Dear Friends, Googlers, and Stoppers-By,

My Mac was broken and I did not get it back for several months. In addition, it is way harder to sit at the computer with a baby crawling around. Finally, I have commitments that I need to fulfill before I blog.

I am getting my blog on as soon as I end my present commitments and will be able to better concentrate on online modes of communication and income-generation. Until then, please continue to read from the blogroll, and please do let me know of changes to your blog address, new blogs, and so on.

Happy web surfing.

I’ve moved to Cacambo.

There is a song by the late Muboraksho, a famous Tajik singer from Badakhshan, called “Chor Javon.”

It’s about four young men who, against the advice of their parents decide to go on a trip in wintertime. They are killed by an avalanche. The song has recently been covered by a rock group and I can’t stand the new version but it keeps running through my head as I think about what happened to my husband recently.

My husband works in a certain city in Afghanistan. Given the present climate there I’m not going to say which one, but in any case, he’s become well-known to the people there as a Tajik who will help other Tajiks (as in, people from Tajikistan, not Afghan Tajiks, since he is obligated to remain neutral in that respect).

Over the past several weeks, as you may know, Iran has been expelling thousands of Afghan refugees. It seems that anyone caught in the net without papers is summarily expelled, without the chance to so much as return to his apartment to get his papers.

Among the thousands were three Tajik teenagers who had lost their passports and had copies of their passports in their apartment. They had gone to Iran to engage in religious study at a madrassa and had only been there a couple of months. The police picked them out as non-Iranians on the street, and when they didn’t have their papers, they got put in the truck and driven to the border. They were dumped on the other side for UNHCR to deal with.

At least, I hope UNHCR was there. There have been a lot of deportations lately.

Somehow, they made it to near the border with Tajikistan. They hoped that there, their fellow Tajik border guards would let them across. However, the Amu Darya separates Tajikistan and Afghanistan, and the Afghans wouldn’t let them across to make their appeal.

They returned to the nearest Afghan city, and were directed by the police to my husband, who housed them and sent their papers by courier to the Tajik consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif. They hoped to get a letter to eventually return to Tajikistan.

When my husband made his weekly trip to Tajikistan, he told this story to his family. That was when he learned that one of the boys he gave shelter to was the grandson of the mullah who took care of his mother when she was orphaned as a child.

Update

The young people are back home. Their things have been sent (presumably by friends at the madrassa) Chinese faux Adidas gym bag after Chinese faux Adidas gym bag, across the border to Herat, over through Hazarajat to Kabul, through the Salang pass up to Kunduz, and finally, dragged by my husband on to the barge to cross the Amu Darya and get stuffed in a taxi up to Dushanbe, where they sit in our apartment waiting for some relative or other to pick them up.

Yay, The Economist

Tom from The Economist has been slumming around our humble corner of the blogosphere and he’s asked me to ask you to take a look at a new project they’re sponsoring: Project Red Stripe. Basically, the greedy capitalists want to steal your great ideas so that they can make money off them or get credit. In return, you get their everlasting gratefulness (possibly) and fame. Nonetheless, if you are like me and know that without such capitalists your ideas are never going to get past the stage where your mother tells you that you should go for it, this is very tempting.

So go to Project Red Stripe and help make the Internet a better place. Or more profitable. Or both.

Boo, Kleptocracy

Bref: Instead of selling electricity at reasonable prices to its citizens, which would merely enable it to pay government salaries etc., the Tajik government is selling electricity to Iran, The United States (in Afghanistan), the Afghan government, Uzbekistan, and possibly others in return for cold hard cash, which will presumably be used to buy more trips to Switzerland and other exotic presents for everybody’s favorite Kulobi, Emomali
Rahmanov.

Because of this, electricity has been rationed in the capital everywhere except in the center. They started by turning it off a few nights a week after eleven p.m. but it has since gone downhill and now we never get it after ten.

And One that Didn’t Make It into the Title

Coming Anarchy has a good link on. Too true, my friends, too true.

My husband is back in Afghanistan and I recently picked up a book about Afghanistan. My mother bought it some time ago and recently finished it. I don’t know whether her buying it had anything to do with my being there.

The book is The Places in Between by Rory Stewart. The guy spends his vacations walking around Asian countries and this book is about his walk from Herat to Kabul in early 2002.

The first thing that struck me when reading the book is how poorly Afghans come off. Although many reviewers did not seem to notice this (though the New York Times reviewer sort of did), I think that most Afghans, if they were to read the book, would call Mr. Stewart a liar.

Of course, they would be wrong. It was difficult for me to read all the hypocrisy (”Muslims are the most hospitable people; We are the most hospitable Muslims; now give me money to buy the dry crust of bread I am serving you…”) again since most of the time I was there I worked hard to block it out. When there, I constantly echoed the Afghans’ own mantra: Afghanistan is an extremely hospitable country, Afghanistan is an extremely hospitable country…

I repeated this although I was invited to about 10 times fewer homes in my two years there than my time in Russia and Tajikistan. A number of times I found myself, like Mr. Stewart, invoking Muslim hospitality in order to get the most modest concession (e.g. letting us drive through a village where we had sponsored a project) out of people. And unlike Stewart, I usually had something to offer and never came with a weapon.

I never entered a house in the former Soviet Union without having food shoved into my hands. I never left a Tajik home without food in my hands or in my stomach. In Tajikistan, if you refuse food, they give you something to walk out the door with, and will trick you into taking it if you refuse.

One suspects that many of the readers of The Places in Between will not understand the extent to which Stewart’s narrative condemns the Afghans he met, because they do not know what is the real tradition of Asian hospitality. They may not know that in Russia, where millions still live without land, electricity, or even more than $1.50 per day, that if you enter the house of a poor person, you risk plunging him into starvation because he really will give you his last piece of bread. If you so much look at someone’s coat, he will give it to you. They may not know that when Stewart comments on being refused entry to a house, he is basically condemning the owner of the house to hell- since hospitality is a must in the Muslim tradition.

Of course, part of it is Stewart’s fault. Rather than relying on strangers and normal people, poor people, he is forced by the situation and his own approach to rely on commanders and their lackeys- not the most generous or hospitable Afghans. He uses the old-fashioned tradition of getting letters of authority to go from one area to the next, so that he is always under someone’s protection.

In Afghanistan, this means he was always under some warlord’s protection. When you deal with butchers and mafia men, you have to expect to be surrounded by nasty people.

Whether he could have made it one kilometer on his own is another question, but I suspect that it is possible if only just. And I’m certain that if he had, he would have encountered an entirely different country- perhaps one full of people like the guards who begged him to stay with them when their master was out, who I’m sure would have fried him their last eggs, and borrowed money to feed him fresh bread.

I am sure of this because though I was invited into few houses, those people showed amazing kindness and generosity. And I was treated to the remnants of Asian hospitality at least once… when I complimented a colleague on her scarf, and she gave it to me, against all insistence and persuasion to make her keep it. It almost reminded me of Russia…