Why I'm Staying in Afghanistan - World News - The Guardian

11/8/2014 Why I’m staying in Afghanistan | World news | The Guardian
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Afghanistan
Why I’m staying in Afghanistan

As western troops withdraw from Afghanistan, a small number of foreigners remain. They
talk about the war-torn country they have come to love
Nancy Hatch Dupree with science students outside the Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University:
‘The young have found their voices,’ she says. Photograph: Joel van Houdt for the Guardian
Emma Graham-Harrison
Saturday 8 November 2014 06.00 GMT
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F ew people now move to Afghanistan to start a new life. Visitors once came for
tourism or trade, but these days most arrive for work postings of a few
months or a few years at most, to fight or deliver aid, take pictures, or flit from
meetings in barricaded ministries to embassy cocktail parties. They do not expect
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/08/the-expats-who-call-afghanistan-home 1/19
to fall in love with a country that, in the west, more often makes headlines for its
violence, extremism and corruption.
The past four decades of conflict have driven away millions of Afghans, and
almost all the foreigners who had made a home here. But as British troops
withdraw after a 13-year military occupation, and other Nato allies send their
forces home, a small band of expats has stayed throughout the turmoil. Some
have been seduced by the natural beauty of the country, the hospitality and
extraordinary history – the stupas and temples, mosques and forts, decaying but
still spectacular. Others kept coming back over the years, and eventually settled –
staying for love, or for work – often seeing another side of Afghanistan. They may
be worried about the future, in a land where the Taliban has stepped up its fight
for both territory and Afghan support, infiltrating stretches of the countryside,
where they control the roads, levy taxes, run schools and dispense justice. But
they are not leaving the country they now call home.
Nancy Hatch Dupree, cultural centre director, Kabul University

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Dupree arrived with her husband, a cultural attache, in the 1960s. They lived in
Kabul, where foreigners mingled at parties with the Afghan elite, then took
morning horse rides through grass meadows.
“We met all these beautiful people: sophisticated, elegant, dressed in the latest
fashions,” she remembers. “[President Mohammad] Daud Khan insisted they all
brought their wives, because that’s what you did in a modern nation. The
highlight was the Queen’s birthday party at the British embassy, where we would
dance until dawn, then go up to Qargha lake with our bottles of champagne and
watch the sunrise.”
Kabul should have been just the first of many postings as a diplomatic wife, but
her life was upended when she asked anthropologist Louis Dupree to edit a
tourist guidebook she had written, the country’s first. She walked into his office,
and found the love of her life. The cultural attache became an ex.
“I didn’t have any sense that I was going to stay here for so long, but when I
married Louis I caught the bug with him,” she says.
The couple spent years travelling through the Hindu Kush and the deserts of the
south, seeking traces of prehistoric civilisations and exploring villages for
anthropology research. Those years were a golden age for the country. “Louis and
I would go in one car, and never think about security.” But in 1978, Daud Khan
was toppled in a Soviet-backed coup, Louis was briefly imprisoned, and the
Duprees were expelled. They moved to Pakistan, where Nancy worked in refugee
camps.
Louis died of cancer in 1989, and when Nancy flew back to Kabul, in 1993, it was
to a city battered by civil war. She helped salvage the national museum’s
treasures, and after the Taliban were toppled, in 2001, she returned for good.
Already in her 70s, she secured the backing to build the Afghanistan Centre at
Kabul University, a home for the couple’s collection of historical documents.
Despite the current conflict, her optimism endures. “The young have found their
voices,” she says.
Alberto Cairo, physiotherapist
‘To see all these patients with terrible wounds was quite tough. But strangely, I have felt since the beginning
that I’m in the right place. I realised I was really useful,’ says Alberto Cairo. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian
Cairo’s office sits a few paces from a metal workshop, near rooms full of plaster
casts of legs, arms and hands. More than 130,000 disabled Afghans have passed
through the simple rehabilitation clinic over several decades.
Cairo grew up in northern Italy and trained as a lawyer, but realised, at 30, that he
did not want to spend his life in courtrooms and offices. He went back to college
to study physiotherapy, spending days in a wheelchair to better understand his
future patients, then joined the Red Cross. His first assignment in Afghanistan, in
1990, was at a hospital for war casualties. Given just three weeks’ notice, he
asked what language the locals spoke and what the weather would be like. “I did
not know anything,” he admits.
He worked 15-hour days for several months to get to grips with his work. “I was
in Africa before, for three years, but it was not a war situation,” he says. “So to see
all these patients coming with terrible wounds, it was quite tough. But strangely,
I have felt since the beginning that I’m in the right place. I realised that I was
really useful.”
Alberto Cairo refereeing a game of wheelchair basketball. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian
Foreign staff were evacuated when a rocket hit the hospital in August 1992, but
less than two months later, Cairo was back, driving ambulances across frontlines
and working at the rehabilitation centre where he is still based. He has always
pushed the Red Cross to be more ambitious in their efforts to help the country’s
disabled. He threw out old rules and began helping people whose injuries were
not caused by the war. Now, only one in seven people treated at the centre are
victims of conflict; others are maimed in car crashes, industrial accidents, or
difficult home births.
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Cairo started the Red Cross’s first rehabilitation projects, offering education and
job training, and he insists that all staff at the centre are disabled themselves –
from the security guards to the teams that make prosthetic limbs.
“It’s society that makes the life of disabled people impossible,” he says. “In
Afghanistan, the disabled are not rejected, but they are given pity, not rights.
They are not given a chance to restart their lives. So we have to fight.”
Recently, he introduced wheelchair basketball to the country, after finding a

