LITERARY | Journey Through the Hourglass
December 2011 | Humanitarianbazaar.org
As our sedan soared across the desert just north of Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan, back on my first journey there in 2004, my new acquaintance who was driving, Karim, and I could see golden sand dunes consume the road ahead. For some time nothing was visible in any direction except those dunes and the thinning stretch of grey hardball which would disappear under them and then reappear again.
Following tire tracks through a bending trough of sand we then spotted a lone, turbaned man having a terrible time peddling an old bicycle through the hour glass. We could not help but laugh to keep from crying for him. The morning sun was climbing quickly and the man was transporting some packages over a great distance in scorching heat. There were no settlements for at least ten kilometers in either direction, and those were abandoned settlements built for families displaced in the war.
I had met Karim, a stubbly middle-aged Uzbek with the round face and thin eyes of a Turkic farmer, back in Mazar-e-Sharif with the help of Leith, an American aid worker. Karim knew the road to Uzbekistan well because he had been trying to corner the market on driving Afghan businessmen to see refugee relatives on the other side of the border. But Karim knew little Russian, and no English, so I had to communicate with him through my Tarzan Persian, hand gestures, and smiles.
“Where is the road?” I asked finally when we had lost site of the bicyclist, and were losing the highway in the sand. He offered an unintelligible response, then simply:
“Very good, very good.” He wanted to reassure me. He knew the road. Finally, a sign of life? A demolished green shell of a Soviet personnel carrier floated in the sand like the skeletal remains of a camel which had died from drought.
“No problem,” Karim assured me.
I had come to Afghanistan in the summer of 2004. The journey was a month-long research venture I had undertaken with funds from Columbia to teach myself how to do investigative work in war zones. I was gathering data on how border security—obstructions like military checkpoints, visa regulations for day traders, tolls, banditry, and mined roads—affected poor families’ abilities to get to markets and find affordable foods. Although I had worked in post-war Bosnia, Croatia, and Azerbaijan before this, the Afghan trip would prove far more quixotic than the others.
Journeys like the one I was suffering through in central Asia were the core feature of the humanitarian aid worker’s life. The internationals spent a great deal of time updating passports, arranging visas, standing in lines, going through airline websites, standing awkwardly in the airport screening line, trying to explain to homeland security and customs why they had gift-wrapped packages from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, or other fronts on the so-called War on Terror. They languished in the duty-free, sipped espressos in the middle of the night, and were on the constant search for a neck brace that actually worked on a trans-oceanic flight.
In-country, both the internationals and the local aid workers endured the long, painfully everlasting journeys in cars through the countryside. There were new highways and air conditioned Landcruisers for many. But other aid workers had to endure driving off-road through rocky fields, deserts, or mud traps to get to the far away villages. Disasters struck those families living in the isolated settlements of their ancestors harder than anyone else. And we needed to reach them.
There were the stops to load supplies: extra fuel canisters, spare tires, satellite phone, spare food and water in case we were stranded, back packs full of clothes, reports, and music CDs, and of course the runaway bags—small satchels big enough for a laptop you took in case you had to ditch the car and get the Hell away in a hurry.
But there were also the grand journeys for R&R. While I usually took holidays in-country then did my wanderlust travels between gigs along the coast of Croatia, Turkey, into the Georgian Republic’s high mountains, or back home in New York or Cincinnati, others planned out a series of resort hops: Cairo, Sinai, Bangkok, Phuket, Bali, or Rio.
If you played your cards right you could land in a country like Indonesia where the gorgeous landscape wildflower tours, the orangutans, and the massages could be had on the weekends or even in the line of work. My lovely girlfriend Anna, a sweetheart New York social worker, took a gig working with street children in Java and managed to meet up with our grad school friends in Aceh, then go scuba diving off the coast of Meydan.
I had always been the kind of aid worker who traveled only to places I already felt intense passion and curiosity about. When I was planning my journey through Central Asia that spring, I longed masochistically to be lost in the desert. But once I was there I was reminded how terrifying and uncomfortable those journeys could be.
After flying to Uzbekistan that June and starting the research there, I hired a car, a Tajik businessman driving his niece home to the Tajikistan capital, Dushanbe. But a rainstorm washed away half a kilometer of a mountain pass just as we ascended toward it. Fortunately truck drivers stopped before the edge ahead, keeping anyone from plunging two miles down a ravine. Once I managed to get a plane to Dushanbe, I toured with an aid agency driver named Alijan the hunger-ravaged Tajik south, along the Afghan border.
A Spanish doctor named Emma showed me her Therapeutic Feeding center in the isolated town of Kulyab. Despite green cotton fields, there were twenty-eight babies and mothers in the ward who had not been able to afford food for so long that they had not been able to afford food for so long that they had turned to skeletal versions of their former selves. The Tajik mothers had pretty, worried faces, their shoulders like coat hangers holding up flower dresses which billowed empty with every breeze. The infants had sunken eyes and were too tired to emote, even to cry.
