Web log:

Date: 12 September 05 (5:00 pm)

Location: Fort at Karte Parwan, Kabul, Afghanistan

Subject: Visiting the Orphanage

Content:

Yesterday I went with David to the orphanage. We were running late. I said to David en route that we must call the Orphanage Director. He said it was OK, nothing is on time in Afghanistan. Michael Fairbanks from OTF points out that one of the things that is most correlated with economic success in the world is the culture of being on time. So I called Soraya Hakim and left a message. I can at least model the sort of world I'd like to see.

It'll be a while getting here, tho. Fair enough, everyone gets caught in the traffic jams, hideous black holes for time that form and congeal, unless one worms one's way through. People suddenly cut right in front of you - or drive straight at you down the wrong side of the road. You can do anything you are big enough to do. And Daud is the biggest with whom I have ever driven, aggressive and fast, an amazing master in the impossible world of Kabul traffic.

David tends to get nervous when it appears that we will wreck, something that occurs every other minute. I've found, tho, that we don't ever seem to wreck, and if you just let Daud go, you get where you are bound in half the time of any other driver. It does amaze me, times, how close some calls can be. But I just grin across at him and say, "Daud-Jan. Houbas." (Good) He answers, "Kabul driving - danger driving. " And grins that Afghan irreverence. Raphy describes an Afghan who, when tossed a live grenade as a joke, spiked it onto the ground as if he'd just scored a touchdown to show he wasn't afraid. The damn thing blew half his foot off, but the Afghan just hopped around on one foot, laughing. Raphy says that they are all quite mad. Myself, I don't find them truly crazy, but when death grins at em they sure laugh back.

We roared through Karte Parwan, our part of town, then out as if to head north to Salang. Almost to the Ministry of Water and Power, Daud slowed to cross the tank tracks laid into the pavement as a speed bump. Ceative use of an otherwise inconvenient piece of metal. We turned into a dusty warren of mud compounds, and tiny streets. Then into a section of old Soviet apartment blocks. At least these Attica like monstrosities were set in lots of open space - bare dirt, but room for kids to fly kites and ride bikes.

Inja, inja, David directed, Chap. (Here, here, turn left.) Daud parked at a high metal fence, with a neat set of yards beyond. That is different, I thought. Most everything in Kabul is behind high mud or concrete walls. This looked more like a big school might look in a very poor town in West Texas. Children went purposefully about the hard dirt soccer field before us.

Camouflaged guards patted David down. Qais says that they don't even have bullets in those Kalashnikov's they swagger about with, but I've never thought it wise to push the issue. My being a woman, however, me, they could not touch me, so they ignored me. My knife and mace came along unnoticed.

We padded along the freshly washed drive (why in a desert, people so profligately water the asphalt defeats me, but it does lay the dust.) We let ourselves into a massive, but newly refaced building. Obviously Soviet, but the new concrete patterning on the facade made it look almost modern. Inside it was like any Ministry. That acidic sensation in the back of my palate spoke of decades of dysfunctional septic systems.

But as much as could be done to make the place neat had been attempted. A mural of a small child with tears rolling down its face and a hand sleeved in the colors of the flag of Afghanistan cradling its head was poignant welcome to the orphanage.

We asked some Afghans standing in the halls for Soroya, and were guided through double doors into a grassy courtyard blooming with roses.

A knot of people stood around a dozen plastic trikes. A clear-eyed woman with a strong face and impeccable English greeted us. We had arrived. She returned to the conversation about how to get all the toys they had been given by U.S. soldiers from Baghram (some assembly required) put together in time for an awards ceremony. There were not enough for every child, she lamented, but these would do to reward the kids who had excelled in school. She showed us the warehouse, crammed with cast off US clothes, bags of flour and mounds of other supplies, as she explained that it was a constant juggling act to keep the 700 boys here, and the thousands of other orphans at 27 facilities throughout the provinces supplied.

How many?! 11,000 children, she replied, continuing to instruct the workmen on the finer points of trike assembly. A stream of others came up to her and she dispatched their concerns, as she explained that she ran all of the orphanages in the country, 27 centers - unfortunately, there were some provinces that didn't yet have one.

So she was a civil servant? David asked. Yes.

As she dealt with another enquiry, he leaned over to inform me that that meant she was paid $1,800 Afs a month - $36. She had recently been appointed to run this place, and is struggling with the enormity of it all. But things are better now, she said. We really would not have liked to see it a year ago....

