Saturday, April 21, 2007

Kunduz - Part 2

Street traffic in Kunduz city center

Private home in Kunduz - check out the size of the door.


Illiterate women use drawing to express their daily tasks and community problems
at a Kunduz women's shura


Usually, women and kids are in charge of gathering water. Most homes don't have running water - or even access to clean drinking water.


Kids outside of one of the women's shuras

Today didn’t start out too auspiciously – the wedding celebration ended around 12:30, only to be followed by about 90 minutes of cleaning and rearranging the wedding hall, directly above my bed. Every time I dozed off before 2:30 a loud bang or the shreek of metal scraping on metal would jerk me awake.

After downing a cup of coffee and some nan we headed over to our partner’s office to begin the day with a 3 hour interview for our gender strategy. It was an interesting process since our strategy consultant speaks Urdu and Pashto and the people we were interviewing spoke a mix of Pashto and Dari. She needed translation for the Dari speakers, and I needed it for everyone since no one spoke English. Needless to say it was a frustrating process, especially since my translator was by no means fluent in English.

Oh, and around 9am a bomb went off at the local police station, just blocks away from our hotel. Unofficial reports say that 9 people were killed and 20-some injured. Apparently it’s the first bomb in Kunduz city in a long while – guess we brought more baggage with us from Kabul than we thought.

After our interview we headed out of town to visit a women’s shura in a small village just outside of Kunduz. A shura is a community organization, sort of like a town council, but more informal. The villages are dusty paths bordered by a warrens of mud brick walls about 6ft tall. We pulled over on one of the roads, walked down a narrow lane through a wooden door and then climbed through two mudbrick rooms before reaching the women’s meeting room. This time there was no one to translate for me – of course they were translating for the strategy consultant and she could have translated for me, but like many others I’ve met here she doesn’t seem to think it’s terribly important to share information. So, through tidbits of Arabic words, body language and the occasional word translated for me I gathered that the women had started their own embroidery co-op, were holding basic literacy courses for women and had taught themselves how use mobile phones. They had also created a map of the village and labeled all the streets and buildings to help the women get around, which gives you an idea how often these women get to roam around the villages they were born in.

The rectangular meeting room walls were covered in poster paper the women used to create community appraisals of problems, the roles of men and women in their community, their problem identification lists and embroidery patterns. While we sat on low cushions on the floor and the women talked about their organization kids peaked in through the one window, climing on top of each other to get a look at the kharijee (foreigners). After we left that shura we visited a second one the next village over that was very similar in set-up, wall decorations and issues. Apparently they thought that we had come to solve their problems (i.e. give them money) so I’m afraid our visit was a little disappointing, but it was very interesting. Of course, it would have been more interesting if I had understood what was being said at the time.

Next we visited a conflict resolution program funded by my organization. Many of these women were members of different shuras, but in this project they come together to talk about problem solving within their families and communities. It was great to watch the women, many of whom are illiterate and had little opportunity for schooling in their lives, become animated as they participated in the discussions.

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