Walking the Precipice

by Barbara Bick

  Apologetically, the driver tells Shreib that he will have to go to an auto shop when we reach the next town. We get back in, and the van chugs on. We are driving on caked earth with no visible road until suddenly we come up behind a dump truck pouring gravel onto the road, with a group of men raking it into place. Ed says the men are paid for their labor in grain, as are teachers, by the UN’s World Food Programme.

  This trip will change my thinking about many things, and prominent among them is my conception of the UN and its role in the world. Along with most Americans, I had half accepted the notion that it was not much more than an international debating society. But now I see firsthand the work of UN agencies like the World Food Programme and the children’s fund, UNICEF, preventing hunger, providing homes, education, and jobs, and I become an ardent advocate of the organization.

  Further along the new road, we are suddenly surrounded, as if by magic, by brilliant vegetation and palm trees. It is my first experience of an oasis town and it does seem miraculous. It is a market day and hundreds of villagers crowd the road, carting in vegetables to sell, hoping to buy staples for their homes. We pass donkeys loaded with straw-wrapped bundles that contain packed snow and ice, stored underground since the winter and insulated by the straw, that will now be used for refrigeration. Driving further into town, we circle a broad roundabout, in the middle of which is a luxuriant green park shaded by tall trees. Busy shops are all around. It is an astonishing transformation after the wretched empty miles we’ve traveled. Our driver lets us out on one of the wide streets feeding into the traffic circle and drives off to find an auto supply shop.

  The curbs are lined with carpeted platforms on which men recline, drinking tea, eating grapes, and exchanging news. We settle onto one of the platforms, anticipating that we will see the second van when it arrives. Ed and Shreib call for tea and grapes. The great bunches of green grapes look luscious, and Ed claims they are the best in the world. Next to the platform sits a barrel of filthy water. Big black flies instantly cover the grapes. Ed and Shreib swish the grapes around in the foul water and happily eat them. I am aghast, and decline the offer to join them.

  Kids stop to stare at a bareheaded woman sitting on a platform, chatting with the men beside her. When the numbers swell and block the street, local men shoo the children away. Another group quickly forms. Women never eat or visit with other women on the street. They never loiter when they go out to shop or to sell goods, so I am truly a spectacle.

  None of the passing women wear burqas, but they cover their hair with scarves. The local female dress is black pants and blouse, with a long, colorful skirt over the pants. The skirts are made of the same brilliantly designed cloth as that of the men’s skullcaps. I smile at the women, enchanted to see them dressed so colorfully and with individuality—more evidence that the Taliban’s militantly enforced dress code is an aberration in Afghanistan. The women shyly smile back as they hurry past.

  Several waiters, running up and down the steps of a building opposite, signal to us to come upstairs. We cross over and enter a large bare room, with a ring of twenty or thirty men settled on the floor, eating freshly roasted kabobs—and Nasrine, happily among them, deep in conversation. She is in her element, sitting on the floor with no head covering, all the men listening intently to what she is telling them. Somehow or other their van passed ours, perhaps taking a different rutted road into town.

  Nasrine’s driver has spoken to ours and tells us that the van is still in the auto shop. It is midday, very hot, and Ed suggests that we all go to an NGO building he knows, assuring us that we will be welcome to wait there. We drive through streets with brick buildings and gardens until we come to the house, which belongs to Shelter Now, an evangelical Christian group, several of whose members were arrested in Kabul by the Taliban, accused of proselytizing. The group is very involved in humanitarian efforts and basic literacy teaching. We are indeed welcomed, and Sara and I promptly fall asleep in a quiet bedroom.

  When we awake, the others tell us they have decided we must keep going even though our van is not fully repaired. Most of the distance to Faizabad is still ahead and it would be dangerous to travel after dark, not only in case of accidents but also because of brigands. So we set off, leaving the luxuriant greenery and human society of the oasis and enter the empty realm of scorched earth again. The vans quickly lose sight of one another and we are left to fend for ourselves. Ed’s plan of having two vans in case one broke down has simply evaporated.

