What's on't telly?

The power just went out again, third time this evening. It came back on but I’m not sure if that’s city power or the hotel generator, they switch from one to the other as need dictates. The big problem is that all my wall plugs seem to have blown, so I can’t charge my phone or watch TV.

Which is a shame, really. I was half watching an Afghan version of “Deal or no deal”, and the lady with the headscarf had just finished a good round. She had the 1 and the 10 still there, but also 5000, 100,000 and 1,000,000. One million what I’m not exactly sure, but I assume Afs, which trade at 50:1 to the dollar.

So that’s not bad, really, $20,000 US dollars. The host had lifted the perspex box to reveal the button, then listened to the phone, then obviously strung things out a bit, then turned to the camera and proclaimed “After this message” or some such – even I could understand that!

So we cut to an ad for an energy drink, and then the power went out. So now I’ll never know. Did she take the money? Or did she play the odds, and try one more round?

An interesting point, but logical when you think of the way that Arabic and other related scripts are written, was that the 1 and the 10 were on the right hand side of the board, and the higher numbers to the left hand side. The bigger numbers were still at the bottom of each panel, though.

I didn’t get to see anyone actually open a box, so I don’t know whether women or men hold the little suitcases, or what they wear. Hopefully I get power back before the show is finished.

I’ve got my windows open as without the air conditioner it gets pretty sticky, pretty fast. We’ve been having some hot sunny weather, perfect for the beaches on the north shore of the Gentle Island, not so perfect for a big city with lots of construction. There are people on the sidewalk spraying hosepipes, trying to keep the dust down, and this morning I saw a policeman laughing as he nailed a passing cyclist with the backsplash. It’s good to see policemen laughing, even – especially? – those who carry guns.

At least there is battery power for the computer, so I can see what I’m doing as I type. I never did typing at school, so I have to look at the keyboard, and decide where to place the two or three fingers I use to peck at the letters.

I think they used to teach typing right after they had taught the ‘how to neatly gift wrap a box’ class, but my friends and I always missed them both as we were still doing the ‘why ask for directions, you’ll get there eventually” module of life skills.

So here I am, Sunday night in Kabul, waiting for the power to come on so I can see what the banker offered the contestant. There is a dull roar of helicopters in the distance, and closer I hear the call to prayer from the mosque. I contacted the front desk and they say they are sending someone to fix the fuse, but he’s not here yet. So I’ll open another window, and wonder who had the marvellous idea of selling 'Deal or no deal' to the Afghan market.

PS Later. The power is back, so I can now post this blog, but the show has finished and I won't be here next Sunday. Ah well, something to come back for, I suppose.

Street walking

At this point in our work we are desperately trying to finish all the tasks we have set ourselves. Our project has five components, and so we each get to spend hours trying to get our heads around alphabetical acronyms so beloved of development agencies – PMF, RBF, PIP – as well as the infamous Implementation Matrix. It was at about day 4 that I wished I hadn’t brought my light little notebook with me but rather a 30” mega laptop - I'm getting fed up with this tiny computer screen!

We’re become so busy that we no longer even leave the hotel unless we have to! We each sit in our rooms, or in a small open area on the second floor, and sometimes we congregate for meals. The sun is shining and the sky is blue, people are sitting in the garden enjoying the shade of the two big pine trees in the courtyard, but we survive on artificial light and the cooling power of the air conditioner.

Most days are the same, a bit like that film “Groundhog Day”, but recent days have been enlivened by two unusual events. First, someone decided that the restaurant here in the hotel is now closed at lunchtime. This was discovered when we went along to get lunch, so I had to go to Plan B.

Plan B meant getting my own lunch. For some strange reason, in my room I had a can of mackerel in oil, and a jar of olives. But I had no bread, and tinned mackerel without bread is like … well, nothing at all, really!

So I had to go out. This involved leaving the hotel and going past ‘our’ security team, then walking down our little street to a slightly bigger one. Here there is a barricade, with Afghan National Police on duty. They raise the barricade and let you through, and then you have to pick your way down the rutted slightly bigger street, past a row of shops (mainly hairdressers ["wedding preparation our special skill"] and barbers, as well as a small general store and a slightly larger so-called supermarket) and then across the main road to the bakery, to buy a round of naan.

My colleague Tony came with me and we made it across the road, soft-stepping between the cars like all the Afghans we've been watching - as one of my colleagues in Kosovo used to say, "you have to be one with the traffic" - and bought the bread, then back across the road safely. As we walked back down the middle-sized street Tony said, "hang on, I'll see if they have yoghurt", and disappeared into the general store. I waited outside. A man came out of the barber's shop and sat down on his steps. He looked at me, and proceeded (by mime and the odd Dari word I understood) to tell me I should come in to his shop and he would trim my beard and cut down my little tufts at the side of my head!

Of course I declined – it may have made a good story, but what would Paula at Blue Note say if I let someone else cut my hair? Nobody else has touched it since she cut it when I popped in the day before my interview for UPEI, back in 2008. I got the job, and she got a customer.

Tony got his yoghurt, and we kept walking, and in the supermarket I bought a cucumber and some oranges, then we came back to the hotel. The ANP opened the barrier to let us through, and as we entered the security team opened our bags to check what was inside, and gave us the usual pat down, but my naan cleared their scrutiny and I had a good lunch.

Second, after our meeting this morning, I needed to go to the bank and change some money, I also needed to buy some more credit for my Afghan phone, as I was down to my last 20 Afs (about 40 cents) and that wouldn’t give me too many calls.

“No problem!” said Jawed, our driver, “give me the money!”