We began with the kindergarten, where the attached photo was shot. Every room was neat, with the best efforts to give the kids a clean environment.

Soraya bemoaned the crumbling infrastructure. Donors give toys, or a solar system, but no one helps to fix the infrastructure. She looked at us with guarded optimism. Were we the ones with some money?

At the Fort was a few thousand dollars that donors had given to enable a solar system to be put on the orphanage so that the kids could for the first time, likely in their lives, get hot showers.

David had advised me not to tell her of the money til we determined whether she was on the take, or doing a good job, and would use the money wisely. On no account give it to the Bank, he insisted. Good advice. Several people, having heard that I was bringing donations for the orphanage solar system have been trying to get their hands on the cash.

My problem has been to figure how to use the money for the purpose for which it was given. My understanding had been that the orphanage needed the money to complete the solar system. Not quite true. The hold up, it seems has been that the orphanage does not have the water supply capacity to run through the system, even if that were to be built.

So, several days before, I had lunched with Ali Azimi, the Director of the Renewable Energy Program at Asian Development Bank, the entity that owned the solar panels. The Bank had already invested $10.000 rebuilding the showers and moved its solar panels away from the Renewable Energy Center (which was annoyed at the loss - tho they were pumping nothing but hot air over there) only to find that there was an inadequate water supply. What will it cost to dig a well? $800. Ali, I chided him, in all the vastness of the Asian Development Bank, there's got to be $800 to dig a well.... "You are twisting my arm, Hunter..." he teased back. He'd already decided to get the well dug. Now I was not clear just what the highest priority was, tho in any plumbing endeavor of this magnitude there will be a multitude of needs that the money could relieve.

I glanced at David, who nodded. It was real clear that this woman was the kind that brings pens into the office, not someone who takes em home.

Yes, I answered, I have some money. Not a lot, but if she and David would agree on its best use, it would be hers to use however she thought best. And I would try to bring more.

Her eyes lit with a quickly blinked away dampness, as she described the hassles of dealing with donor agencies who only build half a system, who lock her in red-tape, who promise and then delay....

Had I brought cash? She suddenly looked worried. Don't give it to her here....she warned. Ah the travails of a system in which there is no functional banking system - where one can't publicly hand over a check for a photo-op.

No, I replied, but it is here in Kabul. I glanced at David, who nodded, the two of them could get together and allocate it. And I named the sum to ensure that both knew the money was to go for the kids.

Soraya was quickly collating her list of priorities in her head. The kitchen, she decided. Her real priority now was to get her cooks out from the horrible environment in which they had to work. Another half done project....

We headed that way, along side an open sewer, just a low area in which the sewage flowed towards a concrete cap. As we entered the building, the firefighter in me said get outta here - get a self contained breathing apparatus. Not in this country, girl. I followed David into the medieval chamber. Smoke poured from meter wide mud brick stalls - fire pits over which sat enormous cauldrons, bubbling with rice and potatoes. In another, darker room an old man sat chopping onions. I snapped off wreathed photos, the cooks proudly posing, as they coughed and wiped the grime from their faces. High windows vented some of the smoke, but the working conditions were appalling.

We retreated and Soraya sadly nodded. She had to get them out of there, but as we would see, the new facility was, well, only half built.

We walked to the other side of the building to where the small cafeteria sat. Squads of boys lined up in more or less precise rows outside, waiting to be admitted, as the younger ones ate and left. The same cook who had toured us around his choking realm, dished out the three starch groups: rice, potatoes, nan. As we walked beside the rows of hungry youngsters, first one, then more, as soon as they saw us, offered to share their lunch with us. Afghan hospitality from little ones who literally have nothing but the clothes on their backs and the rice before them, yet they offer it to us. It was almost a torment that they sat beneath posters of mounds featuring fruit, or meals of meat and green vegetables, unimaginable wealth to these kids.

But, I reminded myself, this is actually better than how most of Afghanistan eats. Many get only bread. These kids have rice and potatoes as well. Sometimes a bit of meat. And candy, Soraya said. She tries to get each one a bit of candy for special days.