  Occasionally we pass shepherds, their flocks inert under the shade of a lone tree. It is always a surprise when buildings emerge from the low hills. Men appear, seemingly from nowhere, and stand starkly silhouetted against the sun-bleached sky, watching us until we disappear. The terrain begins to rise. The ground, cliffs, farm buildings, as cracked and pitted as the hills—all are washed out by the sun until they look alike. Roads are barely differentiated from the stony earth. The driver frequently turns off into a dry river bed, easier to traverse than the rutted ghost of a road. Other times he drives through streams, splashing through the shallow but still rapid currents, water flying up through the windows. He always jumps out at the sight of water, fills his jugs, pours water into the tank. The overheating engine is a constant concern. Finally we leave the valley and spiral up narrow paths, over rocks and boulders, into low mountains of bare, jagged rock.

  Back at Khoja Bahauddin they had told us that the drive would be rough, but this is worse than anything I could have imagined. I am bounced up and down and thrown sideways. My head hits the roof of the car. The hot wind blows through our open windows, bringing in gritty sand that collects on our clothes and exposed skin. My head is wrapped in a scarf, but the thin material seems to absorb the grit, and grains of sand penetrate to the root of each strand of my hair. Our van, rented for three hundred dollars for the day, is really a wreck, and our poor driver is just skin and bones. We cannot be angry with him; he is too pathetic. We just hope both he and the van will last long enough to get us to Faizabad.

  I am terrified each time we drive on the roughly bound boards that serve as bridges over deep canyons. I clutch the seat, pulling my stomach and buttock muscles tight, as the van, screeching and creaking, slowly passes over dizzying heights. We come upon a deep, turbulent river rushing through the wasteland. Between sharp cliffs, the remnant of a great bridge made of rock and concrete crosses most of the river at a low point. But the end of the bridge no longer exists and a rough wooden platform connects to the other side. We make it over without crashing through, and our driver again jumps out and fills his water jugs, pours streams of water into the tank and over the engine. We continue to climb.

  After another crossing of the same river, we come to a real highway; this and the few other highways like it in these formidable, rugged mountains were built by the Soviets for their tanks when they tried to subjugate the Afghans. I can’t help but view these roads as one positive remnant of the Soviets’ destructive passage through the country, despite the purpose they were built for.

  We come upon a rustic roadhouse, built on a bluff overlooking the river. We park and I stumble out of the van. My weak legs are trembling. I hobble over to the steps built up the cliff and manage to climb slowly onto the open porch. I flop down at the table and am delighted to discover that the proprietor has bottled sodas. The view is spectacular—the soaring, jagged mountain peaks above and, below, the tumbling, rushing water.

  I return to an earlier discussion I’d been having with Ed about the camp for displaced people. “I’m still haunted by the helplessness those people displayed,” I say. “They seem to be just waiting for someone, for something, to come and help them. I have to say I found it irritating when they complained about being abandoned by the UN.”

  Ed works with the International Center for Humanitarian Reporting, and understands the refugee issue at all levels.

  “The Afghan refugee problem is enormous. Some six million people have fled during the last twenty-th
ree years—the largest number of refugees of any country in the world,” Ed replies.

  “But the camp we visited was for the internally displaced. They are in their own country. Why can’t they use the great resource lying right at their feet?” I protest. “The river flowing below their camp. Why can’t they carry water up to their camp? They could grow vegetables. They could plant trees—shade trees, fruit trees. They could even plant flowers just to put some color in their lives! I bet the Engineer could help them rig up a simple pumping device to bring river water up to the camp.” I pause, a little ashamed of my outburst. There I am, a cosseted American, blaming people who have nothing.

  “Ed, it’s not that I don’t understand that those men and women have gone through great hardship and misery,” I say. “But is that enough to break their spirit forever? When do people lose their will, not just to survive, but to overcome?” I really need to know, and Ed has been to many camps.