Landing in Kabul on Ariana Air during the lull in fighting between Taliban and combined Afghan and NATO forces, in that window of time during which only random rocket fire and car bombs elicited worry, I managed to handle the stress of the unknown well enough. That was primarily because I had shifted all of my worries about getting into the country to trying to figure out how I would get out.
Due to a visa delay weeks earlier I had two weeks before my Uzbek multi-entry visa would expire, getting a new one, and a new flight out of Uzbekistan while traveling cross-country through Tajikistan and Afghanistan seemed unlikely.
Somehow I had to get through site visits and interviews in Kabul, Kunduz, and Mazar-e-Sharif, and however closer to the Tajik border I could get and back to Uzbekistan in that time. My tight funding made it very hard to afford a replacement flight out of Kabul.
Leaving by road from my sites in the north and crossing the Soviet bridge which spanned the Amu-Darya River—the bridge which both sustained the Soviet invasion of the country and hosted their final evacuation, to Termez seemed the best option. But aid agencies and foot traffic rarely-used the bridge any more.
Uzbek anti-terror and anti-drug security, bolstered by US support, had created a fortress on the north side aiming to limit trade to the most established, and connected, truckers. From Tashkent, I had sent an email to the UN, pleading with them to add my name to crossing list. But I figured that, if I had to, I could bribe my way through that and the other ten military checkpoints on the highway back to Tashkent Airport.
Arriving in Kabul was quite pleasant. I had read so much about the city that it was a joy to finally see it, however destroyed and wasted it was. Although I took no pleasure in seeing the beggars and child salesmen on the street marching drone-like between unlikely philanthropists, or the rugged, bearded cart pullers tugging hundreds of pounds of cargo through criss-crossing car traffic in their bare feet, I did appreciate the grand potential of the desert metropolis.
Spending my days between Kabul University, aid agency compounds, and Chicken Street’s touristy book pillow and musket shops. I could not help but feel the US and NATO presence as a new era of colonialism. But over time, I imagined, when the common Afghan majority escapes both Western patronism and Taliban repression, Afghanistan would become a truly brilliant cultural mosaic in the spirit of Rumi.
During my time in Afghanistan I not only explored much of the capital Kabul and interviewed people working to cure hunger and security challenges in the region, but also managed to meet up with my grad school friend Kim for Thai food and a day-trip up through the historic Panjshir Valley where the ruling party had held out during the long Soviet occupation and Taliban period.
My friend Shaheen who had been working at Kabul University set me up with a clever and handsome driver named Mujtaba who was at a turbulent point in his life. His parents had arranged a girl for him to marry, but he loved another. As Mujtaba drove us past the Intercontinental Hotel on the city ridge, I came out of a deep trance and pointed to a sign a saw.
“Mujtaba, look! Turn here!”
Trapped in a cyclical debate in my head on whether I should risk going north without a host agency, I awoke from the daydream to see a placard that read: Kunduz Rehabilitation agency. An hour later, with Mujtaba more afraid I’d be kidnapped inside than I was, a young Pashtun man named Naveed assured that I would be able to visit their agency’s projects and stay with them near the Afghan-Tajik border. We shook and I left laughing about my combined luck and suicidal determination to Mujtaba.
“You must be careful up there,” he told me. “I can give you my friends’ contacts in Mazar. They can drive you to Kunduz…”
After the plane landed on a wide tan flat beneath a row of sharp high mountains, I stepped out into the most intense heat I had ever faced. I thought my forehead would burst into blisters. But I had a larger worry. I was arriving in an unstable Afghan town and didn’t know what my new hosts looked like.
The airport was a simple building forty minutes out of the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. I looked through the small cluster of men in pajamas and vests waiting by the building. One man had a baseball cap and waited close to another man.
“Jawed?” The sweet bald man in the baseball hat. “Hafez?” The younger prankster with a moustache. They smiled back at me.
“Daniel?”
Now there was another problem. On the plane, a man had told me that the main road between Mazar, where I had landed, and Kunduz, where I needed to travel, was heavily mined and impassable. With very little common language between us, I explained to Jawed and Hafez that we would have to take the long road to Kunduz. They agreed. We bought three ice-cold bottles of water from the airport kiosk and then piled into the roasting cabin of their rickety minivan.
We drove through Balkh, along desert flats, irrigated plantations, foothill villages at Kholm, and finally a dramatic gorge guarded by a pair of blown up Soviet armored personnel carriers.
I reflected on all the historical events which had taken place here: the British battles to conquer the frontiers of India, their loss of Afghanistan, the Soviet invasion and withdrawal, the Taliban take-over, and then the NATO-backed Northern Alliance victory just over two years earlier.
Many of the Tajiks who lived in this area had always been moderates who liked the Northern Alliance. But I wondered if among them there were Pashtuns or Arabs or others who hated Americans.
We pass through the gorge and the realities of travel kick back in. Where can one take a leak out here? Anywhere! What about food? Do they have roadside diners in Afghanistan? We found a country stop where a mother and son team served as rice with onions, raisins, and garbanzo beans. It was terrific.
But just as I got cozy with Jawed, Hafez, and the owner I caught sight of an old woman pulling water out of a filthy drainage channel. Her bucket held water so dense it was nearly mud. She took a drink, then caught me staring at her. Her scowl was piercing.