We toured the fancy new kitchen, sited adjacent to the mess hall, instead of on the whole wrong side of the facility - they truck the meals over now in wheel barrows. But the new kitchen stands empty, a great gash in the floor where the plumbing is supposed to go. Ventilation fans await the smoke, but only dust swirled as we walked about the nicely tiled room. The Danes, or someone had gotten it this far, but, well. Perhaps our money....?

An obese engineer described how the plumbing to be would neatly whisk the water into a "well." David asked about whether the water from the kitchen should better go to a grey water system so that it could be used for irrigation. A well, the engineer insisted, adjusting the ill-fitting tent of a suit he wore. The water had to be poured into a well. It was greasy, and would smell if used on plants. And the flies....

No I insisted, you treat it, use a sand filter, or use an eco-machine, a constructed wetlands....

His porcine face was insolent. Women obviously know nothing of such important matters. My eyes narrowed, and I squared on him. It might interest him to know that I was a professor of sustainability for engineers at the University of Colorado, and if he insisted I would return with such engineers as Dr Bernard Amadei of Engineers Without Borders and we would design such a system. David murmured "calm down" noises. He's seen fire in my eyes....

The engineer's eyes shifted, and a look of uncertainty crept in. I turned to Soraya and told her I would show her pictures. That water was precious and should not be wasted, that the water from here could make her grounds green., and for that matter the sewage from the facility could run a biogas plant that would fuel gas stoves - no more wood for cooking....

As we walked towards Soraya's office for tea, David reminded me that doing it right would take time. They needed to get those guys out of the old kitchen as soon as possible. He's right. I nodded. It would be, when? December before I can be back. How long would it take to raise the money for such an effort, to get John Todd here, to get a biogas engineer - someone with enough imagination to believe that something different could really work.

Just try to plumb it so that you can do it right in the future, I pleaded. Davic nodded. Meanwhile the engineer showed us the "well" into which the drain water would go. A pipe exuded a small pile of shit into what was obviously an way over-full "septic system".

Yeah, I grunted. You go right ahead and run it into here. You'll have an open sewer just like out back at the other kitchen.

But I will climb onto an airplane in two days and fly away. to the land where showers flood hot water down functional drains, toilets mindlessly flush our shit away, and building codes, and OSHA and health departments keep workers from dying of smoke inhalation, and....

This woman needs help right now and however she uses the money it will be better than what exists today.

But just as she insists that the children get music and books and drama and English and computers so that they can know of things beyond the dust of Kabul, I would at least show her what is possible. I ran to the gate. "Daud-jan," I called, "my computer?" He dashed to fetch my briefcase. This the guards searched, before resuming their story telling with Daud. He grinned at my flashing eyes and respnnded with the Afghan equivalent of, "You go girl."

So we sat in Soraya's simple office and I showed her pictures of eco-machines, solar panels, the range of ways to begin meeting her challenges. If you want to talk about a high leverage way to show hundreds of young people that another way is possible....

Along those lines, Soraya's pride and joy is the new computer center. It sits beside the bicycle repair shop, where a now-unpaid teacher instructs his young charges in a skill that can earn them a living, from his tidy workshop in a shipping container.

The computer center is brand new, just completed, the result of the largess of the Islamic Aid Society of the UK. And it is beautiful. Two stories, classrooms, conference rooms, computer labs with dozens of brand new IBM machines.

All donated, and all without connectivity. I will get you connectivity, I promised. Bart Ellers of Simplyr -- the guy who does out computer network. Maybe help from Peter Tavernise of Cisco. This just flat has got to be doable....I shot lots more photos.

Soraya had a meeting to go to. She had been most generous with her time. As we parted, she asked whether we might come to her house in Kabul later. She would like to show us old Kabul. David replied that we would but that she must also come sometime to visit the Fort.

Just as we parted she seemed to catch herself: " would I...? Well no, it would be an imposition...."

Anything, I insisted.

Could I, when we came to visit her, take some eye-glasses to the United States, to put in the post for her mother. She would pay the postage....

Of course, I told her as we kissed cheeks the polite three times. And, no, no postage, I will cover that. My god, of course.....

But I also know that it is not just "of course." Getting stuff back and forth is not trivial. The coffee I bring David is unobtainable here. Those glasses simply would not get to her mother if I don't hand carry em.

