It took a while to get here. I left Tegucigalpa on Sunday, spent a day and a half in New York meeting with journalists from church relief agencies, then flew to Zurich. From there I connected to Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates that's really a big shopping mall rather than a country. I was supposed to have a connecting flight from there to Peshawar, my destination in Pakistan, but the airline agent in Dubai told me the flight had been cancelled. Because of weather, he said. I asked if it was snow or rain. He smiled. "Too much flak in the air," he said, a reference to the U.S. bombing along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. After ten hours in the Dubai airport, I managed to convince another airline to take me, and arrived here in Peshawar on Thursday night. I'm 11 time zones away from Honduras. When I wake up in the morning, my family is finishing dinner the day before.

I've come to Pakistan to assist Action by Churches Together (ACT) in getting out information about what its members are doing in Pakistan and Afghanistan. ACT is an international coalition of church-sponsored disaster agencies, and since Hurricane Mitch in 1998 I've done several assignments for them.

To do this job, I've come to Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier province. It's a wild west sort of place, close to the border with Afghanistan. In many ways, its people and daily life have more to do with Afghanistan than Pakistan. Of the roughly two million people here, probably more than half are Afghanis, many of them refugees who've trekked across the border over the years, fleeing chronic poverty, drought, Soviet repression, the mujahidin who drove the Soviets out, the Taliban who drove the mujahidin out, the U.S. bombing that's driven the Taliban into retreat, and so on. Located at the foot of the Khyber Pass, the fabled gateway between the Indian subcontinent and the harsh mountains of central Asia, it hosted Kipling and Churchhill as they described the ill-fated attempts of the British empire to subdue the Afghanis. In recent decades it served as the conspiratorial center for the muj and their CIA backers when the Soviets tried–and like the British failed–to take over Afganistan. During that time and now, it's a journalist's paradise, the home base of countless muj warlords, spies, mercenaries, drug smugglers, aid agencies, and everyone else who is drawn to violence and suffering. Even Osama bin Laden spent his share of time here. One of the documents uncovered in a bin Laden safe house in Kabul captured by the Northern Alliance was a description of how to make a nuclear bomb, carefully outlined on the letterhead of the Grand Hotel here in Peshawar.

With the retreat of the Taliban from Kabul, Peshawar seems to have lost some importance, and Friday afternoon I found more than 50 foreign journalists milling around outside the local office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, all hoping to tag along in a UNHCR convoy to Kabul. Some Dutch journalists invited me to come along. I declined. I just got here, and I only have a single entry visa for Pakistan. But the action does seem to be inside Afghanistan these next few days. Did I come here too late? Nothing worse for a journalist than to cover yesterday's news. For now, however, I've got some work to do here, describing what ACT member agencies and other NGOs are doing, how the situation is changing for the refugees here, what the changing political and military situation inside Afghanistan (and inside Pakistan, which is ethnically joined at the hip to Afghanistan) means for humanitarian work, and so on. I'll deal with Afghanistan later.

For now, the road to Kabul is still problematic, fighting continues around Jalalabad, although between exactly who isn't real clear. And the apparent collapse of the Taliban doesn't mean that Afghanistan's problems are all done with. Many Afghanis suffered much more after the Soviets pulled out than they did during the Soviet occupation. The civil war that followed, with mujahidin warlords tearing Kabul apart with rockets and Kalashnikovs, ended only when the Taliban came along and drove out the warlords. For a while, many Afghanis celebrated the peace the Taliban brought. But in time, they grew tired of the Taliban, which represented one ethnic group and invited into the country a motley crew of Arabs, Chechens, and others who converted the country into a base for what happened in the U.S. on September 11, events allegedly set in motion by orders from Osama bin Laden, one of the Taliban's foreign guests (or, more likely, foreign patrons).

While the world press seems to be celebrating the fall of the Taliban, many here are worried that history is just repeating itself, and that the liberators of the Northern Alliance will just turn into the latest chapter of bad news for the Afghanis. A big factor in how this drama turns out will be the behavior and commitment of the U.S., Britain, and the other western countries that make up the anti-Taliban alliance. Will they depart once bin Laden and the Taliban are wiped out, leaving the Afghanis vulnerable, as at the end of the Soviet occupation, for abuse by the warlords which the foreign powers armed and then turned loose on the civilian population? We'll see.

I spent part of the day arranging logistical matters, obtaining a cell phone, getting an interet account, registering with the police. I'm staying in an apartment on top of an office of Norwegian Church Aid, located in a wealthy part of town. It's a comfortable place, though there's no hot water. It's winter here, so taking a shower is interesting. There's a gas room heater, however, to thaw me out after the shower. It's a neighborhood where a lot of UN agencies and NGOs have their offices. All the signs out in front have been taken down, however, in the wake of the October 7 initiation of bombing of Afghanistan. It can be a bit delicate around here. The police have promised to protect the neighborhood from any disturbances, however. And not that much has happened. There have been some "anti-American" rallies here and elsewhere, but the Pakistani government is watching them closely, and busted the leaders of a lot of the radical Islamic parties that have supported the Taliban.

That's a change of character for the Pakistani government, by the way, as it previously backed the Taliban. But George Bush's offer of money and credit convinced President Pervez Musharraf to change sides. So far he seems to have a lot of support among Pakistanis. But you stir into this stew the nuclear weapons the Pakistanis have, a continued war with India on the other side of the country, the very real ethnic tensions here, and it's a big question where Pakistan is headed, and how this whole adventure with the Taliban and bin Laden will affect it. In 1982, the British journalist Edward Mortimer wrote that Pakistan was "an idea before it was a country, and whether it is a nation remains doubtful even today." Nothing has changed in 20 years.

There's a guard here at the office 24 hours a day, and a soldier at the end of the street. I've been briefed on security procedures, and yet the qualms I had about coming here (produced in part by the media's fixation on "anti-American" violence) seem to have evaporated in the face of the very kind and gentle acceptance I've felt from the Pakistanis and Afghanis I've met in the first hours. We are all People of the Book, you know.

