Watch Out! You are hiking in Afghanistan

When you are hik­ing in Afghanistan, don’t always rely on the white paint­ed rocks. You should use your own bomb deters, too. Una and I were hik­ing at this sup­pos­ed­ly dem­ined area near the Bud­dha in Bamyan when we saw an unex­plod­ed bomb half buried in the dirt. Only the tail was stick­ing out and I almost almost stepped on it. It was twi­light and I gave the near­by police a shout. They did­n’t both­er to come at first. Then Una took off her yel­low sock and put it next to the bomb. Then we walked down to the police and told them about it. They said, “we’ll do some­thing about it tomorrow.”

This Time in Bamyan

Back in April of this year, my col­league, Una and I came to Bamyan for a needs assess­ment sur­vey at Bamyan Uni­ver­si­ty (here­after BU). The uni­ver­si­ty is locat­ed in the provin­cial cen­ter. The num­ber of stu­dents as per last April was over 1700. Its aca­d­e­mics are fac­ul­ties of Edu­ca­tion, Social Sci­ences, Agri­cul­ture, Geol­o­gy. And fac­ul­ties of Com­put­er Sci­ence, Jour­nal­ism and Health to open in 2012. We took a tour of BU’s old and new cam­pus­es. BU’s new cam­pus that was under con­struc­tion in our last trip is the most remote uni­ver­si­ty I have ever seen. My col­league vis­it­ed the girls’ dorm since I a man and not allowed into the girls’ dorm. Pho­to of ther­mal water heat­ing sys­tem at the girls’ dorm: I was impressed by the young and tal­ent­ed fac­ul­ty mem­bers of the uni­ver­si­ty. They have been extreme­ly help­ful and friend­ly. The aim of our vis­it was to assess the elec­tric­i­ty sit­u­a­tion at uni­ver­si­ty and then see how we could help. The uni­ver­si­ty has big gen­er­a­tors but the the donors who donat­ed these gen­er­a­tors to them did not think about the fuel costs. One of the biggest chal­lenges for the uni­ver­si­ty is their fuel costs for the gen­er­a­tors. They have very lim­it­ed funds for it and they can’t run them more than four hours a day. They need to run the four com­put­er labs they have for the uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents and the fac­ul­ty from at least 8am to 4pm. Insuf­fi­cient sup­ply of elec­tric­i­ty. Anoth­er mis­take that the pre­vi­ous donors have made is that they donat­ed desk­top com­put­ers to them which require a lot of elec­tric­i­ty. In addi­tion to not­ing their elec­tric­i­ty prob­lems, we noticed that they need­ed more com­put­er labs and inter­net for the over­whelm­ing num­ber of stu­dents. The new cam­pus had no com­put­er lab or inter­net when we vis­it­ed. Anoth­er great chal­lenge of the uni­ver­si­ty was lack of local IT exper­tise. At the end of our 5‑day sur­vey at BU, we shared our find­ings with our big boss­es in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Luck­i­ly, they were able to fund two com­put­er labs for the uni­ver­si­ty with a total of 40 ener­gy effi­cient lap­tops, a com­plete solar sys­tem for the two com­put­er labs and inter­net for one of the two labs. My col­league and I were also able to raise some mon­ey to finance two pro­fes­sors from Bamyan Uni­ver­si­ty and a few more peo­ple from oth­er orga­ni­za­tions to attend a 2‑week inten­sive train­ing on web­site man­age­ment in the cap­i­tal, Kab­ul which end­ed last Fri­day. Here we are again we arrived in Bamyan yes­ter­day morn­ing. We came here a few days ahead of the solar engi­neers to train the uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents and the staff in a bunch of tech tools, social media and map­ping tools and apps. There was also mon­ey bud­get­ed for 15 smart phones that we pur­chased in this project. It’s impor­tant for the stu­dents and the pro­fes­sors of social sci­ences depart­ment and oth­ers to learn how to use them when they are train­ing in social media and map­ping. We had a brief meet­ing with the deputy chan­cel­lor of BU late after­noon yes­ter­day and we’ll dis­cuss our sched­ule for the train­ing and an overview of the plan with them in more detail lat­er this morn­ing. They will also help us to iden­ti­fy stu­dents for the train­ing today. My awe­some col­league asked them to keep in mind gen­der bal­ance in iden­ti­fy­ing the trainees. They’ll be trained in four dif­fer­ent things: 1. Start­ing on the 16th, 2 days of Open­StreetMap train­ing which I will be giv­ing (Bamyan on OSM will hope­ful­ly look like Jalal­abad on OSM one day). 2. Then 2 days of social media and blog­ging train­ing that Una will be giv­ing. 3. After that 2 days of train­ing in Crowdmap (an Ushahi­di ini­ti­at­ed plat­form for dis­as­ter response and reports). 4. And final­ly when the solar engi­neers arrive on the 21st of Octo­ber, we’d like the trainees to be present there and see how they install the solar gear and the com­put­er lab. It’s 2:45 in the morn­ing and I need to get some shut eye. But please look at the pho­to blog of Una about our yes­ter­day’s won­der­ful trip: Transitionland.wordpress.com/back-to-bamiyan/