So I gave him 500 Afs ($10) for the phone top-up, and US$50 for the bank, and suddenly we stopped on a street corner. Jawed whistled, and a man came out from under the shade of a tree where he had been sitting with friends. Moments later I had my phone card, and my 2500 Afs.

So there you have it - another exciting couple of days in Afghanistan!

By any other name

It’s amazing. Kabul in the early summer, and there are roses everywhere. They surround the fountain at the centre of the courtyard around which my hotel is constructed. They line the streets, and are resplendent on the roundabouts. Amid the dust of the city, hazy gritty air man-made through construction or swirling in as part of a sand storm, the roses bloom.

 

This is not a surprise, I suppose. After all, the word itself is traced back to Old Persian, from where it travelled – via Greek and then Oscan, an old Italianate language – to the Latin, rosa, and from there to French and then English. So this is a plant with flowers where I live and roots where I work!

In western European culture the rose is considered a temperamental plant, difficult to grow, and needing the endless hours of retirement before it can be properly cultivated. And yet in Kosovo, in 2001 after the Balkan wars, the first thing that public works employees did in Prishtina was to plant flower beds with roses. There were mounds of garbage piling up, the streets were rutted and torn by tanks or bombs, but first the roses bloomed.

And here in Kabul, in a city where uncertainty still reigns, the public works department is carefully planting and tending the roses.

These are not just municipal priorities. Along one of the roads which we drive on a fairly regular basis, I was delighted to see a series of garden centres. And there, in the front, were clay pots containing rose bushes. I would love to see a family there, selecting the best one for their garden, choosing the colour – yellow, red, white, gold – and scent – heavily perfumed, gentle, none- before deciding on the type – should this be a climber, or a shrub rose, or a rambler?

I have roses in my garden. In the back are there is a bed of rosa rugosa, the wild rose, all gangly from never having been properly pruned. I took the secateurs to them this spring, so hopefully they will fill out a little through the summer. We also have three of the climbing type, two newly planted. I agonized for hours over which to buy, reviewing a very fine catalogue sent by friends in Ottawa. They arrived a couple of weeks ago, and were prepped in on the night before I left, located to clamber up over the verandah of the back deck, entwined in the ancient honeysuckle that lingers there.

In the front garden out a rambler rose arches out over the culvert. It was there when we bought the house, and hasn’t flowered once. Last fall we cleared out all the surrounding growth of grasses and wild dock, so hopefully this year we shall have a display. Along the edge of the driveway we planted a hedge of cuttings, root stock taken from the pruned mess in the back. They had started to put up new shoots just before I left, so in a year or so there will be a fine fragrant hedge to greet visitors.

Along the main flower bed in front of the house are the bush roses, six of them – two an apricot-gold known as the Morden Blush, and two are Persian yellow, both sets flanking a pair of white roses.

I am, after all, a Yorkshireman!

As summer comes, and the Battle of Bosworth Field is remembered on 22 August, who can forget that day in 1485, just 527 years ago? On that day fell the last true king of England, Richard III, betrayed by the traitorous inaction of Percy (Early of Northumberland) and the traitorous opportunism of the Stanley’s from Norfolk. And, later, slandered by that scribbler from Stratford in his attempts to curry favour with Elizabeth, the Lancastrian upstart.

The Kosovars with whom I worked used to say “you don’t understand, we have a history, we remember the past!” To which I would reply – and so do the people of Yorkshire.

Another view on PNP

0330. I must be in Kabul. 

I woke up thinking about the PNP. I have no idea why.

The PNP (Provincial Nominee Program) is under some scrutiny right now, back home on PEI. I’m not sure of all the details, as most of what people (some people: others could not care at all) are upset about took place before we came to the Gentle Island. Still, it’s one of those stories that just doesn’t seem to want to go away.

As I pick up the news from the newspaper, television or radio, or listen to people in coffee shops and cafes, the essence of it appears that some people are reputed to have made personal gains from the PNP. There has been talk of calling in the Mounties (again), or having an inquiry, and recently a group of journalism students from Kings College (Halifax) published an expose (of sorts).

So far I have not seen anything that suggests that anyone did anything illegal. However, there appear to be instances where some people may have done something immoral.

That’s not a word we see very often these days. I use it here in the context that we sense that perhaps certain behaviours are not banned by law but are, nonetheless, not right.

This is a difficult concept. After all, what seems ‘not right’ to one person may be perfectly OK to another. It is when the collective we coalesce around a notion that something is ‘not right’ that the trouble starts.

The thing is, there is very little recourse except moral suasion to resolve such a situation. That is why I used the word ‘immoral’ earlier. What would we have people do – return the money?

If it is indeed determined that some people stretched the rules to the limit, without necessarily breaking them, then should that be a cause of cheer (“well done on finding that loophole!”) or derision (“looking after yourself again I see”). Again, this is something in the eye of the beholder.

Things are exacerbated when politics comes into play, especially on the Gentle Island. I remain convinced that the lack of deer or moose on PEI have required people to turn to other types of blood sport in order to satisfy those primal urges. And yet the collective we who may find something immoral or ‘not right’ are not necessarily the same collective we who will support Party A, B, C or D in the next election.

That is perhaps the essence of political acumen. If you can identify that which the collective we consider to be ‘not right’, and identity with it to the extent that you are seen to be the only voice which reflects that of the collective we, then you have a better chance of getting support on election day.

Perhaps.

But now it’s nearly 0430, and time I tried to go back to sleep. But I can’t get PNP out of my mind, and that’s sure not going to help me have a restful rest-of-the-night.

PNP. Hmmmm. What restful image does that conjure up?

I know … a photograph I took at Kew Gardens, London, on my way here.

PNP = Peacocks ‘N Pagodas! Now I'll sleep ...