What I do

Picture above: A carload of children and women in burkas make their way home after school in a taxi-cab in Kabul

8 May, 2007

Many people have asked me who I work for and what I actually do in Afghanistan. I work for a Paris-based non-governmental organization, or NGO, called the Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (ACTED). ACTED has been in Afghanistan for over thirteen years and is one of the largest implementing partners in the country. Initially all projects were "relief" oriented, but in line with ACTED's mandate, we primarily focus on the implementation of sustainable development projects that can be self-sustaining in the long run. Among our interventions (both relief and development) we do emergency relief for earthquakes, floods and returning refugees in the form of shelters as well as non-food items (NFIs); ACTED is also the largest facilitating partner for the World Bank funded National Solidarity Program (NSP) that aims to establish local Community Development Councils (CDCs) that will represent rural communities on their development needs and aim to prioritize and physically implement various projects once approved by ACTED and the World Bank, all of this is done under close guidance of expert engineers, provincial managers as well as expat staff. ACTED is also working with UNESCO to establish an Afghan cultural center under the auspice of ACTED's cultural branch, BACTRIA, to be located in the historical town of Mazar e-Sharif, home of the famed Blue Mosque.

My position with ACTED is that of Area Coordinator for Northern Afghanistan. This position will have me based in Mazar e-Sharif, and reporting directly to our Country Director in Kabul. At the moment it appears that I will oversee a team of approximately four expat staff and over three hundred local (or national) staff ranging from office-based finance and HR people, to field engineers and provincial managers.

I have had the pleasure to travel to some of our project sites in the north, but have not made it out west toward Mazar and plan to move up there on Saturday. The drive up from Kabul to Phuli Khumbri and then on to Kunduz in the northeast is beautiful across the majestic Hindukush mountains. (See First Impressions).

I just returned today from yet another trip up north where we visited with some of the beneficiaries of one of our shelter projects aim to provide shelter and community to returning refugees from neighboring countries such as Pakistan and Iran. These communities are considered to be extremely vulnerable with little or no hope of regaining their previous land, which have in most cases been annexed and integrated by families and communities that remained in the country during the recent wars. I will elaborate more on this project, which incidentally I will be managing, and provide some interesting images to give a better idea of the wealth of cultures and people of this nation.

If you are interested in more information about ACTED, may I suggest their official website: http://www.acted.org/. For specific information and some informational articles on our work in Afghanistan specifically, please see the ACTED Afghanistan reporting team's blog: Updates from Afghanistan.

The people I see on the Hindu Kush...

Photo right: breakfast of lamb kebabs, fresh bread and strong tea at the foot of the Hindu Kush.

Headed back over the pass. This time it is only myself, the driver and our HR local manager returning from vacation. It is an absolute magnificent day for a drive in die Hindu Kush. In any other situation, this could be a great trek on an adventure vacation that Chris and I would surely be first in line to sign up for. With something of a National Park feeling to it, the mountains rise up and pierce the bright blue sky.

Through the open windows on the backseat of the old Toyota with its rug-covered seats, I watch people go by as we crawl up to the top of the world at an angle surely a few degrees outside the normal road standard. The river changes lanes on the mountain as herders steer their cattle in green pastures on the left, while a group of turbaned men sit down a la Monet for a picnic edge-side.

Soviet-era tanks litter the hillside along with the green flags planted sporadically in memory of Northern Alliance soldiers who perished in these parts while fighting against the Taliban in the 1990s. All remnants of the impossible-to-forget recent history that only adds a thin layer on the disaster that is Afghanistan's past.

Photo left: A decorated truck emerge from one of the landslide tunnels with the 22,000 foot mountain tops in the background.

