Beefcakes in Afghanistan

Beefcakes in Afghanistan
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

Well i suppose this is less ag (food) than culture but I thought I'd put it in the digestible aggie because the body building powerders and carb drinks are what intially prompted me to take this photo.

There are always interesting (and sometimes contradictory) things to be found in every culture and one (of the many) things I have noticed in Afghanistan was a tolerance for, and fascination with, bodybuilding, I have been told (by some people here) that even when the Taliban were here it was tolerated (it probably helps explain Afghan’s fascination with WWF, the super built fake wrestling). It amazes me that such an uber-conservative culture would tolerate some overly tanned, massive beefcake poster child clad only in grape-smuggling speedos bearing it all to the world (this in a place where I have been told I would be yelled off the street [or worse] for wearing shorts). In Kabul I see signs everywhere with pictures of huge body builders (the younger Arnold is a favorite) usually advertising gyms or fitness types stuff (in this case a little shop with protein powders, thirst quenchers, etc piled from the floor to the ceiling. In the local paper I saw a picture of “Mr. Kabul” who one the Kabul body building championship, while he could easily kick my ass he was a fraction of the size of the body builders you see in the magazines. Go figure.

Sikh Doctors

Sikh Doctors
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

This guy is totally not what I think of when I think of Indian doctors (really, to me an Indian doctor is just a doctor that happens to be Indian [has MD, white coat, etc]) but this is what many Afghans think of when they think of Indian doctors.

Actually this guy is Sikh (yes, still Indian/Pakistani but I think considered a different ethnic group) these guys fit in well enough since their lifestyle dictates they should have beards but they also wear turbans in a certain way that makes it pretty easy to pick them out in a crowd (Afghans wear turbans of sorts but a much different style). There was a string of Indian doctor “shops” in the main bazaar but apparently these guys specialize in herbal type remedies.

I am not sure if these guys are able to stay in business because they are truly effective, or because Indians generally have a reputation for being good doctors (compared to Afghan doctors), or because Afghans still believe in herbal remedies (which is not too far fetched since it seems like much of Asia still has significant faith in the powers of herbal type remedies).

Oil N’ Eggplant

Oil N’ Eggplant
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

I have been holding out for an “Oil N’ Okra” shot but that will come later, today was Oil N’ Eggplant day garnished with a bit of tomato. While I am not a fan of eggplant there are palatable ways in which it can be fixed, alittle in a spaghetti sauce or chili works nicely, eggplant parmesan is quasi-edible, and musaka (the eggplant & meat casserole version) is one of my favorites, but Oil garnished with alittle eggplant (ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration) is not at the top of my favorite dishes list.

I have come to the conclusion that many Eurasian dishes are perhaps a bit more oily than I normally prefer (case in point, I later drained the oil off into one cup and the food part into another cup and found that oil was about 1/6th of the entire dish [perhaps more but that is all I could drain off]). This was an issue in Eastern Europe but I don’t remember excessive (to this degree at least) oil usage in Kenya or Southeast Asia. While this is waaaay too much oil for me (in terms of personal taste and considering the semi-sedentary lifestyle that working in Afghanistan imposes on one) I have noticed that if there is less oil then people do not seem to like the food as much.

Having grown up in the Southeastern US, the land of fatback and overcooked vegetables, I have come to the conclusion that excessive use of oil/fat, salt/msg, sugar, etc are means of culinary compensation for poor cooking. That is not to say those that who use excessive amounts of the afore mentioned ingredients are thinking “well its bad food but I’ll just add a few cups more of oil to make up for it” but just that they have just learned that this way of cooking is good enough. I am no master chef but I consider myself to be a decent cook and I have cooked food in areas where inordinate amounts of oil in food is the norm and have been complimented on most of the foods (where I used a small fraction of the oil normally used, or none at all); I say most because I have learned the hard way that no matter how well they are prepared there are some foods that some societies typically will not eat like Spicy stuff in Moldova or vegetables in Afghanistan (this is more true in the rural areas than the larger cities).

Fun with Mud

Fun with Mud
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

This is the last “construction” thing I will show for at least the next few posts (it just seemed to make sense to put a few posts that built on each other [no pun intended]).

These are an architectural staple of afghan construction (especially in the more rural areas), mud bricks. I was reading a Wikipedia article for “adobe” and it mentioned how strong adobe is; on the one hand I question that because of all the dilapidated adobe structures I have seen here (though admittedly at least some of their decay has been helped along by war) but having handled these bricks and felt some of the structures I am amazed at how solid they actually feel. When I was a kid I made a ton of things (forts with red-clay stucco) holes/tunnels etc and I don’t ever remember any of them feeling nearly as solid as the mud-based structures/materials here. Anyway, they have wooden forms here and they seem to make raised “tubs” (earth raised on four sides) where they pour water and dirt, mix, then pack the mud into the wooden forms. I haven’t seen the procedure myself but wikipedia goes into some detail that probably holds true for most parts of the world.

