Bamiyan Village

After a quick stop in Peshawar—a city still packed with aid workers, journalists, and the American Club—for new clothes and a burqa, I was on my way to Kabul with nary a chance to at least circle the club.

Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, was a desolate, demolished, and desperate place, teeming with people, animals, all manner of vehicles and dust, all competing for space amidst the rubble. The dust seemed to be winning. Although music was playing there for the first time in years (it had been forbidden under the Taliban), the people in the streets were destitute and joyless; they had been stripped of everything but hope. Burqa-clad women, their faces covered, seemed almost to blend into the background, another haunting slice of the scenery. Most of the men hurried along, heads down, hands stuffed into pockets, while others—men, women, and children—stood quietly, some with their hands out, haunting, hungry eyes searching for money, food, anything to get through another day. I couldn’t stay to help. I was headed to Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, where, it was said, the need was even more pressing.

I fell into bed in the MSF Kabul house, not much more than a series of bedrooms for aid workers on their way in and out of Afghanistan. I fell into a restless sleep, and by 5:00 A.M. I was awake, dressed, and ready to leave. After a quick cup of coffee, I climbed into a sparkling white Range Rover with the Afghan driver and the Australian man I’d met in Paris, and we headed out of the city, on our way. The ten-hour drive over rocky terrain was memorable for the signs of recent war—the rubble of destroyed houses and villages, minefields marked with red danger signs, the carcasses of stray dogs, and the lingering scent of death. In one particularly devastated village, people ran alongside our obviously foreign SUV with the bright red MSF logo on the side and yelled “Thank you” in clear English. It made me sad; we hadn’t even done anything yet and they were grateful that we were there. Along the road, amidst all of the devastation, were bursts of sweet, colorful flowers growing, struggling through the scorched earth to be seen; wonderful reminders that beauty still existed here. I took a deep breath; there was no mistaking that I was in Afghanistan at last.

After nine hours on the road, I could no longer wait to use a latrine at the MSF compound. I noticed an old, bombed-out, falling-down mud farmhouse and asked the driver to pull over so that I could pee. I pulled my hijab tight, ran in, scouted about for land mines, and squatted in the dust, adjusting my wide pants, long dress, and sandal-clad feet, careful to keep the run-off away. It was an art that would take me months to master.

As we neared Bamiyan, the air here in the mountains, even in early May, was much colder than I’d expected or packed for; no sweaters or jackets in my bags. No matter the preparations and research, it seemed my clothes were always for another climate. It wouldn’t be until early July that summer finally settled here in the mountains.

The MSF compound, located just outside the village center, was a series of mud buildings surrounded by a high mud wall and metal gate. The compound housed both offices and living quarters. The housing area consisted of an L-shaped mud building with separate bedrooms along a long outdoor corridor, a dining area, and a bathroom. The bathroom, about the size of a closet, consisted of a small water tank and a heating urn.

This had been a Taliban house not so long ago, and signs of them were everywhere. The walls in the living area were covered with simple drawings—apples, trees, an occasional flower, hinting at someone who was perhaps not quite so filled with hate as we all believed. The flowing Persian letters that seemed at first glance to be symbols of beauty spelled, an interpreter quickly explained, words of hate—for the local villagers, Americans, nonbelievers. And the walls held still more secrets; bullet holes marred the surface of walls both inside and out. No one knew, or would say, if people had died here, and it wouldn’t have changed anything anyway. I was here to stay.

The team consisted of five others—a South African doctor, an Australian midwife, the logistics manager I’d arrived with, and the French coordinator and his wife, and every one of them had been told that I was Irish. I greeted them in my soft brogue, and when the coordinator asked for everyone’s passport to keep in his safe, I shuffled through my bag and produced my Irish passport. I would keep my American one hidden, moving it every now and then. The advice from Bendu had been clear—keep your identity a secret. I planned to keep it that way.

A quick orientation revealed that in order to bathe, I would have to first start a fire under the urn, fill it with water from the larger water tank, and wait for the water to heat. Once the water was warm, I would pour the water into a bucket and take a “bucket” bath by squatting beside the bucket, wetting myself down, soaping up, and then rinsing off. Our water was supplied from a nearby village well and delivered by a weary old donkey that spent his day shuffling back and forth from the well with large buckets of water lashed to his sides. There was no electricity and the bathroom was windowless, so the only light was supplied by a kerosene lantern. The toilet was a mud latrine (literally a hole) in another closet-sized room, built onto the roof. We had to climb a set of mud stairs to get there. Again, no light, so a lantern or flashlight was always needed.

For meals, we would sit on the floor in the dining room and share the Afghan food, always sweet tea, rice, and bread, sometimes meat or fried eggs. Breakfast was instant coffee.

My own room was an austere mud room with a pad on the floor for sleeping. I tried to make it more comforting by decorating. I taped a world map labeled in Arabic on the wall and placed my own things around the room, but come night I was not alone.

As I lay on my sleeping pad that first night, I heard a loud chomping sound just above me. I froze, my heart pounding as a bead of sweat trickled along my neck. I took a deep breath, reached for my flashlight, and angled it toward the source of the sound. The room’s ceiling was flimsy—straw and mud and a rare slice of rough wood. The straw that was visible was moving—just a little—but enough to show that something was eating away at my flimsy ceiling. The chomping was too loud for a mouse, too light for a dog, but what could be up there? I moved my sleeping pad out from under that patch of thin ceiling and watched warily, certain that whatever was up there would be crashing through any minute. But it didn’t. Not that night and not any other after that. I was soon used to the noise and slept right through til morning. There’s a lot to be said for exhaustion.