Here's a short situation report I filed for ACT today.

17 November

Ramadan has begun, the Muslim holy month when devout Muslims fast while the sun is up. Fortunately, Ramadan comes this year during the winter, when the days are shorter. I'd been warned that Muslims can get pretty grouchy towards the end of the day, even more so after Ramadan has drug on for a couple or three weeks. Muslims are very kind and don't force sick people to fast, and we non-Muslim foreigners are sort of lumped into that category. But to be polite if we eat during Ramadan we close the doors.

The situation inside Afghanistan gets more complicated. The different factions of the Northern Alliance, and some other muj who weren't part of the Alliance, are fast heading toward a conflict in several areas of the country. There's a consensus among NGO staff and international officials here that unless the international community moves in massive numbers of troops to stand between the armed groups that the country will rapidly return to the chaos and violence that followed the Soviet withdrawal. And which they Taliban came along like saviors to end.

I spent most of today visiting the Shamshatoo refugee camp about an hour from Peshawar. The trip was delayed by a few hours as we waited for permission from the police. The Pakistanis control the movements of foreigners carefully around here. And even Pakistan authority only reaches so far. Much of the country beyond this city is a patchwork of autonomous tribal areas where one enters only with very difficult to obtain permission.

Many of the refugees have been around for a while, but dozens of families have arrived in recent weeks, fleeing the bombing and the fighting. I found people very open to talking, though there are certain issues which one has to read between the lines. There is more to translation than the literal meaning of words. This is a complicated place, and I realize that the nuances I pick up quickly after years in Central America fly right by me here. I depend on others to help me interpret more than just words.

My biggest problem at the camp was that, delayed by waiting for permission, we got there at midday when the sun was high in the sky–a photographer's nightmare. I did my best, and even took a few photos with a digital camera I've brought along. (That's what you'll see in this internet journal.) I'm mostly shooting slides which I won't develop until I'm back in Switzerland in December. For now, the digital images suffice for something.

The other problem I had was a crowd of kids who adopted me and followed me everywhere, chanting “Thank you berry much” over and over again, and constantly trying to crawl into the edge of the frame. It took all my charm to shoo them out of the picture. Usually. Looking at the images later, there are a lot with the curious faces of children sticking out from the right and left sides of the frame, staring at the camera.

We drove to the camp through a dry, arid landscape filled with brick kilns fired mostly by burning tires. I had wondered why the air was so polluted here. Combined with diesel exhaust, the smoke of dung fires over which the poor do much of their cooking, and the dust whipped up from the reddish-black earth, it makes for a sort of Dickensonian pall.

The brown of the refugee camp was contrasted by the bright colors of the women's clothing, particularly the burkas, those hideous tents that the Taliban forced Moslem women to wear outside the home. Burkas come in several colors. Several times I watched some blue tents walking across the brown fields, floating patches of color on an otherwise lifeless background.

They really look medieval, a sort of torture instrument. That Afghan women were wearing them in Pakistan underscored the fact that the burka were not an invention of the Taliban, and the international media's suggestion that the apparent collapse of the Taliban has somehow set free Afghani women is entirely mistaken. They are a product of a culture of which the Taliban were but one manifestation. As I looked at the moving tents, it was hard at times to understand that a person was underneath. I couldn't imagine why some men cooked up the idea of the burka. I've been assured there is nothing Koranic about them. But then there is nothing Biblical about Jerry Fallwell blaming women (and gays and rights activists) for allegedly provoking God's punishment of the United States on September 11. Whatever side of the world, there are people who get off on blaming others, on hurting others. They usually seem to claim that God is one their side. If God demands burkas for women, then I don't believe in God.

18 November

I stayed up too late last night talking with some Norwegians who invited me to dinner, so I spent today, a Sunday, yawning a lot as I met with some other aid workers from Denmark and the Netherlands. I'm still getting briefed, trying to understand the complex background and the even more complex current battle for control going on across the border. I also interviewed a couple of people by phone, and set up a phone call tomorrow when Radio New Zealand will interview me (after three days I'm now an expert). I tried to catch up on my email. I'm identifying some themes I want to write about in coming days. At least I'll try to do it from live sources. I found some U.S. journalists today taking notes while watching CNN on a television in the lobby of a Peshawar hotel. It is a problem, reporting on Afghanistan from the outside. But several of us have visa problems that make it difficult to go there. Actually, I could go there easily. I just wouldn't be able to get back into Pakistan. The journalists going across the border have multiple entry visas, or they come from media willing to pay to charter them flights out to some other country. We'll see what happens in the days ahead. In the meantime, refugees continue pouring across the border from Afghanistan as the fighting actually picks up in some areas. Sporadic communication via satellite phones is taking place with some Afghan staff of aid agencies based here. Some Afghans have been able to reopen a few offices. Others haven't. So there are lots of stories to be listened to here, for now.

Having come from an area of the world where outside military intervention is always wrong, it's interesting to hear church aid workers calling for international intervention inside Afghanistan. And urgently. There's a clear sense that time is running out, or that it may already be too late. While the U.S. bombing accelerated the apparent collapse of the Taliban, the question now is what's next. And the U.S. and British forces don't seem to have figured that one out. Some of the Northern Alliance is already calling for the British troops who seized an airport near Kabul to be withdrawn. They want to have their own way. Which historically–as we saw before the Taliban threw them out–meant civil war and suffering for lots of Afghans.

19 November

Although so many things are different here, at least I feel at home around the ubiquitous AK-47, the assault rifle of choice in Central America or Central Asia.

