Border Hopping

Jalal­abad sits at the crux between cen­tral and south Asias, tucked into the moun­tains near the Kyber pass- the famous gate­way to the Indi­an sub­con­ti­nent. The peo­ple here are Pash­tuns, and their tribes strad­dle the polit­i­cal bound­ary between Pak­istan and Afghanistan. I’ve heard ref­er­ence sev­er­al times to “Pashtunistan,” a coun­try that exists in only a cul­tur­al con­text, encom­pass­ing all the Pash­tun peo­ple from both sides of the board­er. The red line on the map was drawn when British India pushed…

What’s NORMAL anyway?

Words are pow­er­ful.  You read them and they paint a pic­ture. The prob­lem is, some things are hard to describe, our con­texts are too dif­fer­ent. Humans have an amaz­ing capac­i­ty to adapt, and we have already adapt­ed. You’ve seen some pic­tures and some videos.  We’ll keep those com­ing. Once a week, I’ll try to write a longer post.  Lou and I have been here a week now and it’s time to share more ful­ly. It’s chal­leng­ing to back­track this process of…

Turkey Slaughter

We went shop­ping for Christ­mas din­ner in the bazar. Todd (Huff­man) had in mind to get a turkey and our dri­ver helped us find one. The bird was dis­as­sem­bled in front of our eyes.

Merry Christmas from Jalalabad

This is Dave. He’s our trib­al elder here at the Taj Guest­house — Malik Dave. He runs the Syn­er­gy Strike Force, which Peretz and I are now part of. He’s a US tank gun­ner turned MD PhD turned hip­pie-human­i­­tar­i­an aid-tech guru. He’s respon­si­ble for the flex­i­ble, organ­ic nature of the projects we work on and gets batch­es of mon­ey to make them hap­pen. Last night at our bar (the only bar in East­ern Afghanistan) he decid­ed to take a holiday…

Panorama of Jalabad Valley

Panora­ma of the val­ley where we are liv­ing, tak­en from the top of a Bud­dhist bur­ial mound. You can see the Kab­ul riv­er in the dis­tance with the caves Osama Bin Laden lived in when he first came to Afghanistan behind it.

Explosively Sweet

Take me for a ride in Kabul

This is footage I shot out of a taxi win­dow while the boys and I were in stop and go traf­fic on Tai­moni Street, head­ing for Pajh­wok news.

The Russians are coming.

In the 80s I was a lit­tle boy grow­ing up in the Sovi­et Union and everyone’s old­er broth­er was either going or busy­ing them­selves about how to get out of going to Afghanistan. Mil­i­tary ser­vice was manda­to­ry. If you didn’t study hard and get into uni­ver­si­ty, the gov­ern­ment had an alter­na­tive edu­ca­tion in mind for you. “Study hard so you will go to university,” the teach­ers warned us, “so you will not die in Afghanistan.” Hamid was our taxi dri­ver from…

Afghan War Rug

In a coun­try where most peo­ple are illit­er­ate, the tapes­try of his­to­ry is woven into the rugs.

FabFi — FabLab Jalalabad

Meet the home­made Fab­Fi mesh net­work. We are bring­ing some indus­tri­al equip­ment to replace the most used edges on the net­work. (bonus if you can spot the geo­graph­i­cal error in the pow­er­point presentation.)