Pile of dead stuff

Pile of dead stuff
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

This is a truck loaded to the hilt with pelts, the dead stuff. No I am not necessarily one of those “fur is dead” types (fur for function, that is from an animals that is grown for lots of things like meat/milk/hide is ok, fur for fashion, some animal grown just so it can be skinned for a $800 coat seems obtuse to me) and this truck is carrying goat pelts (lots of ‘em) I belive.

In Afghanistan I kind of doubt people will be into raising animals just for their pelts (well sheep, but they are sheared) any time soon. I don’t think I have ever seen so many pelts in one place in my life, and from a distance I couldn’t tell what it was just “dead stuff”. Sheep are the dominant livestock here but goats aren’t too far behind and just about everywhere in Afghanistan (land of homosapi-us carnivor-us) you can find butcher shops with a line of cow/goat/sheep heads and a pile of fresh pelts. I assume that this truck makes its rounds picking up pelts from these butchers but I have no idea what they do with them. As freezing cold as it can get in some parts of Afghanistan I can’t recall having seen many fur jackets, actually I remember seeing more fur jackets in eastern Europe which has far less (per person) livestock than Afghanistan. There is of course the “Karzi Hat”; I can’t remember what it is called but the current president, Hamid Karzi wears this funky little cap that I call it a “Karzi Hat” which Afghans laugh because they all know what I am talking about. This hat is actually made from the lamb hides and seems to only be worn by older Afghans but apart from this hat I can’t think of many other leather products that I commonly see around Afghanistan. It’s quite possible these hides are sold in Pakistan where they have a more developed manufacturing sector and are probably better able to turn out leather products en masse.

While you can’t see much of the truck what little one can see does give you and idea of how most of the truck is decorated. This is part of the reason I thought this truck might be en route to Pakistan because almost all of these decorated trucks are Pakistani. There are usually chains hanging off the trucks with little trinkets of sorts hanging on the ends with colorful art ranging from picturesque scenes to religious depictions but some of the art is decidedly more psychedelic (It is rumored that many of these Pakistani drivers are perpetually stoned which, as I think I mentioned in a previous post, would go a long way towards explaining the designs on their trucks). The art on these trucks is usually pretty benign as I am sure having metal silhouettes of nude women on the mud flaps wouldn’t work very well in Muslim society though you see pictures of Indian and Pakistani movie stars all over the place, even without shawls covering their hair (gasp!) so I have never been totally clear on what was taboo here and what is acceptable.

Repeating myself…

Repeating myself…
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

This is a irrigation canal that diverts water from a river into irrigation ditches. Projects like these are almost as common as “carpet weaving” and “gender development” projects here in Afghanistan’s development community. While they all have their place they are all (in my opinion) not implemented as well as they could be, but since I don’t feel like talking about carpets and I just don’t think I know enough to talk about gender development I’ll focus on irrigation.

I feel like am becoming a bit of a broken record by repeating myself about various topics, in this case water usage. I have seen a myriad of projects/organizations (including mine) start irrigation or water infrastructure projects but the vast majority of these projects focus on increasing people’s access to water not helping people use water more efficiently. When I first came here I thought “geeze, this is a country full of water efficiency poster children” but I have studied irrigation a wee bit and it didn’t take more than a day or two to figure out that some of the technologies (as they exist now) that could produce maximum water usage efficiency will not be realistic here for a long time. I believe that there are other steps that could be take like education about how to use water more efficiently but alas, if people are given more access to water they will have little immediate incentive to conserve so education would be a moot point.

Adobe Afghan Style

Adobe Afghan Style
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

After talking so much about trees and lumber I thought I’d post a picture of a house in progress. Just about every structure in Afghanistan is either cement or adobe (or a combination of both) and this place is not exception. These places look bomb-proof and according to the Wikipedia entry for adobe they are but in driving around I saw many places there were falling (or totally fallen) apart, though this could have happened over 20 years. Because there is so little rain (snow can be, and is, shoveled off the houses before it has a chance to melt) these structures don’t have too much to worry about and like houses in the US have their roofs replaced or sides painted every few years people usually repair their walls/houses every few years (plastering/piling on fresh mud in the areas that need it).