Today I went to visit a refugee camp to be, one of 11 new refugee camps that the Pakistani government is preparing, with help from the UN and NGOs, to host new refugees coming from Afghanistan. Most of them are close to the border, many, like the one I visited today, at the end of the earth. It would be easy to criticize the Pakistani government for not treating the refugees better, but we must remember that Pakistan has hosted the largest number of refugees in the world for several years, yet once the Cold War aspects of the conflict in Afghanistan evaporated, so did international help in dealing with the refugees and other lingering fruits of war. (Hmm, sounds like Central America and Central Asia have more in common than machine guns.)

We climbed high up in the Khyber Pass then cut north through dramatic scenery, up and down steep routes that wound among the arid hills. This was one of the tribal areas, a string of autonomous areas along the border where neither Pakistan nor Afghanistan have any authority. I had to get special permission from the government to enter the area, and an armed guard. The guard came with a military pickup that sounded its siren ahead of us as we drove past earthen villages, heroin labs, and a couple of very fancy homes belonging to local druglords. Again, middle of the day trip meant horrible lighting for photos. Yet I wasn't supposed to take photos, anyway, especially of women. It's punishable by death, which strikes me as a bit harsh. I didn't get much chance to test my luck, as the army pickup and the jeep I was in careened around the tight corners in a tight convoy, the lead vehicle's siren wailing away. The only stop was when the guards had to stop to pray. I was praying all the time around those corners.

How nice it would be to get into Afghanistan. That's where the story is these days, always a motivating factor for journalists. And then the news comes that four international journalists were killed today on the road from here to Kabul. The news is not very detailed yet, but it was enough to dampen any interest. We'll see what these days bring. I've put in the paperwork to have my Pakistani visa changed to a multiple-entry visa, but they wouldn't give me one in New York and people here are doubtful that I can get one, at least not very fast.

There are several mosques nearby, and early in the morning I awake to the competing singing from their towers. It's a nice way to wake up.

Here's a situation report I filed this evening with ACT.

20 November

I let my beard grow long before coming here. I thought it might help, you know, if I had to put on a turban and sneak past some border guards or watchful muj. Some journalists have put on burkas to slip around unnoticed, though I'm kinda tall for an Afghan woman. And neither of the two journalists that I'm aware of succeeded; one was caught because Taliban officials recognized his translator, the other was caught when she tripped (it must be pretty hard to see inside one of those things) and swore, in English. So I'll leave the burka disguise aside for a while, and stick with my beard, since I don't know how to swear in Pashtu. Some Afghan men at the refugee camp yesterday were pointing at me and discussing my beard, so I asked the translator to ask them what they were saying. I was told they were impressed with my beard. "It is a good beard, you are a good man," they said.

I spent the day doing a short piece on the political situation, then some more interviews, trying to figure this all out. I've got to get started early because many offices close by midafternoon because of Ramadan. The logic being that people who are fasting don't have the energy to make it through the whole work day, so labor law requires employers to send them home after just six hours. Sounds like a scam to me. But then I did sneak a cup of the green tea they drink here. I went into an office and closed the door to drink it. I'm such a wimp. We non-Muslim foreigners do try to be discreet, though, not drinking tea in front of Muslims, closing the door before we stuff our faces. I got lucky today when I went to interview folks at a Christian organization just before lunch and they invited me to eat lunch with them. Lentils. People here eat lots of lentils. Tasty lentils, but nonetheless lentils. There's a good name for a rock band: Nonetheless Lentils.

Maybe they inherited it from the British colonialists, but Pakistanis seem addicts of paperwork. To visit here, to visit there, I need a permit. Ok, we do the paperwork. But I keep it quiet that I'm a journalist, as that adds another layer of papers and audibly increases the official suspicion. I'm an "aid worker."

I'm also a Canadian, if anyone asks. Or any other country that's not the U.S. These aren't the best times in this part of the world to tell someone you're from "America," so if they ask then I'm from somewhere else. I've tried Spain, Norway, and Denmark. Yesterday this teenage boy tried out his limited English by asking me, "Wheruryoofrom?" I said, "Canada." He smiled and responded, "Trees!" I said "Yes!" And we both laughed. We were standing in the middle of a hot, arid, treeless valley. Canada seemed a long ways away.

21 November

Islam keeps you in shape much better than Christianity. Several times a day you take out your mat or rug and do some praying that involves bending over and deep knee bends. Makes Christian-style praying pretty whimpy stuff.

A day full of interviews, of which I've had enough. Tomorrow I'm heading out at 6 am to a refugee camp that's been off-limits to journalists until this week. I'm hoping to spend all morning there, then spend the afternoon at another. The best interview I had today was with a group of Afghan women activists for one ACT-supported organization. But I realized I still haven't completely understood the cultural gap when, after talking with them for some time, I asked them to give me names of some of the women leaders in one camp where I'm hoping to visit in a couple of days. They just looked at me. The question didn't make sense apparently, so I repeated it. One of them responded, "But there are no women leaders, all the leaders are men."

The bodies of the journalists killed just to the west of here inside Afghanistan were brought out to Peshawar today. Seven journalists have been killed in about seven weeks of fighting.

I did a quick update for ACT, as well as a short piece about how Catholics here are responding to the refugee crisis. I'm hoping to take most of the weekend for writing. Early next week, I'll travel to Queta, another border city south of here.

22 November

I got up well before dawn to drive out to Jalozai, a refugee camp where the UN has started taking refugees and moving them to camps closer to the border. Some 500 are going every day. I arrived in time to interview some refugees and photograph the drama, then went to ask permission of the police to enter what's known as "New Jalozai," the part of the camp where the most recently arrived refugees live. It is, by several accounts, a depressing place. The Pakistanis denied the permission, as they have for the last two months. Why? There are several elements to their denial. They have a huge problem with the Afghan refugees, have gotten almost no help with them, and would like them to go home. Perhaps they're worried that if journalists document what's happening in the camp then the world will demand better treatment. And the U.S. has reportedly put pressure on the Pakistanis to downplay the refugees. The U.S. bombing has caused more refugees in the last six weeks, and thus doesn't want to draw more attention to them.

