Plowing my way through Aghanistan

...or the video I shot in Afghanistan, that is. Am pressing to get a short piece up.  So much to choose from, 45 hours of great interviews, gorgeous landscapes, startling street shots, driving across the Hindu Kush! More coming, but for now, here's a teaser clip from a challenge by a friend to describe Afghanistan in one minute.


12/12/08

FUNNIEST THING i've seen in a long time!

omg!
she is hi-larious!


The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

Subdued, Sub-Dude, or, being a woman in Afghanistan

How to even express what it's like to be a woman in Afghanistan... I am at a loss. A complete loss.
4/13/08 1:38am

K-K-K-Kabul!

Who knew it would be so dreary, cold and rainy in Afghanistan? I am not be the most ignorant American, yet I feel I am representing us as a whole quite well in that regard; lots and lots of things I didn't know before I came. Here are a few:

1. Afghanistan is cold and rainy a LOT in springtime
2. Kabul is 6,000 feet above sea level - which doesn't mean elevation sickness but it ain't nuthin!
3. Kabul is located at the foot of the foothills of the Hindu Kush, a steep, snow-capped, jagged range in the Himalaya (you can see them from the city, incredible view!)
4. in 2002, Kabul had a population of 1 million; current population is approx. 4 million (mostly returning refugees, mainly from Pakistan, where they fled during the Taliban occupation)
5. There are 2,000 internationals in Kabul working in NGO's or independently as part of the rebuilding effort
And finally,
6. The whole situation of women here in Afghanistan BLOWS! (Okay, I DID know that before I came here, but having been here for a week and a half and having to try to live by these stupid, oppressive, de-humanizing rules has given me an opportunity to experience firsthand and see for myself that these rules are, in fact, BULLSHIT!

There, I said it.

More on everything here later.

Kabul Day 3 (or is it 4?)

...how long have I been here?

I have a tendency to get lost in time anyway, but here it seems impossible to keep track. We are staying at Turquoise Mountain Foundation, which is housed in a walled-in compound behind the old British Embassy (bombed out in the war). There is a 19th century fort (not 14th century, as we'd previously thought!) which is being restored, as well as gardens and classrooms where they are teaching classes in pottery, calligraphy and woodworking. It is beautiful and quiet, friendly with mostly Brits living here - being here seems more like camp than being in a country ravaged by war for thirty years.

My first day here I was taken to Murad Khane, a bazaar in an old section of Kabul which was destroyed. TMF is restoring and rebuilding it, and has a clinic there, a school and an arts program for kids.

I am helping my host Jenny Hartley with an oral history documentary she is making. She has surveyed households in the area and found the oldest members of the community to interview them. She told me that the life expectancy for both men and women in Afghanistan is 40-something years, so a really old person here might be in their 60's. On this day, I shot an interview with an 87-year old man. He was beautiful!

Then I shot the arts program for kids - !!! Some of the kids came from the school in Murad Khane, but many just came off the street in the bazaar. So sweet to see them rush in, eager to cut and paste and paint. The culture here doesn't really encourage creative self-expression just for the sake of it, so this is the first time many of these kids have done anything like this - potato stamps! They have gotten to know Jenny and her colleagues, and when they see her in the bazaar they run up and ask, "When do we get to come and make a mess again?" I will try to post a clip of these sweet-faced, wide-eyed kids grappling with glue-sticks in this mud-walled house.

In an unexpected twist, Adam had to stay back at the compound (after all the preparation we had about how I wouldn't be able to do as much, and the gender roles here!) and the next day was Friday, which is a weekend here, and it poured down rain as well, so we stayed here all day except for a quick trip to the local market around the corner. By yesterday, Adam was raging with compound fever; the sun came out and it was actually WARM, so we went to Chicken Street with Fatma, an Afghan woman who works at TMF and speaks perfect English.

After all the warnings about dress code and behaviour, I ended up wearing jeans with a Kurta (long shirt - women must ALWAYS always cover their butts here) and a fleece hoodie with a scarf to wrap around my head. I was wearing Jenny's duck boots to navigate the thick, gooey mud and puddle-filled streets. It felt so good to wear jeans! I was relieved to have been with western women and see how they deal with the dress code - I was able to cobble this outfit together that felt like I was being myself while still respecting the local culture. I mean, it's not like I was going to fool anyone into thinking I am a local, so why not embrace my American self?

