's supply and more than the world's addicts consume in a year.

Poppies are beautiful flowers, and with the vast fields of white and pink flowers around me, I wondered how difficult it was for the police and locals to go chopping them. The field of white flowers behind me in this photo are all poppies. The men behind my right shoulder are carrying out the dangerous task of eradication, much-loathed by the farmers and militants.

A young boy playing in the destroyed field over my left shoulder handed me this flower.

Passing time

Our friend Nico draws Landry.
Here's more of Nico's work.

Landry makes Alisa dolls.
(When we were apart for 3 weeks in January.)

Afghan alarm clock

Another boom wakes us up. I look at my clock: Exact same time as the earthquake. Synchronized quakes? Suicide bomb this time, on the other side of town near the Darul Aman palace. At least five dead.

Another Rude Awakening

Our bed shook, and I thought it was Landry tossing and turning. "What was that?" I got up and looked out the window, at which point we were shaken again. "Earthquake, of course! Let's go!" Landry said, grabbing my hand and running downstairs, outside into the yard. Our cook, the guards and drivers were all standing outside, waiting for the house to fall. Fortunately, it didn't.

6.2-magnitude quake, 260 kilometers (160 miles) northeast of Kabul. Here's a list of the world's earthquakes from the past week.

The King's Stables, Then and Now

King Zaher Shah's horse stables outside Kabul, 1968.

Now, after decades of war.

Out Around Town

Police help boy climb wall at new year celebration.

Afghan biker dude -- scarf, shalwar kameez, red rug on the seat.

Alisa in the great outdoors a few kilometers from Kabul.

Some Reading...

Afghan artifacts that had been protected at a museum-in-exile in Switzerland have returned to Kabul. Among the 1,400 items, a phallus once held by Alexander the Great. Click here to read about the Afghan artifacts that weren't looted.

March 8 was Women's Day, which is a big to-do in Afghanistan, but for many women here, life remains grim. Read here about a woman who married a man who stalked her and later became her abusive husband.

Afghans recently celebrated their new year with a ceremony that kind of resembles the U.S. Groundhog Day, only their superstition is based on the strength of wrestlers who hoist up a flag pole. Click here to learn about how erecting a flag pole can bring peace in Afghanistan.

Thunder Under a Blue Sky

Boom!!! That was the alarm clock, about 6:45 a.m.
Landry: What was that?
Me: I don't know.
Landry: Just thunder.
We tried to go back to sleep, but my sleepy eyes squinted at the sunlight coming through our window and a bright blue sky. "I don't think it's thunder." I rolled out of bed, went to talk to the cook downstairs, who pointed to the big cloud of an explosion outside _ a brown mushrooming cloud that dissipated as it rose into the sky over the mountains of Kabul.
Gunpowder explosion, officials said, in a poor part of Kabul. At least six were killed. Cause: unknown.

Recent Acquisitions

The works of Mohammed Akbar Salam.
Les peintures de Mohammed Akbar Salam.

Hi-Tech Afghan Gadgets

Afghan photographers use these heavy camera obscura to take official (passport-sized) photos on the streets of Kabul. This is Landry's first portrait, "Alisa 1920."

Suicide Bomb

A suicide bomber detonated himself just outside the U.S. air base in Bagram, killing more than 20 people, most of them Afghans who work on the base. Hundreds of villagers _ almost all men _ poured into the area to seek news of their relatives. One man ran up to the base entrance, crying, moaning and wringing his hands.

One woman ventured out of her home to search for her son, an employee on the base. I only saw maybe one or two other women that day, but was otherwise surrounded by men and boys.










Death toll figures ranged from three to more than 20. I saw a dozen bodies carried by shoulder or driven away from the base.













The area where the bomb blast happened is actually a busy market area, where Afghan workers line up every morning to go to work. Among the surprising sights that day, were these two young children who walked out of the area that journalists were initially forbidden from entering.

She was a bright little spot that appeared on an otherwise sad, muddy day in Bagram.

Playing in Snow, Afghan Style

Afghan children, I've found, are vicious. I met one young boy who offered me his snowball as a sort of friendly gift of ammunition. He had somehow managed to pack this snowball into a deadly baseball-sized ice rock. He smiled at me and pointed at it, proud of his technique.

During an outing in January, dear Landry was clobbered in a snowfight. Thank goodness his face was protected by his bushy beard... which still isn't long enough to satisfy the old Taliban rule. Under the Taliban, Landry would have been jailed until his beard grew to a fist's length.

The housemates went for a day of fun in the snow, which meant sitting on an innertube and hurling yourself down this hill. The brave housemates had also gone snowshoeing, even though this country is notorious for its landmines. One of them said that according to the Afghans, if the snow is deeper than 50 centimeters (20 inches), then the weight of an object with a large surface area (like a human being wearing tennis racket-sized snowshoes) is not enough to trigger a landmine.

It's all fun and games until you come home without a leg.

Happy Circus Children

We went to an outdoor performance by the circus children at their school on the outskirts of Kabul. Landry (in the above photo with the bandage on his left middle finger from the car accident) played a bout of tug-of-war, in which he pulled relentlessly on this elastiboy! After the show there was an announcement that one of the cute little girls, 6-year-old Fariha, will be one of 17 children touring in California in January and February 2008.

The visit to the circus made Landry so happy. He described it as the first time he had seen Afghan children here who were "épanouis," or "beaming" with a happiness that was pure and simple.

Another Glimpse of Afghanistan

My mission here is to paint the lives of the Afghan people -- my most recent stories are on the children and the artists. (Check out the links below to my stories and audio/photo essays.)

My colleague, Rafiq, said he was going to take pictures at a school that teaches children the circus arts. Here's the story.

For the arts package I did, Landry fowarded me a story he found about the Afghan arts on one of our favorite Japanese online mags. Through this article, I met one Afghan artist who introduced me to several others. The findings? What appears to be an Afghan art renaissance. I included with the story an online audio/photo tour of Afghanistan's National Gallery -- this could be your one and only chance to see this art collection, unless you decide to take a trip to Kabul!