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Brand Recognition, Afghan Style

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| by | Afghanistan |
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The other day, I went appliance shopping for a friend’s new apartment. We visited about 5 or 6 stores in to get a sense of options and pricing, and found everything from stainless steel refrigerators, lightweight plastic washing machines, to appliances covered in flowers. “Those,” my friend said, “are clearly Pakistani. They love flowers.”

As curious as the stylized flowers were, I was most excited to find Haier, one of the most successful Chinese brands to compete on the global market.

Noticing my interest, one shopkeeper confidently pitched, “Haier is a German brand – very good quality.” Another later tried to convince us that Haier  was Korean.

So at least it’s got one half of the brand recognition equation right. Haier is recognized in Afghanistan as a dependable brand… even if no one seems to know that it’s from China. Is this a win or a lose for brands like Haier? I can’t decide.

 

Nostalgia

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| by | Elsewhere |
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Dubai at dusk

View from the Burj

I’m lying on a sofa bed on a high floor of the Burj Khalifa, staring out the windows at the sprawling metropolis at my feet. Here in Dubai, as everywhere else in my month away from Afghanistan, I am haunted by the same question: “What would it be like to live here?”

I was tempted in Philly, as I have never been before, when a friend told me that he used to rent a downtown 1 bedroom for about $750/mo. It was unheard of in any other major city on the East Coast, and since all I really need for my home base is the hustle and bustle of a large city, I momentarily wondered if Philly could be it.

I asked myself this also in Cambridge, MA when I met another friend at 1369 Coffee House, an old favorite of mine during college. What if I had stayed in the area after graduation? What if coffee with this friend could have been a weekly, rather than annual, thing? But it was an idle thought, since staying in Boston had neither been a real possibility nor a real desire for me.

I looked forward to it in Manhattan, which I had decided was the only U.S. city that could keep up with me. Manhattan was home to some of my oldest and best friends, and as we wandered the streets, stopping in at any coffee shop that caught our eye, enjoyed evenings at the Met and late nights in Meatpacking, I felt like I fit in the city. It was as if Manhattan and I were kindred spirits and our energies matched, or something. 

And yet, no place invoked that line of questioning more strongly than DC, where “What would it like to live here?” became “What would it be like had I stayed?” And so it is – nostalgia for the past trumps nostalgia for futures imagined, no matter how bright those futures seem.

DC caused such a strong reaction that I literally cried about it. Luckily, it wasn’t the snot-filled, red-faced, bawling type of cry, but rather the silent kind characterized only by a few fat drops that roll so slowly down one’s cheeks as to make you wonder if even the tears are too sad, too lethargic, to make any real effort.

It had been building for a while.

As our plane descended into Northern Virginia, we flew over lush green fields of farmland hedged by thin, winding slivers of interstate, nearly empty at this early morning hour. I thought of other early mornings on the Interstate after weekends away from the Beltway, listening to NPR, coffee in hand, feeling just as care-free as those car ads always promise. How long ago it all seemed now! I felt my breath catch and a knot form deep in my chest; in that moment, I could not remember why I had ever wanted to leave the United States. 

But the tears didn’t come then.

No, they waited for a more public space to make an appearance: the baggage claim. Carousel number 4 at Dulles’ International Arrivals Hall, to be exact. As the carousel hummed to life, I could feel that tightness dislodging from my chest – slowly, slowly, slowly – until finally one tear and then another spilled out of the corners of my eyes.

I was thinking of something my mother had once told me. Before I went to Afghanistan for the first time, she said, “You know that you can’t go back to a normal life after an experience like this.” At the time, her prediction was premature, and I brushed it off. I didn’t want to “go back” anyway. I didn’t want the normal life. In fact, much the opposite; many my life decisions have been driven largely by a deep desire to avoid normalcy.

But in that moment, in front of baggage claim, I no longer knew what I wanted, and the thought that I could not go back scared me. As was recently written in a blog post widely shared by expats…

“…you look at your life, and the two countries that hold it, and realize that you are now two distinct people. As much as your countries represent and fulfill different parts of you and what you enjoy about life, as much as you have formed unbreakable bonds with people you love in both places, as much as you feel truly at home in either one, so you are divided in two.”

I was hit by a deep nostalgia – for the life that I had lived before I left; for the life that part of me still hoped to return to; and for the lives that I would be missing, now, no matter what country I was in. 

Descent

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| by | Afghanistan |
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Yesterday, I returned to Afghanistan after a month in China. This is what I was thinking as our plane began its descent into Kabul. 

For days, the anticipation builds.

You think of everything that you missed while away: the city’s first real snowfall, gatherings around warm bukharis, expat holiday parties featuring traditions from around the world. You imagine your return: the chowkidor’s warm welcome when he sees you through the gate, long conversations with friends reunited, and your confidence now that you’re not just a newbie expat…

And then you are in the airport.

