If you know Washington, you know that the hip cafe/bookstore/poetry reading place is Busboys and Poets. Now it's a chain of three, though obviously the original on U Street is the hip one, and neither of the others is here in Kabul. But Busboys and Poets, as I will explain, are the bookends of the past days.
Sure, it should be Bus(kashi)boys. Buzkashi is (as I noted recently when editing a post that hasn't yet appeared on Dipnote) an exciting sport played throughout Central Asia that involves horsemen fighting over a goat carcass, which they try to bring to a goal area at one end of a field. (Stay tuned for a photo.) And I recently spent a Sunday at the buzkashi field with a group from the Wyoming-based organization Vista 360 watching a buzkashi match. Vista 360 is an NGO that promotes exchanges among rural people and mountain people in different countries and assists in economic development projects, especially marketing of traditional handicrafts. They've worked extensively in Kyrgyzstan so Afghanistan is a logical next point. So we had Gail the cowboy-poet and Linda the horse-trekker-musician meeting with Afghan chapandaz (horsemen) and traditional culture organizers and the like.
And poets: I've spent the last several days with my old friend Chris Merrill, director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and a group of writers from the program. We've traveled all over Kabul doing writing workshops for students at Kabul University and other educational institutions and readings with Afghan poets. The enthusiasm for their visit was palpable. As one young Afghan writer said, "After ten years of soldiers, it's about time you brought us poets."
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