Journey to Afghanistan

"And the burqas... I was trying not to stand out too much and covered my head while out in public but I really don't have the hang of it." Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps.

April 2, 2003 - My journey into Afghanistan started off on a humorous note. From what I can gather, there are two options for flights between Islamabad and Kabul: UN flights and flights on planes operated by a Christian NGO called AirServ (AirSwerv for us cynical NGO folks). AirServ was our only option that day. First of all, as we were going through all of the regular departure procedures here at the Islamabad airport (which are pretty involved, require lots of x-ray machines, physical searches, stamps, lines, etc.), I was handed a baggage tag on which the following was written: "Kabul AirServ. Frequent Flyer Club". Yippee!!! The only other place I'm aware of at the moment were AirServ flies is Congo-Kinshasa!

The next humorous moment was watching Jim, at 6'5", squeeze himself not only into our tiny 10-seater KingAir plane but then into the tiny little seat across the aisle from me.

As I always do, I dozed off almost immediately after take off. I awoke somewhere over Afghanistan to a most beautiful sight of snow-capped mountains. My awe at the beauty of the scenery quickly turned into another kind of awe when I looked out the windshield of the plane to see nothing but mountains directly in front of us.

The Country Director of AirServ happened to be in front of me and he explained that our plane had a cracked windshield. With this, our aircraft couldn't be pressurized, meaning that we couldn't fly above 15,000 feet, leaving us to wend our way through the Khyber Pass! Everywhere I looked were mountains and we were not above them!

This, to me, was not the nerve-wracking part. To me, the real problem lay in our altitude. Afghanistan is a country that is armed to the teeth. As I looked down at the mountains and valleys not too far below me, I kept thinking that we would be a pretty easy target for some wacko with an RPG (rocket propelled grenade). Or a slingshot.

As always, we completed our journey with no problems and another good story under our belts. I was finally in Kabul!

What... a... dump! I've been to some dumps but this place was a D-U-M-P dump. Not only is a majority of the architecture along the lines of that lovely Soviet concrete block style but it is trashed from too many tank fights between warloads. When I commented on this to my colleagues, they pointed out that I was in the nice part of town. Good lord.

And the burqas... I was trying not to stand out too much and covered my head while out in public but I really don't have the hang of it. It's my silky smooth hair. There's no keeping a scarf on it. Actually, there's something to burqas. The top is kind of like a little skull cap that fits onto your head and to which the veil and a long cape thingy is connected. That certainly is easier than what I was grappling with. I know where to buy a burqa...

Kabul is a strange place. People say that it was quite a place in its day -- the Paris of South Asia. Believe me, there is no indication of this now. The only attractive things that I saw while I was there (granted, I didn't see much other than the Mercy Corps guest house and office) were the snow-capped mountains on the horizon of the city and a 200-year-old bombed-out fortress on a hilltop outside the city.

The flight back to Afghanistan was more "normal" in that we were in a larger plane with a proper windshield. We flew at about 30,000 feet, giving us a spectacular view of the snow-capped mountains and even the Tora Bora mountains where Coalition forces fought long and hard to route out Osama Bin Laden (or OBL as we lovingly refer to him here). The landmarks here are amazing - both historical and recent.

I'm here in Islamabad for a few days and then I'm off to either Quetta (in southwest Pakistan) or back to Kabul. Before the month is out, I'll be spending some time at our office in Taloquan in northern Afghanistan.