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.