Soraya went off about her considerable rat-killing, and David and I toured the dormitories. Most of the massive concrete structure is housing for these abandoned children. They sleep 20 to a room on metal bunks. But the rooms are spotless. In several as we entered, study groups were underway. We encountered one group leaving the recreation room - a bare room with one television. Ping pong tables stood in several wide spots in the halls, but without nets, balls or paddles.

The halls had that tang of urine. I'm not a big fan of bleach, but a bit of it would not come amiss, here. But with the carpet around the bathrooms soaked in overflow water, well. maybe better to fix the infrastructure first. Now the boys have to pad all the way down four flights of stairs out to the pit latrines...I expect that some of the younger ones just don't make it.

I caught a glimpse of the half done solar system that was supposed to be providing hot showers to these kids (some may never have had a shower in their lives). Empty racks and huge water tanks stood dusty on the roof. I shot a picture of that as well. And determined that I would help Ali ensure that the bank makes good on its promise to provide these children with showers.

I remembered Ali's words to me as I left my lunch with him. He said, "Hunter, when you leave here you will have made Afghanistan a better place for at least some of its people."

Inshallah.

Posted By: LHL

[Click Here] to email a comment to Hunter

Date: 7 September 05 (3:20 pm)

Location: Fort at Karte Parwan, Kabul, Afghanistan

Subject: Development as if New Orleans Mattered

Content:

A student of mine from Presidio School of Management recently asked some very good questions that I hope everyone in America is asking right now.

Why did the disaster in New Orleans have to happen? Why is no one linking climate change to why the storm got so violent? Is it the job of the federal government to protect us against such things? And if so, why didn't they? Why were they so slow to respond? Why was the community so defenseless?

Hurricanes are a force of nature. But the increasing numbers of them, and the increasing violence, is human caused. I know, not all scientists agree with the first assertion, but all the climatological models show the second. Kerry Emmanuel’s recent landmark paper in the science magazine Nature, demonstrates that tropical storms are now lasting half again as long and the spinning winds are 50% more powerful than just a few decades ago.

“So far the U.S. has done exactly nothing even to try to slow the progress of climate change: We're emitting far more carbon than we were in 1988, when scientists issued their first prescient global-warming warnings. Even if, at that moment, we'd started doing all that we could to overhaul our energy economy, we'd probably still be stuck with the 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in global average temperature that's already driving our current disruptions. Now scientists predict that without truly dramatic change in the very near future, we're likely to see the planet's mercury rise five degrees before this century is out. That is, five times more than we've seen so far.”

Sucker’s Bet for the New Century, by Bill McKibben.

Should the federal government protect us? Going back to the depression and the socialist tendencies in the United States at that time, there was a strong move to federalize the delivery of most human services. Raw, robber baron capitalism had proved itself unresponsive to the people. Part of the legacy of the New Deal, which the ‘neo-conservatives’ have been trying ever since to dismantle, was a tendency to look to Washington for all the answers. This derives from the philosophy that there should be public ownership of resources, institutions and solutions. The neo-cons call it tax and spend and call for unfettered capitalism as the answer. The liberals call it good social policy.

But remember, all that a free market was ever designed to do is allocate scarce resources efficiently in the short term. Markets were never meant to deal with issues of equity, or the next generation—that is the proper role of politics, whether at the local, national or global level.

America has never developed an understanding of what it is that markets are good at, and what they cannot achieve. Market mechanisms are very powerful, but as a country, we are not good at their appropriate use.

The truth is that neither of the current ideologies works. Unfortunately, New Orleans is paying the price now. As we pull together to do all that we can to help in the immediate disaster relief efforts, it is important that we begin to think more systemically so that we can learn the lessons that this crisis is thrusting upon us now, so that others will not have to later. If we think this through, we can help New Orleans and the Gulf Coast rebuild in ways that will enable people who live in hurricane paths to be able to weather them in the future, and all of us to live more securely.

What lessons? First let's ask some questions: should we socialize bad planning? Should taxpayers subsidize the ability to build in places that should never have been built on, and from which, if people had borne the full cost personally, they would have chosen to go elsewhere?

One philosophy says that the public treasury should pay to enable us to do what it is that we have decided we want to do, whether it makes ecological or economic sense. The Dutch do this with their dikes, and indeed in an age of climate change, dike building is a profession with a secure future. We let taxpayers subsidize going into space, building in flood plains, urban and wild-land fire interfaces, and developing the best farmland for sprawl. Local farmers can't compete with the big guys in part because of subsided agriculture and transportation, so they sell out. Today the average molecule of food travels 1,500 miles before someone eats it. Because we want to be able to get rapidly to where we want to be, we subsidize the building of roads and sprawl and the inner cities decay. Now, no major city can feed itself. So people in New Orleans started to starve.

