First kites

As you know, I've been thinking about Afghan kites, and I finally saw my first one. I was asked to go to the new building for the Voice of America and Radio Azadi, which is just a few minutes away from the Embassy. There, hanging on the back wall of the garden, were their very own Afghan kites!

So, following the speeches, the ribbon cutting, the trek up to the rooftop terrace, the views over the city, the snacks, and all that, I got my kite, neatly wrapped up in a cloth bag and ready to go. I don't have a picture for you, but soon Radio Azadi kites will be flying over DC.

New citizens

Some of my colleagues went to Kandahar Airfield for a naturalization ceremony for 50 U.S. servicemen who became U.S. citizens. It turns out that DOD actively supports non-citizen military members who want

Untitled, a photo by U.S Embassy Kabul Afghanistan on Flickr.

to become citizens, and the U.S. CIS official flew in from their regional office in Bangkok to administer the oath of citizenship. The folks in the picture above are among our newest citizens. I wasn't part of the contingent, but I thought it was pretty moving.

Earth Day at Kabul University

Kabul University is surprisingly green, especially when you see how dusty Kabul is, and even more when you learn that the campus was a battleground in the civil war here. But even if the campus buildings are a little worn, the grounds are inviting. So the University was a good place for Afghanistan's Earth Day commemoration.

There were speeches galore, and important people, and even more than a few TV cameras. But most impressive were the five women students from the University's Forestry Department who came over to talk to our Ambassador. You can see them on the Embassy's Flickr page. Good English, check. Obviously knowledgeable, check. Utterly confident that they were going to make an important contribution to their country. That's the sort of thing that makes you feel that there's hope.

How it all started

Over coffee, naturally.

A friendly coffee in the State Department's Foggy Bottom cafeteria with an old colleague turned into, "Can I tell my boss that you'd consider going to Kabul?" And then a phone call from the boss turned into, "We could really use you." Though I think that "you" was a euphemism for "someone" or even "anyone: help!"

I've all too often found my jobs, not exactly through networking, but rather through serendipity. I tell people, and it's nearly true, that I joined the Foreign Service because it was raining one Saturday morning in Brooklyn, so I took the Foreign Service exam in the main post office, rather than get wet. It is the absolute truth that I got my first Foreign Service posting, in Ivory Coast, because it was the available French-language assignment, I spoke French, and, having recently finished graduate school, I had little appetite for a year learning, say, Czech or Mongolian. And when I left the Foreign Service, sure I would never return to the State Department, a phone call inviting me to work on cultural exchanges with Iran, a land that had always been mysteriously attractive for me, was all it took to entice me back.

So it was natural that when Kabul came calling, I went willingly, entranced perhaps by the mythology of the Silk Road and the curiosity of a huge Embassy in a war zone. My boss, who had served in Iraq, wondered why I wanted to go; his boss thought it would be a great adventure and learning experience; his boss (there's no shortage of hierarchy where I work) worried about who would do my work. And Fidy said, "Go!"

But the truth is, I was sent on a mission. Not a political or evangelical mission; democratizing the world was far from this commander's orders. My mission was simple: "Bring back an Afghan kite!"

By way of a beginning

This is a beginning from the middle. With all good intentions, I had planned this to be a travel diary, or at least a teenager's journal of random notes, fears and aspirations. Instead, I've been in Kabul a full week already without a single word posted. So, let's start from the middle...

From the "hooch" - which everyone except me knew was the basic lodging offered to Embassy staff. When I'm polite, I tell my family it's a trailer - and it is, in a way, with what I imagine to be all the comforts of a modest mobile home: bed, dresser, desk, sink, toilet, shower, microwave plus a big flat screen TV, all provided by the Embassy. And really, it's fairly comfortable if small. The hot water works 24/7, the toilet flushes, there are thirty or more stations of cable television.

The truth is, though, that the hooch is not a trailer. It won't trail anything; it never had wheels; it will never know the joys of the open road. It is not an RV just waiting to set out for the back woods of Afghanistan.

The truth is, the hooch is a container, fixed up and reconstituted for human life. It is utilitarian, without any hope of having an emotional connection with its occupant. It exists in vast organized rows, never to be alone. It is meant to be temporary (and indeed, a couple of dozen of them disappeared from their site the other day). The hooch is the empty shell on the beach, occupied by the hermit crab but eventually abandoned.