Inside the airport was complete and total chaos. There was a crowd of people pressing up against a man who was checking passports before we could get through to baggage claim. When we finally squeezed through that bottleneck, we found that our bags and equipment were being tossed into a heap by men wearing long pieces of cloth twisted into ragged, mushroom-shaped turbans. Other men and boys swirled around us asking if we wanted them to help with the luggage, but we had been told beforehand by the group leaders that we should get our own bags—that the locals would charge us too much money. So when three men reached out for my luggage, I shook my head. They backed away, disappointed but respectful. I must say that, in all my time in their country, I’ve never met a rude Afghan. Even when they’re pointing a gun at you, they’re polite.
Outside, a van and a driver waited for us. Before we could leave, there was a confusing moment when one of the men carrying a machine gun—and there were plenty of them in front of the airport, too—was talking to the driver and shaking his head. I held my breath, wondering if they wouldn’t allow us to go, but finally we started to bump along the street leading away from the airport.
“Why was he shaking his head?” I asked the driver. I had to shake my own head to show him what I meant. “In America, this means no.”
He flashed a grin at me. “Here, it means ‘Okay—go ahead.’”
My overall impression of Kabul in those first moments was that it was a city of gray. Everything seemed to be the same color, from the crumbling gray walls of the mud-brick houses to the clothes that people were wearing to the sky filled with dust. The roads themselves were long strips of gray mud, with lots of holes and humps of rock and dirt and only occasional flat spaces. But against that basic palette of gray, I started to notice bright colors here and there. Once we got away from the airport, the street turned commercial. Along both sides and all crowded together, there were shops made from old shipping containers—like the kind I used to see going by on trains back in the States. There were shops made from burned-out trucks, shops made from tarps draped over wood or metal frames. Even the shabbiest of these stores had colorful signs above them, with the stores’ names written in elegantly flowing Dari—and here and there, an added sign in English. The first few blocks of stores seemed to be selling basic goods, such as tires and tin pipes and big rolls of cotton batting. Often the roofs were heaped with things like car parts or plastic jugs. Extra inventory, I guess.
Then we turned a corner, and suddenly, all the stores were selling food. Our driver swerved around a cluster of old men who were talking in the middle of the road and passed within inches of a huge dead sheep hanging from the front of a shop, its skin and head lying on the ground. A live sheep was tied up on a rope next to it. As we rolled by, I imagined that the live sheep was hoping that everyone would fill themselves on his dead, dried-up, fly-covered brother. There were brightly painted carts along the street heaped with fruits and vegetables that seemed bigger than any I’d ever seen. Were cauliflowers usually the size of basketballs? Were cantaloupes usually so large that you’d need two hands to carry them? We sped past shops that had big white plastic containers that held conical heaps of spices and nuts—red heaps, gold heaps, brown heaps—and shops with hundreds of things that looked like snowshoes hanging from their roofs. I found out later this was the flatbread that Afghans eat with just about every meal. We sped past shops that sold packaged goods in tins and boxes and bags, each colorful and so artistically displayed that the shops almost looked as if they were piled with beautifully wrapped presents. Even though we certainly weren’t here to shop, I wished the driver could pull over for a minute so I could wander around. Then we drove past a man who was shaking something in a big pan over an open fire. The smell of roasted corn floated into the van, and I realized I was famished.
Though the Afghans added lots of color to their environment—the painted signs, the vibrant store displays—they didn’t wear much in the way of color themselves. We passed people on foot, on bicycles, crowded into wagons, in cars; there were even a few young men who startled us by cantering on horses between the lines of cars. The clothing was almost always the same, either close to white or close to black. The only clothes that seemed to stand out were the blue burqas covering the women. These were just a whisper of color—soft, fluid ripples that moved through the black and white and gray and tan stream of men, usually with a few children attached to their blue fringes. It took me several minutes to realize that, aside from the few women in burqas, there weren’t many women on the streets at all. Even on the very busy blocks, there were hundreds of men walking, pushing wheelbarrows, dickering over prices, balancing long, curled-up rugs on their shoulders, calling out to customers, sniffing at bananas, inspecting pomegranates, nodding their heads in conversation, eating kebabs, and peering at us as we drove by, but aside from the few elusive puffs of blue, no women. It was chilling to see this visual proof of the absence of women from public life.
The driver turned another corner, and we were on a street where half the buildings had been blown apart. Some of them were still being used, at least on the lower level. We passed one building where there was a thriving business in metal pots on the first floor, storage on the second floor, and teetering spires of shattered brick on the third. As we kept going, I saw more and more empty spaces between the buildings. I wondered why there were so many children playing on the sidewalks and streets instead of in the open spaces. Later, I found out that these open spaces hadn’t been cleared of mines yet. The terrible inventions of war were still there waiting, buried just a few inches underground.