Chinese firm that makes the special wheelchairs cheaply, and an American willing
to coach.
“Physiotherapy is painful. Prosthetic limbs are not easy. But sport is fun, it’s
joyful,” he says.
There is not much about Italy he misses, though he sometimes longs for theatre
or cinema. He taught an Afghan at the centre to make Italian food, and when he
returns from a visit to Italy, his cases are loaded with parmesan and coffee.
“I will never be an Afghan, but when you ask me where is home, I say Kabul. This
is the place where I want to be.”
Alexander Levenyets Yurivitch, former Soviet soldier, now a taxi driver
Alexander Levenyets Yurivitch in a field near the airport in Kunduz, where old Soviet military equipment has
been left behind. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian
It was an unpromising introduction to Afghanistan. Alexander Levenyets

Yurivitch’s plane had taken off from a Soviet Union airbase with no destination
given; he and the other conscripts on board were not warned they were heading
into a bloody, protracted war. When he stepped off the aircraft in windy Kunduz,
he recognised the Afghan flag fluttering beside the Soviet Union’s hammer and
sickle.
The young Ukrainian was primed to face squads of ruthless foreign fighters and
hostile locals, but found himself chatting to Afghan teenagers who peddled
hashish to bored soldiers, and he realised the war was much more complicated
than he had expected.
Yurivitch started selling Soviet ammunition to his mujahideen enemies, but got
caught. In detention he was barely supervised, because the guards thought that
the prisoners’ fear of the men waiting outside the gates of their military base was
security enough. And so, one night, Yurivitch slipped out.
“I wasn’t nervous. I was born in Ukraine but these are my people – I felt it as soon
as I escaped,” he says. “I converted on the first day.”
‘I was born in Ukraine but these are my people – I felt it as soon as I escaped,’ says Alexander. Photograph: Joel
van Houdt/Guardian
Alexander became Ahmad, and within a month he spoke fluent Dari, the only
trace of his origins a thick Russian accent that has lasted over three decades. He
sent a letter home to his only relatives, his mother and brother, after he
absconded, telling them he was alive but had switched sides. His mother, whom
he never saw again, replied, “I want you to be happy. You don’t have to come
back – forget your debt to me.”
Yurivitch has left Afghanistan just once, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca,
travelling on an Afghan passport. He spent six years in the mountains fighting his
former comrades, once barely escaping a village ambush in which the only other
convert in the group was killed. But he found a band of brothers, after growing up
desperately poor and fatherless.
“It wasn’t so tough,” he says. “We had heaters, electricity, everything was well
planned; we even had a cook, a baker...”
In 1989, Moscow finally ordered its soldiers home, so he was able to give up his
guerrilla life, move into Kunduz and turn his thoughts to marriage, a challenge for
an outsider in a country where most people’s partners are chosen by their
parents.
“The mujahideen looked for an Afghan woman for me. A radio operator gave me
his daughter,” he says. His wife is a teacher, and they live with their four
daughters in a small village 20 minutes’ drive north of Kunduz. The land there