For whatever reason, the police there denied my request to enter, so we took off. But in passing through "Old Jalozai," which is a village of Afghan refugees dating back to the beginning of the Soviet occupation, I decided it was a good place to photograph. Those with me agreed, and with a translator I set off through the village. I photographed for over an hour, til all of a sudden an official on a motorcycle roared to a stop in front of me and blocked my picture. I waved to him to move. Wrong. To make a long story short, the translator and I were detained and taken back to the local police headquarters, a mud building, where the man on the motorcycle stood us in front of a bunch of Afghans and then proceeded to lecture us, all the while keeping his motorcycle helmet on. He looked pretty funny, really, as if he thought it gave him more authority. Like a crown. I worked hard on not laughing. After yelling at us for a while he went off to attend to some other desperately urgent matter, telling us not to move. While he was gone the Afghans told us that he was that way with everyone, a self-important man who took every chance to remind people that he was the boss. Actually, the Afghans had lived in Pakistan long enough to pick up the common use of the Pashtun word for dog in regards to the police. Anyway, the guy finally came back and told us from beneath his helmet that we could go. It took about 90 minutes from getting busted to being released. And the rest of the day was full of a lot of jokes about The Helmet.

In the afternoon I went back to Shamshatoo. We didn't have permission, so drove the other way when we saw the police, even though none of them had helmets on. Walked around for a bit and ended up talking with and photographing a couple of Uzbeck families. Uzbecks are one of the smaller ethnic groups in Afghanistan. They're also good carpet makers, and survive here by making carpets inside their UN-issued tents, while they live in a mud hut they built. (Here I am with part of one extended Uzbeck family. Notice the absence of women. They were in the house, but wouldn't come out while I was there. I finally got into the house and photographed inside, but it took some cross-cultural charm.) We drove back to Peshawar after dark, and went by the American Club, an exclusive sanctuary of colonial privilege where only non-Muslim foreigners are allowed inside. I went as the guest of a European. It's one of two places in Peshawar where non-Muslim foreigners can buy liquor, and we celebrated with a round of beer. Only in the pursuit of participative hermeneutics, of course. They were going to serve a turkey dinner in honor of Thanksgiving, which I had forgotten about. Yet I passed on the big meal to go have a light supper with some Norwegians.

Tomorrow is Friday, the Muslim sabbath, the day the mullahs traditionally stir up the faithful. Of late that's meant haranging the Great Satan, and religious services have often been followed by Death to America rallies. I discussed with the Norwegians tonight whether it would be safe for me to go cover one of the rallies. Things have calmed down a bit here since the Taliban's partial collapse, but recruiters are still on the streets signing up volunteers for the jihad. A lof of bodies of jihad volunteers are also coming back, something which tends to dampen enthusiasm for the cause. I've seen a couple of Talibs around, including one today who had a camouflage coat on over his traditional clothing. Some of them are apparently escaping the dragnet and slipping back into Pakistan. Wouldn't want to cross one of them these days, they must be in a horrible mood. Wouldn't want to give them the chance to become a jhazi - one of the faithful who kills an infidel. It's a guaranteed ticket to heaven. For the killer, not for the infidel.

It's a difficult time to cover the area as a writer. News reports indicate three more foreign journalists were killed today, again near Jalalabad, just across the border in Afghanistan from here. [This turned out to be not true.]

The good news is that standing out in stark relief to those people who see the world in selfish ways, from the Taliban to the White House to The Helmet, there is the poor, who possess that wonderful charism of hospitality, no matter what language they speak or where they close their religious canon. In the morning and afternoon I stuck my questions and cameras into the lives of people, asking to come into their simple homes to photograph their lives. I wonder what would happen if a photographer from here went to some U.S. suburb and knocked on doors asking to take photos of people's lives. But here, as in so many other places, those who have nothing are those who are most willing to open their homes and lives to the stranger. Thanks be to God.

November 23

A journalist friend in the states, who was a close friend of one of the journalists killed earlier in the week, wrote me to tell me to stay where I am, that journalists are supposed to report the news, not be the news. She also said I was an old man with kids, and I should leave the inside reporting to younger journalists without dependents. Hmm, I don't know about the old man part, but for now I'm content to remain in Pakistan.

Danger is a relative thing, anyway. Yesterday, going to and from interviews, I rode several times in these little rickshaws, tricycles with a lawnmower engine and a sort of cab on the back, inevitably painted on the rear side with a likeness of Rambo, blood dripping from his facial wounds and holding a big gun. The drivers of these vehicles, which have more in common with go-carts than with taxis, obviously see their vocation as an opportunity to live out that image. It takes a bit of squeezing for me to get in the back, and communicating with the drivers, none of whom spoke English, was fun. But most fun - read scarey - was the ride. These little carts, whose drivers are uniformly young, barefoot, and maniacal, whip through traffic, dodging trucks, donkeys, pedestrians, and cops who wear masks as they direct traffic at the smoggy intersections. At one point my cell phone rang and I answered it, but couldn't hear very well because of the racket. I motioned the driver to stop at the side of the road for a moment and climbed out. It turned out to me a journalist calling from the states for an update on the situation here. "You sounded like you were in a washing machine," he said.

One of my interviews yesterday was with Fatana Gailani, an Afghan feminist leader. A rare breed. Not many of those around. She represents a large sector of the population that is locked out of the talks set to get underway in Germany on Tuesday, where supposedly the future of Afghanistan will be charted.

The situation "inside" remains complicated. From here I can see the warplanes flying along the border. The U.S. bombing continues, and is unlikely to stop, despite the terrible human toll it is taking, because Bush and Rumsfeld and the gang are clearly enboldened by the retreat of the Taliban. Now even the UN, which likes to talk about what a good job it's doing, admits it can't get the food out to people who need it. The war has to stop, or the tragedy will grow murderously worse every day.

