Travels in the Riel World

The southwestern African country of Namibia may not be well-known as a tourist destination, but travelers who have been there often return home raving about the desolate beauty of the place. Elinor Burkett is one of those travelers and she wrote about her Namibian experiences for a recent NY Times story.

As the first rays of the sun pierce the thick darkness of the Namibian desert, sinuous ridges of quartz sand ignite in a firestorm of seared orange. Then the sky lightens to the new day, revealing the sea of sand mountains, their crisp edges and perfect curves wrought and polished by the expert chisel of the Kalahari and Atlantic winds.

With the tracks of yesterday’s visitors to the Sossusvlei dunes burnished by the breeze, you can’t resist trudging — perhaps plodding or crawling — up at least one of the pristine hills, some towering to 1,000 feet, instinctively looking for shimmers of water. But from the top, there’s no sign of the sea; it retreated millions of years ago, back when continents were drifting wildly.

What’s left is a dazzling geological display of possibly the world’s highest sand dunes, extending for 400 miles along the coast and more than 80 miles inland. Those naive enough to believe that a dune is a dune is a dune are faced with a dizzying array of sand configurations: parabolic dunes with dynamic slip faces, long and narrow transverse dunes, dunes petrified by ancient climate change, and star dunes formed by winds that buffet them from all sides…

Such a forbidding panorama hardly seems the stuff of a compelling journey. But Namibia, a country of stark beauty and riveting contradictions, should be at the top of any serious traveler’s want-to-visit list.

The landscape is otherworldly, from the ocean of blood red crests along Dune Alley at Sossusvlei … to the gravity-defying rock formations and petrified forest of Damaraland, in the country’s center. Even beside the main highway, there are enough elephants, giraffes and springbok to satisfy those who can’t imagine a southern African trip without big game.

The best designed governments are those that build upon the culture of a country, rather than those that try to impose foreign ideas and systems on a people. So I read with interest this recent story in the International Herald Tribune about a movement to re-design the government of Somalia in a way that would emphasize the traditional role of clans and elders.

Does the international community have it all wrong on Somalia? After 17 years, 14 transitional governments and more than $8 billion in foreign aid, the country is as violent and lawless - and many say hopeless - as ever…

Nothing seems to be able to lift Somalia’s curse of anarchy. And part of the problem, a rising number of Western academics and Somali professionals argue, is that the bulk of outside efforts have concentrated on standing up a strong central government, which may be anathema in a country where authority tends to be diffuse and clan-based…

But there may be another answer: going local.

Many Somali intellectuals and Western academics are pushing an alternative form of government that might be better suited to Somalia’s fluid, fragmented and decentralized society. The new idea, which is actually an old idea that seems to be enjoying something of a renaissance because of the transitional government’s shortcomings, is to rebuild Somalia from the bottom up.

It is called the building block approach. The first blocks would be small governments at the lowest levels, in villages and towns. These would be stacked to form district and regional governments. The last step would be uniting the regional governments in a loose national federation that controlled, say, currency issues and the pirate-infested shoreline, but did not sideline local leaders.

“It’s the only way viable,” said Ali Doy, a Somali analyst who works closely with the United Nations. “Local government is where the actual governance is. It’s more realistic, it’s more sustainable and it’s more secure.”

Did you know that 100 million people in China are minorities? There are 55 tribal groups in the country who are not ethnic Chinese. That means there are 100 million in China who probably don’t eat all that much Chinese food. NPR’s Kitchen Window has an interesting feature about these ethnic groups and their foods, based on the book Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.

Deep-fried cheese, crepes and carrot salad don’t sound like Chinese food. But they are.

Fried cheese momos are a standard snack in Tibet, two-layer crepes are eaten by the Hui people in Qinghai province, and dai carrot salad is from the southern Yunnan city of Jinghong.

These are some of the foods of the 55 tribal groups called “minority peoples” by the Beijing government. These tribes make up 8 percent of China’s population, which amounts to more than 100 million people.

Although these communities are not ethnically Chinese, they have lived on land that is now part of China for centuries. This includes Inner Mongolia, the western Silk Road region of Xinjiang and other lands outside central China’s westernized cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

The story includes recipes for dai carrot salad and cheese momos.