I repeatedly grilling the folks at TMF about how to behave here; what to wear, where to look - men can't look at women, but can I look at people? Not sure where the boundaries are - (this isn't an area I've particularly excelled at anyway, but here I'm REALLY clueless!) but here it's more than just social etiquette, it might be a matter of personal safety! After all that, I felt pretty safe walking around, shooting everything (a surprisingly small number of people didn't want to be filmed!) and being myself, albeit a slightly toned-down version.

There's so many incredible stories here - amazing people doing extraordinary things in extreme contions - it's beyond kid-in-a-candy-store for shooting and writing. I've said it before, but it bears repeating - there's lots of horrible, awful things happening here, but there's also lots of amazing, beautiful things happening here - it's a very inspiring time here in a lot of ways. Most Americans I know, educated and well-read as they may be, are clueless about what it's like here, what is really happening. I am psyched to be here to see for myself, and am hoping to capture some of the inspiration to bring back to America.

Electricity is even worse here than India, so hopefully the gods of power will shine on us and I can get a clip up soon!

Good Morning Afghanistan!!

We arrived in Kabul yesterday afternoon. We are in Afghanistan!

We flew on the Afghan airline Ariana Airlines, “the friendliest way to fly to Afghanistan.” But the 2.5 hr flight from Delhi clarified two things – why Ariana was half the price of the other airlines, and why it’s nicknamed “Scary”ana airlines (a moniker we heard shortly after purchasing our tickets.) We were also told, shortly AFTER we had bought our tickets, that the reason Ariana isn’t allowed to land in Europe is because they don’t have a regular maintenance schedule or don’t maintain their planes, or something. Yikes!

On the plane I noticed a few interesting things: one, that all the seat belts were different – Adam’s was an old Pan Am seat belt, with the classic 70’s emblem on it. Mine was from another airline. Somehow the realization that various parts of our plane were cobbled together from recycled bits of 30-year old airplanes didn’t really comfort me, particularly as we hit some very rocky turbulence crossing the mountains over Pakistan.

I was the only blonde on the plane, and the only American woman. None of the men looked at me, not even a sideways glance - not even that thing that guys do when they don’t want you to know they are looking at you, that sort of quick little flick-glance thing. It was quite interesting, made me feel almost invisible, except for the women who stared at me unabashedly.

The view from the plane was almost completely brown, even the mountains. which were steep and a little too close to our window for my preference. It was an overcast day in Kabul, lovely and cool after the smothering heat of Delhi.

We were met at the airport by Conrad, an American who is working at Turquoise Mountain Foundation as Rory Stewart’s personal assistant. I still haven’t finished “The Places In Between,” Rory’s book about his walk across Afghanistan in 2002. It’s a great story and well-written, but who’s got time to read? He is arriving here tomorrow and while I doubt it’ll come up, I wish I was more prepared.

What great luck to have Conrad with us –he’s been living here for ten months and speaks Dari (I have now learned how to say hello and thank you, but that doesn’t help much in immigration). He ushered us through the tourist registration process, chatting with the official in Dari and making the whole process seem easy and friendly.

We easily found the TMF driver in the small, sparse parking lot. What struck me was how quiet it was, especially after the constant cacophony of India. We’d been told that the most dangerous part of Kabul is the road between the airport and the city, but somehow I’d forgotten about that, feeling so comfortable with Conrad and the car and the whole thing. I’d already pulled my camera out, shooting the landscape when I saw the roadblock. A couple trucks and some men in uniform with assault rifles were stopping traffic on both sides of the road. That was a little worrisome, but not nearly so much as the next moment when Conrad said he didn’t recognize the uniforms they were wearing. Hm. At the Delhi airport we’d read a newspaper story which said the Taliban is preparing to take over Kabul in the spring. Conrad wondered aloud who the roadblock might be, but we passed through without stopping and it was not mentioned again.