One of the four groups that will gather around the table in Germany is from Peshawar. This town is a sort of Miami, the place that people come when they can't stay home any longer. Yet besides the muj (or the Gucci muj, as some call the comfortable mujahidin commanders who frequent the fancy hotels in Peshawar and never see battle) and the non-governmental organizations, the biggest Afghan presence here are hundreds of thousands of poor people. It's hard to get away from the constant reminders of what they left. The streets are full of people with one leg, hobbling along on crutches. Afghanistan has as many as ten million land mines, and a lot of the refugees here left one of their legs behind before they fled.

November 24 - 25

The situation inside remains difficult. Foreign UN staff are present only in Kabul (and up to a maximum of 20), in the north they are commuting in for the day from Tajikistan, have to be back out of the country by nightfall. Some NGOs like Doctors Without Borders have managed to get foreign staff in, but most are waiting for the situation "to stabilize," as they say around here. I've watched the BBC a few times in the last couple of days and the journalists are doing a decent job following the action, though it's not cheap; the UN is charging reporters $5,000 for the round trip from Islamabad to Kabul on a UN plane. Given that going by land will get you killed, it may not be a bad price. Yet they only can take 20 kilos of luggage. A Norwegian TV crew called up the Norwegians here to see if they could stick some video equipment in among some tents being shipped in overland. The TV crew was flying, but couldn't take all their equipment along. When the Norwegians here said yes, but then explained the risks of banditry and U.S. bombing, the Norwegians said no thanks.

The bombing right across the border has picked up. Some say Evil One Number One is hiding out there.

I went to the Pearl Continental Saturday. It's the most expensive hotel here and the base of most journalists. At least those with bigger expense accounts than mine. A room in normal times goes for under $50 at the Pearl. These days it can go as high as $400. A sellers market. I went to pitch ACT to some secular journalists, and had several good discussions. Most involved beer, the Pearl being the second place in town to buy alcohol. Whereas the American Club carries St. Pauli Girl, the Pearl has only Pakistani-made beer. Now there's a contradiction.

While the media has done a laudable job in many ways, some journalists here have expressed to me their frustration with management back home, especially in the U.S., who have sent the word down the line that they are "not to overdo" the suffering provoked by the U.S. "war on terror." They are somehow supposed to maintain some sort of symmetry between the victims of September 11 and the victims of the U.S. bombardment of Afghanistan. I don't know how you do that, and neither do any of those I talked to here. The tragedy of September 11 was well covered by the media, in the whole world. I haven't seen coverage of the suffering of poor Afghans that even begins to come close. I think we need more coverage of how ordinary Afghans are suffering, not less.

The suffering predates September 11, of course. Refugees here fled from the Soviet invasion, the mujahidin madness that followed the Soviets, the landmines, the drought. The bombing only adds to all that. Unexploded cluster bombs from the U.S. "war on terrorism" will be killing Afghan civilians for years to come. All the UN and NGO offices here that deal with Afghans have pictures on the wall of the unexploded cluster bombs, part of a campaign to raise awareness of them. The food packages that the U.S. dropped (a great public relations stunt, by the way, that had nothing to do with humanitarian assistance) were at first the same color as the cluster bombs.

I'm having a hard time being both a photographer and a writer here. It's so different for me, like the far side of the moon, that I'd like to spend all my time photographing. I spent time, for example, poking around in the old part of the city, including taking photos in a burka shop. (A woman I interviewed Saturday called them shuttlecocks. They do look a lot like those badminton thingies.) Yet that wonderful time outside photographing is not giving me time to write. My notebooks are filling up. I was going to spend Sunday morning writing but got dragged to church. Interesting experience. Christians are very much a minority here, and after the massacre a few weeks ago their position seems a bit more precarious than usual. But the government has cracked down on the Muslim fanatics who were responsible, and things have calmed down a bit. After the service I went and had tea with the priest and his family. They told me that their Shiite Muslim neighbors are persecuted more by the Sunni Muslim majority than Christians are. Although there were several police guards at the church, they said the Shiites have ten times as many police and army troops guarding their mosque.

There's a military guard around the U.S. consulate here, including a big tank parked in front. I'm still not from the Great Satan, lately I've been telling people I'm from Spain. No one seems to remember the problems that Muslims had with Spain centuries ago. Spain was long ago replaced by other more evil lands.

I failed to make Friday's demonstration, in part because it wasn't very big, and I apparently drove by the area and didn't see it. The fall of the Taliban has hit the Islamic fundamentalist groups here very hard. What will happen when the defeated Taliban fighters come home may change things. Or maybe not. Afghans have a historic ability to switch sides at the drop of the hat, and do it again tomorrow. I did find some people selling Osama bin Laden t-shirts. The sales weren't exactly brisk, and one salesman followed me for over a block trying to get me to buy several dozen. He said he'd make me a special deal, that I could sell them back home for much more than the roughly $3 apiece he was asking.

A rickshaw driver I stopped tried really hard to understand my English directions, but didn't get it. He wanted to communicate, however, even offering me three choices of language. "Urdu? Pashtu? Farsi?" he asked me. None of the above. What a dunce I feel like at times.

Here's a situation report I just filed with ACT.

November 26

I'm tired tonight, a case of delayed jet lag, I think. And I've got to get up early tomorrow to drive to Islamabad and catch a flight to Quetta. So no profundity tonight.

I hope to be online from Quetta but can't promise. If not, I'll be back online on Friday.

Here's a story I filed today for ACT. It's an overview of the situation of Afghan refugees here.

November 27

I'm now in Quetta, 600 kilometers to the southwest (that's about 400 Farenheit). It's the other major Pakistani city on the Afghan border. Right across the border is Kandahar, the last holdout of the Taliban. So this city is the jumping off point for people heading for "the action," and also a destination for people fleeing "the action."

The flight from Islamabad was about half journalists. Waiting for my luggage, I watched as one European television crew piled up their luggage, a huge pile of some 30 boxes and cases. The effort needed to get two minutes of video, with 20 seconds of one guy standing in front of the camera, is enormous. I read some of the labels on the boxes. One said, "Flak Vests." Another said, "Kevlar Helmets." Jeez. I can't go to Afghanistan, I only have cameras and a notebook.