The Chicago Tribune has been asking their foreign correspondents for travel tips and for lists of their favorite destinations. One recent installment focused on places in the Middle East and Africa. An excerpt:

Liz Sly on the Middle East:

My favorite place: The Old City of Damascus, Syria, a warren of ancient cobbled streets, mosques and churches that evokes the Orient of the imagination.

Don’t miss: Petra, the majestic, rose-red city carved 8,000 years ago out of inaccessible mountains in the Jordanian desert. It’s too breathtaking for words and too old to wrap your head around.

Joel Greenberg on Israel:

When friends come to visit I always take them to … The beach, either in Tel Aviv or the beautiful strand at Beit Yanai near Netanya. The Mediterranean is warm and inviting most of the year, and there is ample opportunity for long strolls on the sand and viewing brilliant sunsets.

Best photo-op: The stunning view of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, or, from another angle, at the Sherover Promenade, preferably a little before sunset.

Laurie Goering on Africa:

My favorite place: It’s nearly impossible to choose just one place in a continent so diverse and wonderful, but Madagascar’s lemur-filled forests, Namibia’s silent deserts and Chapman’s Peak scenic drive in Cape Town, South Africa, are contenders.

Best place no one knows about: The Matapos Hills outside of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, a conservation area that is home to some impressive cave paintings by the ancient San people. The hike to the paintings, through gorgeous bushland, can’t be beat either.

In honor of Beijing playing host to the Olympics for the past two weeks, here is another China-themed post. Many Chinese people make it a habit to get up early every morning in order to perform tai chi exercises, often in a public park. So John Branch went to one of Beijing’s most popular parks one morning and observed the tai chi ritual. You can find his report here.

The giant gates of Temple of Heaven Park swung open at 6 a.m., magnets pulling people into a new day. People quietly poured out of apartment buildings and low-slung hutong neighborhoods and drained through the gates of Beijing’s favorite morning gathering place.

Slowly the corners of the park filled, even the shady spots deep among the tight rows of cypress trees that date back 800 years. Over there, a man performed the slow-motion dance of tai chi. Over here, a woman scratched her back against a tree. Everywhere, people gave themselves pat-downs to loosen their muscles…

Here came a woman walking backward. There went a man furiously rubbing his head. Everyone made room for the man crawling down the sidewalk on his toes and hands. It is exercise without ego. There seems to be no way to move the body in a way that would draw puzzled looks here, although the bear-crawler elicited some second glances….

This is exercise to connect with the world around, not tune it out. This is exercise done to feel good on the inside, not to impress anyone on the outside.

On living in a multipolar world. I think Eugene Robinson nailed it in a recent op-ed column:

The lesson that’s being brought home this summer is that we live in a multipolar world. We knew that, but in our political rhetoric we prefer to ignore it. Now, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are going to be able to make it through their convention without acknowledging the world’s complications and interconnections.

Obama will probably talk more about engagement and the “international community,” while McCain is likely to sound more confrontational. I’m pretty sure, though, that neither will come clean about a central truth: Our future is being decided not just in Washington but in Beijing and Moscow — and in Riyadh, Islamabad, New Delhi, Dubai, Caracas, Abuja, Brasilia. . . .

We still have the wherewithal to lead. But we’re deluding ourselves if we believe we won’t have to adapt to the new reality.

If you’re searching for a more authentic and less glitzy destination by the sea, Sarah Wildman recommends Costa Brava - the sparsely populated coastal region of Catalonia in northeastern Spain. She wrote about a recent trip there for the International Herald Tribune.

On the small roads between Cantallops and Llançà - two names that were barely dots on our map of Catalonia in northeastern Spain - the lush mountain greenery turned quickly to farmland rolling out for miles around us and filled with sunflowers and bales of hay.

We were traveling from the interior mountains of this Spanish autonomous region to the Mediterranean. Again and again, rising up in the near distance, came fantastic, if dusty, terra-cotta-colored medieval hamlets and equally ancient churches and farmhouses. On the streets everywhere the lingua franca was Catalan, not Spanish, and amid all the tourists that descend from France and elsewhere, a local pride seemed to pervade the scene, against a backdrop that fell away suddenly, breathtakingly, into the sea.

