Afghanistan part I

It's early morning on the base in the countryside of Afghanistan and I awake to quiet sunlight filtered through the yellow curtains in our room. A fly buzzes past my ear and I roll over on my floor mattress and notice the time is just past 5 a.m. The sun rises early here and thankfully I have a few more hours to sleep before my day begins.

Later I step outside and take in the cool, dry air and cloudless blue sky of the beautiful wide-open countryside. A dusty fog muddles the view of the large brown rocky mountains in the distance and I can just make out their hazy outline.



On this morning in mid-August I am going to visit a home to see how the women make the staple Afghan nan bread. We walk along a dirt road scattered with pebbles and rocks. Although most of the landscape is a tan, dusty sand color, the valleys are lush with tall green grasses and fields of thick golden wheat soon ready for harvest.



As we go inside the house we pass two young girls sitting at a large loom weaving a beautiful rug in oranges, blues, dark green and reddish brown hues.



Inside the cooking room there are around 10 women and children sitting down on floor mats. One woman is seated next to a round hole about 4 feet deep into the ground and less than 2 ft. in diameter (tandoor oven). It's blazing bright orange inside. Her eyes smile at me as she peers through a veil that covers her mouth and nose. She takes a ball of dough and smashes it between her palms and stretches it out in a long oval shape before slapping it onto the wall of the tandoor oven. I'm surprised that she doesn't burn herself, and my translator explains that she has a long cloth wrapped the whole way up her arm underneath her sleeves to protect her skin from the hot flames. In just a few minutes she reaches in and pulls out a baked bread and tosses it to a woman across from her who scrapes off a few burnt spots and piles it with about 10 other loaves.



The women bake bread twice a day and in total make around 45 loaves for the 25+ members of the four families that live in the home together. Many families have to rely on imported wheat from Pakistan because they can't grow enough of their own to last throughout the year. In wintertime food is especially difficult to come by in the rural areas. The people tell us that during winter they basically just stay indoors, eat and sleep.

After photographing the bread baking I'm led to another room where I am served a breakfast of warm fresh bread, tea, and milk mixed with sugar and black tea.



The reason we are in the rural countryside of Afghanistan is to visit some food for work projects. Here local communities are building roads and receive food in exchange. We watch as men both young and old work with pick axes and hammers to chip and break away the shale and rocks of the mountainside to create even roads that will connect communities to one another.




Bumbling back to the base in our land cruiser, past the shepherd boy with his herd of sheep, the woman harvesting wheat in a field of gold, the man riding his donkey home, I am in awe at the calm serenity of this place. In a country where we don't often hear the positive story, I am encouraged to find that peace does exist in some parts of Afghanistan and I'm glad that I was able to experience it in the beautiful landscape, stories and homes of the people here.