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.”