Thinking about Kabul again

It's been quite a while since I've posted on this blog, but that doesn't mean that Kabul has gone away. The attack on the U.S. Embassy, for one thing, certainly gave me a kind of scare. It was never clear in the media reports exactly which building the Taliban were shooting from, but I've always assumed that it was the building up near Massoud Circle that I was told will someday be the Marriott Hotel of Kabul. A building that, for that very reason, seemed to be a source of great hope.

Then in another "you never leave your last post" moment (post being, in this case, the assignment, not the blog), I was able to join former Public Affairs Section colleagues to play Trivia at Tonic up the street. With great memories of the Red Tent on the Embassy compound and the fiercely competitive Trivia matches there.

And finally, an email from Ram, filmmaker, IT guy, and dedicated teacher. He was part of the International Writing Program group that came to Kabul in May and in between reading his own poetry, showing new techniques to film

students at Kabul University, and generally being the good guy that he is, he finished several video projects about the tour. I haven't yet seen the feature documentary, but here is a short video about the poet Nathalie Handal, with images of her workshops at Kabul University's English Department (here in the photo) and at the Education Faculty.

Bus(kashi)boys and poets

I'm not sure what happened to my good intentions to write every day, but I see it's been a couple of weeks since I touched fingers to keyboard. So the question is... do I start where I left off and maybe catch up... or should I just jump up to the present? Here's my solution, yet another of my favorite kind of choice that involves not making a decision: Busboys and Poets.

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."

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.