This is a prime example of how wood is used in these areas, rarely burned (probably due to scarcity) and mostly used as trusses. The logs they are using are perhaps a wee bit on the larger side of trees I have seen grown here but then again this house (probably a compound for a large extended family but that is only speculation) is larger than average. You can also see the wet mud that has been stacked/piled on top of the dry parts slowly building up the size of the building. This is hands down the best examples of a house being built and I am thankful I actually got a shot in as the driver was speeding back to the office (I think he was ready to get back and eat).

Tree Thinning

Tree Thinning
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

Here is a common scene along creeks and irrigation ditches, trees tightly packed together to be cut later. Since my folks raise saw timber anything having to do with silviculture is kinda interesting to me, and growing saplings certainly counts.

I am still figuring out silvicuture in Afghanistan. There does not seem to be an industry of growing wood here but it does seem to be available and possible to grow. I see “lumber yards” all over the place in Kabul selling firewood and I do wonder were it all comes from. I think a wee bit of my question was answered yesterday while talking to a person who has an office in the Afghan Red Crescent (Islamic version of Red Cross) compound. She was telling me about how a person on a backhoe had come through to “remove all the dead trees” (but as she pointed out, it is still winter here so no trees have so much as a bud on them yet). The conclusion was that someone was probably just collecting all the trees to sell for a small (afghan) fortune, criminal at best considering how few trees there are around and this compound is/was like an oasis of sorts. So, the tendency seems to be cutting the trees wherever one can first and them and when nothing else is left start planting… at times Afghanistan is vaguely reminiscent of Easter Island.

This photo though was taken out in a rural province (Wardak) where I got the impression that people relied more on dried cow patties and grass for fire fuel so these saplings were almost certainly for construction (Poop and grass just doesn’t support ceilings/roofs very well).

The first thing I thought of was “Geeze they need to thin (prune) these saplings a bit”. I am no forestry expert but in growing trees in the southeast USA one normally starts off growing trees fairly close (though we measure the distance between planted saplings in feet not inches like here) but after a few years we go in and cut a few saplings out to allow others to grow more effectively etc. Here it seems that there might be a wee bit of informal thinning (“Oh, I need a shovel handle, time to go cut a tree!”) but no organized/intentional thinning efforts. Since people depend on trees for trusses across windows, doorways, small bridges, and ceiling/roof beams I would think it would be in their interest to grow some slightly better trees, that said however arable land is *much* more scare here than where I am from so maybe it works out (as centuries of practice does sometimes) as a more efficient use of water/land to grow many half-ass trees rather than fewer good trees, I just don’t know.

Afghan Logging

Afghan Logging
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

We were driving back from (I think it was back and not to) one of the field offices and I noticed some cuts trees. The trees seem to have been planted here as they are most everywhere in Afghanistan (ok, that is a bit of a generalization since I haven’t seen any other areas apart from Kabul and central Afghanistan) packed as close together as possible. They pretty much just cut everything at once (instead of thinning and then getting even larger trees). In the states clear cutting also just cuts everything but normally the trees have been thinned (many years) beforehand.

The tree sizes here are respectable but I saw many places where trees were literally growing on top of each other forming a veritable wall (literally, close enough that you can not squeeze through). It has occurred to me that considering the level of technical sophistication (or lack there of) that larger trees might not be manageable, in many rural areas people just don’t have access to anything apart from handsaws for cutting and donkeys for transport. I do wonder though if that is the reason why they don’t bother growing them any larger (something tells me that no, that is not the reason).

Purty Pile of Poop

Purty Pile of Poop
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

Honestly this is about the most creative use of poop I have seen outside of Chris Ofili's redrawing of Mary, the major difference is this was happenstance and will be used for fuel to keep people warm. This is in Wardak, a province in central Afghanistan that is pretty high up, pretty (damn) cold and pretty much devoid of wood. As a result of the wood shortage (when wood is available it is usually used for ceiling beams in houses) people in these parts resort to using weeds/brush and manure. It hardly ever rains here (I would say that about 90% of Afghanistan’s water comes from winter snows) so they can leave piles of dried poop outside that would be potentially soluble disasters in wetter climates (ok, maybe not disaster but it would make quite a pool of manure given a good rain). I have other, less artistic, pictures of poop piles on walls, on top of houses (wouldn’t want anyone to start steal’n from you poop pile now would ya?), and beside door ways.

While this may seem disgusting to all but the crunchiest of individuals I have to say it honestly isn’t a big deal. After working on multiple bovine farms, and doing a masters paper that dealt with infections in poop I can say that #1 I really wish that all poop was dry coming out of the cow’s a*s, it’d be a bit more manageable and I could make pretty piles with it and #2 Once the poop is dried the most of harmful microbes are dead (not that I’d start munching on one of those patties but you get the idea).