They decided it was winter today

Will: Winter is slowly settling on Kabul. The early mornings are crisp and clear but the aafternoon air is thick with smoke from four million people trying to stay warm. Women rifle through piles of used clothes on rickety wooden trolleys by the side of the road, looking for warm clothes to keep their children warm. Men warm their hands over roadside fires, clad in leather jackets with scarves pulled tight over their heads. It’s November and everyone knows that the worst is to come: toilets freezing, pipes bursting, diesel heaters leaking, wooden stoves smoking, muddy impassable streets, and a cold so intrusive that people measure time in terms of how many winters they have survived. But I love how new seasons are heralded by slight senses: the air stiffens, the ground grows hard and the leaves tremble on the trees. It is a gentle knocking at the door, a clearing of the throat, a whisper of arrival. The peacocks know what’s coming and have taken to sleeping in the wood shed.  People gather in the kitchen around cups of tea and the warmth of the stove. We came home from work today to find a bukhari installed in our room and plastic sheets covering the windows. I couldn’t help feeling a little annoyed. When you’re living communally it seems that certain things are decided for you. I’ve been enjoying the view from those windows since we moved up here last week. A sharp westerly ridge dominates the skyline. It must be 15,000 feet high and has received the first dusting of snow. Apparently the management decided it was winter today.

 

The bukhari is a large metal drum packed with sawdust which sits in the centre of the room and burns intensely for about three hours. It is a popular form of heating here for those who can afford it. Think Doctor Zhivago: antiquated, romantic, brutally hot, but not so good when the wind blows the smoke back down the stove pipe and you are forced to rip off the plastic and open all the windows. One of our staff has acquired a briquetter. He pours sawdust from our carpentry school into it and watches with boyish delight as warm biscuits of compressed sawdust are spewed out into plastic sacks. A dozen briquettes burn at the same heat as a whole barrel of sawdust and therefore represent a significant saving on fuel over the course of a four month winter.

 

Our building work in the old city will finish for the winter at the end of this week. It will be too cold for the cob walls to dry. We are busy finishing roofs and making each site weatherproof. There will be a small team of barfshui whose job it will be to clear the snow from the flat mud roofs and a team of engineers who will do emergency repairs to houses which are in danger of collapse. Some of the families I have been visiting in the old city have neither doors nor windows. We have protected the most vulnerable homes and are systematically upgrading the whole area. The plastic sheeting they pin up keeps the weather out but provides no insulation whatsoever. In a few weeks, families will gather around low tables called sandali to sit out the winter. They will light a fire under the table and pull rugs up over their knees. In contrast, Lucy and I have managed to find two old leather armchairs. We picked them up from the side of the road. There is a label that describes them as ‘executive easy chairs’ belonging to the American embassy on route to New York. I think they must have been mislaid in the haste of the American evacuation in 1979. We shall sit in these armchairs next to the bukhari, drink some tea, perhaps smoke a pipe, and imagine that we are back beside the roaring Bay Tree cottage fire in Ramsden.

 

Escape to kingfisher valley

Will: Lucy and I escaped into the hills at the weekend. Our starting point was Istalif, an old village nestling at the foot of the Koh-e-Daman mountains on the edge of the Hindu Kush range. We drove there on a road that was built in 1906 by King Habibullah to accommodate the first ever car in Afghanistan. The road heads north out of Kabul across the Shomali plain through vineyards and farms towards Charikar where a whole Gurkha regiment was slain in 1841. There are over a hundred varieties of grape in this region and the roadsides are piled high with boxes full of grapes waiting to be taken all over the country. Looking out across the plain, it is sometimes possible to catch a glimpse of an old sayagi khane: a mud built drying room in which grapes are suspended and dried by wind passing through long slits in the walls. Driving on, we saw men trying to hitch a lift with large triangular bags of cheese, dripping with water in an attempt to keep it fresh. Istalif has long been a popular destination for Kabulis seeking refuge from the city on a Friday. It is famed for its brilliant turquoise pottery and beautiful orchards of pistachio, almond, mulberry, fig, and pomegranate. But the bazaar is quiet now and much of the village lies abandoned following a particularly brutal Taliban offensive in 2001. Many of the potters fled to Kabul but some have returned and we have been working closely with them to promote and preserve this distinctive Afghan tradition.

 

We wound our way out of the village on autumnal lanes bounded by beautiful stone walls and ancient mud houses. The river tumbled over large rounded rocks and men made their way down from the hills to the village mosque for Friday prayers. Small boys cajoled donkeys along the path, dragging long poplar beams back to repair their roofs before winter.  Old men rode past on horses and women made their way downhill spinning wool as they went. We passed a young chap chopping up a large block of walnut for fire wood. He looked as if he had stepped out of a fairy tale. He wore a skullcap and a long brown tunic tied at the waist with a leather belt. We wouldn’t have been surprised to see his lunch wrapped in a handkerchief on the end of a stick. The path took us through mulberry groves where men were busy filling large sacks with golden leaves to use as kindling through the winter. A small man invited us into his small house, which sat astride a tumbling stream and functioned as both a mill and a hydro-electricity plant. We reached a large plane tree which stood at the junction of two valleys and had some tea. It started to snow and we decided to turn back. For the first time since arriving I sucked in fresh mountain air and filled my lungs. On the way down a bright flash of blue drew our attention to a kingfisher perched on a rock beside the river. When we passed the woodcutter he had barely made any progress but seemed perfectly happy. We arrived back in the village high souled and free. The potters prepared some lunch for us and we slept on toshaqs in the afternoon sun.  Kabul seemed a million miles away. We bought some baskets from the bazaar and made our way back to the city.

