A Short Walk

Concentric Circles of Kabul

Emails back from NGOs wanting IT or web design help have come in, but
all too late in the game for me to do anything meaningful. I just got
two of them yesterday, but I'm leaving tomorrow and am now too busy
with other things.

These last few days in Kabul have been interesting for other reasons.
I've been running in different circles, meeting people who are,
functionally, in entirely different orbits. An American lawyer living
in Moscow who does contract work with the US embassy here a few times
per year. (He treated me to lunch at a fancy Indian restaurant and was
boggled by my stories of travelling here as a tourist.) An American
who went to high school here in the 1960s and has returned, after 40
years, to work with NGOs on rebuilding a country that he remembers as
being full of laughter, swimming pools, kite flying, etc.

Two nights ago, I spent the evening with two independent contractors
who've known each other for years. They worked together "on Kuwait"
with the Bechtel project there, capping and cleaning up some seven or
eight hundred burning oil wells, completing the project in something
like 8 months when the projected timeline was a number of years.
Listening to them reminisce for hours was a glimpse into a world I've
never seen.

Snapshot: "When I got the call (for Kuwait), I left the office with
only the clothes on my back. It was only a couple days after
liberation and the entire country was on fire, raining oil. Before I
left, they gave me a credit card with no limit and told me to get six
planes and take them to Kuwait. I knew nothing about airplanes but I
managed to figure it out and a day later I was underway with six
planes bound for Kuwait. The British Airways wreckage was still on the
runway there and the smoke was so thick that the pilots couldn't even
see the airport. We had to turn back and land on an island in the
gulf. Finally, a solution appeared and we ended up being guided into
the airport by using the head of a smart bomb -- they'd set up a
beacon on the runway and we let the guidance system of the smart bomb,
sitting there with us in the cockpit, guide us in to the airport. That
was only the beginning..."

Running the country, commandeering buildings, digging around cities
looking for live phone lines, race riots ended by planeloads of
commandos, developing chemical compounds to dump in the oil lagoons,
taking the oil to the top and the sediment to the bottom so the oil
could be siphoned off and sold, etc.

Later that night, I ended up at a fancy Indian restaurant here in
Kabul, the guest of an Afghan businessman (construction) who ordered a
little of everything on the menu. It was a nice change in palate and
the company was good.

---------

Molly is on her way back from Herat now and she and I will go to
Peshawar together tomorrow. She wanted someone to travel with and I'm
more than happy to have an English speaker to pass the time with. (And
especially her, as her last year of travel has been almost exactly
what I'd love to be doing.) I think the trip is about 10 hours or so.

I don't think I'll have any time to buy souveneirs in Peshawar so I'm
going to try to buy some today in Kabul. Unfortunately, everything is
about 10x as expensive here, both because I'm in Shahr-e Now (the
somewhat ritzy "New City") and because the only place in this
neighborhood to get "gifty" stuff is the dirty tourist trap known as
Chicken Street.

posted by daviduri @ 10:36 PM