In Llançà we stopped at Platja Grifeu, one of the village’s perfect beaches, with clear tropical-looking water to swim in. At the beachside restaurant, I ordered a tortilla española, the ubiquitous potato omelet of Spain. It was, improbably, the best tortilla I had ever tasted. I savored it, facing the sea and the local families sunning themselves, in this tiny village about 10 miles from the French-Spanish border on a road that looked like nothing more than a scribble on the map.

By some small miracle - and preservation efforts that have helped to control development in Catalonia - the Costa Brava has maintained an authenticity and a refreshing resistance to change that keeps this stretch of the Mediterranean radically different from the southern coasts of Spain. Fishing villages still feel like fishing villages, medieval mountain towns are still hushed at siesta, and artists still paint on the streets of Cadaqués.

This is a bit longer than my typical post, but if you’re interested at all in U.S. politics there is a lot here that will interest you and hopefully provide some food for thought and debate…

Speculation over Barack Obama’s vice presidential candidate is reaching a fever pitch this week, with the selection widely expected to be made known between Wednesday and Saturday. Most reporting indicates that there is a three person shortlist - Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, and Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine.

If that’s truly the case, then Biden seems to be the best choice of the three for reasons that are quite well expressed here and here. Indeed, a lot of smart people today are predicting that Biden is going to be Obama’s pick. However, these things rarely go according to conventional wisdom. Therefore, I have to agree with Nate Silver that there is a reasonable prospect of a surprise choice.

Ah, but who would be the surprise? All along, Obama has really had two options - someone who “balances” the ticket by adding a long record in national politics and foreign policy, or an “outsider” who reinforces the message of bringing change to Washington. Silver thinks a surprise choice is more likely to come from the first group and he lays out the contenders: Hilary Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and Colin Powell. Wow! Can you imagine the media shock wave any one of these would set off? It would be a perfect Obama head fake and produce reams of publicity heading into the Democratic convention.

Frankly, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Obama went in this direction. The problem is, I have difficulty making the case for why it would be any one of the four.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Chinese are proud to be hosting this year’s Summer Olympics in Beijing, and they certainly want the home team to perform well. But perhaps not too well.

There was an interesting cultural note in a recent Washington Post article about Chinese rooting interests in these Olympics. It seems that while the Chinese are proud of their nation’s growing might on the world stage, some of them think it’s a bit too soon - and too showy - for their athletes to emerge with the most medals this year. It’s typical for the Chinese to be self deprecating, and this reminded me of a Chinese-born woman who used to work with my wife. She was horrified at the thought of filling out a performance review for herself at work because it would be unseemly to be too self congratulatory.

Apparently, that attitude even extends to the Olympics. Here is the telling anecdote from Francesco Sisci in his Post story:

The Olympic Games aren’t just a show for me; they’re a family affair, and one that’s turning out quite differently from what I’d expected. I’m Italian, but I’ve lived in China for about 20 years. My wife is Chinese — and very patriotic — and my two daughters grew up here…So you can imagine my state of mind before these games. I thought we all had to be very patriotic — that is, pro-China.

But when my mother announced before the games that she hoped that China would win the most medals, my wife, Luoyan, looked at me as if my mother had said something inappropriate. “Well,” she replied, “I hope that China comes in second and America will be first.”

She’s not alone. There’s a sizable undercurrent of hope here that the United States will top the medal rankings…The subtle reluctance to win may also be related to China’s being host of the games; by coming in first, China would look like a showoff. It could also be part of an idea that sport stands for economic and political might, and China knows that it certainly can’t challenge American supremacy, at least not yet.

“It’s not our moment. It would be too ambitious and too unreal to be the first in the Olympics now,” said a friend of mine at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the country’s premier think tank. “Many people, even among the leaders, think like this.”

Every country has to deal with contrasts between its rich and poor citizens. But in few countries is this disparity as stark as it is in India. A new film there (“Barah Aana”) looks at the life of migrant workers who are employed as waiters and chauffeurs, and it explores the contrasts between their existence and the lives of those who employ them. It has apparently stirred a good deal of conversation in India, as described in this NY Times article.

India may be changing at a disorienting pace, but one thing remains stubbornly the same: a tendency to treat the hired help like chattel, to behave as though some humans were born to serve and others to be served.