Airports, more alike to each other than to the cities and countries that host them, have always been a constant in your life, and in them you feel at home. But it is always in the airport – at the boarding gate – on your way back to Afghanistan that the excitement begins to mix with doubt. There’s something about those boarding areas, with their crowd of beefy western security contractors in baggy cargo pants but tight t-shirts, and slim Afghan men in shalwar kameez and Chinese sandals that you find stifling, oppressive even.

Maybe it’s the sheer amount of testosterone in the air, but you feel out of place. If you were already in country, you would be nervously adjusting your headscarf around now, but because you are not, it is still stuffed in a ball in your carry-on. You wonder if you should put it on, and then your stomach knots at the thought of covering your hair again after it has been free for so long. And so it starts. Next you find yourself repeating the questions that you’ve been asked ad nauseam by relatives and strangers and friends back home – where ever home is or was for you.

“How can you stand it over there as a woman?” 

“Why do you keep going back?”

“What do you love so much about Afghanistan?”

And, (a favorite of my father’s): “If you want to work in a harsh environment, why not just find some village in ends-of-the-earth China?”

And then, two hours later, you are flying over the snow-covered Hindu Kush.

You marvel at the beauty of those mountain peaks and ponder their meaning and history. Though its etymology is debated, Hindu Kush translates literally as “Death of the Hindu” (referring to anyone from India, i.e. Hindustan). Flying over that rugged terrain that stands sentinel over Kabul, you are struck by how much the Kush has seen and how many secrets are guarded in its valleys. And suddenly, as your plane begins its descent, you remember.

You remember the country’s complexities that you studied in undergrad and tried to make sense of on your first trip. Try to know me, it taunts. Just try. You remember the quiet peacefulness of the pre-dawn and the dusk, as well as the hectic yearning and trying and hoping and pushing of days in a post-conflict nation. You remember your firsts: first film you saw about the country (Kandahar), first impressions as you drove out of the airport in that armored vehicle on your first trip (that it’s really not so different from rural China, other than the guns and uniformed men wielding them); the first time you heard the word Afghanistan pronounced the Afghan way (Off-hahn-ee-stahn); first time you managed to find your way without getting lost; the first time you saw a potential life for yourself here…

You remember also that you are the type to fall in love more with places than with people and that sometimes – or most times – love is illogical.

The plane touches tarmac and, by then, some clarity.

You realize that, like countless faranji before you and countless that will come after, a part of you now belongs here, to this country. The reverse may never be true, but you, dostem, you belong to her.

A Kabul Night

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| by | Afghanistan |
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When it is night in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood of Kabul, you forget for a moment that you are still in Afghanistan – or at least, Afghanistan as it exists today.

The streets, paved and numbered – a rarity in Kabul – are empty. Here and there a security guard stands sentinel outside of a gated house and a lone dog pads silently towards a destination unknown, its tail low and feebly wagging. For the most part, however, the streetlights cast their pale glow over nothing but the Kabul standard of dust and haze.

It is quiet in these moments after dark. Sometimes you’ll hear a peal of laughter from behind the tall walls that protect its residents – and especially its women – from the gaze of the outside world. Other times you’ll feel even more than you’ll hear the shaking of the pick-up trucks, with their load of menacing armed men in the back, as they speed past you.

For the most part, however, Wazir at night belongs to the few of us pedestrians that want it. And I, for one, want it. I relish the relative peace and privacy and, above all, the sense of normalcy - hypernormalcy, even - that it provides.

I had one of those wonderfully normal nights earlier this week, when Una and I had dinner with two of the bandmates of District Unknown, Afghanistan’s first heavy metal band. Over Lebanese food and shisha, we had somehow gotten onto the topic of our totem animals.

“If you were an animal, what would you be?” One of the guys asked.

Thus started a long and lively discusion and, even after we left the restaurant for the Wazir night, we were joking, laughing, and loudly imitating the sounds of whale and marine mammals. As Pedram was pretending – with surprising accuracy – to be a dolphin, I saw the silhouette of a private security guard, who poked his head out from behind a door at the unexpected noise. I imagined him shaking his head and chuckling at our antics, and hoped that in his dolphin-imitating, Pedram had made his night as much as he had mine.

In that moment, we were just another group of irreverent friends in another tree-lined street in another residential, semi-urban neighborhood. It could have been anywhere in the world – but it was not. It was in Kabul, as the concertina wire curling over the walls on either side reminded us.

But even in Kabul, in that sleepy little neighborhood where a deadly suicide bomb had exploded days before, there was normalcy. And normalcy = hope.

Hope that these irreverent, carefree moments and that “alternative Afghanistan” are neither so fleeting – nor, for most Afghans – so far away.