As we passed another military vehicle, I saw the heavily armed man on the hood through my camera and then saw him seeing me. He locked eyes and held my gaze so intensely as we passed, I put my camera down. I looked back a minute later and he was still there, still looking, still holding his large gun.

Now we are safely ensconced in the compound of TMF – with a 19th century fort and wi-fi (although a horrible connection) a cook, offices, classrooms, a garden and living quarters for the mostly-British staff. It is quite nice and feels very safe. The guard at the gate walked around our SUV with a bomb-detector before we could drive in. That made me feel VERY safe (!!!) We were told never to leave the compound, partly because we might be arrested by the corrupt police who don’t speak English.

Today we are going to an old area of Kabul which TMF is helping to rebuild. Jenny Hartley, who is our host here, is in charge of community development and runs programs for children, among other things. It is going to be shooting-heaven (camera shooting, I mean) and I am incredibly excited to be here.

Off to Afghanistan!

It's happening. We are flying to Kabul today from Delhi! After months of planning, discussing, researching, we are really going. The funny thing is, everyone we've spoken to about this trip who HASN'T been to Afghanistan has warned us about how dangerous it is, while everyone we've met who has been there, worked or lived there tells us that it's the friendliest place they've EVER been, that it's not really that dangerous and that we are going to be fine.

Funny that - having lived in Los Angeles and New York City, and been warned by non-residents how dangerous THOSE cities are, I know firsthand how wide the gap can be between the perception of danger from the outside of a place and the perception from inside. In truth, not a day has gone by in the last month when I haven't felt the miracle of survival here on the streets of India, where just crossing the street is a kamikaze endeavor.

SO, all that is to say that a big part of my mission in going to Afghanistan is to experience what is happening there and bring it back to America, via words, pictures and video. We will be staying at the Turquoise Mountain Foundation (see first blog post for more detail) and working on a documentary for Prince Charles, as well as shooting as much on our own as possible.

The awful irony of our arrival there today is that we just found out yesterday morning that a young woman at TMF named Anna (whom I'd been emailing re: helping out on this project) died yesterday, falling off a horse. She was a 26-year old American, working for an NGO in Kabul, and just had this freak accident. So tragic! We will be arriving today in the midst of their mourning for her, and will try to help however we can.

We are told there is connection so hopefully we will post updates here.

PS, I am NOT planning to wear a burka, and yes, I do feel a bit like Private Benjamin (although Goldie actually made a more appropriate movie to reference here, but I think I am one of the 3 people who ever saw it, "Protocol" - don't bother, but she plays an aerobics instructor or something who accidentally saves a diplomat's life and gets a job with the State Dept, and ends up as an "ambassador" of sorts in some unnamed fictional Muslim country.)

Holi-day in India

This is an American we met in Brindavan. Or Vrindavan. Also known as "Krishna's Playground" because it is where Krishna danced and played with his gopis (Hindu for "groupies." no, seriously) it is referred to as one of the holiest places in India. We were there for Holi, and he was wrapped like this to protect himself from being pelted with color-bombs by roving gangs of youths on the street.

The spring festival of color, called "Holi" takes place on the first day of spring, which is the Spring Equinox, and the full moon. It is a celebration of spring , color and the playful dance of Krishna and his main babe Radha, (who was sort of queen of the gopis.) It is celebrated by people getting very drunk and pouring toxic, permanent color powder and liquid all over each other everyone and everything in reach, sort of like spring frat parties, only they just used beer. The holiday stretches into a week or more ahead of the actual day, and in some cases days afterward. It gets so rowdy we were told it can be dangerous, and were warned to absolutely not, under any circumstances, travel ANYWHERE, or even leave the house, for a day and a half prior to the actual day, as the festivities ramp up and the crowds get wilder and more aggressive, we were told it can actually be dangerous, even though it is just "play."

It was WILD!!! Beautiful, crazy, fun - and yes, as I - never one to pass up a dare - did venture out onto the streets for a short bit. Got pelted with color and then briefly groped before heading back to the safety of our hotel compound. We got video!! (Coming soon...)