I'm hosted in Quetta by Church World Service (CWS), which has opened an emergency office here. They're helping refugee women here and channeling aid into the country, when they can get it through. Shortly after I got here, their staff took me out to a refugee resettlement area for the last hour of sunlight. Yet I quickly picked up an entourage of about 50 kids, for whom I was obviously the best entertainment they'd had in a long time. They followed me everywhere, screaming, laughing, jumping into the photos. They were a pain in the butt. But they were just being kids. My translator and a couple of the refugee men tried throwing rocks at them or whacking them, but I protested. It wouldn't have done much good anyway. I took it in stride, we do what we can, but there was one moment when I wished they would have gona away. I saw this girl, about 10 years old, who was just beautiful. The last minutes of sunlight were shining off her green eyes. It was magical. I instantly thought of the famous Steve McCurry photo of an Afghan girl that was used as a National Geographic cover. She just looked at me with a natural look, magically gorgeous. I wanted to shoot three or four rolls of just her face with the sunlight striking it. I got off three quick shots with a long lense and then she was enveloped by screaming kids. I looked for her in the mob but she had disappeared. When I get the film developed next week, she's the first person I'm looking for.

My translator explained to the local mullah, who gave me permission to take photographs in the area, that I would like to take photos of women if possible. A grizzled old guy in his 60s, he said no problem and took me to his house where he ordered his two wives to uncover their faces (they had covered up when the translator and I entered) and let me take their photos. One woman was cooking flat bread over a fire. I tried taking her photo but she kept arranging herself in a way that I couldn't see her face. The husband ordered her to show her face. I felt torn. I wanted her to disobey her husband and do what she wanted. But I also wanted the photo. Aww, the dilemmas we face. I finally gave that camera to a woman CWS staffer who was with me, and asked her to try it. I walked off to try something else. When I develop the film I'll see if she had better luck.

The issue of taking women's photos is a tough one. One the one hand, I don't want to be the culturally insensitive jerk who invades people's private space without their permission. Yet the world needs to know about the lives of the refugees, and part of my role in that is photographing them. Yet if I don't get somewhat assertive, all I'll have at the end of the day are photos of men and children. When it comes to photographing women, this really is another planet from Latin America.

I was talking in Peshawar the other day with a woman in an office. I asked her if she was Pakistani or Afghan. She laughed. "Do I look like an Afghan woman?" she asked me. I said I didn't know what an Afghan woman looked like, 'cause they are all covered up. (I'd seen the faces of a handful, but not enough to draw any generalizations.) She explained that Afghan women are much lighter skinned than Pakistani women, and often have green or blue eyes. Like the girl I wanted to photograph.

As we were leaving, just after sunset, as the families were preparing to break their Ramadan fast, we saw a Talib fighter arrive in the village with his family, carrying bundles like they had just come from far away. My translator tried to get him to let me interview him, but he just walked away.

Coming back to the office, I got into a discussion with the translator, a guy from here, about Osama bin Laden. I'd made a joke about the $25 million ransom for bin Laden, who may be around here somewhere. Yet the translator said he wouldn't turn him in if he knew where he was. He was proud of bin Laden because the guy had stood up to the United States. He didn't try to justify the September 11 attacks, but he was proud that someone had tried to get even with the U.S. for a long laundry list of misdeeds in the region, which he checked off on his fingers.

One of the families that invited me in to photograph this afternoon had an 8-year old boy laying on a bed. His name was Sher Mohammed. He'd been injured eight days ago when his house was bombed by the U.S. in Kandahar. His father had carried him and hitched rides for two days to reach Quetta, where he was recovering. They had no money to go to a doctor, however, so they had splinted the boy's leg themselves. I went inside the dark mud house where the boy was laying and talked with him and his father for some time.

I removed yesterday's story a couple of hours after I uploaded it, and several of you wrote to ask why. My slavedrivers in Geneva had some problems with a couple parts of it. Besides the normal age-old conflicts between writers and editors (don't get me started), there is also a tension between writing the truth about what's happening, the journalist's task, and trying to protect personnel in the field and working relations with other agencies, the bureaucrat's calling. Both sides of the argument are right. We'll work it out in another day or two and I'll post the revised story. (Now available.)

November 28

I got up early, the photographer in me looking forward to the clear early light in this high-elevation city. Yet even after the sun cleared the mountains to the east, there were few people up. Maybe it was because it was freezing; with few people having heating in their homes, people preferred to stay in bed til the sun came up and quickly warmed up the air. So I decided to join them, came back inside and warmed up with some tea.

I spent the morning documenting a project sponsored here by Church World Service that pays refugee women to make quilts, which are then in turn given to other Afghan refugee families that need them. One of the good things about the project is that by providing income for women, it indirectly begins to change the power relations within the family. As women earn cash, they begin to have more of a say in how the family is managed. Some of the women sewing quilts were new arrivals, having come across the border since the US bombing began. I also visited a school where the refugees' kids go, run by an Afghan organization supported by CWS. Had a nice talk with a group of the teachers, all Afghan women with faces. Afghan refugees here are mostly Hazaras, who are Persian-speaking Shiites, and their cultural bias toward hiding women is a bit more relaxed than the more dominant Pashtuns, who are Pashtu-speaking Sunni Muslims.

A local staffer from CWS spent all morning doing the rounds of government bureaucracies and finally managed to get a permit for me to travel through the tribal areas to Chaman, on the border with Afghanistan. So we went there after noon, arriving about 3 pm after crossing a landscape that would look an awful lot like the moon were it not for the camels.

