Where I Live In Kabul
Monday, October 16th 2006 - 8:32 AM
This is a bit i wrote in my diary not long after i got to Kabul. It's a little bit out of date now, but it gives a bit of an idea of where i am etc...
The house where i live is the Internews "guest house" - which is where Internews overseas staff live when they're working in Kabul. It's a big house, with half a dozen bedrooms, a big lounge room, dining room, kitchen, a couple of bathrooms. There are marble floors in the hallways, kitchen, bathrooms, and the stairs are marble too. The floor outside my room, the upstairs hallway, is done in crazy paving style, with irregular bits of different coloured marble.
My bedroom's quite large, with windows along two sides and doors out onto two separate verandahs on those sides. There's a great view of a big bare, brown and rocky hill in the middle distance, from the window where i've got my desk. That's the window the sun shines in first thing in the morning, when it rises over the top of the hill at a bit after six o'clock.
The house has got a decent sized yard on three sides, with about a dozen small trees, including a couple of pear trees with ripe fruit on them. The pears are small, but they taste good, and i manage to get a bit of exercise occasionally, by climbing them to pick some pears. There are some grape vines too, one of which had small but really nice grapes on it until a few days ago, some brownish grass and various small shrubby things struggling to grow around the place. There are high walls all round and the gate to the street is always locked for security reasons.
The view from my bedroom window
There are three "guards" employed by Internews, who work in shifts around the clock. They're more like watchmen than guards though. But you have to be let in and locked out, so there's always someone kind of "monitoring" your coming and going. And you have to bother them if you want to pop out - although one of them, at least, Abdul Fatah, is bored mindless most of the time and probably looks forward to having to let someone in or out. He's a nice bloke and we talk a bit. His English isn't great, but it's a million times better than my Dari!
The street outside has road blocks and a boom gate at each end, because a member of parliament lives over the road and there's been attempts to kill them. There are always several soldiers on patrol outside and occasionally they want to know where you're going when you're walking to the guest house. I'm not sure if all this makes the place safer or more dangerous!
Roadblocks in the street outside my house
To get to work, i turn left outside our gate, walk between the red and white striped concrete blocks of the roadblock, and turn left at the corner. This is a side street of Darul Aman Road - the busy main road that the Internews office is on, in a suburb called Karte Se. The road is tarred, but the wide verges are mainly bare earth.
There are a couple of little general grocery shops on the far corner of our road. And on right hand side of the road i walk down there are two or three small shops - but i haven't managed to work out what, if anything, they sell. On the left side, a bit further on, there's a small shack cum stall, run by a man with one leg. It doesn't seem to sell very much though.
Every now and then, i see sheep herded down this street - going from who knows where to who knows where. And there's a fair bit of pedestrian, bicycle and car traffic, but i certainly wouldn't describe the street as busy.
Turning right into Darul Aman Road, there's a small metalwork factory just round the corner. Between the buildings and the road along here, there's a strip of dirt about ten or fifteen metres wide, and the guys in the factory seem to do most of their work out here. I wave to them and say "salaam" as i pass, and they generally respond the same way.
A bit further on, there's a couple of small mechanic's workshops and they're usually working on a car or two out the front. Just next to them there are three or four large, heavy roadwork-type vehicles parked in the dust.
Another twenty metres and i come to the gate of the Internews offices. On weekday mornings, it's generally not locked and there's often a couple of the security guys or drivers hanging around out the front.
There's a constant stream of traffic on Darul Aman Road - crowded buses, cars, trucks and bicycles. Curiously - unlike the rest of Asia - there doesn't appear to be any motorbikes here.
It's only about a five minute walk, but it's just about enough to help keep me sane. And it's certainly a nice change from the fifty kilometres i had to drive each way to get to and from work before i left Australia!
Kabul is probably the most dusty place i've ever been - apart from lots of building sites, that is. In fact, the air here is pretty much on a par with your average demolition site. It's certainly a million miles from the beachside environment at Suffolk Park, where i lived before i came here!
Full moon as seen from my bedroom window in Kabul
You can see some of my photos of Afganistan at
WillKemp-Photos.com/afghanistan