On the Road with Dharma Boutique

Daily Dharma - Episode 2: Elecricity vs. Electronics

Apparently my ambition intention to upload a daily video podcast from India was just that - ambitious! Here is a brief explanation of some of the reasons why we have had trouble achieving our goal...

Almost HEAVEN!

We are in Jaipur now, known as the Pink City. It is beautiful and feels like nirvana after Delhi, which was really intense, to put it mildly. I got quite sick there and learned firsthand what the term “Delhi Belly” means. After four days of increasingly bad dysentery (on the third day I threw up and thought I was going to die, and although I’d hardly eaten in days and nothing at all in a couple days was still in the bathroom every ten minutes. Ew!) I was so weak I didn’t know what to do.

Finally I surrendered to the evil wonders of Western medicine. Having been to a hospital on my last trip to India that seemed like something out of a WWI movie (as sick as I was, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to EVER get better if I stayed there, and eventually fled to the relative** (see description of our room below) safety and sterility of my blessedly air-conditioned hotel room) I held out for as long as I could. I shuffled down to the local pharmacy, a couple doors down on the main bazaar (we’d moved to a cheaper and much less nice room at the Hotel Shelton, where we begged in vain for days to get a second towel, as we’d used one of the two we were given to sop up the water on the floor (the showers here have all been sans stall – meaning, you stand on the bathroom floor, which is marble and quite slippery, and the water comes out of the wall all over the room, like a ship’s bathroom. It isn’t bad, but wet marble floors are a deathtrap for anyone, not to mention this accident-prone writer, so we naively used one of our towels as a bathmat.) Unfortunately, the hotel staff saw how we’d treated their towel (filthy with stains and worn down to a nice 40-grit sandpaper, which I happen to like as it’s great for exfoliating) and refused to bring us any more during our week-long stay. The room wasn’t bad although we had to ask them to clean it upon moving in and even still were afraid to touch the walls.)

In India you don’t need a prescription to get anything, you just walk in and ask for what you want. I didn’t know what to ask for, and I don’t speak Hindi, so I just pointed to my stomach and said, “Sick. Belly.” The man gave me some pills – very strong antibiotics which made my extremities (and my brain) tingle in a somewhat frightening way. However, they did the trick. Some sort of thing I’d never heard of – noxiprocin? Anyway, I didn’t know what to do, couldn’t imagine the benefit of sticking it out any longer and the natural medicines Adam brought, which I prefer, didn’t seem to be working. It has been years since I’ve taken antibotics and I’m pretty sure there is not a single organism alive in my body now, but I will take it all in trade for the ability to walk upright and put food in my body.

Now I am completely recovered and back to feeling myself again – full of energy, curiosity and enthusiasm, ready to explore and eat the world! Adam has been a great travel partner, taking very good care of me, all the logistics and doing his business as well. It’s been amazing to see how much work it takes to do what he does. I envisioned a sweet, relaxing trip wandering through colorful bazaars, chatting with locals, bartering and drinking chai. While much of that is true, he is doing it all on his own, and it is far from relaxing. In reality he works long hours, slogging through miles of markets and piles of objects to find beautiful pieces, worthwhile businesses and people he can trust and wants to work with. He also must track each item he finds, the cost of purchase, packing, shipping, customs, unloading and marketing that piece, how many he bought last year, how much he paid, how many he sold, how many he can buy this year and on and on and on...all on India time, which means everything takes longer than you think.

Meanwhile I went exploring on my own a bit. Saw and rode an elephant yesterday, and I have finally managed to edit the FIRST of what was supposed to be our daily video podcast! The technological problems have been unbelievable. Still, all in all, a big adventure and lots of amazing footage and experiences.

PS - this tip from my friend Missy came in VERY handy when I was sick!! I didn’t bring Alka Seltzer, and they do not sell it here (or any American pharmaceutical products) but they do sell something like it called ENO and I put it in a lime soda (they give you a bottle of soda water, a small dish of fresh lime juice and a small dish of simple syrup – it’s make your own!) and it did help. What a great concept! Alkalize the system, I learned that in my yoga teacher training, how important that is, and yet I never equated ALKA seltzer - !! Funny!

