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Surkhrod Trip of OSM
OSM">Nearly two weeks ago, we had an OSM maps editing trip to Behsood District. Our team spent the last ten days and a few days before the trip to finish editing the entire district in very detail: OSM/Behsood This week, when we were finished with Behsood as per our plan we took a mapping trip to Surkhrod District of Nangarhar Province. Luckily, our mapping manager, Habib Raza is from Surkhrod and he knows the area like the back of his…
Shoes
Behold a typical Afghan shoe. It’s a dress shoe, because that’s the preferred style. And it’s bent in the back because they wear them like slip ons. This is convenient. Afghans take them on and off so many times a day. They take them off to pray 5 times a day. They take them off whenever they enter someones house for tea, etc. etc. And this is probably true across most of Central Asia and many other countries in the…
Guns and Welding
I was playing around with my stick welding skills when I attracted the interest of one of our security guards. He wandered up, trying to look nonchalant, to check out what I was doing that was making so many sparks. I showed him the section of an ammo case lid where I had ground off the paint and was practicing laying welds. When he saw I also had a 40mm bullet casing, then he got really excited. He pulled out a…
Disaster Services
Yesterday Megan and I taught CPR to a group of University Students who have taken it upon themselves to form a Disaster Response team and are trying to amass skills and knowledge that will be of use to them and their communities. One of the boys, Hameed, is part of our informal “geek squad†at the Taj and wrote the previous post on this blog. Of the four he was the only one who spoke fully fluent English. Two could…
My Moment of Heroism
Morning rolled around. After having breakfast with my uncle, I headed towards Jalalabad bus station in Kabul. I sat in the rear seat of a wagon. A man with grubby clothes, long hair, dirt-caked hands, wearing a big baggy vest with swollen pockets, lines etched into his tanned face, creases framed his eyes and his mouth, came aboard and sat next to me. His face was pale and his eyes were frightened, like the eyes of a hunted animal. In…
A Small Adventure
(Note: This is the first post by Hameed. Get used to it!) I have an American friend named Jeremy. He is my Pashto language student as well. Our friendship is very tight, and it goes beyond the teaching. One day, Jeremy asked me to travel to Kabul with him because of security problems and to help with translation on the way from Jalalabad to Kabul. I agreed to his suggestion. It was a bright Thursday morning of humid summer, promising heat,…
Introducing Hameed!
We kick off the New Year with a new author on our site. Meet Hameed Tasal. Here Hameed is aligning the Satellite receiver dish atop the Taj. See the earphones? He’s not rocking out to blasphemous tunes, but listening to the diagnostic pitch that tells him if the info cannon is hitting the target. And he’s no stranger to big name publications (such as Jalalagood) having been interviewed for the Boston Herald this April. Worth a read.
Happy New Year!
Thanks to Anselm for coming up with it, we have a new tagline: Adventures in Khyberspace! Get it? We’re focused on bringing technology to the Khyber Pass. Just a few days ago, we took a drive to it’s Western Edge, the Torkham Gate. This street scene brought to you by JD, a friend of the TAJ:
Border Hopping
Jalalabad sits at the crux between central and south Asias, tucked into the mountains near the Kyber pass- the famous gateway to the Indian subcontinent. The people here are Pashtuns, and their tribes straddle the political boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan. I’ve heard reference several times to “Pashtunistan,†a country that exists in only a cultural context, encompassing all the Pashtun people from both sides of the boarder. The red line on the map was drawn when British India pushed…
The Russians are coming.
In the 80s I was a little boy growing up in the Soviet Union and everyone’s older brother was either going or busying themselves about how to get out of going to Afghanistan. Military service was mandatory. If you didn’t study hard and get into university, the government had an alternative education in mind for you. “Study hard so you will go to university,†the teachers warned us, “so you will not die in Afghanistan.†Hamid was our taxi driver from…