What is democracy?

I was in Dara-e-nur dis­trict of Nan­garhar yes­ter­day. It’s a very remote dis­trict in the mid­dle of nowhere. All moun­tains. I saw this guy who was rid­ing on his motor­cy­cle along with three oth­er friends. I asked them, “why are you four peo­ple rid­ing on one motor­cy­cle?” They said, “it’s democ­ra­cy.” You do what you want and feel like doing.

Car wash in Jalalabad

Gen­er­al­ly, there are two types of car wash­es in Jalal­abad: 1. fan­cy and expen­sive that com­man­ders, et. al. use and 2. riv­er and stream sides locat­ed ones that use a small gen­nie to pump water and hose down cars. 

Below is a hand pres­sure pump that is used to splash oil under the car so that it does­n’t get rusty. Most of the cars that we use in Afghanistan are used cars that get dumped here after they are first used in Cana­da, the U.S. or Japan main­ly. Their bot­toms are real­ly rusty after they were used in those coun­tries in snow and salt on snow.

I am nei­ther a com­man­der nor the son of a com­man­der so I usu­al­ly use the latter.

A Joyful Weekend at Sweating Man

My broth­er, Idris, Rah­mat and I went to the Jalala­good Sweat­ing Man last weekend.
Then we played Khu­sai, the one foot­ed Afghan game. It was so much fun that I for­got to take any pho­tos. There was a flood a cou­ple of days ear­li­er and the water in Behsood Riv­er was all very gray because of the floods, etc. This fish­er­man was try­ing to catch fish. He caught a few fish that were lit­er­al­ly the size of his mid­dle fin­ger. He was so hap­py with that. Three oth­er friends and fam­i­ly mem­bers were wait­ing for him and hold­ing the fish the he had caught.

Our car got stuck in wet sand. We asked a small Suzu­ki car to pull it back and get it out. It slipped and had to get the Suzu­ki out. It was small­er than my Toy­ota Corol­la. We put the jack under the car and a lot of rock under the tires then tried to go reverse. It worked. I enjoyed get­ting our car out of the sink­ing sand.

Water Tank

Fun­ny water tank on top of a house. This fam­i­ly lives 20 kilo­me­ters south of Jalal­abad city and they have enmi­ty with Tal­iban. Tal­iban killed a mem­ber of this fam­i­ly and then they went and killed sev­er­al Tal­iban to take revenge. The fam­i­ly is always vig­i­lant. They guard their house with their AK47s 24/7. It’s fun­ny that they have this flashy red water tank. There is anoth­er house in Jalal­abad that has a water tow­er in the shape of an old Rus­sia jeep.