  “It’s not just lack of will,” he says. “When people have nothing, not even shovels, then everything has to be provided for them: tools, seeds, and sometimes someone with technical expertise. You need foreign countries and international agencies to sponsor the projects. Norway and Sweden work with the World Food Programme and pay workers with food.”

  I find myself near tears as I imagine the camp with trees and vegetable plots in front of the tents. I feel sure that with growing things around them, the women and men would begin to build homes instead of mere shelters. I am a little ashamed of my irritation with those hapless people, but I am also defensive and annoyed that I feel that way. Sobered by our conversation, we get back in the van, and head off. Miraculously, as it seems to me, by late afternoon we are approaching Faizabad.

  Chapter 5

  Faizabad

  The day is still bright as we enter Faizabad. It is September 4. I had planned to be back home the following day, but instead I have finally arrived in this town of some one hundred thousand people, the administrative and commercial center of Badakhshan province and a good place to begin our investigation of women living under the Northern Alliance. Faizabad, an ancient provincial town, is set in a valley of the Pamir Mountains. The climate is moderate, although it can be snowbound in winter. Its fertile soil is bountiful, amply irrigated by the Kokcha River. During the Soviet invasion Faizabad was the site of a major garrison of some six thousand Russian troops.

  As we drive through the hilly, crowded streets, we pass market districts where shops and street stalls display meats and fowl, stacks of produce, and clothing. We also pass through an industrial area filled with piles of used building materials. Our car descends a steep incline leading to a concrete embankment that confines the thrashing, white-capped Kokcha. Rock cliffs loom on either shore. The road follows the river for a short distance, then ends abruptly at a concrete causeway that leads to a flat rock in the middle of the river. We walk across the causeway to a low building—Star House, another Northern Alliance guesthouse. The river beats against the rock on all sides, but the sturdy house sits stolidly on its rampart, impervious to the force of the dashing waves. What a wonderful contrast it is to the guesthouse on the sun-scorched mesa of Khoja Bahauddin!

  Once again, Nasrine and Sara have arrived before us. Nasrine stands at the end of the causeway, beaming and calling out, “Come in, come in.” She eagerly pulls me up the steps. A tall woman with a broad smile stands beside Nasrine. She looks amazingly like Eleanor Roosevelt. It is Mary MacMakin, the American whom Sara has come to film.

  Mary has been in Faizabad for several days, anxious to meet us, wondering why we haven’t arrived sooner. Our bags are put into a small room at one end of the building and we quickly go to join Ed, Shreib, and several Afghans in a large dining room for a dinner of nan, rice, meat, vegetables, and tea. At the end of that long day, I just want to relax, so I tune out the conversational din and concentrate on the dining room. It is furnished with the same carved, gold-painted furniture as in the villa at Khoja Bahauddin. Gauze drapes, gently stirred by breezes from the river below, frame wide French windows.

  When we return to our rooms that first night, we realize that the guesthouse is, like the one at Khoja Bahauddin, only lit for a few hours each evening using its own generator. During the night there are kerosene lanterns, and the long narrow hallway is lit by a single lantern on the floor, casting a ghostly wavering light. I am a bit scared that first night, going down the hall in that flickering light to the bathroom, where there is no running water. I flush the toilet with ladles of river water kept in a large container and brush my teeth with a few miserly sips of my bottled water. I have been given a nice room to myself across the hall from Nasrine and Sara, with a window on each of the two corner walls, both looking out on the rushing, glittering river below. A large old sofa and coffee table sit beside the high double bed, which is stacked with half a dozen mattresses, blankets, and coverlets. Since it is doubtful the coverings have ever been washed, I take Nasrine’s suggestion to spread my bedroll on top and wrap myself in that. I keep the windows open for the river to cool and freshen the air.

  The next day Ed and Shreib leave for Kabul and we head off early with Mary. We get into a car provided by the Northern Alliance and the driver slowly makes his way through narrow streets clogged with both animal-drawn and motorized vehicles.