Mumbai

Mumbai
is just as I remembered it – big, beautiful, hot, harassing, charming, chaotic. The water, the trees, the bougainvillea!! The street urchins, the vendors, the traffic! We stayed just two days there, long enough to go to the Mahalakshmi Temple, the Chor Bazaar (the famous Thieves Market) India Gate and the playa. I mean the beach. Chowpatty to be specific. We didn’t really GO to the beach, mind you, but it looked lovely from the taxi window as we passed it.

Adam reconnected with some business contacts, we saw some beautiful pieces of art, crashed the Taj Hotel, met up with a friend for lunch at the famous Leopold’s Café (big hangout for foreigners in the traveller-heavy Calaba district) began our search for the world’s best lassi and shot tons of video – I was a kid in a candy store, video-wise! Landing in Mumbai, it was immediately apparent that the question was not WHAT to shoot, but when to STOP shooting. Everything looked amazing! Strange! Beautiful! Different than anything we’re used to back home!

It was hot, but nothing like my last visit (April and May – ayiyi! Even the Indians complain about the heat and flee to the North if they can.) We didn’t sleep much, but were in good spirits as we explored and acclimatized. Our first experiences with technical difficulties began immediately, as we discovered our biggest problem was NOT difficulty filming people, as we’d thought (Indians, almost to a person, LOVE to be filmed, I’ve discovered) but electricity vs. electronics. Unfortunately for us, electricity won almost every round that first week. Oh sure, we’d brought adaptors and surge protectors – but we’d failed to realize that a) the power goes out randomly and often, all over India and 2) the wiring in most buildings is neither contemporary (by which I mean, of the last 80 years) or to code. If there is a code, which seems unlikely, now that I’m here. Plugging our electronics into the wall meant possible damage each time the power surged, went out, flickered or sometimes...just because. Inserting the surge protectors into the wall blew the circuits in our part of the hotel each and every time. Mind you, that is without plugging any electronics into them. Just the units on their own would do it. Sometimes the pop was so big the little surge protectors were smoking. The plugs were fried and etched from the battle. Hotel workers came to fix the circuits, but couldn’t do anything about the wiring. They looked at our electronics and smiled politely with the classic Indian head bobble. It’s hard to describe if you haven’t seen it – sort of a side-to-side head wobble – neither a nod nor a no, it’s vague and essentially meaningless, which is really the beautiful thing about it. And everyone does it. All the time. You can see a great example of it in this video – look for the guy unwinding wire in the Chor Bazaar – classic!

Frustrated, but not beaten, we took a night flight to Delhi on Wednesday February 27, arriving in the tourist ghetto of Paharganj at 1am. Although Adam’s first choice (the Cottage Yes Please! Yes, that is the name!) was full, as were most other hotels along the main bazaar, we found a nice spot at the Metropolis, where we stayed for two nights, blowing more circuits and befriending the hotel electrician (ah! Improvement!).

Here we thought we’d gotten the electricity thing dialed, and I joyfully neared completion on the first video webcast – 3 days behind, but better late than never! - when we experienced the first of several Delhi daily power outtages. Unfortunately, I’d chosen to use iMovie, rather than my usual FinalCut, because it’d been recommended to me (by someone who’d clearly never tried to use it in India) as it was “so easy! So simple! Perfect for quick podcasting!” I learend the hard way that this sweet, simple program just isn’t sophisticated enough for these conditions, as each time the power went out, the hard drive went down and we lost EVERYTHING. In FinalCut of course it’s non-destructive editing, so whatever you’re working on is still there when the power comes back on. Bummer! I started over from scratch several times before I found out that the power goes out in Delhi every day for four hours, but you never know when and the hours aren’t necessarily consecutive! I also got a closer look at some of the wiring – it’s a Robert Crumb heaven out there, with wads of wires wrapped around each other, poles, tree branches, potted plants, hanging signs and anything else that might be close by. I couldn’t help myself and shot some some video which gives you an idea of what India’s electrical situation is like. Video coming...

India & Afghanistan

Ahh, India!

Ambitions of daily blog & video podcast aside, this has been an amazing trip. At least we have our health, heh heh...