was left to him by his commander from jihad days. The legacy is testament to
Ahmad’s popularity, bolstered by his reputation as a devout Muslim.
“I didn’t have any problems with the Taliban because I was one of them,” says
Ahmad, who drove trucks for them in a time he looks back on as a golden age. “I
had a fixed salary then.”
Now a taxi driver, he is ambivalent about the past decade. “Back then, people
were honest, good Muslims. Nowadays, people want democracy and open
society,” he says.
Still, sitting among the rusting wreckage of military transport planes and
helicopters, on the airbase where he first set foot on Afghan soil, he is hopeful.
“I think things are getting better because the Americans are leaving, and we are
all tired of fighting. This is a holy land, which can’t accept foreigners. Just like the
Russians, they have been forced out.”
Father Giuseppe Moretti, Catholic priest
Father Giuseppe Moretti in his church at the Italian embassy. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian
To Father Moretti’s Afghan friends, the bishop of Kabul is “mullah sahib”, a token
of respect for his status as a man of God, even if his God is not the one they
believe in. Conversion to Christianity still carries the death penalty in
Afghanistan, so Moretti’s diocese is a single church inside the grounds of the
Italian embassy, its construction authorised nearly a century ago.
Communist secret police, civil war militias, Taliban vice police and now Nato
soldiers have all passed through its gates in the years since 1977, when Father
Moretti first flew into the city.
“I realised when I arrived that I could work from the presumption that I was
European and therefore superior, and understand nothing; or I could open myself
completely to this country and love it. And it was the latter,” he says.
His small house is crammed with mementoes of his life as an Italian priest in a
war zone. When the country spiralled into civil war after the departure of the
Soviet troops, he refused to leave – at first naive, then stubbornly committed.
“On 28 April 1992, the first night there was fighting, I thought it was a party with
fireworks, beautiful. The second night, I thought the fireworks were continuing.
The third night, our chargé d’affairs said to me, ‘There are no fireworks, that is
fighting.’”
Undaunted, Moretti stayed to minister to the handful of nuns still doing charity
work in the battered city. “We had nothing for our defence. I remember the
boom, boom, boom, so close around.”
Two years later the shells hit his home and he barely escaped alive. “When I
opened my eyes, my dog, Benji, was there in the ruins; he helped me cross to the
ambassador’s residence. When the watchman saw me, he fainted. I must have
been covered with blood.”
Moretti was ordered home to Italy to recover. When security returned to Kabul it
was under the Taliban, and although they left the church and the nuns who
prayed there in peace, there was no priest until the Taliban fell in 2001. That year,
Pope John Paul II sent Moretti a simple message. “He said, ‘Father, it is time to go
back.’”
The two celebrated mass together, and on the journey to Kabul, Moretti stopped
to look around a small shop in eastern Afghanistan. With a surprise still evident,
he found an oil painting of the pontiff there; it now has pride of place on his wall.
Newly invested with the authority of a bishop, he leads an eclectic congregation