“Indians are perhaps the world’s most undemocratic people, living in the world’s largest and most plural democracy,” Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar, two well-known scholars of Indian culture, wrote in a recent book, “The Indians: Portrait of a People.”

The subject, usually overlooked, has been raised by a provocative new film depicting India from a servant’s-eye view. The movie, “Barah Aana,” by Raja Menon, tells the story of three migrants to Mumbai from the ailing villages of northern India. They work as a chauffeur, a waiter and a security guard, sending most of their earnings home. They are heroes in their villages, but in Mumbai they are invisible men, enduring the callousness that comes with being an accessory to other people’s lives…

The director’s answer is that India has something deeper than a poverty problem. It has, in his view, a “dehumanization” problem. In an interview, he described India’s employers and servants as living as “two different species.”

I have to take time for a bit of book promotion here, as there was some nice press coverage in today’s Arizona Daily Star newspaper about my travel memoir, Two Laps Around the World.

It was the trip of a lifetime. Two trips, actually. In 2002, Bob Riel and Lisa Higgins, wed the year before, embarked on a three-month-long trip that took them from Greece to Turkey, then on to Kenya, Thailand, Beijing and Tokyo.

In 2005 they did it again, this time traveling to Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Singapore, Egypt and Europe.

But this was no four-star-hotel experience. The couple traveled at times by rickshaw and rickety bus, flatbed truck and camel.

More than mere sightseeing, the trip, says Riel, was a life sabbatical — one that more of us should undertake to renew and refresh our lives.

You can read more about the book, including some chapter excerpts, at my other website, www.bobriel.com.

Want to know the long-term consequences of a society filled with one-child families? Apparently, the situation gets a lot more complicated when combined with an economy that produces too few professional level jobs. Check out the current situation in China, which is described in a fascinating article in Psychology Today.

When China began limiting couples to one child 30 years ago, the policy’s most obvious goal was to contain a mushrooming population. For the Chinese people, however, the policy’s greater purpose was to turn out a group of young elites who would each enjoy the undivided resources of their whole family—the so-called xiao huangdi, or “little emperors.” The plan was to “produce a generation of high-quality children to facilitate China’s introduction as a global power,” explains Susan Greenhalgh, an expert on the policy. But while these well-educated, driven achievers are fueling the nation’s economic boom, their generation has become too modern too quickly, glutted as it is with televisions, access to computers, cash to buy name brands, and the same expectations of middle-class success as Western kids.

The shift in temperament has happened too fast for society to handle. China is still a developing nation with limited opportunity, leaving millions of ambitious little emperors out in the cold; the country now churns out more than 4 million university graduates yearly, but only 1.6 million new college-level jobs. Even the strivers end up as security guards. China may be the world’s next great superpower, but it’s facing a looming crisis as millions of overpressurized, hypereducated only children come of age in a nation that can’t fulfill their expectations…

“In this generation, every child is raised to be at the top,” says Vanessa Fong, a Harvard education professor and author of Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One-Child Policy. “They’ve worked hard for it, and it’s what their parents have focused their lives on. But the problem is that the country can’t provide the lifestyle they feel they deserve. Only a few will get it.” China’s accomplished young elites are celebrated on billboards as the vanguard of the nation, yet they’re quickly becoming victims of their own lofty expectations.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for first linking to this story.

David Brooks usually focuses on politics from a conservative perspective in his NY Times op-ed column, but every once in a while he has a piece that delves into culture in some form or other. That is what he does in today’s column, which looks at some of the differences between individualist and group-oriented societies.

This is one of the key differences between countries and cultural regions around the globe. Brooks uses the topic as a pivot to discuss the rise of China and the possibility that its goal of a “harmonious collective” could rival the more individualist “American Dream” as an economic vision for developing societies. Still, it’s nice to see topics like this getting some play in the national press.

Here is an excerpt from Brooks’ piece:

The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts…

You can create a global continuum with the most individualistic societies — like the United States or Britain — on one end, and the most collectivist societies — like China or Japan — on the other.

The individualistic countries tend to put rights and privacy first. People in these societies tend to overvalue their own skills and overestimate their own importance to any group effort. People in collective societies tend to value harmony and duty. They tend to underestimate their own skills and are more self-effacing when describing their contributions to group efforts.