Our current way of doing business encourages community vulnerability in many ways. The book Brittle Power, which I co-authored back in 1981, details the vulnerability of the domestic energy sector. At that time we pointed out that three quarters of the oil and gas going to the eastern states comes out of Louisiana in just a few pipelines. A few competent people could cut the pipeline in an evening without leaving Louisiana. Free download available at www.natcapsolutions.org. Much of this vulnerability we actually pay for with taxpayer money.

Government subsidies keep gasoline artificially cheap. Globally, annual energy subsidies top $240 billion dollars, most paid to incumbent industries, not to the new renewable energy technologies that could actually make communities more secure. Indeed a marvelous bit of twisted logic just appeared in an Oregon paper that castigated the market for not delivering cheap gasoline. Isn't it part of market theory that if a resource is scarce, its price will rise, substitutes will enter the market, and on we go? But we have subsidized the oil industry, and the whole energy industry, to keep prices artificially low—because we believe that cheap energy is somehow a basic human right. Is it? Don’t energy subsidies simply lead to inefficient use of a very finite resource in support of a car based lifestyle that now kills more people on those subsidized roads every year than died in the twin towers?

That “entitlement to cheap oil,” our President just revealed, is the rationale for the Iraq war, on which we are spending more money each week than we did in Vietnam at its height—over a billion dollars of your and my tax dollars—and killing twice as many young men and women as died in the hurricane, and well over 100,000 Iraqi citizens. Yet since we went to war, oil prices, and oil company profits, have risen to record heights.

This so-called free market administration is subsidizing the fossil fuel industry in many ways, directly with handouts of public money in the recent energy bill, and indirectly, but more importantly, by giving them the protection of not insisting that they pay the full cost of their activities—i.e. carbon emissions. So the climate we are changing has given us hotter waters in the Gulf, and more violent storms that destroy the city we subsidized to remain where it might ought not to have been in the first place. The Louisiana petrochemical industry, long subsidized by such measures as Army Corp dredging of channels, has now released a toxic soup into the city and surrounding waters.

Those with cars got out. Those left behind—the ones disenfranchised by our car dependent society because we have not chosen to put public money into a good mass transit system—are the least able to bear the costs, or to understand why they have been abandoned. Many of these are people trained since the New Deal to expect that the Federal government will take care of them, and who have, thus, not taken it upon themselves to provide alternatives.

But this Federal government is busy elsewhere, and many of the National Guardsmen, and most of Louisiana's high water vehicles, were in the other Gulf. FEMA, which had said months ago that the levees needed fixing, was busy being dismantled in favor of Homeland Security. Can someone remind me again just what it is we are trying to keep secure? So we now have lost to Katrina even more people than died in the twin towers, with more to die in the aftermath of heat and disease and heartbreak. We have lost vastly more property, because chasing terrorists is more important than providing secure cities so that people can live in the homeland.

What are the answers? Obviously, given the tangled web of issues, systems thinking must be the foundation of any long-range solution. If we try to navigate these rats' nests one at a time, we will get lost.

Perhaps the biggest part of any ultimate answer is the creation of far greater community capacity to deal with our own problems. We need a vigorous national debate over the role of markets, the role of the government, the role of civil society. We need more than knee-jerk reactions to threats like al Qaida and the Patriot Act. We need real leadership, not sloganeering.

Real leadership exists. At this point there is more of it in some cities than at the national and international level. There is a lot of good leadership in NGOs, and when all is said and done in New Orleans, it will turn out to be community groups, the Red Cross, Engineers Without Borders and other such ‘voluntary’ organizations that will have brought the real long-term relief.

In a world that is globalizing and spinning out of control in so many ways, the only sensible answer is to enable communities to be able to provide their own basic human needs. The solution is to use local organizations and business along with the best sustainable practices to provide energy, water, sanitation, housing, transportation, health care and food. We have the technologies to meet basic human needs in ways that do not cause climate change, do not deplete the environment and that are not vulnerable. For example, a micro-wind turbine ensuring basic power supply to the home instead of relying on a crumbling energy grid, or converting old cooking oil to bio-diesel that can provide essential community transport in the face of rising fuel prices. There exists a wealth of sustainable ways to strengthen local businesses and community.