We left Hartford on February 24 and landed in Mumbai (the official name, although many Indians still say Bombay) on the 26th, so we lost a whole day! Weird. I couldn’t help but wonder what I would have done with that day...

But first, a brief explanation of how & why I got here. My friend Adam Bauer has an import business and travels every year to India to buy goodies. This year, after seeing some of my recent video webcasts (www.youtube.com/sarakarl) he asked me to come along and document the trip on video, as a way of showing the story of Dharma Boutique: how he gets his products, where they come from, who makes them, and so on. We brought a great little Hi-Def camera (the Canon HV20 – it is TINY and takes amazing broadcast-quality video, can’t recommend it enough!) a Manfrotto monopod and my Macbook Pro, and set off with visions of daily vidcasts dancing in our heads.

But a funny thing happened on the way to India. Adam called me one chilly, dark, January morning to say, “Hey, how would you like to go to Afghanistan?” India is one thing, you might be thinking, but...Afghanistan? It sounded so out-of-left-field and full of potential adventure, of course how could I say no? He knows me just well enough to guess (rightly, as it happens) that I am just crazy enough to do it. Actually, as it turns out, it isn’t as out-there as it sounded at first. Adam’s friend Jenny Hartley has been living there for the past nine months – after getting her PhD and subsequently finishing medical school, she went to Afghanistan to work for an NGO called The Turquoise Mountain Foundation.

One of many organizations working to rebuild Afghanistan, TMF is working to nurture and nourish the indigenous arts and crafts, specifically pottery. It is one of Prince Charles’ charities, and is therefore well-protected and supported – they live and work in a 14th century fort in Kabul, and have luxurious facilities, including bathrooms and WiFi! They are the envy of all the NGOs in Kabul. The man who runs it, Rory Stewart, sounds amazing – he wrote a book called “The Places In Between,” about his journey walking across Afghanistan in 1992. What a story!

Jenny went there to work last year between medical school and her residency back in the US and has been helping them make a couple of documentaries – one about TMF, the other about the area in which it’s located. She emailed Adam and said, “Hey, since you’re going to already be in India, and since I’m staying here in this amazing situation until May – you should come visit!” Since no one at the organization, including Jenny, knows anything about filmmaking, they invited us to come and work as consultants on the films. We will have bodyguards, a car and driver, protection and will probably never leave the fort, much less Kabul. In answer to our questions about safety, Jenny replied that, like many places, it sounds more dangerous from the outside (having lived in LA and NYC, I understand this to a a degree). She said the suicide bombs always target the roads during rush hour, so you don’t drive before 10am, and the lobbed rocket-bombs (which have bad aim anyway) are only at night, so you don’t wander around after dark (I am hard-pressed to imagine doing so anyway).

Shortly after we decided this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance (who goes to Kabul?) the 5-star Serena Hotel was attacked and several westerners killed. It was the first terrorism targeting tourists, and shook us up a bit. However, there has been nothing since then, and life has pretty much continued on as usual in Kabul. While there is an element of danger there, I am sure we are more likely to die in traffic here in India - not to mention New York! - and have agreed that if we feel okay about it, we will go. We have our Afghan visas, and are waiting ‘til the last minute to buy our tickets. If we go, we will fly from Delhi to Kabul, and probably stay a week or so. Our visas start April 1, and TMF is expecting us to stay for two weeks, but we will see.

My feeling about it is this: there are lots of horrible things happening there, but there are also lots of amazing, inspiring things happening as well. Many organizations with thousands of westerners are living in Kabul and all over Afghanistan, working to replant the hills with trees, educate and empower women, get girls into schools, support and nurture growth of local crafts and businesses, and help the Afghan people have a home again – their home. We have a camera and can capture some of this and bring it back – how can we pass up an opportunity like that? I am sure that there are many ignorant Americans like myself who have no idea of what it’s like there, or what is happening there, and you know what they say – knowledge is power. How can we do anything about anything if we don’t know about it? For me, it falls into “wildest dreams come true” territory – a chance to do what I do – explore and broadcast what I find, in the areas I’m most passionate about – empowerment, environment, education.

And yes, we did see “The Kite Runner.”