The Loss of My Friend

Things haven't been the same around home since My Friend left, a key staff member at my hotel. He was a vital component to interests near and dear to my heart, like breakfast. I don't really know what My Friend's real name is. There was a Japanese woman around for a few days who has been coming to Afghanistan since 1996, and one time she called him Hussaini, but I never heard him introduce himself as anything other than My Friend.
At first, none of us took My Friend's alleged departure to the south seriously. "He's been saying that for two years," Abdullah said. Still, I threatened to hobble him, and Ged and I discussed some sort of captivity plan. Eventually My Friend escaped anyway. As a former teacher, he had to fulfill several more contracts before he could receive his pension. They sent him to Kandahar along with ten other teachers, perhaps Helmand and Uruzgan to come. I haven't really been able to secure a breakfast since, and the days of two cups of coffee in the morning are long gone.



Above: My Friend gleefully shows us his plane ticket, as we all voice our disapproval. "I'll take a picture in case you get kidnapped," I offer. "Okay," My Friend says. "Thank you."

Foreigner Landscaping Techniques

A pond of fecal waste material, complete with decorative fountains, outside a military installation in Kandahar.

Photo complements of Paul Junior, reporting from Kandahar.

Goodbye, Wall!

The concrete wall I usually face when I walk outside was totally missing this morning. It was visually shocking, but I knew its disappearance was coming. The cranes had been working on it all night, removing the cement barriers that ran the length of the road, the same that hid virtually all the buildings in Kabul for security purposes.

Mustafa came into our sitting area when they first started to remove the wall yesterday afternoon. He said Karzai signed a deal with the Taliban and both sides were making concessions: no more suicide bombings, no more barriers. The old foreigners I live with all grumbled something like: "...grumble grumble....until the next suicide bombing....grumble grumble....," but I celebrated the peace agreement, because even fifteen minutes of peace agreement seemed better than no peace agreement, and I was looking forward to seeing what some of these buildings looked like after all.

I searched for some news on it later in the day, but there was nothing, and like most things here in Afghanistan, I had absolutely no idea if it was true or not.

An excerpt from the Listening Project, Afghanistan

“I was at a meeting with an NGO and I asked ‘Is the assistance going to the poorest?’ and no one answered.”
-Resident of Kabul

The REAL threat: hotel ghosts and migrant pigeons-

At home, I was still trying to rack up support for the filming of a new movie about the hotel. I needed a host for the segment. I thought about it every day when I went out onto the roof. I was smoking up to a pack a day, sometimes more, cleverly edging the dust out of my lungs with smoke, which was especially useful lately, as the dust had been swirling around us at an even more frenzied clip. I was watching some birds build a nest in the bathroom window down by my portion of the fourth floor. Between that and the ledge outside my bedroom, these pigeons had me surrounded with their habitat. My living space echoed with a persistent cooing at certain times of day.

In the old days, the Soviets used the building to hold, interrogate and torture potential enemies. Now it was my hotel. It was so goddamned haunted. A hotel employee had once seen an apparition so terrifying, he fired his gun at it and then fled the hotel, never to return. Although I had heard some impressive stories, I hadn’t seen much of anything too frightening, but then again, I was often too exhausted to humor any dead people in my down time. I was sleeping through everything: gunfire and explosions, pigeons, ghostly torture victims. The foreigners at work told me that as foreigners, we have a stamina expiration date of about 3 months in Afghanistan, and if you don’t take a vacation after that amount of time you usually wind up sick or crazy, or both. So I was pushing the envelope, but I wasn’t exhausted enough to sleep through the seismic tremors a few mornings ago, although I didn’t immediately identify them as earthquake material, instead pinning the shaking walls on my new, possibly frisky neighbors or their many lively children.

Immigrant Jirga

The Rhodesian gunsmith and I were sitting around, watching some lousy movie on cable as usual. He was naming all the different kinds of guns as they appeared in the movie and commenting on their comparative advantages.
The Danish botanist was depressed, lying on the couch. I knew he was depressed because a little bit earlier I had pointed in his direction and shouted,
“Look at him! He’s depressed!”
“I am,” he had confirmed. “Every day I think I’m going to get my visa extended.”

He was facing disappointment on a daily basis, reminiscent of the woes that had initially surrounded Paul Senior’s visa extension application, slowly torn in half before his very eyes at the Ministry of the Interior. The botanist was aiming for not only a visa extension but also some permits to extract vegetation from Afghanistan that he found relevant to his botanical research in some way. It all seemed highly unlikely to me given the track record of other foreigners I had witnessed before him but I was keeping my potentially negative mouth shut due to his already-descending depression. He was the third Danish expedition dispatched to the Wakhan Corridor. I think he said the last one was deployed about a hundred years ago.
But so far he was trapped in Kabul due to these aforementioned visa concerns, as were many others (c.r. the Swiss motorcyclist, until his eye had gotten so infected he had to go home because he was becoming a medical emergency and just the sight of him was starting to get a little bit sickening).

The next day, at the office, I went to print something, but when I tried to retrieve it, the printer was missing. I saw it later on, sitting in a wheelbarrow outside Building A.