The Gulf Coast needs all the help that all of us can give to them right now. As we start to rebuild, let's help everyone to ask these systemic questions, to use world best practice in more sustainable ways to meet human needs locally, and implement these solutions in ways that leverage the re-creation of a viable local business community and human community.

It’s not that different from the reconstruction work that I am currently doing in Afghanistan. And it is way past time we began.

Posted By: LHL

Recommended Reading:
Engineers Without Borders web site
 

[Click Here] to email a comment to Hunter

Date: 6 September 05 (11:10 pm)

Location: Fort at Karte Parwan, Kabul, Afghanistan

Subject: Making the rounds to the Ministers

Content:

Howdy again from Kabul.

Still here.

Yesterday passed without the warned of event that would "get the attention of the world." We are amused by articles that just appeared in a Japanese Newspaper saying: "Afghanistan: It is not a suitable destination for a summer vacation." In fairness, a couple of Japanese teachers were found murdered in the South. Tho it is likely that they were actually killed in Pakistan and their bodies dumped over the border. When people ask me about this, I remind them that the last time I returned from Afghanistan to Washington D.C., the headlines were about how someone was grabbing cab drivers, hauling them out of their taxis and killing them. One can get dead anywhere.

Other papers trumpet: In the run-up to elections in Afghanistan on Sept 18, there is an increased danger of terrorist acts and kidnappings. As a result U.N. officials as well as staff members of nongovernmental organizations are leaving temporarily.

In truth, life here goes on as normal. Traffic is just as thick, the air as foul, the days as sticky hot, with no promise of rain. Dust lies a half inch thick everywhere, hangs in the air, coats everything, from trees, to walls that I brush against (yeah, that is why khaki is the preferred color), to the little kitten that has adopted us, if he sleeps too long.

Some ex-pats are taking their R&R leave now, but most are staying. I will. What an historic moment to be here. 'Sides, I've got work to do.

Been making the rounds of the Ministers (may get to talk to Karzai in the next week as well). The opportunities are so huge, and the time short. Not surprisingly, the powers that be are realizing that they must get reconstruction out to the provinces (even Kabul still lacks sewers, or power except at night, and that is a big improvement over when I was here in December). So there is a new sense of "let's get it done" that I like very much. Tho it has led to an interesting power struggle between the various ministries as Karzai pushes his ministers to make something happen, and shuffles portfolios around to the ones he trusts. It has made a most amusing mess - the Ministry of Mines is now in charge of olive oil and industrial parks, and the Economic Advisor to Karzai is putting industrial strategy together. The Minister of Commerce just found out that he is being bypassed and is well and truly annoyed.

But hey, if they can actually get it done, I don't care if the bureaucratic boxes look pretty.

Bureaucrats the world over suck. I was in a meeting with a US AID officer in which the guy kept trying to interrupt my offer of the entire engineering curriculum from the University of Colorado to the University of Kabul for free, to say that they had to study how best to do such things. As we walked out he said to a very frustrated cowgirl, "The trouble with you academics is that you talk too fast."

I explained to him that I have only recently become an academic, that I spend most of my time consulting for some of the world's biggest corporations. He shrugged indifferently. I about said, "The trouble with you bureaucrats is that you think too slow." But I didn't. He has the money.

I despair, tho, whether he will spend it in time or wisely. I've been to the University. They don't need studies. They need electricity, chairs, computers, blackboards, books, teachers beyond those with an undergraduate degree . . . . They need this damn curriculum. And to have it translated into Dari.

Right now the massive promise of tax money from donor nations (there's been lots of talk, but very little money has actually gotten into this country, or if it has, it is paying for consultants from Bearing Point, KPMG and other western "advisors") can be be allocated effectively and in ways that can produce sustainable development, or squandered. If left to this guy it'll be the latter.

But I will dine tomorrow night with a young woman who is equally frustrated. The plan is to get a group of people who have been working on these issues together and see whether we can put together a plan to implement our Green Afghanistan program.