At Chaman, this notoriously anarchical border town that serves as a regional smuggling center for everything from Iranian gasoline to boom boxes to heroin, we went to the border, where thousands of refugees are crossing over. Yet the makeup of the refugees has changed in the last few days, and many of them were Taliban. And they were not in a good mood. At one point, when we were right at the border in the middle of a group of refugees that had just crossed over and had yet to deal with the Islamic Relief officials who were managing the processing point, my translator said to me, "It is a good idea that we will be leaving now, Sir." I had been warned in my security briefing upon arrival that local staff will often seem to understate threats, and to be sensitive to subtle hints about safety. So we left. Had a few rocks thrown at us as we walked away. Only an hour later, as we were driving away from the border, did the staff with me explain that two of the Taliban had said to them that I looked like a Russian communist, and told my colleagues that they would be doing a favor to Allah to kill me. The Taliban said they would do it except they were inside Pakistan. So much for my long beard fooling anyone.

We did manage to interview some Taliban who were less hostile, but clearly not in a good mood. These guys are sore losers, and one family talked about how they'd been mistreated by the Northern Alliance as they fled from Mazar-e-Sherif. That certainly jives with the news from inside, where hundreds of defeated Taliban have been massacred. It's a frequent pattern in recent Afghan history.

We got back long after dark. Tomorrow I fly back to Islamabad and then drive to Peshawar.

November 29

A Swedish cameraman was killed inside Afghanistanry in an apparent robbery attempt, a sign of the chaos that reigns. The road into the country from Chaman has been closed for two weeks. The road through Jalalabad is tricky, though a few trucks are making it through. No reporters nor UN nor NGO staff is trying it. Eight journalists have been killed inside since October 7. A Canadian reporter has apparently been kidnapped just across the border from Chaman. It's not clear who has him, but some Canadian diplomats were to go to Chaman today to try and find someone to negotiate with.

On the taxi trip from the Islamabad airport to where I was going to pick up my ride to Peshawar, I had a driver who told me he was a Christian. I asked him how he felt about the Bahawalpur massacre on October 28, in which 15 churchgoers and one Muslim guard were assassinated. He said he was angry. Rafi Azed was his name, and the question got him excited. "If I had a gun I would find those men and shoot them dead," he said. "I have a big son now to take care of my family, so I am not afraid. I would kill those men who kill Christians." He let go of the steering wheel and pretended he had a gun and started shooting out his window. The taxi veered to the left and was going to hit a bus but he dropped his make believe rifle and regained control just in time. His reply was interesting in how it contrasted with church leaders who I've talked to on this trip who say the massacre has helped improve interfaith relations because it was so shocking. Rafi disagreed.

We left Islamabad, this Brasilia-like modernistic oasis where no poor are allowed to live, just before dark, bound for Peshawar. We stopped for fuel in a small town just as people were breaking their Ramadan fast. After the guy at the gas station pumped our fuel, we paid. Then he asked us if we'd like to join his family for dinner. Such simple hospitality. I can't imagine someone working at a gas station in the states asking a customer to come eat dinner with their family. The Ramadan fast is supposed to make you more senstitive to the poor, the hungry, even the traveler, it would seem.

Back late to Peshawar, feels like home after the trip to Quetta. Driving by the airport in the dark I remembered that this was the place where Gary Powers took off on the fateful U-2 flight. Peshawar has always sat at the edge of big conflicts.

November 30

In the morning I went looking for a guy, a local journalist, who ACT was interested in hiring to provide some coverage when people like me are not around. I had a phone number for the guy, but it was a wrong number. I had an email, but he hadn't answered. So I resorted to going to see him at the address that had been provided to me in an old section of Peshawar. I took a taxi over there but after about thirty minutes of driving around the small streets of the neighborhood we had not found him. I finally got out and walked, and soon collected some men who wanted to help. They took me to this old man who was the sort of local neighborhood leader. He had never heard of the guy, either, but for the next hour walked with me up and down the tight streets, asking everyone we met, knocking on doors. No one knew the guy I was looking for. The neighborhood leader finally admitted that we had to give up, that no such person lived there. Then he apologized that because it was Ramadan he couldn't offer me tea. Instead, he dragged me down yet another narrow street and knocked on a door. A woman answered, they discussed something for a moment in Urdu, then the woman in broken English invited me into her home. She was going to give me tea. Seems she is a Christian, and the leader took me there because he wanted to be hospitable. Had a nice cup of tea with her, and after about 20 minutes left her house. The old man was waiting in the street for me. He put his arm around my shoulders as we walked away. "I am a Muslim. She is a Christian. She is my sister," he told me, smiling.

Early in the afternoon, I went to the weekly Death to America rally in the old part of the city. The Norwegians had discussed with me whether it was safe to go. In general, they have orders to stay inside on Friday afternoons because the time after Friday prayers could turn difficult if the mullahs decided to preach something particularly strong. Commenting on safety is a powerful issue for one of them. He once told a Norwegian journalist that it was safe to go to a particular section of the Sudan where the Norwegians were working, and received the journalist back a few days later in a body bag. So it was a serious discussion. They finally agreed I could go, and provided one of their Afghan staff, Omar, who's a big guy, to take me. We jumped in a taxi, and after winding our way through the streets found a parking spot a couple of blocks away from where the march had ended and people were listening to speakers. The taxi driver insisted on coming also, he was so concerned about me. So he walked beside me, and Omar walked about ten feet behind so he "could keep an eye on things," he insisted.

There were about 5,000 people for the demonstration, yelling all sort of anti-American, pro-jihad slogans. Not much different from demonstrations in other parts of the world. I dismayed Omar and the taxi driver by climbing up on top of the cab of the flatbed truck that was being used as a speaker's platform, but it was a good vantage point to photograph the angry shouting, the Osama bin Laden posters, and so on. When I'd done what I needed to do, I turned to get down but the space was now crowded with more journalists. Where I finally attempted to lower myself down wasn't working very well, but some of the protestors reached up, signalling that they wanted my cameras. I handed them down, and then they reached up and lifted me down as well, then handed me my cameras. Several of them shook my hand and a couple said, "Hellohowareyoumyfriend," which is the limit of many people's English here. As I walked out of the crowd, people smilingly parted the multitude for me. Being an American at a Death to America rally wasn't so difficult after all.