We kept driving until we left the stores and crowds behind. Now we were clattering along streets that were more like canyons—all the buildings on either side were surrounded by high walls made of either exposed mud bricks or bricks covered with stucco or concrete. I remembered all the little squares I had seen from the air and realized that I had been seeing walled compounds. The compounds looked pretty much the same, one after another, except for their colorful metal gates. It was a little like being in a room where everyone wore a gray suit but was allowed one fancy brooch. Some of the walls were topped with long snarls of barbed wire. Many had clusters of holes in them, as if they had been pecked by big, strong birds. I realized that they must have taken some bullet fire during the fighting. The walls often fluttered with glued-on papers that had pictures of stern-looking, bearded men in blue and black ink. Many of the compounds had little houses—not much bigger than phone booths—outside by the road with machine-gun-toting guards lounging against them. It was hard to see what was going on behind the walls. I could sometimes see roofs, sometimes trees with bits of colorful cloth clinging to them, and once in a while one of the big metal gates would be open and I could see gardens and cars inside. Finally, our driver pulled up to one of these walled compounds, honked the horn, and the gate swung open. Instead of living in a tent, I would be staying in a guesthouse—kind of like a bed-and-breakfast—for the foreign aid staff and volunteers.
“WHITES? DARKS?” I called out as my teammates rose from one of their endless strategy sessions. “I’m filling a tub with hot water, and I actually have some detergent.”
Once we settled into the guesthouse, I finally got to know my six teammates better. They were lovely people, every one of them—and all of them had some sort of medical background. They were doctors, nurses, and dentists, some of whom had already done disaster work. I realized that they were probably wondering why the CFAF had bothered to send along a hairdresser. I started to wonder about this myself. I tried to find ways to be useful over the next few days while all the rest of them discussed the most pressing health care issues in the city and started making plans to open a clinic. At first, the only thing I could find to do was everyone else’s laundry. Then, when they started to go out to hold clinics in temporary spots—it would take a long time before they found a house to rent for a permanent clinic—I went along to take people’s blood pressure. But really,
anyone can do that.
When someone else on the team came to tell me she had a job for me to do, I was momentarily excited. But it turned out she just wanted me to make welcome posters for the new team members who would be arriving soon. I started to feel frustrated and restless, wondering if I’d ever have much of an opportunity to do something meaningful. My consolation in those first few days was that, while everyone else was figuring out how to save lives, I had started to make friends with the Afghans who worked around the compound. The lovely girl who was always so kind about helping me figure out how to get hot water and phone cards to call home was Roshanna. The shy, handsome man who drove the van was Daud.
After a few days, our little group of volunteers went to a meeting of other foreigners who had been living in Kabul for a while—including some who had been there for years. We rode to the meeting site in the van, and when we arrived, our group leaders urged us to get out quickly and duck into the building. No one wanted to attract attention to the fact that a big bunch of foreigners was getting together; it might make us an irresistible target to any Taliban sympathizers who were still in town. Inside, there were about 150 people milling around, eating cookies and introducing themselves, passing out business cards and telling one another about the projects they were involved in. I overheard their conversations and had the sinking feeling that everyone else had been trained in something that met a specific and pressing need here. Since the fall of the Taliban, hundreds of foreigners and dozens of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—big ones like the Red Cross as well as smaller ones like CFAF—had been pouring into the country. All around me, I heard people introducing themselves as teachers, engineers, nutritionists, agricultural specialists, and experts of all sorts. Not once did anyone introduce herself as a hairdresser.
Toward the end of the meeting, Allen—our group leader—was asked to introduce the team. He stood in front of the room and explained CFAF’s plans to open a health care clinic. That got a round of applause. He also got quite a few cheers when he offered the team’s services to the other Westerners in the room as well. Some of these people had been working here for months with cavities that needed filling, mysterious rashes that wouldn’t go away, and other ailments that they hadn’t been able to do anything about. Then he introduced our team members one by one: doctor, nurse, dentist, doctor, and midwife. Everyone in the room clapped as each team member was introduced. When Allen finally got around to introducing me, he gave me a bright smile, as if to assure me that he wasn’t going to leave me out. “Finally, we have Debbie Rodriguez,” he said. “She’s a hairdresser from Holland, Michigan, who did some training—”
He didn’t even get to finish his introduction, because the room broke into the wildest applause of the night. A few of the women were actually jumping up and down. It seemed like half the people in the room were pulling at their hair with relief. Allen hesitated, then finished talking about the clinic. The meeting soon broke up. And suddenly I was mobbed.
“We’re so glad you’re here!” said the woman who got to my side before any of the others. “There isn’t a decent haircut within a day’s drive of Kabul.”
“We have literally risked our lives for highlights,” another said. “Once I drove ten hours over the Khyber Pass to get my hair done in Pakistan. I had some other errands to run there, too, but that was the one thing I really couldn’t do here.”
“Aren’t there any beauty salons in Kabul?” I asked.
“I think there used to be a lot of them, before the Taliban took over,” the first woman said. “They pretty much squashed them out of existence. I hear some are resurfacing now, but they’re in pretty rough shape.”
“My kids and I got some kind of bionic lice at an Afghan salon,” her friend added. “When we got back to the States, we had to use an industrial-strength pesticide to get rid of them. It took months!”