It is cool up here. A pleasant relief from the 36 degrees Celsius weather in Phuli Khumbri. The Toyota chuggs along past brightly painted long-haul trucks, so decorated I am told for protection, a tradition originating in Pakistan. The smells are many - over the driver's Super Seven cigarette smoke there is a strong rubber presence as the trucks make the hours-long descent in their lowest gear. Sweet-smelling soap of vehicles being washed road-side permeate my nostrils as I close my eyes and take it all in. There is still the dust. There is always dust. But not nearly as bad as it can be. We are almost to the top, past another group of men. The scent of hash trails them as they throw a glance in our direction, but only briefly.

This time of year is also the time when the Kuchis ("those who are on the move"), a nomadic tribe of Baluchi and Pashtu speaking tribes of Afghanistan are out in force. You can spot them easily across the pastures and hillsides. Simple little tents made of white canvas perched on traditional Afghan rugs and nothing else. Their brightly colored costume-like outfits turn the green fields into a paint palette of bright fuchsias, reds, oranges and blues. The men coax small herds of sheep roadside while women and children gather around a water source with a myriad of water jugs.

Chugg-chugg up the mountain. I am mesmerized by this place with the people from all over. Mongolians, Pakistani, Indian, Asian, Uzbek, Tajik...a world in a country. Being excluded from lunch based on my gender by a provincial politician who visited a refugee shelter site with us that afternoon, I suddenly realize that I am quite hungry...I start to look forward to dinner in one of the Kabul restaurants with Chris where we can talk about it all over a glass of wine.

Photo: Green pastures along the Salang Pass

First Impressions: Afghanistan

This from the backseat on my recent trip....

I have now been in-country for about 18-hours. Crammed in the back of a Toyta Land Cruiser circa presumably somewhere post-1987, we speed north from Kabul toward the town of Phuli Khumbri in Baghlan province, through the majestic Salang pass. It is not so much a highway as a slab of tarmac at times roughly the width of two lanes, that snake through a landscape composing mostly mud-type dwellings, farmland and hundreds of little shops with hanging bags of flour and sugar and bottles of warm Fanta.

It is abundantly clear from my back seat where the sun is punishing my right cheek, that the driving in fact poses the greatest threat to life and limb. Apart from the potholes that could swallow a motorcycle, we also share the surface with bicycles, donkey carts, amputee adolescents, kids pushing barrows, women in blue burkas, and men on tractors. As in the middle east, driving in Afghanistan should also be considered a contact sport, and treated with the utmost respect at all times. As our driver alternates between his forever-ringing mobile and the buzzing of the comms system in the cruiser, we go between a dodgy 110km (I know we have reached this speed every time the annoying ding-ding-ding alarm goes off), suspension wobbling around the unsuspecting bends, and very abrupt stoppages, mostly to navigate one of the incredibly high speed bumps (for which I am increasingly thankful), or simply to avoid the oncoming Corolla with lights now flashing. And as in the middle east, remember, you can always drive a car without a steering wheel, but you cannot ever, attempt to operate a vehicle sans horn.

The dust has formed a caked layer of insulation in my nose. My scarf provides some protection from the baking sun, while my white linen pants looks even more starkly white draped across the Afghan carpet that serves as a seat cover. We swerve for a vehicle of some sort, slam on the brakes for another bump, and straight ahead lie the absolutely majestic Hindokush mountain range, still adorned in snow from the long harsh winter endured this year. At the base of the mountain the driver stops at his favorite stop to pick up some sodas (Pepsi seems to be a favorite breakfast cereal for workaholic NGO-types). We hit the "road" again, and this time drive parallel to the river now in full flood after recent rains, unnecessarily augmented by the massive snowmelts. Everywhere the destruction is evident, washed out bridges, missing pieces of road. Men in turbans and bulging pilazzo pants are knee high in water collecting and breaking stones which they load into large wire-mesh cubes that line the side of the road, presumably to repair the broken road, and hopefully to provide some retainment for future floods.

The pass is beautiful though, with mud dwellings built directly into the walls and people making their way to and fro. Kids walk along the side of the road with their bright backpacks over black uniforms, on their way to school. I wonder who funded the road, with its tunnel-like structures to try and keep the integrity of the road in the most daring corners, I think it was the Japanese.

