Over Christmas I joined members of Voices for Creative Nonviolence UK on a peace delegation to Kabul, Afghanistan.
Over Christmas I joined members of Voices for Creative Nonviolence UK on a peace delegation to Kabul, Afghanistan. We stayed with the women’s community of the Afghan Peace Volunteers, who run a community centre, home to humanitarian and cultural projects. The volunteers host many delegations from the US, Australia and the UK. They also join Global Days of Listening in Skype calls with people all over the world.
My way of getting to know a new city is to set out on foot, see where my feet will take me, stop for coffee. In Kabul, this will not be possible. At the moment, it is too dangerous for foreigners to walk anywhere; all trips will be by taxi. We will disguise our presence, heads down, keeping silent in front of strangers.
Stepping off the plane, into the bright yellow light, there is a sweet smell, partly diesel fumes partly something chemical. Pale yellow, grey dust covers the roses, trees, soil in the small airport garden. The dust and the smell are the same painful, yellow gray.
From the airport, the taxi noses round pot holes, round pedestrians and cyclists. Men in the street, gather in small groups, drink tea. Young women walk in small groups, girls gather around school gates.
We pass garages, exhaust pipe and tyre shops, bumper shops, bodywork shops. Men crouch on the kerb, selling petrol from a long tank. The road passes marble shops, cement stores, concrete mixers, carpet shops, signs of a construction boom. There are new houses, with tinted glass and ornate balconies that look as if they have already seen better days or waiting for better days to come.
The atmosphere, the bright yellow light and the strange smell of diesel fumes and wood smoke, seems personified and in my jet lagged state seem to follow us into Kabul, into the flat where we’ll be staying. After a good sleep, the bright yellow light streaming across the carpeted floor, I soon grow accustomed to our inside life. In the day I pick up sound clues, the neighbour’s ringtone, the neighbour’s children. I can hear the thud of a football against the wall and scuffling feet in sandals. I distinguish the street cries from the muezzin. The silent gap between our garden wall and the next building is the Kabul river bed.
Best of all I get to know our hosts, the young men and women of the Afghan Peace Volunteers, sitting round the beaten metal stove, eating the Celebrations we’ve brought. After a few days I start to hear their stories how the war has affected their lives and their families.
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© Henrietta Cullinan is Ekklesia’s administrator. She is also a peace activist and involved with London Catholic Worker. Her blog, from which this is adapted, is here: https://henriettacullinan.wordpress.com/ Twitter: @Henrietta_