Guests in the Land of Buzkashi
Afghanistan Revisited
by
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We drove merrily through town. As we approached the other side, several policemen waved us down. Andrea happened to be driving. She pulled over to the side of the road, across from a police check station. We had never been stopped there before. We resigned ourselves to some new fun and games the police thought up that day.
In fractured Farsi and English, we determined that an Afghan man had been hit and maybe killed by a Land Rover that afternoon on the road from Bamiyan. They suspected us. Our dismay at being held up turned to real fear of being accused of murder.
The police belligerently asked Andrea, "You hit man? You fall asleep driving?"
"No, absolutely, no!" denied Andrea.
Harley got out and accompanied the policemen to the interrogation area...a table and chairs situated alongside the road. Harley explained that we hadn’t hit anyone. The police looked skeptically at an obvious, large dent in the right hand fender.
"You hit man...see here, car hit man!"
Harley showed them rust marks and said,
"Old, not new."
They saw, but disbelieved. They demanded our passports. We had none. We had other identification and, of course, our WHO cards. Prepared for epidemics but not for police checks!
First one and then another policeman strolled over to ask Andrea pointed and accusatory questions about hitting the man. They couldn’t tell us when or where it had happened, but if we killed the man, we had to compensate his family. Harley suggested they get more information. He would try to work out a schedule of where we had been at what time. All this "conversation" took time as each side struggled to understand the other with insufficient knowledge of the other’s language.
The only time we could prove where we were at a given time was in Shamshudin’s village. The police said they would call the village by phone and find out the details!
"You wait here."
We sweltered in the heat, humidity and flies. We speculated on having to spend the night and whether our food and water would hold out. Small boys asked for baksheesh and men stood around peering in the Rover, looking at all the women with bare arms. Not expecting to get out of the car until reaching home, we women all wore the coolest things we had and Robyn and Noel were in shorts. Not acceptable clothing for females in the conservative countryside.
Half an hour after being stopped, the police waved down another four-wheel-drive vehicle, not a Land Rover, with two young men and one young woman. Frenchmen, they had driven into Afghanistan over one of the most deserted areas. This made us think this was a shake-down for bribery since the Frenchmen had not come from Bamiyan.
Police swarmed all over their car much as they had ours. Suspicious underlings escorted the three to the interrogation table where Harley still sat. The new foreigners had no idea of the situation so Harley explained it to them. All the hostility intimidated us as we sat waiting in the Rover. We wondered what might happen to us. Frightened, I worried especially for Robyn and Noel if we had to spend the night or longer in the local jail!
The police subjected the French trio to the same nonsensical questioning. No officer present. Just a bunch of lowly, incompetent, slovenly policemen, having a ball stopping and accusing foreigners.
Finally, a policeman came across the road from the French vehicle. He triumphantly held up something in his fist, dug out from the front of the French vehicle. He showed it around and the policemen’s attitude toward the young people became more menacing. Already accused, intimidated and pushed around a bit in a contemptuous manner, they showed fright. It looked bad: all young, the girl not married to either boy, dressed like hippies, although not in an extreme way. The girl wearing a skimpy top, no sleeves, immediately became the subject of derision.
Harley pointed to what the policeman had in his hand.
"Red Russian grease, not blood," he explained.
The Frenchmen agreed.
"Our vehicle greased in Teheran. They use red Russian grease," in broken English.
Not convinced, the policemen sent someone to ask a doctor to come around to determine blood or grease.
Harley asked the policeman, "Why did you stop the French people? They aren’t driving a Land Rover."
It turned out the police used Land Rover as a generic term for any four-wheel-drive vehicle. Getting more and more worked up at the lack of progress, we suggested Harley demand that the police call the American Embassy in Kabul, which Harley did. The police still had not gotten through to the village where the accident happened. No one "in charge" seemed to know what to do. A lot of standing around with guns over their shoulders, visiting, smoking, staring first at us, then at the Frenchmen.
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About the Book
In 1972-73, the author lived with her family in Kabul, Afghanistan during the period when a coup replaced the monarchy with a republic. The resulting instability of the government alarmed the Soviet Union which began to apply pressure on the government to replace all westerners with Soviet workers. Consequently, many foreign aid projects fell by the wayside. This is an insider view of Afghanistan at a formative period of its history and gives background to understand today’s rule by the fundamentalist sect, the Taliban.
Stratton mixes humor with frustration as she meets inflexible male Afghan attitudes toward women, particularly the male servants in their home, as well as how foreigners seek to create a slice of home in alien circumstances. Gathering around the pool to trade rumors following the coup, learning one’s telephone is tapped, mixed signals between cultures, having a servant threaten to kill for one for his having been fired. All these and more give the reader insight into living abroad in a third world country. Stratton and a female friend risked the hostile elements to travel around the country on their own, in an unreliable car that put them in peril more than once. They lived through their experiences...perhaps by Grace extended to naïve fools.
About the Author
Miriam Stratton lived in Asia for more than a decade, traveled throughout Europe and earned a Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences from Washington State University. Her letters home formed the basis of this, her first book. She lives with her husband in Pullman, Washington.