We arrive at our destination after the four hour journey. The meeting is in full swing. We are first brought to the base manager's office where the house manager serves us a breakfast of fresh flat bread and two fried eggs with lots of salt and pepper. Heaven. The coffee is still bad, black Nescafe can only go so far - we will have to find the coffee plunger and procure some descent coffee, or it is going to be a loooong six months. The meeting goes well, there are about ten expats and twenty-five Afghan staff, all long-time employees of the organizations with tons of experience. I learn a lot. Can almost navigate my way through most of the new flavor of alphabet soup I was exposed to like CDCs, PMs, PMUs, CDPs.... but much more to come. Oh, and my assigned based was changed from the sleepy, rural town of Kunduz to the historical town of Mazar i-Sharif. Stay tuned for a write-up on Mazar and more impressions from Afghanistan in a day or so.

Coming to Afghanistan

I have been in Afghanistan for exactly two days now, though it feels more like two months. I am in our office in Phuli Khumbri, a town where the road splits to go north west to Mazar i-Sharif, and northeast to Kunduz. I am here for the senior staff meeting of one of our largest programs, and this has given me an immediate jump into the work and the people. How immediate you ask?

Well, to give an idea of my travel schedule of the past week...I arrived Paris on Tuesday morning, had training Wednesday and Thursday and departed with my Afghan visa in hand on Friday afternoon. A 0200 arrival at Dubai international on Saturday morning, saw me navigate a very crowded and humid arrivals hall only to learn that there is no easy way to transfer to Terminal 2, rather it requires a taxi ride for the 10km or so to the other side of the airport. Inside Terminal 2 it reminded me of a small airport in any remote town. At least it was clean. There I spent the hours between 0200 and 0630 uncomfortably balancing on a coffee shop chair eating hummus and drinking coffee, before I could clear security after purchasing a one-way ticket from Kam Air to Kabul for $225.

A few more hours in a stuffy terminal coffee shop where the cups leak and the smoke ventilators don't work, and I boarded the plane with a large contingent of British Personal Security Details (PSDs) a few diplomats, a smattering of NGO-folks and a bunch of Afghans who must have come to Dubai to shop for their businesses, because not even I, the queen of large carry-ons, have ever packed a bag that was so heavy I could hardly move it.

The flight was uneventful, the food scary, and the coffee terrible. I dozed in and out of a trance-like sleep as I wondered who would eventually pick me up at the airport, since that was still up in the air due to the expected lock-down in Kabul at the time (read my piece: the Landing and the Lockdown). At my last discussion with Chris in Paris I finally gave him my country director's mobile number and asked him to sort it out with her since I knew I would have limited access to telecommunications for the next 24-hours. On approach I had a huge knot in my stomach as the mountain grew bigger and bigger in the window to my left. I must say, if I had my choice between landing with a local airline between the mountains surrounding Kabul, or flying with a twin-prop over Baghdad for the 20,000 foot spiral drop, I'll take the spiral - it doesn't involve anything we can fly into.

The arrivals hall was the usual absolute chaos as expats and nationals fought their way through passport control and the always-too-small baggage collection room to search for luggage convinced lost. In addition to the baggage-scramble, all the expats are required to complete a "foreigners registration card" which, I am told, one hands in when you leave the country, only to complete another one upon re-entry. No copy is made nor record kept that I could gather.

But can you imagine my joy when I saw the friendliest of faces in the parking lot when Chris came to collect me! Going on three months and three continents later, we meet again, in another "exotic destination". I got clearance from my country director to spend the night at his guesthouse, since we were not allowed to go up and back...with one condition, she would be picking me up the next morning at 0500 for a field trip to Phuli Khumbri, my current position, for a three-day intensive meeting. Yeah! No rest for the weary. And so, I give you "First Impressions: Afghanistan"