Recycling the Afghan Way

A curious thought occurred to me the other day - Afghanistan must be one of the most environmentally friendly nations in the world! Let's for a moment forget the 60 year old second-hand German trucks which chug through the city at night spurting out clouds of black fumes. And let's forget the overload of plastic bags which are obligatory to any purchase (not so different to the developed world) which end up flying around in the air. You see, many Afghans don't use rubbish bins. They just chuck things out of the window, the front door, straight on to the ground. Admittedly, this doesn't help to control the spread of disease or the aesthetic of the place. But what they do have is a automatic, natural recycling system! First of all, along comes an old man or woman, sometimes a child. They load the empty plastic containers into their sack for resale elsewhere in the city. They take out the pieces of old clothing and bits of rubber. Everything will be re-used. Next come the dogs to scavenge for old bones and vegetable scraps. When they have left, along comes the shepherd and his herd of fat-bottomed sheep and goats. Sometimes there are a couple of donkeys too. The rubbish heap is the herd's only source of food. They eat most of what is left, even some of the plastic bags. The shepherds spend their days taking their herds to the best 'rubbish spots' to be found around the city. Ultimately the sheep will become kebabs sold on street corners. What remains of the rubbish heap are a few cardboard containers and yes, the inevitable plastic bag that the goats passed by. These get trodden into the ground by the humans, animals and next load of rubbish to be left there...

Summer smells

What contrasts! I drove home the other day almost gagging at the smell of sewage that had been cleared from the drainage ditches, and left at the side of the road for the dogs and sheep to scavenge from. The hot air and sun are here to stay. They do great job of heating everything up so that for once my headscarf has become less of a hindrance and more of a useful weapon against those powerful smells. I then arrived home to the delicious scents of roses, irises and blossoms that pervade the fort courtyard. There are roses of many different varieties - each with their own unique colour and scent. The last couple of weeks have seen beautiful hot, sunny mornings which are followed by humid, stormy afternoons. I was teaching a lesson the other day when one of these storms broke over our heads. The electricity went out, hailstones flew in through the glass-less windows and the classroom was thrown into darkness. We did our best to keep the lesson going by the light of our mobile phones, but soon admitted defeat. When the torrential rains have passed over us, the sun comes back out again and heats up the land so that all the smells are heightened - grass, herbs, pine, blossoms, lilac.

Shifting Sands

I spent a few days recently preoccupied with thoughts about the concept of normality, and what it means. It is perhaps a sign of having been here now for eight months that there are many things which do not shock me anymore about Afghanistan. If I do see or hear something extraordinary, I find that I am quickly able to fit this new information into a relevant pigeonhole of thought about Afghan life. It seems that my perceptions of Afghanistan are more or less fixed now, but having a benchmark to work from, my ideas of what constitutes ‘normality’ are now being challenged.

What was normality? Well, I suppose that it was everything in the UK that I took for granted. It was children and teenagers surging in to school at 8.15 in the morning and then spilling out of the gates bang on 3.05 in the afternoon. It was the ability to drive 100 miles within about two hours with the guarantee that there would be smooth tarmac roads all the way there. It was the ability to have an almost instant connection to a phone line, electricity and gas. It is all the things that reflect a prosperous and developed nation, where systems work and things are fixed when they go wrong.

Perhaps one of the biggest tragedies of thirty years of conflict in a country is simply the way in which it pulls everything back, squashing what progress could have be made if there was peace. I have heard that back in the 1970s the Engineering Faculty of Kabul University was one of the best in the world. Thirty years on and the teachers are struggling to find desks and chairs for their classrooms. Glass in the windows is a luxury. Just think of the impact that this one faculty could have had on the current generation of young people here had it not been hindered by conflict!

So what is normality here? Well, it’s not smooth roads, children in school or regular connections to public utilities. It is young boys of no more than twelve years old selling crisps and chewing gum to students on campus at the University. It’s a horse and cart loaded with great piles of radishes and spring onions stuck in the rush hour traffic amongst hundreds of cars and lorries. It’s a young boy pushing an unlit cart up a steep and busy main road in the dark, cars rushing past him. And its men, women and children sitting on the floor of their one-room shop enjoying dinner by the light of a lantern.

Both ‘normalities’ are valid of course – one is the normality of a wealthy nation, the other is the normality of a war-torn nation many of whose population struggle to survive. But is it not true that our western normality is an abnormality? Almost half the world’s population live on less than $2.50 per day, like the librarian I met who earns $20 a month (not easy when petrol is $1/litre and enough bread for the family is about $1 a day) . The reality that I see here is the same as that of many nations in the world. Why am I saying all of this? Well, for me it has been a revelation, a shifting of my understanding. I’d really like to know what you think... Please do leave a comment!