Village Voice bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris (photos © John Montgomery)

Diane LeBow reads at the Village Voice bookstore in Paris (photo © John Montgomery)

Diane LeBow’s reading at Village Voice Bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris on June 1 went very well.  Diane read from her story, “Tea in Kabul,” which appears in Travelers’ Tales’ Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010.  Its original version won the Travelers’ Tales’ Solas Gold Award for Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010. Over 80 people attended the Paris reading, including some of Diane’s French friends who have traveled with her to Afghanistan several times. Here’s Diane’s story:

Tea in Kabul:
An activist witnesses a nation’s struggle for peace

Winner of Travelers’ Tales Solas Gold Award for Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010

“Those are the Hindu Kush Mountains, the killer of Hindus,” said the Afghan man seated beside me, pointing. We were on a flight from Dubai to Kabul and, through the window, could see the flat desert of Iran and southern Afghanistan suddenly give way to barren blue-and-gray ridgebacks, like waves of a stormy sea. I wondered how stormy the political situation would be during my visit to this war-weary land. Twenty-four hours ago, as I prepared to leave for the San Francisco airport, a neighbor had called to say that another bomb had just exploded in Kabul. “Should you delay your departure?” she asked.

It was 2002, one year after the World Trade Center bombing and the subsequent fall of the Taliban. I was traveling to Afghanistan as part of a human rights delegation sponsored by the San Francisco-based organization Global Exchange. There were eleven of us, mainly young Afghan-Americans and me, a recently retired college professor. Our mission was to assess the state of Afghan culture and the arts and set up projects both immediate and long-term. Having worked for women’s rights all my life, I planned to focus on that area.

Yet, I had never visited a war-zone and couldn’t help feeling anxious. Small villages of stone and mud dwellings grew visible as we angled in toward Kabul Airport. Voices and nervous laughter grew louder as excitement mounted among the passengers. Many were Afghans returning home after absences of fifteen and even twenty years.

“I left when I was three,” one man said, while another confided: “I’m afraid to get off. Everything will be so changed.”

Our plane swept past bunkers and a graveyard of smashed planes and cadavers of military aircraft. We were entering a land of lawlessness, anarchy, warlords, and twenty-three years of conflict—a part of the world where civil war and foreign invasions were more “normal” than peace.

We stepped off the plane into the “Country of Light,” as Afghanistan has been called. A young Afghan-American traveling with us said: “I thought I wouldn’t remember anything, since I moved to the States when I was five, but now that I feel the air, I know I am home.” Inside the terminal, young men in ragged brown garments who looked straight out of the Middle Ages pleaded to help me with my luggage to earn 10,000 Afghanis, about twenty-five cents.

A van awaited us outside. “Don’t worry that there are no seat belts,” said the driver. “I drive slowly.” Then he floored it, racing up the wrong side of the divided street against the oncoming traffic. Indeed, there seemed to be no traffic rules or stop lights in Kabul. Traffic moved like spilled milk—anywhere space allowed.

Through the open window of our van, I bought the autumn 2002 Survival Guide to Kabul from a street child. “There’s a lot to see, even if most of it is wrecked,” it noted. On the way to our hotel, we passed bombed-out houses, stores, and even palaces. Near the center of the city, burned skeletons of buses were stacked on top of each other around the devastated former public transportation center. Women in blue burqa and street children begged at the windows of our van. Men with no legs, victims of mines, negotiated along on a sort of skateboard amidst the traffic, pleading for baksheesh, or money.

As we approached our hotel, I noticed the top floor had no roof, only jagged remnants left behind by a past shelling or bombing. Affecting nonchalance, I joked to the driver that I sure hoped our rooms would be on a lower floor.

Our guide suggested we visit the Darulaman Palace and the Kabul Museum first. We climbed into a minivan and bounced along through the dust on the remnants of a formerly paved street. From a distance, the palace looked appropriately majestic high upon a hill. Photos I had seen from the 1920s depicted an impressive three-story turreted edifice, but as we drew near, we realized that the palace walls were now pocked with cavernous holes. Security guards yawned as they waved us through the gate. At the front entrance, we came upon a young guard sleeping on the ground, atop a red woven rug. A Kalashnikov lay beside him.

“Salaam,” we said, hoping to sound friendly. Staring up at us, he rose slowly to his feet, rubbing his dark brown eyes and running his fingers through his curly hair. In his late teens or early twenties, he would have been a heartthrob in any American high school. Our guide explained that we wished to visit the palace. The guard waved us in, and soon we were wandering through rooms that had once been grandiose, but now lay in ruins. The large chunks of missing wall permitted panoramic views of the countryside: parched rolling hills backed by hazy blue mountains.

