"Dine and drink in Kabul: it is mountain, desert, city, river and all else."

This is a pretty typical sight in Kabul after it rains: the entire city turns into a giant mud puddle. There are extremely few paved roads in the city, just a highway or two, so it doesn't take much rain to get this result but it takes days for the roads to dry out again.

You've also got mountains like these looming just north of the city, which connect to the Hindu Kush.





The Kabul River--not such a pretty sight right now.

There's garbage strewn everywhere, all over the city. It does get picked up, but that's basically just a drop in the bucket. By the time it gets picked up in one spot, people have been dumping in five other spots. It's an endless cycle that doesn't look like it will end anytime soon, at least not until the country gets more developed.


People live in these fantastic cliff dwellings, as we called them, that climb right up the mountains and cling to the sides at impossible heights.







This is not a very good photo, but it shows typical Kabul traffic: horrible, chaotic, and completely insane. Driving in Kabul is basically a free-for-all. If there are any traffic laws, they aren't enforced and people drive like madmen. Anything and everything goes. Frankly, I'm somewhat amazed that we never even saw an accident the whole time we were there, much less someone get nailed. People walk right through the center of traffic, barely noticing as vehicles blast right by them. It made me nervous just to watch--I couldn't imagine doing it, but people were completely nonchalant about the whole endeavor. Just business as usual.

A view of the city from Band-e-Qargha, up in the foothills outside Kabul.

A bus cemetery--at least that's what Najib called it, which seemed apt.

from Wikipedia

"Kabul (Persian: کابل Kābol IPA: [kɒːˈbol]; Pashto: کابل Kābul IPA: [kɑˈbul];^[2] archaic Caubul), is the capital and largest city of Afghanistan, located in Kabul Province. According to a 2009 census, it has a population of 3,568,500.^[3][4]

It is an economic and cultural centre, situated 5,900 ft (1,800 m) above sea level in a narrow valley, wedged between the Hindu Kush mountains along the Kabul River. The city is linked with Ghazni, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-e Sharif via a circular highway that stretches across the country. It is also the start of the main road to Jalalabad and, further on, Peshawar, Pakistan.

Kabul's main products include munitions, cloth, furniture and beet sugar, but since 1978, a state of nearly continuous war has limited the economic productivity of the city. Economic productivity has improved since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in 2001.^[5]

Kabul is over 3,000 years old; many empires have long fought over the city for its strategic location along the trade routes of Southern and Central Asia. In 1504, Babur captured Kabul and used it as his headquarters until 1526, before his conquest of India. In 1776, Timur Shah Durrani made it the capital of modern Afghanistan.^[6] Since the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the city has been a constant target of destruction by rebels or militants. It is currently in the early phases of reconstruction.^[7] New construction projects are being implemented as attempts at modernizing the city."

Due to a dream I had last night about being back in Kabul, I've decided to devote an entry to the city of Kabul itself. For the most part Kabul defies description. Unless you've actually been there or somewhere like it, you can't even imagine it. Kabul is chaotic, loud, dusty, colorful, muddy, ancient, mountainous, vibrant, large, dirty, destroyed, rebuilt, full of life, bright, timeless, and so much more. There's no easy way to describe a city as full of contradictions as Kabul.

This map of the city (courtesy of Wikipedia) gives good overview of the city and provides a general idea of where neighborhoods and some sites of interest are located. A lot of these I remember seeing when I was there (from driving by them if not actually visiting them) but even more are not shown on here.

Because of security issues, we weren't able to actually walk around on the streets so instead we were driven everywhere we went and then on arrival we were hurried in from the bus inside to our destination. As a result, most of my pictures of street scenes were taken from the windows of the bus as we drove by, but some of them turned out fairly well regardless. We also did make it to a lot of the city on our way to various meetings, so I saw a lot of very different neighborhoods in the course of ten days.

Aschiana

Both of these photos are from our initial meeting with Mohammed, the manager of Aschiana ("Aschiana" is the Dari word for "nest"). I'm not really sure how to handle security/anonymity issues regarding the people we met on this trip; I don't want to put anyone in undue danger from a reckless blog entry, so even though it's probably not really necessary I won't use full names for anyone we met with.

The photo below shows Mohammed holding the 2009 Humanitarian Award which Aschiana won, beating out more than 4,000 entries from 35 different countries.



These photos were taken in the room containing all the handicrafts and art products that are made by the students at Aschiana and sold, providing part of the income used to run Aschiana. And all the art was absolutely beautiful.



This painting was my personal favorite.


This was the first classroom we visited, where an art class was taking place.









These was the special ed classroom. These women were wonderful with the students--very kind and gentle and supportive.

This cabinet we saw on the path between different buildings and stopped to look at. It contains a display of different ordnance, I believe the word is, that can be found everywhere in Afghanistan and particularly Kabul. This is meant to show the children at Aschiana what different bombs and grenades and various things that go boom look like so they leave them alone. Unfortunately it's not uncommon for children looking for playthings or scrap metal to sell to find something like this and pick it up, only to be killed when it goes off.

Afghanistan is also one of the most heavily mined countries in the world--landmines are everywhere. The HALO Trust is a mine-clearing NGO that locates and destroys landmines and other "debris of war," as their website puts it.



Students in another classroom. The big guy on the right is one of my fellow travelers, not an unusually large Afghan kid.

Notice the poster at the top left of the picture below, and the close-up below that. This type of poster was more common than the HALO Trust display cabinet and was prominently displayed at every school or children's organization we visited in some form or another.




More handicrafts in the woodworking shop. Aschiana also does vocational training, teaching people to make things like this to sell.


The dojo or whatever it's called where they teach judo.

When we walked in and they explained the gym to us, Jake informed everyone that he is a black belt in something or other and Mohammed asked if he would like to go one-on-one with this kid, one of their students in judo.

It was very entertaining--for us at least. We weren't the ones getting slammed into the mat:)






We kept huddling under David's umbrella while we were waiting for Abdul, the driver, to bring the bus over when it was time to leave.

It was cold and rainy the day we went to Aschiana. Aschiana is a program that provides education and vocational training to street children in Kabul, and they do great work.

Aschiana was developed to support street children, who are the most vulnerable in Afghanistan. It is registered/funded by the Ministry of Education. The center we visited is not the only center they operate; there are others in Kabul as well as in different provinces. They work with more than 9,000 children and also work with children from IDP camps, which stands for Internally Displaced People--or in other words, refugees from other areas of Afghanistan. Aschiana works with1,300 families from four IDP camps, which is about 2,500 kids total.

Their main goal is to integrate children from the streets to schools, and also provide vocational training for both boys and girls. School activities include art, literature, sports, health education, work with special ed/handicapped children, etc and vocational programs include carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, and so on.

It costs $20 a month for each child to go to school, and since most families can't afford that Aschiana has a school sponsorship program that finds private donors to sponsor a student and pay that student's school expenses.

Aschiana also has a foundation in the US, based in Washington, D.C. which helps fund Aschiana's programs and also helps locat and provide sponsors to pay the childrens' school fees. If you're interested in learning more about Aschiana or donating to their exceedingly worthy cause, you can find their website here.