 

As kingfishers catch fire and dragonflies draw flame;

as tumbled over rim and roundy wells, stones ring;

like each tucked string tells,  each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal things does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying what I do is me: for that I came.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins 1844-89)

They decided it was winter today

Will: Winter is slowly settling on Kabul. The early mornings are crisp and clear but the aafternoon air is thick with smoke from four million people trying to stay warm. Women rifle through piles of used clothes on rickety wooden trolleys by the side of the road, looking for warm clothes to keep their children warm. Men warm their hands over roadside fires, clad in leather jackets with scarves pulled tight over their heads. It’s November and everyone knows that the worst is to come: toilets freezing, pipes bursting, diesel heaters leaking, wooden stoves smoking, muddy impassable streets, and a cold so intrusive that people measure time in terms of how many winters they have survived. But I love how new seasons are heralded by slight senses: the air stiffens, the ground grows hard and the leaves tremble on the trees. It is a gentle knocking at the door, a clearing of the throat, a whisper of arrival. The peacocks know what’s coming and have taken to sleeping in the wood shed.  People gather in the kitchen around cups of tea and the warmth of the stove. We came home from work today to find a bukhari installed in our room and plastic sheets covering the windows. I couldn’t help feeling a little annoyed. When you’re living communally it seems that certain things are decided for you. I’ve been enjoying the view from those windows since we moved up here last week. A sharp westerly ridge dominates the skyline. It must be 15,000 feet high and has received the first dusting of snow. Apparently the management decided it was winter today.

 

The bukhari is a large metal drum packed with sawdust which sits in the centre of the room and burns intensely for about three hours. It is a popular form of heating here for those who can afford it. Think Doctor Zhivago: antiquated, romantic, brutally hot, but not so good when the wind blows the smoke back down the stove pipe and you are forced to rip off the plastic and open all the windows. One of our staff has acquired a briquetter. He pours sawdust from our carpentry school into it and watches with boyish delight as warm biscuits of compressed sawdust are spewed out into plastic sacks. A dozen briquettes burn at the same heat as a whole barrel of sawdust and therefore represent a significant saving on fuel over the course of a four month winter.

 

Our building work in the old city will finish for the winter at the end of this week. It will be too cold for the cob walls to dry. We are busy finishing roofs and making each site weatherproof. There will be a small team of barfshui whose job it will be to clear the snow from the flat mud roofs and a team of engineers who will do emergency repairs to houses which are in danger of collapse. Some of the families I have been visiting in the old city have neither doors nor windows. We have protected the most vulnerable homes and are systematically upgrading the whole area. The plastic sheeting they pin up keeps the weather out but provides no insulation whatsoever. In a few weeks, families will gather around low tables called sandali to sit out the winter. They will light a fire under the table and pull rugs up over their knees. In contrast, Lucy and I have managed to find two old leather armchairs. We picked them up from the side of the road. There is a label that describes them as ‘executive easy chairs’ belonging to the American embassy on route to New York. I think they must have been mislaid in the haste of the American evacuation in 1979. We shall sit in these armchairs next to the bukhari, drink some tea, perhaps smoke a pipe, and imagine that we are back beside the roaring Bay Tree cottage fire in Ramsden. 

Tragedy and Comedy in Kabul

Will: Ancient Greeks used to tell the story of two philosophers. One came out of his front door every morning and roared with laughter. The world was so comical that he couldn’t help it. The other came out and burst into tears. The world was so full of sorrow that he couldn’t help it. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry this morning when a mother showed me a martyr’s photo of her son who had died recently; crushed by a falling wall whilst squatting over the loo. Comedy and tragedy thrive in Afghanistan, probably because there is so little order. Recent weeks have seen a spate of kidnappings and the murder of a friend’s friend. There has been a suicide bomb at the ministry of culture and friends of ours have left the country. 8.4 million Afghans are suffering from ‘chronic food insecurity’ caused by rising global food prices and a summer drought. Some of the ladies from our embroidery programme were beaten for having left the neighbourhood to have their eyes checked and one of my staff apparently received a death threat this morning for having shaken hands with a foreign man - me. Equally, I was presented with a parrot during a meeting this week and told by the headmaster of our school that he desperately needed a ‘reproduction room’ (for photocopying). In another meeting a man stated that a ‘secret bullet’ was what was needed to solve a particular voting problem.  I have tried to have a serious conversation with a man who had a chocolate cake stuck half way down his white beard and watched as one of my senior afghan colleagues gave an interview to an international agency saying how proud he was to work for the Turkish Foundation. Our armed guards spend most of their time trying to coax the Peacock down from the tower and my driver asked today if we had dinosaurs in England. But perhaps the funniest story is told by a friend of ours who saw a cart loaded so high with sacks of potatoes that the cart was upended and the poor old donkey suspended in mid air.  The cars grew tired of waiting and started to drive underneath the donkey until some of the cart’s cargo had been removed.