A week or so ago, I had a post about Luang Prabang, Laos, and quoted an article written by Gayle Keck. Not long after that, I heard from Gayle and she told me about an interesting new website she’s created called “Been There Ate That.” There, people post photos of meals they’ve eaten around the world, and the site is searchable by location or ingredient.

Here, for instance, is a post-dessert fruit dish from Tunis, Tunisia:

Check out this new site, and add some photos of your own.

Every year, the National Football League produces t-shirts and hats to commemorate the winning team in the Super Bowl. These items are, of course, passed out on the field immediately after the game finishes - leaving one to wonder what happens to the products that were made for the team that didn’t win. It seems they are distributed via charitable organizations to poor people in far-off rural communities, never to be seen again in the United States.

That means that somewhere on planet Earth are t-shirts made to commemorate the New England Patriots’ Super Bowl championship and perfect 19-0 season from a year ago. That title, as every fan knows (and as it pains me to write even now), slipped away with less than a minute to go in the champiosnship game when the New York Giants mounted a startling comeback on the game’s final drive. But Aaron Kaplowitz wanted to know where those Patriots t-shirts were, so he and a friend set off on an improbable quest to find them. And find them they did - in rural Nicaragua. Kaplowitz then penned an amusing article about the quest.

So when the 18-1 Patriots failed to live up to Reebok’s prophecy, World Vision, a Christian humanitarian organization, arranged to ship the memorabilia to people in need in nearly inaccessible places, ensuring that these treasured items would not see the light of day back in the States.

But with a trip to Panama and Costa Rica already in the offing, Ilan, my roommate at Boston University, and I, both lifelong Giants fans, decided that dipping into Nicaragua for a few days to try and get our hands on the rare collectors’ items was a necessary addition to our itinerary.

They found what they were looking for in the tiny town of San Gregorio.

…soon we were accosting villager after villager, receiving new information and hot leads each time. We snaked our way through the back roads and happened upon a young woman sitting at a rectangular entry carved into a chicken-wire fortress. Hannibal spoke to her, then waved Ilan and me inside, where I saw people standing around a circular pavilion, looking into a dirt pit enclosed by long wooden boards, and I heard a frantic cacophony of clawing, clucking, and banging. Only then did I realize that I was standing among roosters being trained for cockfights.

Walking past the furious birds, we made our way to a counter where a teenage girl was selling beer. Jessica told Hannibal she used to have a Patriots shirt but didn’t know where she had put it. Besides, she said, why would we want it? The XXL-sized shirts were too big for humans.

I glanced at my watch. It was 4:30 p.m. Hannibal told me the final bus out of San Gregorio left at 5.

Hannibal quickly led us to a row of one-room hovels, where we met a wrinkled woman sitting outside in a mint-green dress and a white apron. Her warm smile revealed a mouth lacking teeth. Hannibal and the woman talked for a few minutes. I reminded Hannibal that we were willing to pay money for a hat or shirt. The woman entered her shack and returned with a black plastic bag.

My fingers curled with anticipation as Ilan removed a fresh, clean shirt and a never-worn hat. This could have been Brady’s. This should have been Brady’s.

The woman couldn’t believe we were willing to pay money for these things. We gave her $5, a sizable amount in the area, and handed Hannibal an equal finder’s fee before sprinting down the road as the bus began to gain speed out of town. The driver slowed to let us on.

Thomas Friedman is in Greenland to learn about climate change.  Greenland, of course, is a sparsely populated land near the top of the earth. So why would one go to Greenland to study the environment? Friedman explains:

Because the world’s biggest island has just 55,000 people and no industry, the condition of its huge ice sheet — as well as its temperature, precipitation and winds — is influenced by the global atmospheric and ocean currents that converge here. Whatever happens in China or Brazil gets felt here. And because Greenlanders live close to nature, they are walking barometers of climate change.

What did he learn there? Well, a new language. Sort of.

I learned a new language here: “Climate-Speak.”

It’s easy to learn. There are only three phrases. The first is: “Just a few years ago …” Just a few years ago you could dogsled in winter from Greenland, across a 40-mile ice bank, to Disko Island. But for the past few years, the rising winter temperatures in Greenland have melted that link. Now Disko is cut off. Put away the dogsled.