Noticing some fresh graffiti on one wall, I stopped and peered through a doorway. The smaller adjacent room was newly plastered and painted. Noticing my curiosity, the young guard motioned for me to follow him into the bathroom next door. It featured a sparkling new white porcelain bathtub. In hesitant English, he said: “A few weeks ago, bin Laden stayed here. They prepared these rooms for him.” This couldn’t be true—could it? Regardless, the notion that I might be staring at the world’s number one terrorist’s recently used bathtub made my temples pound. I hoped that he wouldn’t be bathing here today.

I was about to rejoin the others when the guard held out his Kalashnikov and pointed at the camera hanging around my neck. Curious to hold one of these infamous Russian weapons, I accepted his offer, cradling it carefully with my fingers far from the trigger. He snapped my photo with his weapon in my hands.

From there, we drove back down the hill to the equally battered Kabul Museum. The director met us at the front door, above which hung a sign that read: a nation is alive when its culture is alive. “Welcome,” he smiled. “Please allow me to show you through as best I can. We have no electricity, but I have a flashlight.”

Until 1992, this museum housed one of the finest collections of Asian art and artifacts in the world. Ten years later, there was little to see but rubble. We shivered in the musty chilled air as the director pointed his flashlight at piles upon piles of shattered ancient treasures. Most were either destroyed by the Taliban—who believed that any portrayal of a human form was sacrilege—or by bombs. Somehow, the director seemed optimistic about its recovery. “With international assistance, we are sure we can restore most of this,” he said.

Our final visit of the day was to the Allahoddin Orphanage, home to hundreds of girls and boys on the outskirts of Kabul. Immediately upon entering the gray cement façade, we were surrounded by shouting crowds of children, from tiny toddlers to teenagers. Little hands pulled on my jacket and grasped to hold my hand, eager for human contact. Although initially unnerved by their sticky fingers and unwashed faces, I was soon reaching out and hugging everyone within my reach.

“We only have that one pump for water,” announced the director, a middle-aged bespectacled man with a short gray-streaked beard. “And our plumbing rarely works,” he added, pointing at the small water pump standing in the courtyard. “The children make a game out of pumping the water and filling buckets.” Sure enough, the kids were jumping around the pump, energetically taking turns at keeping the water flowing into receptacles.

Inside the girls’ quarters, I noticed a tiny child sitting alone quietly. Through the chill and dank air, her dark eyes stared with an expression beyond sadness and hope. One thin arm extended from the baggy sleeve of her oversized tan-and-yellow dress as she repeatedly crayoned the same simple pattern on a piece of paper.

The director gathered a group of children, aged four to fourteen, for us to photograph. A fifth-grade class of girls sang to us in Dari, the language of Northern Afghanistan: “My mother is gone away. Afghanistan, you are now my mother, and I must take care of you.”

Afterward, the director took us aside to explain the direness of the situation here. “When the Taliban took over Kabul in 1996, they came here and threw all the girls out in the street, taking some of the older ones with them. We don’t know where they are now. Please help us in any way you can. Money would be best.”

We distributed the pillows and wool mittens that we’d purchased in town for this purpose. These gifts seemed like a paltry contribution, but it was all we could do at the moment. As we drove off, I tried to envision life for women in this nation. Western news coverage of Afghanistan generally consists of illiterate warlords and draped women. However, up until the mid-1990s, Afghanistan was a progressive society. Women’s equal rights were guaranteed by the constitution. In pre-Taliban Afghanistan, urban women were educated and active participants in society, comprising 50 percent of civil administration, 70 percent of teachers, and 40 percent of physicians. Women made up roughly 15 percent of the highest legislative body in Afghanistan—a much larger number than the U.S. Congress.

The Taliban, of course, changed everything. Suddenly, these modern women were confined to their houses, with all their windows painted black, permitted outside only when accompanied by a male relative. They got beaten for showing even a bit of wrist or ankle. They were denied an education or access to earning a livelihood, and deprived of medical care. They were even forbidden from visiting the public bath on occasion, even if they had no running water at home.

Somehow the Afghan people’s resiliency persisted, perhaps bolstered by their sense of humor. The Afghan women I befriended during this visit and subsequent trips mocked the Taliban-imposed restrictions. They cracked jokes about many things, including the blue burqas they had been forced to wear. One evening at an all-women’s party, our hostess pretended to address a large crowd, asking: “Will the woman in the blue burqa please stand up?” Everyone giggled. Continuing the joke, another woman waved her arm as if signaling to an imaginary coat check girl: “Mine’s the blue one.”

At first, I was surprised at these jokes, yet their laughter was infectious. Soon, we were doubled up in laughter, rolling amidst the cushions on the floor, trying to avoid the plates of kebabs and fruit.

