Special Announcement for Afghans

Mar 12, 2012   //   by Hameed   //   culture  //  1 Comment

I was fly­ing from Del­hi back to Kab­ul after hav­ing been on a few flights in South­east Asia. Nor­mal­ly, in-flight safe­ty announce­ments for pas­sen­gers in air­planes were all sim­i­lar. Since the flight from Del­hi to Kab­ul was most­ly Afghans so the announce­ment was a bit more tai­lored to us. The announce­ment said, smok­ing in the air­plane is strict­ly pro­hib­it­ed. Then it added, “not even in the toi­lets”. They’d obvi­ous­ly found cig­a­rette butts in the toi­lets before that and decid­ed to change the announce­ment hop­ing that it’ll work. The announce­ment also request­ed us to switch our phones off but then there were my fel­low Afghans mak­ing phone calls for final good­byes after the announce­ment. They would to tell their family/friends how they were in the air­plane and fly­ing right then. I want­ed to Tweet it but my phone was off 😉 You know how short our tele­phone con­ver­sa­tions are here in Afghanistan. There was one Amer­i­can, one Briton and one Afghan and they were all in hell togeth­er. They missed their fam­i­lies and they want­ed to call back home. The Amer­i­can called home and talked to his fam­i­ly for four min­utes and the Satan brought the bill and it was $20000. Then the Brit called home and talked with his fam­i­ly for three min­utes and he was billed $15000. Final­ly, it was the Afghan’s turn to call home. He called and talked to his fam­i­ly for three hours. Satan brought the bill and it was $3 and then the Amer­i­can and the the Brit com­plained to him why they were so ridicu­lous­ly over­charged and why the Afghan was charged so cheap. Satan told them that it was a local call. From hell to hell is local price. I say this with a lot of love but we do talk a LOT most of us enjoy break­ing some small rules like the one on the airplane.

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