There has been a 30 percent increase in the melting of the Greenland ice sheet between 1979 and 2007, and in 2007, the melt was 10 percent bigger than in any previous year…Greenland is now losing 200 cubic kilometers of ice per year — from melt and ice sliding into the ocean from outlet glaciers along its edges — which far exceeds the volume of all the ice in the European Alps.

There’s much more in his column in today’s paper. Check it out.

The country of Belgium is a remarkable success story considering the simmering tensions that have persisted for decades between the country’s Flemish-speaking north and its  French-speaking south. The International Herald Tribune has a fascinating article today that discusses the links between culture and country, while contemplating the difficulties of keeping two cultures happy within a single nation.

The German newspaper Die Tageszeitung a few days ago called Belgium the “most successful ‘failed state’ of all time.” The Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme offered to resign last month, saying that the “federal consensus model has reached its limits,” and that he couldn’t bring harmony to the country’s Flemish and French-speaking regions, raising the specter that this nation of 10.4 million might split up for good.

For the umpteenth time. Belgium’s perennial woes have been much reported upon. The country keeps muddling on, as it has for decades, with per capita income exceeding that of Germany, the world’s leading exporter, although maybe a tipping point has been reached…

It’s about culture in the end. In its escalating dysfunction Belgium demonstrates the inextricable link between culture and nationhood…

Els Witte is a Belgian historian. At her apartment, up the street from the headquarters of the European Union in Brussels, she pondered the bad marriage of French-speaking Wallonia and Dutch-speaking Flanders.

“A language is a culture,” she said. “In Belgium the two cultures know very little about each other because they speak different languages. There are singers known in one part, not in the other. Television is different, newspapers, books.” …

The other afternoon Francis Dannemark was at home in Brussels… “I don’t think it will, but for the first time I really believe Belgium could disappear,” he said… “A Flemish friend,” Dannemark said, “put it to me this way: ‘Flanders has nothing in common with Holland except language, and the Flemish and Walloons have everything in common except language.’ But there’s almost no communication between the two communities, except through rock music, which everybody sings in English, and sports, which transcend everything.”

What is life like for expatriates in Afghanistan? There is an interesting feature in the Financial Times today - an interview with Belinda Bowling, a South African lawyer who currently lives in Kabul. An excerpt:

What brought you to Afghanistan?

When I turned 30 I decided to take a year’s career break from my law firm and explore my fragile sense of national identity by travelling to other countries in transition. My journey took me to Kurdistan, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran and Afghanistan. Entranced by the soft light that envelops Kabul at dusk, I fell in love with Afghanistan immediately. Four and a half years later I’m still here.

You have the only house I’ve been to in Afghanistan where you enter directly into the kitchen.

Typically in Afghan homes the kitchen is an outhouse shed, since the fumes from the charcoal-burning stoves are unpleasant, and cooking – done by women, of course – is a low-status activity. I wanted to bring the kitchen into the main house, so I converted the large entrance hall. I installed a modern gas stove, built a breakfast bar, so friends can chat with me while I’m cooking, and added a wall of open shelves to hold all my spices and condiments.

You have a cat. It’s not very Afghan to have her indoors, is it?

No. My Afghan colleagues think I am a bit of a loony foreigner. Having pets is utterly alien to them. Shortly after I arrived in Kabul I found Screw (short for the Screwdriver cocktail – it’s yellow and she’s a ginger cat) in a sewage ditch. It was snowing and she was whimpering because she had been run over by a bicycle. Like all Afghans, she’s a survivor – she pulled through and we’ve been together ever since.

What’s the best part of the house when it’s 40°C in the summer?

The thick mud walls of old Afghan houses like mine keep the soaring temperatures at bay to some extent. However, I prefer to be outside (as long as there is no dusty windstorm). I had a local carpenter make a large wooden daybed, on which are a kelim and kelim-covered floor cushions, and a low coffee table. One can lounge about on it and read and relax or chat with friends. My other indulgence is a kiddie pool. I spend many summer Friday afternoons on a lilo reading and looking up at the children’s kites in the sky.