Article Contributed on: 4/23/2008 9:41:10 PM
Writing this at about 8:30 p.m. Kabul time (10 a.m. Colorado time) we are all safely in Kabul at the SOZO International guest house. Updating you from the last report, after leaving the food court at Dubai International Airport Terminal 1, we headed a few miles over to Terminal 2 to catch our flight to Kabul. Terminal 2 was the first time we seemed like foreigners rather than travelers.
Terminal 2 is under renovation. It has less amenities, less glitz and less glam than its counterpart. The flights were still international, but were more regionally based, including flights to Baghdad and three flights to Kabul.
Most of the passengers were wearing more culturally Middle Eastern garb, with more women wearing the full Abayas and a greater percentage of the men wearing long shirts and caps.
Things were a little chaotic at the Kabul airport. For being the airport for the capital of the country, it wasn't very big. The passenger terminal was comparable in size to a regional airport in the United States. Everyone made it through customs just fine.
Upon leaving the terminal, I had instant flashbacks of spending time in Honduras in high school and college a few years ago. Litter was strewn about. The smaller houses were tiny, one-story squares while the bigger houses had large walls and metal gates preventing entrance. Kids were playing in the streets, which were mostly dirt roads or cleared out terrain that made four-wheel drive very necessary.
Soon after arrival, everyone participated in preparing bags with school supplies to be handed out to the children at Barak Aub. That's tentatively planned for tomorrow morning, but we've been warned many times that schedules can (and probably will) change at any moment.
We then went a few blocks up to Prayer Hill in Kabul. As the dirt road wrapped around, I could see graves of all shapes, sizes and decorations on the hill. The hill plateaued at the top and children and a few adults were at the top - just hanging around or playing soccer. Once the cameras came out, it didn't take much convincing to get the children to break out huge smiles as they crowded around some of the team members. Some of the children were also playing in a worn-down pool on the top of the hill that was built by the Soviets when they inhabited the region a few decades ago.
No one knows why they built a pool at this particular spot - maybe it was because of the view. If not for a couple of well-placed mountains ranges, we'd be be able to see all of Kabul from the top of the hill. On two adjacent hills were forts that were apparently built by the British during their occupation of the area. Further on were some of the shopping malls, new hotels and apartment buildings and even the capital. Filling most of the space were the small mud brick houses with mosques interspersed in there.
We had two meals at the house today. The first consisted of beef, which was as if it were stew meat. With it was Kabuli Plow, a delicious rice dish. The second meal was lasagna and French fries. By the time the evening was done, just about everyone was suffering from exhaustion-induced narcolepsy. Some people nodded off while typing on the computer, others in mid-sentence and just about everyone who laid their head down somewhere soft was out like turning on a light switch.