By Dawn Lloyd
Editor’s Note: Dawn Lloyd is a guest columnist that spends most of the year in Kabul, Afghanistan. Throughout the term, she’ll be sharing her experiences living in Kabul with Ethos. Any opinions she expresses are solely hers and are not necessarily held by the editorial staff.
Her other entries can be found here: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7
I’m occasionally asked what it’s like to live in a desert, and I have yet to find a diplomatic way of telling people that Kabul is not a desert. At approximately 6000 ft above sea level, and surrounded by rugged mountains, Kabul is far from the landscape people imagining deserts envision. At time of writing, April 30, the mountains are white with fresh snow, making the landscape almost attractive if a person can ignore the city itself.
At no time is Kabul less a desert than in the spring, when thunderstorms routinely roll across the sky. Last week we had thunderstorms nearly every day, with the ominous black clouds hanging over the sky as a perpetual reminder that Kabul weather can rival any others for its ferocity. Wednesday still has people talking. The day began with a thunderstorm, followed by another thunderstorm with marble-sized hailstones, and then an earthquake, and finally another marble-sized hailstorm. The rain brings with it green grass and flowers inside the pock-marked and graffiti-covered brown walls surrounding the various compounds, however, offering a few hidden gardens around the city.
Earthquakes, although almost never severe, are frequent in Kabul. They most often originate from the Hindu Kush region dividing the country, and sometimes offer enough of a jolt to rattle windows or even occasionally break glass here in Kabul. After the last one, measuring 5.7 with an epicenter about 60 miles east near Jalalabad, one of my housemates was analyzing her door frame and commented on a new crack in the not-to-standard concrete wall. In the last two years since the new faculty building was built on our campus, earthquakes and bombs have caused the building to shift and settle so much that half the office doors are difficult to close or lock. Fortunately for me, my office is on the other side of the building and still closes and locks easily.
Spring thunderstorms aren’t the most interesting kinds of weather, though. Summer is relatively hot, dry, and drab, with temperatures in the nineties and not too much rain. My favorite time is fall when it begins to cool off. The winds are perfect for kite flying, and the popular sport of “kite fighting” dominates the skies. (My students once asked me what we called kite fighting in English, and I was at a loss since I have never seen it in America.) The sport consists of Afghan boys and men coat buying kite strings coated in shards of glass and attacking each other’s kites by circling another kite with their own, and then using their string to slash the other combatant’s string. By catching wind currents and either letting out or taking in more string, they can control the kites with precision that would nearly rival the trick kites one can find at the beach. Once, standing on my rooftop watching the kites, I decided to try counting them. I knew this was as unachievable task as counting a flock of crows, but I thought I would try anyway. I gave up at forty, although there were still many more distant dots floating in the sky.
Winter brings several snows. They usually range from a few inches to a foot deep, and bring with them all the fun that snow anywhere in the world does. Our college campus sprouts snowmen and snow forts, although the snowmen seldom last long. While most of our students enjoy making the classic two to three snowball caricatures, complete with stone eyes and Afghan scarf around their necks, a handful of the more conservative students consider it a depiction of a human and thus a sin in Islam. The particularly conservative students tear them down, but it is only hours before others rise to stand as white sentinels over the campus. Snowball fights are another inevitable pastime for energetic students looking for a break from their studies. We have several rows of shrubs along the sidewalks, and these are most often used as walls and forts, although sometimes the students build formal walls of giant snowballs in the same fashion that students anywhere do. In a country that has been at war for three decades, snowball fights are often much more official things. Formal cease fires are called when a teacher or other VIP walks down the sidewalk, with shouts of “resume fire” as soon as the hapless civilian has passed the snowball red zone.
All in all, the diversity of Afghanistan’s weather and climate make it a diverse and interesting place, with Afghan variants of all the seasonal activities popular anywhere in the world.
About the author: Dawn Lloyd is an American who got bored and set out to find adventure. Four continents later, she’s settled in Kabul where she teaches English at the American University of Afghanistan. She is Editor in Chief for The Colored Lens magazine and writes speculative fiction, a list of which can be found on her personal site.
Kabul Dispatch: Beyond the Desert
Ethos
May 13, 2013
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