that has at times included ambassadors and Nato commanders. The only people
he has not tried to reach out to are Afghans. “We are forbidden from
proselytising, and I would not say anything about Christianity to my assistants,
even as a joke. But they have respect: they change the flowers every day, ask me
how many people came to the service.”
At 75, he is due for retirement, but has volunteered to stay on despite growing
security problems. There have been two suicide bombings just metres from his
gate, which have made him a virtual prisoner in his house. He no longer wanders
freely through the city he remembers from decades ago. “It was not a splendid
city, but every day you could see the mountains. It was a pleasant life. You could
walk everywhere peacefully.”
His main worry is not the violence but his shrinking congregation. He feels an
affinity with the Afghans because they are religious people. “For the Afghans, it’s
impossible to think of a man without God. In the west, it’s the contrary:
impossible to think of a man with God,” he says. “This is the most difficult thing
for me as pastor of the international community: people are proud of their
religious indifference.”
Hiromi Yasui, photojournalist
‘This is my home,’ says Hiromi Yasui. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian
Yasui’s garden is a shady escape from Kabul’s dusty, frenetic streets. A fountain
sits among fig and mulberry trees, and two giant guard dogs given to her by
nomad families loll on the lawn, longingly eyeing a small aviary.
“It’s comfortable to have a house of your own,” says Yasui, a photographer who
was first drawn to Afghanistan by its wandering tribes of livestock herders. She
had been captivated by an old book of photos of the country’s Kuchi nomads, and
in 1993 she hitched a ride on an aid truck to the eastern city of Jalalabad. After a
sheltered childhood in the historic Japanese city of Kyoto, she was shocked by the
violence she found.
“I crossed the border and I was so excited, thinking, ‘This is Afghanistan.’ I only
knew it from the book. I thought there would be caravans of nomads, and I
looked and looked but couldn’t see a single one. There were just burning trucks
and tanks, and then I realised: there is still a war here. I had never seen war,” she
says. “I had to report these facts to Japan, instead of the Kuchi.”
After two weeks covering a sprawling, squalid refugee camp, Yasui travelled to
Kabul, crossing the frontlines between several warring factions. Undaunted by
her inexperience, or by the horrors she had already seen, she joined a handful of
other journalists in the city’s dilapidated German Club and became a war
correspondent almost overnight. “It was so surprising, so sad,” she says. “I was
crying a little bit at the beginning… It was not necessary for so many children to
die. But I was not frightened. It looks very dangerous being at the frontline but
the [other soldiers] were a long way away.”
She returned to Afghanistan every year after that first trip, eventually
photographing nomads in the Panjshir valley, and then befriending one of the
war’s most famous commanders, Ahmed Shah Masood, known to his admirers as
the Lion of the Panjshir.
“When his bodyguards introduced me, saying, ‘The Japanese female journalist is
here’, he would joke: ‘She’s not a girl, it’s a boy.’ If you see the pictures, I have
very short hair and I’m wearing men’s clothes for my work.” She laughs.
Masood gave her a Persian name, Mursal, which means rose. “After the war
finished, all the mujahideen came to Kabul, everyone knew me. Every street,
passing by, I’d hear ‘Mursal’ – someone calling to me.”
In 2002, after both her parents passed away, Yasui moved to Kabul full time.
Months later she fell in love with an Afghan colleague, but dating was a challenge
in a city so conservative that many couples don’t even meet until they are
engaged.
“It’s difficult to secretly be boyfriend and girlfriend in this country, so in the end
we decided to get married. We went to Turkey,” says Yasui, who converted to
Islam for the marriage and sometimes worries that she is a “lazy Muslim”.
A decade later she has become famous in Afghanistan with a new generation, this
time for her cooking and hospitality. Encouraged by an unconventional Japanese
tour firm keen to invest in Afghanistan, she opened a small but immaculate hotel
in the historic Bamiyan valley, looking out over cliffs studded with ancient
Buddhist caves.
“At the beginning it was quite difficult, because I’ve no experience of being a
hotelier,” she says. “But I have been a customer, so I try to put in what I think is
comfortable.” That included introducing Japanese and Chinese food to a once-
cosmopolitan valley that had fallen off international trade routes centuries
earlier.
The Hotel Silk Road became the closest thing Afghanistan has to boutique
accommodation, booked out for government retreats, charity workshops and
diplomats’ holidays. Guests told her that, once back in Kabul, they missed her
teriyaki chicken and tempura, so she opened a restaurant in the capital, and a
handicraft business to provide jobs for local women whom the small hotel could
not support.
She still works as a journalist, but her side projects now employ nearly 100
people. Security worries have already affected her business: roads into Bamiyan
have been periodically cut off to foreigners and most government officials. But
having endured one Afghan war, she is prepared to ride out another – and is still
hopeful she won’t have to.
“I am ready to fight for things to go the right way,” Yasui says. “Sometimes I’m a
little bit tired, but still I want to stay here. This is my home. We believe the future
will be bright.”
Afghanistan Religion Catholicism News photography
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comments (32)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion.
Order by Newest Threads Collapsed
Dale Stiffler 0
1h ago
Brave people to stay there
Reply Report
Ophilia 3
1h ago
“The mujahideen looked for an Afghan woman for me. A radio operator gave me his daughter,” And
then “Back then, people were honest, good Muslims. Nowadays, people want democracy and open
society,” he says.
What did the 12 year old daughter have to say about that? Good honest Muslims my bottom. Good
honest misogynistic slavers is more like it. Hard to imagine why women want a more open
democratic society instead of a stone age existence run by Taliban Troglodytes.
Reply Report
TonyWalk Ophilia 0
Thats a sad statement by you. There was no.mention of age. Why do you have to assume
things with your little understanding of the world that you come to know through your Fox
news and the likes?
Reply Report
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11/8/2014 Why I’m staying in Afghanistan | World news | The Guardian