  When the Taliban decreed that girls could not go to school, education became a major issue and focal point for anti-Taliban groups back in the States, so we have decided that our first stop will be a high school for girls. The school is in a small stone building, identical to all the others lining the street. Above the doorway are two signs, one in Dari and the other in English, with a UN insignia above it: “World Food Programme. Food for Education Project. Norwegian Afghanistan Committee.” The high school, founded in 1924, is quite famous and boasts fifty-eight teachers, eleven teacher assistants, four teachers with advanced degrees, and five administrators. All the teachers are women; the principal is—once again—male. The classes are taught in three shifts.

  Entering the school through curtained double doors, we come into a small courtyard surrounded by whitewashed concrete classrooms, shaded by two ancient trees. Several teachers hurry out to greet us and bring us to their classes. The condition of the rooms is dreadful—cracked, discolored walls, desks made of rough planks worse than those used for vegetable crates in the States. Two or three girls sit on each bench. We enter another classroom where there is no furniture at all; the young women sit on the floor, each on her personal, colorful mat.

  The girls are in their late teens. Their ethnic mix parallels that of the region: a majority Aryan, an ancient Persian group, and many Tajiks. The girls look healthy, alert, and poised in uniforms of long, lightweight black coats and white headscarves. Nasrine is glowing as she tells them in Dari, and us in English, that she wore the same uniform at the girls’ high school in Kabul that she attended in the 1960s. I notice that many students have polished nails, rings, and watches and wear low-heeled pumps or sandals. Their white scarves are worn loosely back on their heads. Not too far from here the Taliban prohibits women from exposing their hair, hands, ankles, and feet.

  The school has an academic curriculum: mathematics, sciences, social science, art, and languages. It also has an indoor sports and gymnastics program. It is tuition free, and UNICEF provides most of the textbooks. The teachers receive 49 kilos of wheat and 12.5 kilos of bottled oil a month from the World Food Programme, since they and their families can barely subsist on the government’s miniscule and irregularly paid salaries. Despite the condition of the classrooms and the scarcity of school supplies, all the teachers comment on how eager the girls are to learn. “Their morale is so high!” is the refrain.

  When this session of classes ends and the students are dismissed, we follow them into the courtyard and stand aghast as these beautiful young women pull blue burqas out of their bags and drop them over their heads. The girls become anonymous phantoms as they slip out of the gate and dispe
rse down the street. My heart constricts. “Why do girls have to cover themselves in the heartland of the Northern Alliance?” we ask repeatedly. The standard explanation is that it is for protection. Just as during my visit in 1990, when we were unable to leave Kabul because, we were told, the borders were “porous” and enemies could be anywhere, we are told here that the area is porous and enemy agents may sneak into town.

  On the following day, we visit a large hospital with buildings scattered over an extensive campus. Men and women wait in groups, some sitting on the ground under trees. The women all wear burqas but with the tops pushed back to uncover their faces. Most women are carrying babies. I am impressed with the comprehensiveness of the hospital: there are signs listing an emergency room, a blood bank, a pharmacy, a school of nursing, and a radiology department.

  The Mother and Child Care Center is a two-story contemporary building. We meet with the director, who speaks English and received her medical degree in Kabul in 1984. She tells us that the hospital, founded more than thirty years ago with only twenty beds, has expanded dramatically; the surgical unit alone has twenty-five doctors, eleven of them women. The hospital has fifty nurses, eighteen of whom are women, all graduates of the local nursing school, and a pre-and-postnatal clinic is headed by a female doctor. The director emphasizes that there is no lack of competent personnel, despite low salaries, but laments that in every material way the hospital is deficient—they need equipment, supplies, and medication. I ask her about psychiatric care, remembering the facility I visited in Kabul. There is no longer a psychiatric facility anywhere in Afghanistan, she tells me.

  The director’s pride is evident as she tells us they have the only family planning facility in all of Afghanistan, which Doctors Without Borders helped set up three years earlier. Amazingly, abortions can be performed legally, although only for “therapeutic” or “medically needed” reasons. Doctors Without Borders also supports the hospital with outpatient medication for tuberculosis and malaria and with lab work and radiology. The World Food Programme helps with food for the patients.