Notes from Stephen, Wan, Kweilin, and Li

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Outside Kabul: schools, children, land mines

From Kweilin:

   We had a GREAT day today.  This was our third day in Kabul and our
   first two days we stayed pretty much inside the city and went around
   to markets and to the outskirts of town.  Today, Daddy arranged
   through a friend of his (the same people he went to Bamyan with for
   that three-day trip last week) to have two day trips around Kabul.  So
   today at 9:00 a.m. we went to the north of Kabul on the road to
   Mazar-e-Sharif.  There were at least 100 rusting and decaying tanks
   all along the road, and some rusting trucks too.  A lot of the houses
   were crumbling and full of bulletholes and the vineyards had been
   burnt when the Taliban fled.  Almost all of the families outside of
   town are very poor, and there were a lot of small stalls along the
   road.  There are SO many kids here.  I think an average woman has
   around 8!  But then child mortality is pretty high too.  With the
   growing number of cars and trucks, a lot of the! kids are getting hit
   and hurt by them.
   The countryside was really beautiful.  There are huge snow-capped
   mountains and brown hills on all sides of Kabul.  And we drove along a
   beautiful river today too.  On certain parts, the bridges are bombed
   out, so you have to take a detour around.  The roads were so bad that
   we had a flat tire half way through.
   The highlight of the day was visiting a school.  The schools here are
   held in big tents (open air things held up by poles with some desks
   and a very small basic chalkboard inside).  Most of the students are
   so poor they cannot even buy a notebook to write things down in, and
   the kids sometimes don't have pencils and pens.  The school we visited
   had 1600 students and it was just two big tents!  There is a morning
   session for the younger boys and an afternoon session for the older
   boys.  There is a separate girls' school.  Each class has about 200
   people, so half the students are out in the sun at any one time
   because there isn't enough room under the tents.  And then every so
   often they have to stop teaching because a big dust storm will start
   up and nobody can see.  And there are no classes during the winter
   because there is snow and they can't be outside in an open-air tent in
   the snow.  So Mommy was g! oing to give them money to buy notebooks,
   but we decided we should just buy the notebooks and deliver them
   ourselves.  So we'll probably do that sometime over the next week.
   We'll have to go the market and buy some notebooks in bulk.
   We had a GREAT tourguide today.  She is 24 and just came back from 6
   years in Pakistan where she fled when the Taliban was in power.  She
   was lucky to get away.  She speaks pretty good English because she is
   an English teacher and she is really nice.  She just got married a
   year ago, and when she found out that we wanted to go outside of Kabul
   today, we had to stop by to ask her husband's permission.  By Aghan
   law, she can't go anywhere without her husband's permission.  She had
   an arranged marriage but is very happy with her husband.  She is going
   to join us for our day trip tomorrow too.
   I videotaped a lot of stuff today.  The kids at the school were
   great.  They were really funny and really energetic.  Just fifty feet
   behind their school are three overturned and decaying trucks.  It
   really is such a stark contrast to see this beautiful country and then
   see these tanks all over the place and bulletholes in everything.
   All along the road there are stones that mark whether the area has
   been searched for landmines or not.  They say that Russia put in
   roughly 10 million landmines and they have found and removed 4 million
   so far.  They go in with a big thresher-looking machine and then the
   landmines explode like popcorn.  Sometimes, when they hit a reall big
   landmine, the machine will be disabled, but it never blows up because
   it is so heavily protected.   They mark the area with stones that are
   painted red (that means it is NOT demined), stones that are painted
   white (that means that it IS demined-- although nothing is ever 100%),
   and stones that are painted half white and half red (that means that
   the area is partially demined).
   The day was amazing.  It was really nice to get a sense of the rest of
   the country.  It has been an incredible three days.

posted by Li at 7:43 PM