home › world europe US americas asia australia africa middle east UK

Why I’m staying in Afghanistan

Nancy Hatch Dupree, cultural centre director, Kabul University

watch the sunrise.”

Alberto Cairo, physiotherapist

Recently, he introduced wheelchair basketball to the country, after finding a

Alexander Levenyets Yurivitch, former Soviet soldier, now a taxi driver

It was an unpromising introduction to Afghanistan. Alexander Levenyets

as I escaped,” he says. “I converted on the first day.”

Father Giuseppe Moretti, Catholic priest

Newly invested with the authority of a bishop, he leads an eclectic congregation

Hiromi Yasui, photojournalist

‘This is my home,’ says Hiromi Yasui. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian

Afghanistan Religion Catholicism News photography

Bowe Bergdahl's life in Afghanistan before he disappeared – in

Steve McCurry's Afghanistan – in pictures

Afghanistan presidential elections – live

5 Apr 2014 211 comments

Afghanistan on the eve of presidential elections

Afghanistan prepares for elections - in pictures

Why I’m staying in Afghanistan

On the run from my father

Tough love: is this a model prison for children?

The rise and rise of sexology

24h 196 comments

Serial: listeners of podcast phenomenon turn detectives – with troubling

Order by Newest Threads Collapsed

Brave people to stay there

View more comments

1 Mexican gang suspected of killing 43 students admits to mass murder

2 Why I’m staying in Afghanistan

3 Ukraine says Russian military column has entered east of country

4 Indian police arrest woman suspected of plotting to kill Bangladesh PM

6 Ebola for beginners: Twitter map outlines some elementary geography

9 Rouble crashes as Russian economy teeters on brink of recession

10 Alleged connections between Kosovo PM’s family and assassin investigated

Why your data matters to us - video

Use current version Leave feedback

UK sport football comment culture economy lifestyle fashion environment

info and resources

complaints & corrections

terms & conditions

You might also like