Dubai

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| by | Elsewhere |
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It is morning in Dubai, and I have been up since 04:30. I watched the sun rise over a sliver of marina, the light hitting the deep turquoise of the water, the gleaming white of the yachts, and the glittering glass of the tall buildings on both sides. I’m on the 16th floor – out of about 30 – in a luxury apartment building that belongs to a friend in Kabul, and even from “down here” the views are spectacular.
I’m in Dubai for just over 24 hours to get my visa back to Afghanistan, and then I head to Baku, Azerbaijan for the UN’s Internet Governance Forum.  I didn’t expect to like Dubai. Everything about this city is the antithesis of Kabul. I love history and culture and localization and even chaos, and Dubai is modernity, efficiency, globalization, and consumerism.
That Dubai is so close to Afghanistan – and to all of the other headline-making conflicts in Africa and the Middle East – is incredibly disorienting. A short 3.5 hour flight, and you leave the endless dust and fecal-matter-coated sky of Kabul; the burqas and the distinct discomfort of being a woman; the pockmarked roads and the ditches (I fell into another one on Saturday); the crashed cars from all over the world that get a second life in the streets of Afghanistan; and the constant presence of cheap weapons and the cheap men that wield them.
 –
On the way to Kabul International Airport, I felt incredibly sad to be leaving. It was silly, since I’d be back in Afghanistan – Kandahar, to be exact – in a week. But I missed this strange place, and it did not help that I was leaving in the dark of night.
But the flight from Kabul to Dubai is always in the early morning, and so the leaving of Kabul is almost always done while the sky is still dark, the streets are empty, and your only companion is the haunting melody that floats over the mosque’s loudspeakers. That, and the armed men, though even they seem less threatening in the sleepy pre-dawn.
I regretted my last-minute decision to attend the conference in Baku. As great of an opportunity as the IGF will be, there are still so many places in Afghanistan to visit, so many people to meet, so many interviews to conduct. Besides, I had just started Dari lessons, and finally was beginning to pick up on conversations around me.
–
My first impression of Dubai was of the heat. I was wearing a black turtleneck sweater dress over black jeans (jeggings, to be precise), a black coat that skimmed my knees, and a blue floral headscarf that an ex-boyfriend’s mother had brought for me from Kashmir. Appropriate outfit for Kabul, not so much for muggy Dubai, where women from all over the world descended with their 4″ heels, designer bags, and tight, tight clothing. Is that cleavage, really? Her ass is hanging out of her jeans! How is this still the Middle East?
It was not until I “acclimatized” a little that I realized how much I actually missed all of this. That feeling came as I was walking through the food court of the Dubai Mall with a new friend from the Afghan Embassy, though it had been building as we drove through the new freeways past villas and skyscrapers and a remarkable amount of green space for a city that rose out of the desert.
“Do you want Pizza? KFC? Burgers?” He asked.
“I want something local,” I responded. “Is there a local fast food?”
He laughed. In a city where the population is almost 90% foreign, what could I expect? We settled on Iranian fast food that was not very fast at all. It tasted just like Afghanistan’s, though my kebab was of shrimp instead of lamb.
–
I feel guilty that after just a month in Afghanistan, I could want all of this. I thought I was tougher. I have always prided myself in my ability to adapt and to get off the beaten expat path. But sitting here now – in the most comfortable (and the largest!) bed I’ve slept in since leaving the U.S., in this apartment with its full wall of windows, in this city that is global in every sense of the word – part of thinks that I could get used to this.
But at the same time, I can’t shake this growing suspicion that I am just an outsider looking in, and that this world – this normal world – no longer belongs to me.

Weekly Links I Liked

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In case you need some weekend reading material… here are my picks on social media, tech, start-ups, and women and work:

A Cautionary Tale of ICT4D Failure at Scale

If you missed this when it first came out 5/18, great analysis of a great idea that failed – a city-wide Wifi network started by MIT students in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Unlike many international intervention failures in Afghanistan, it has nothing to do with Afghanistan’s violence and everything to do with a lack of stakeholder engagement and long-term planning.

Reverse Engineering When and Why Controversial Tweets are Deleted

It seems that this week’s news is all about MIT students, but at least this article writes of a success rather than a failure. Niemen Labs highlights the research of an MIT student on social media censorship in China. Chi-Chu Tsang has been following the deletion of Weibos (the Chinese version of Twitter – Weibo is both the platform and the equivalent of a tweet) and mapping them against the context of current events in China. SO awesome. Makes me want to get a PhD.

Startup Culture: Values vs. Vibe

This article questions traditional ideas on what “culture” means at an organization, startup or not. It argues that the the stereotypical “startup culture” – short bursts of intensity and long periods of chill, lots of organizational bonding, etc – is actually reflective of a temporary state (vibe) rather than permanent core principles (the values). This post spoke to me in part because we talked a lot about “values” at McChrystal Group – and I think that this post’s interpretation of values is completely in line.

‘I’m Not Your Wife!’ A New Study Points to a Hidden Form of Sexism

Incredibly worrying study finds that men with stay-at-home wives tend to carry over their “traditional” views of women into the workplace. Surprising? Not at all. But a step back for feminism? Very much so. This is a great article not only because of the study it highlights, but the point about feminism – and feminist allies – that it makes at the end.