Riding back to the office with Omar, I confessed to him that I wasn't really Norwegian, but from the US. In that case, he wanted to know why the US was bombing his country. He talked about how big foreign countries always come to Afghanistan, screw it up for the Afghans, and then leave. He agreed that Osama bin Laden was a bad guy, but asked me why the US had to kill so many Afghans if the US was mad at bin Laden. We both agreed that the US war on Afghanistan had in many ways made it easier for the Muslim fundamentalists to recruit new fanatics.

December 1

Late last night I went out for dinner with some other expatriate church-sponsored aid workers here. Afghan restaurant, laying on pillows, eating spicey food. And people worry about me here. Afterwards the Norwegian driver, a long-term resident here, decided that the best show in town was to drive through the narrow streets of the old city, where the jeep barely passed between shops on either side. Few cars attempt it; it was an exercise that involved intimate contact with hundreds of people walking on the street late at night, enjoying late-night shopping. A British guy and I were sitting in the backseat, and we opened the sunroof and stood with our heads out of the car as it navigated what was more like a tunnel than a street. Now I know why the pope likes his job. We were assailed by "Hellohowareyoumyfriend" as we inched along, people reaching up to shake our hands. It was hilarious. No, we weren't drunk, this is a Muslim country and getting alcohol takes great effort. It was just fun in a country where people have been very hospitable. I probably shouldn't tell you about it, as it blows the image that I'm suffering and sacrificing to be here. If the truth be told, I've had a wonderful time.

I wish I could say the same for my cameras. The omnipresent dust has been nearly fatal. The lenses have this irritating grinding sound.

This morning went back to Shamshatoo refugee camp one more time, this time with some women from one of the ACT-related NGOs working there. I interviewed women who had participated in a health course. It was a very honest dialogue inside one woman's house with women of varied ages who let their chador down after a few minutes. On the way back to Peshawar I photographed and talked with some of the refugee kids who work in the nearby brick kilns, a Dickensonian world but the only work available for refugee kids besides carpet-weaving.

The security situation along the border is getting worse, and several areas where UN staff and NGO workers could travel safely a few days ago are now transitable only with an armed guard. Seems the return of defeated jihad fighters, some of them dead, has stirred up animosity anew. Attendance at the demonstration yesterday was reportedly much higher than the last several Fridays.

The conference in Bonn is having difficulties as the Robbani group, the muj faction that's in charge of most of Kabul and thus sees no reason to negotiate power-sharing, refuses to accept the king or any international peacekeeping force, both of which seem to many people in Peshawar as two indispensable elements of emerging from the current quagmire. Robbani and his people are also the most antagonistic group to women. If he takes over again, the throwing off of the burkha will become ever more symbolic and less real. I've heard from many Afghan women here that the fascination with the burkha, and the idea that the overthrow of the Taliban means that somehow gender inequity is resolved, is clearly not grounded in reality. For a few urban women in Kabul to take off the burkha, while the majority of women in Afghanistan remain illiterate, uneducated, and with limited power, is a misleading drama.

The world's eyes these days are certainly on Afghanistan and the battlefield dramas and diplomatic struggles that are shaping its near future. Yet will such interest linger, or will the world abandon Afghanistan once again as it did a decade ago? The sudden interest in the welfare of the Afghan people by the U.S. government, including the special interest by Laura Bush and other public figures in the life of Afghan women -- will it dissipate as soon as US military objectives are met here? Omar the Bodyguard asked me the other day why the US didn't care about Afghan women and their repression under the Taliban until after the September 11 attacks. It's a good question. Not just for George Bush but for all of us. I didn't know much, and didn't have time to learn more, until these last few weeks. Can we demand things of our political leaders that we don't demand of ourselves?

In the afternoon I packed up, had a last interview with some ACT members, and drove the three hours on the Grand Trunk Road to Islamabad to catch a flight in the wee hours of the morning to Dubai.

December 2

It is the first Sunday of Advent. I'm stuck in Dubai for a day and a night, having missed a connection by ten minutes. Tomorrow I'll fly from this Islamic emirate to Geneva, that historical hotbed of Protestantism. I'll be in Geneva for five days, participating in a training session for ACT-sponsored rapid response teams. Then I'll fly to Peru to help lead a disaster preparedness course for Latin American church workers. I'll get back home on December 12.

This will be my last entry in this journal. Thanks for reading it, and thanks to several of you who've written with your encouragement, questions, and copies of Doonesbury. This has been a helpful space for me to keep in touch both with many of you as well as with my own feelings and responses to being here. I've got more articles to write. I'll reference a couple more for ACT right here in a day or two. Here's one now. One or two longer articles that I'm planning to write in the next couple of weeks will be linked to the article sampler off our home page once they appear in print.

Advent is a time of waiting. For the last two weeks I've spent most of my time amid the largest refugee population in the world. They are people waiting - some of them for decades - for peace in order to return to their homeland, a place where moisture is another word for hope, where land mines trouble every step, where empires have stomped heavily across the arid landscape, and where men with petty definitions of power have taken possession of everything within their reach. It is a land where children born into a climate of war and orphaned at an early age have been easily turned into cannon fodder by religious bigots who misinterpret the Koran. It's perhaps the poorest place on earth today.

Advent is a time of waiting for peace, of praying and working for God's shalom. As Moslems continue fasting their way through Ramadan, letting their thirst and hunger make them more aware of the holy in the stranger and the marginalized, may we who claim the Christ as our Savior wait for him with humility as he comes to us in the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the imprisoned, the Afghan. Jesus, too, was a refugee, fleeing with his family to safety in Egypt as the madmen raged against the children. As we wait for the incarnation one more time, let us open ourselves to Jesus who, once again, is a refugee waiting for the war at home to end.