Meanwhile I am spending my days with the guys from On The Frontier (OTF) Group, who are doing the real and hard work of writing business plans to get investment into the economic sectors that can ramp up quickly and get foreign exchange into the country. Our job is to get them information on how to get Afghan industries certified as organic or fair trade, in such sectors as fruit and nuts, carpets, marble mining. The OTF guys are my example of how money spent on ex-pat consultants should be used. They come into a country, create with local business people, government officials and civil society members, a competitiveness council, which, when they move on in a couple of years, can go on helping local businesses gain the skills and tools to compete on a global basis. They get their hands dirty, they hire and train locals, and their approach to development results in real companies doing real business, solving real problems. It is a good outfit.

And fun to work with. They have been most generous to me, setting up meeting with the Ministries they know, providing me with an office, a car and a driver. And connectivity!!!! And when the power is off at the Fort (which means there is no water), it is great to be able to come on over to the OTF house and get a shower and a good meal. They also have the best cook in Kabul.

Posted By: LHL

Recommended Reading: OTF Group web site
      Green Afghanistan Proposal by Hunter Lovins

[Click Here] to email a comment to Hunter and

Comments:

From: Katie Grotegut
Please address New Orleanstan for us, or refer us to a source of on going info if you please. The biggest opportunity to topple the corruption in Washington and address a neglected environmental agenda is NOW.
Wish you were here,
Katie G.

Katie: See above, I was working on this as you wrote, hope to get it published as an Op Ed, thus the delay. . . LHL

Date: 6 September 05 (11:50 am)

Location: Fort at Karte Parwan, Kabul, Afghanistan

Subject: Kite Fighting and Shakespeare

Content:

It is Friday - the Sabbath - and the air is clean. Without all the traffic, or the commercial diesel generators, one can actually see blue sky.

Everywhere the sky shimmers with kites. We are spending this fine morning kite fighting. All across the mud walled district of Karte Parwan, children, and kids like us made roofs bristle. My Afghan brother, Qais, is a boss kite-fighter, and we cut many many kites' strings. And our fingers, as our string sliced us in the intensity of battles. The art is to dip your kite beneath the string of another, then soar, cutting the neighbor's nylon. Qais told once of trying to cut a helicopter with his kite, but somehow the snagged string and savaged his hands so badly that he spent days in the hospital. He had been pretty serious at the time - and as with many fighting kites, the string was embedded with ground glass.

I have brought him fancy gloves, thin, but tough, so that he can keep fighting and his fingers. He disdained them, saying that they would be wonderful for snowball fights, but that in them he could not feel an attacker's string. But after viewing a deep slice to the forefinger of one, he laughed and allowed as how perhaps he would learn to feel better. And now against the hill to the south a kite is cartwheeling its surrender to earth, its string cut by Qais' as I sit here in the shade and write.

Last night we partook a magical moment. An actress friend of David's from Paris, and a man who is currently living in the Fort have been working with a group of young Afghans, men and women together, to put on Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost - in Dari. Opening night, two nights ago, was a mob scene, the huge crowd of Afghans roaring with laughter, clapping along with the Afghan music, and wildly entering into the spirit of the tale. The young actors, some of whom are taking an almost unimaginable risk for the sake of art - one's husband has ordered her to leave her house because the neighbors say she must be a prostitute for coming home after eight at night - were utterly intoxicated on the experience alone - a giddy thing in a country where alcohol is illegal.

Last night, tho, had all the makings of a disaster. It was a half hour past time for the "curtain" to go up - the play is being given open air in an elegant large garden - a wonderful set with trees to hide in, stairways to race up and down, and flowers to pick to lament over one's heart's desire . . . - and no one occupied the plastic hairs that only one night before had been overflowing an hour before show time. It was Stephen's (the co-director's) birthday and my heart sank for him, and for the troupe. It is hard to play to a dead audience, and worse to a non-existent one. I've done it - it's no fun.

Then from the shadows of the apple tree came my Afghan family. Qais is the assistant to the directors. Then meekly, beneath billowy turquoise burqas, came a small group of Afghan women - the family of one of the actors - her father had not come - he would not approve. A couple of policemen swaggered in (unnerving the actors who dodged behind the pomegranate trees as they waited to be called, but who then dissolved in amazed giggles as the cops uncertainly took their seats. The British cultural attache arrived. TV crews straggled in and unlimbered tripods and jockeyed for sight-lines. Children raced across the "stage."