People were swarming around me, eager to set up appointments. They wanted to know what I was doing the next day and the day after that. They wanted to know how long I was staying in Kabul. They wanted directions to my guesthouse. I couldn’t give directions, since I hadn’t a clue which streets we had taken to get to the meeting, but I tried to point them toward the people who could tell them. They didn’t even ask me whether I had brought any of the tools of my trade with me, but if they had I could have quickly assured them. I always travel with my scissors, my combs, a salon cape, and some product. It’s just part of who I am.
And the next day, people started showing up at the guesthouse. I don’t know how they found their way there, but they did. Word seemed to spread throughout Kabul that there was a Western-style hairdresser in town. Soon, all sorts of people—journalists, diplomats, missionaries, aid workers, you name it—were trying to contact me. They couldn’t call for appointments because there wasn’t any phone service, but they managed to send word that they were coming. Every time I’d go out with the team to do some work, I’d return to find the door to my room covered with sticky notes from people wanting their hair done.
My team had finally figured out some useful tasks for me, including trauma counseling with Afghan children using puppets. But by the end of that first week, there was almost always a little group of Westerners waiting in the yard of our guesthouse for me. I’d take them up to my room between team assignments and cut their hair. Some people came with their kids, and I’d do the whole family. One German woman who had been living in Afghanistan for seven years even showed up with perm solution stored in a brown bottle so ancient that it looked as if it had been dug out of an archaeological site. She told me the Taliban had raided her house a bunch of times, but they’d never taken that bottle. I apologized and told her that I didn’t have perm rods, but then she held up a bag—she had the rods, too. So I set her up out in the garden and gave her a perm. Roshanna and I served her tea and cookies while it set, and then I washed the solution off with a bucket of water.
All this time, I’d been making fast friends with the Afghans. While the other team members were busy doing the medical things that only they could do, I’d be hanging out with Roshanna, Daud the driver, Muqim the cook, and several others. There was a swing set in the garden, and Daud, Muqim, and I would sit there and talk and swing, talk and swing, until soon we’d be pumping ourselves up so high that we could see over the wall. Daud and Muqim would let themselves fly off the swings at the high point, tumble on the grass, and joke about who had gone the farthest. I’d have to laugh, remembering that these were those scary Afghan men half the world was afraid of.
One day, after I came back from doing trauma counseling at a school, Daud picked up one of my puppets that had a beard and head scarf and examined it. “Is this Osama bin Laden?” he asked. The puppet did look a little like Osama, but it had been Joseph of Nazareth in a former life. A church group had donated the puppets to our team. Now I was turning Joseph, Mary, and Jesus into ordinary Afghans who were trying to become happy families again in the aftermath of the wars. But Daud and Roshanna preferred the idea that the patriarch puppet was Osama. Roshanna picked up the Mary puppet and announced, “I am Osama’s wife. I will help the Americans kill him!” And for the next half hour or so, we played “Search for bin Laden” throughout the downstairs of the house. We did some really bad things to the Osama puppet, but he recovered well enough to be an Afghan dad the next day.
I cut their hair, too. The men had been watching as I cut some of the Westerners’ hair—on nice days, I did it out in the garden—and they were intrigued with the kiwi-scented gel that I used to finish up some of the cuts. So I squirted a little on their hands, and they spread it on their hair. They liked it so much that they didn’t want to wash it off. For days they walked around with stiff hair coated with dust. Then I offered to trim Roshanna’s hair out in the garden. I took a few inches off the bottom and cut a few short angles around her face so that she could have little tendrils poking out of her head scarf. When I finished, I asked Muqim if he wanted a haircut. After a few minute
s of deliberation, he said yes. I knew that Afghan men don’t get their hair cut by women—they go to barbers, not beauticians—because there is no touching allowed between unmarried men and women, either professionally or casually. So I was careful to snip his hair gingerly, without a lot of physical contact, because I didn’t want him to go home at the end of the day thinking he had sinned. But when I finished, he stared up at me with bleary, besotted eyes.
“I love you,” he croaked. “I love you, I love you!”
Then I pointed my scissors at Daud. He had a haircut that was pretty typical of the Afghan men I had seen so far—a sort of pompadour trimmed short in the back with a big wad of hair puffed up on the top. It was like the hairdo Elvis had sported in his most hideous days, when he was wearing those tight leather pants and awful capes made by the Ice Capades people. I hated it. Daud backed away, but Muqim, Roshanna, and some of the other Afghans hanging around decided to nab him for me. I put my scissors down and joined the chase. All of us raced around the yard trying to grab him, slipping in puddles, tripping over the hedges, laughing, hooting. We were so full of our own high spirits that you’d have thought we were roaring drunk. They finally captured him and dragged him back over to my chair, then tied his feet down and put a gag in his mouth. After all that, I only trimmed his hair a little. But when I was in the middle of doing it, Roshanna came running outside with a video camera and taped me standing over Daud, menacing him with my scissors while he rolled his eyes and tossed his head from side to side.
Kabul Beauty School Page 4