Perhaps I had come on this journey, not simply to discover new ways of helping impoverished Afghans survive war and hardship, but in some quest for middle-class American martyrdom. What I was really headed toward was one sentence in a Reuters dispatch, the same variety of historical footnote saved for British or Punjabi soldiers killed in an ambush in their first month on patrol in the 1890’s. No one knows their names.
When we reached Kunduz, we found the Kunduz Rehabilitation Agency office. They had never heard of me, nor had their co-worker, Naveed, called them from Kabul to let them know I was coming. But they invited me in regardless. They were a warm crew of independent thinkers. Although there were no women working for them, they seemed kind and flexible and I knew that if I were a woman everything would have been just fine.
Aqtash, a broad man with a soft beard and long eyelashes was the Deputy Director. I explained that I was here to interview people and visit sites related to the struggle to cure hunger amid security challenges. He gladly introduced me to his entire team and then took me with him in his car down the road to Khanabad where foreign aid was creating a new revival of irrigated farming.
By the time Karim and I drove into the sand dunes just northeast of Mazar-e-Sharif, the notion that what I was doing was historically significant and that my future was so short I needed not be concerned with it dissolved. Plans for return started to flood my mind. I began to imagine the nights of passion awaiting me in New York, delicious pad thai dinners, and Austin Powers films on video.
All of this, my future which now looked long and full, lie on the other side of this horizon of sand. But the road was disappearing. After all I had gone through, just as I grasped that I wanted to go home and live, that future was obscured. Karim could surely earn hefty cash for turning me over to the Taliban. Hell, once we were lost in the desert he might even wish to eat me.
“Very good, very good,” Karim assures me. “No problem.”
At last there it was. Civilization reappeared at Afghanistan’s northern border with Uzbekistan in the form of an industrial village. Now there were shrubs and homes and lines of trucks and dusty migrant hotels and smoky pilaf stands. The horizon was no longer a golden nothingness, but a hard break in the earth filled with grey water which flowed down to the West from the icy peaks of the Badakhshan Mountains.
The Afghan border patrolmen were shocked to see a lone western man like me coming toward the building, much less so at 7:30 in the morning. I paid Karim what he had asked, and a tip and sent him on his way. In a mix of Persian, Russian, and English, one of the border men tried to explain why the place was completely empty.
“You no come. This was no come. Americans no come.”
“Look,” I broke out. “I have an Uzbek visa. UN. I will go!”
He pointed to his watch. Then crossed his arms like a football referee would do to say “Off sides: Penalty. Ten yards. First down.”
“Nine o’clock.”
I looked around and realized why the place was vacant. The Uzbek side wouldn’t open for another hour and a half and, even so, only the known truckers were being let through after certifying their trucks had been searched for weapons and heroin. I was one of the only pedestrian crossers they had seen for days.
For pedestrian traders, there was nothing on the other side without the kind of money needed to pay a car to get to Termez, some ten kilometers from the crossing point.
I passed through and stood on the Afghan side of the bridge, literally in the void between countries. At first I stared down the length of the bridge at the befuddled Uzbek border patrolmen looking back at me.
But as the sun rose higher and heat deepened, I took time to study the grey water of the Amu-Darya flowing beneath the bridge, the Soviet-style border towers and fencing on both sides, and the few stragglers walking around outside of the fenced off area where I was.
Finally one of the Afghans waved me on and I walked, backpack and camera bag raised, across the bridge toward the end of my research venture.
The Uzbeks did not have my name on the UN list.
“No one crosses here these days,” the chief explained.
“Call the UN,” I ordered, somehow so afraid of being trapped out of state that I risked Uzbek jail. He called. Nothing. “call again. Please.”
Finally, the chief got a hold of the man I had registered with weeks earlier. Somehow my name hadn’t reached the local list. The guy didn’t believe I would really cross there. For a moment I worried the chief was just scaring me to extort a cash toll, but then he shrugged and let me go.
After ferrying my bags between the modern X-ray machines in the US-funded behemoth Uzbek border facility, I found a new taxi driver to pilot me to Termez. I had survived my journey. I could go home and publish my study.
When I arrived at the Termez bus station looking for a car going to Samarkand, the ancient city on the road to Tashkent. I fell into a circle of two men and a woman waiting for are more passenger to cover fuel costs.
But as I leaned against the car back I overheard them trading virulently anti-American stories. For some reason, still in survival mode, I pretended not to be American. Grasping quickly for something I could fake, I told them I was Bosnian.
Just then, a creepy, pineapple faced man with red eyes under black sunglasses showed up with a hefty duffle bag, hurriedly obscured the bag under others in the trunk, and agreed with the driver that they had better leave as quickly as possible.
“A foreigner?” the man asked the driver, referring to me.
“Yes, but don’t worry,” the driver smiled. “Maybe we can use him to get through the police checkpoints.”
Just then the woman next to me shot me a worried look, revealing her gold-capped teeth, and I knew my troubled trip was far from over.
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