Having worked with Afghan women who were living in exile in France and Tajikistan, I was accustomed to their hospitality, courage, and wit. But because of our stereotype of the Afghan man as a misogynist warrior, I did not know what to expect during my interactions with men. Yet, even in the dusty chaos of Kabul’s perpetual traffic gridlock, I never saw any men get angry. My driver used the traffic jams to shout messages to other drivers and passengers. “Tell my cousin to ask his friend Hamid about the tire he is fixing for me.” Even when cars crashed into each other, the drivers didn’t seem very upset. Once, one of my drivers knocked a man off his bicycle. They chatted about it for a few minutes, then laughed and drove on.

On one of my last days in Kabul, Tarek, a university student, and I hiked up the side of a mountain near the city’s ancient walls, which date from the fifth century. Some twenty feet high and twelve feet thick, these walls ascend almost perpendicularly from the Kabul River. As we clambered up the loose shale on the steep hillside, security helicopters buzzed above, while far below, women washed clothes in the trickle of river remaining after five years of drought.

On that day, most people were heading toward the Ghazi Sports Stadium. This was the infamous stadium where the Taliban performed public executions and stonings every Friday until they were routed by U.S. and Northern Alliance forces earlier this year. Today’s event was a commemoration in honor of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the great Afghan freedom fighter who was assassinated on September 9, 2001, two days before the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City. Al Qaeda is believed to have orchestrated the killing in order to deprive the United States of Afghanistan’s most capable ally commander.

Up in the mountains, the hum of the city softened and the air grew slightly less choked with dust. Most people in Kabul have a hacking cough or bronchitis and I did too—a worrisome condition, given that air particles are believed to contain depleted uranium from Soviet and U.S. bombings. Children waved at us from doorways of mud-brick houses cantilevered into the slope, so that one end of each roof was at ground level. A woman yelled something to Tarek. He translated: “She said that I should assist you more, as the hillside is slippery.”

At the next house up the slope, a one-legged man on crutches waved and shouted, too, beckoning us over with a smile. “He’s inviting us to come in and have tea with him and his family,” Tarek explained.

As we approached, I could see that he had the movie-star good looks of many Afghan men: gorgeous symmetrical features, muscular build, dark hair and beard, and expressive dark eyes. Afghan eyes really look into you, and their gaze is not pained or demanding or threatening in any way. It is dispassionate and composed, perhaps the result of millennia of survival.

“English, American?” the man asked. “Don’t you have hills like this? Stay here awhile and you’ll get stronger legs. See what it’s done for me!” He pointed to his stump and laughed. His four children peeked out from behind him as he ushered us into the living room. There was no electricity but windows cut through the mud brick let in daylight. Unlit oil lamps sat in one corner.

Introducing himself as Ashraf, our host lowered himself on to a pillow on the dirt floor and indicated that we do the same. His wife, a beautiful woman with golden-green eyes, nodded hospitably as she brought in a teapot, cups, and bowls of nuts and raisins.

“I’m the mayor of this section of the city,” he said, a broad smile on his face. “I’ve fought against the Soviets and the Taliban to protect my family and little community here.” A mine had blown off one of his legs, he explained, and he showed me various holes in his chest and back from mortar fire. He’d even been friends with Massoud, serving with him in both wars against the Soviet Union as well as the Afghan civil wars against the Taliban.

Yet, despite his personal tragedy, Ashraf was one of the most jovial people I’ve ever met, cracking jokes and grinning. As we talked, I realized that his knowledge of world affairs would put many Americans to shame. Where did he learn so much?

“I’ve never had time to go to school but I listen to the BBC in Dari,” he explained.

“My husband is a very good man,” his wife chimed in.

Given the amount of affection he showed toward their children and to her, this seemed sincere. Still, I wanted to probe more deeply. What did he think of the cruel treatment his country had inflicted upon its women? Didn’t he want his daughters to receive an education and find a good job?

He gave this some thought, then responded: “I’m an Islamist. I believe that women should have full rights to have careers, to go to the university, but still they should wear the hijab. We are Moslems, we want to respect our women wearing the cover. It is not the burqa which is the point but the freedom to move about in their lives, to live full lives, that is important.”

“But it’s uncomfortable inside the burqa and difficult to see and to walk,” I persisted. “I tried one and it gave me a headache. Do you think I’m a bad woman because I’m wearing trousers and a sweater with only a scarf around my neck? Look how nice it is for us to discuss life and everything together!”

He laughed and nodded in agreement.

We sipped tea with Ashraf for nearly two hours, sharing stories about our families, our travels, our lives as we pushed bowls of raisins back and forth. Finally, I said: “Here you are, after twenty plus years of war. You’ve lost a leg, your body has been shot again and again, yet you are so cheerful. How is that?”

“Diane,” he said, leaning forward from where he sat and gesturing toward me, “Now we have peace,” he said. “And peace is everything.”

– Diane LeBow
BATW President