As the elegantly costumed King strode on, the "house" were respectably filled. The actors grabbed a new gear and performed their hearts out - as if inspired by the "close call." And Stephen basked and cheered so loudly that his co-director scowled over at him. He really didn't seem to give a damn.

I declined the pleadings of my Afghan family to come home with them, explaining that I'd promised to attend Stephen's birthday party - as had Qais. It would be a monstrous imposition to make them put on the feast which they will surely do my first night home, so late and with no notice.

My mother was delighted by the play - it used to be like this, she said. My father, who used to teach physics and math before the Soviets came and ruined their house, and life, was properly reserved, but his eyes were shining. He is a modern man who believes in the potential of Afghanistan, if it can be freed of the mullahs and the war lords. He looked sad that I would not come home with them but lightened when I promised, yes, I will come and stay with you another night . . . Tho the thought of my mother's kabli pilau had me thinking traitorous thoughts about abandoning Stephen to the cast.

Goodbyes properly spoken, the celebration ensued. It turned out that several of the cast had been given an award for their opening night performance the night before. So there was much merriment. And mounds of Afghan food. Presents for Stephen, and speeches. And a birthday cake, complete with candles, tho Qais had to fetch them out at the last minute and borrow matches from someone who smokes. The Afghans didn't care that the cake should have been brought in flaming, and delighted at the ceremony of blowing out the just lit candles.

Plates empty, we repaired to the dressing room for music. As part of the play, the actors sing and play the traditional harmonium and tabla drums. Now they really cut loose. And one by one rose to dance, each one calling up another as he, and yes, she tired and needed replacement. The women danced together, then with a man.

A member of the House where we were, pulled the drapes. This was verging on scandalous. But so utterly harmless. David leaned over to make sure I realized just how remarkable this was. I nodded and added that I sure hoped nothing horrible comes of it. The assertion that one of these women has been dishonored could well lead to her death

We later drove each actor home, and a separate car took the women. The young men partied on in the car, occasionally begging my forgiveness, but also comfortable with me being that strange third sex that western women are here. They had obviously enjoyed experiencing being at once western and yet still as exotic as Afghanistan is. A modern cast at a cast party, and yet also Afghan change agents as surely as were the women and young men who ended the Victorian terror in the west. Innocent and magnificent. I am not even sure that the significance of what they are doing has occurred to them. They are just doing it and enjoying it, experimenting, believing that they are well within normal bounds, but then at times, glimpsing that perhaps just by having fun, they are doing something revolutionary.

It was a magical and perhaps historic moment. Like the kites that now color the sky, a sign of hope in this so long saddened land.

Posted By: LHL

Recommended Reading:

Chicago Tribune  "Bard back in Kabul in true labor of love" By Kim Barker -- Published September 4, 2005
ABC News / Christian Science Monitor "'Love's Labour' not a lost cause in Kabul: A theater troupe finds Shakespeare surprisingly relevant to modern-day Afghanistan." By Scott Baldauf
Playbill News  "Shakespeare Plays a Part in Return of Afghanistan's Cultural Life" By Morgan Allen 06 Sep 2005

[Click Here] to email a comment to Hunter

Date: 2 September 05 (3:20 pm)

Location: Fort at Karte Parwan, Kabul, Afghanistan

Subject: Fereingi Female at the Fort

Content:

On the south roof of the fort five little Afghans in their miniature shalwah kamises are chucking rocks into the fountain in the courtyard below of the Fort. A stone just bounced off the marble sheets that caps the rim.

The kids scamper like squirrels across the mud roofs as I step towards the door, then merrily regroup and reload. I have already told them "bas" - enough. To no good effect. The situation is fixing to become a fight. They can't stand down to an adult authority without losing face. And a Fereingi at that - a foreigner - no, Star Trek didn't make that word up. And a female.

I really do not want to waken David, who is napping in the heat. Nor do I want these little rascals to bust any of the marble he is so proud of in his lovely fountain - "the best in Kabul."

I slip into shoes. One does not wear shoes inside on the fortune in antique Persian carpets that soften the floors.

But if I open the door, the confrontation will be on. Then I will have to clamber onto the roof and give chase. Another rock clatters off the concrete around the fountain. Least their aim leaves something to be desired.

"Khoubnist," I call back - "it is not good." The utter inadequacy of my Dari, studied from tapes (of Farsi - modern Persian - where Dari is the older root language - but I can't find Dari tapes....) en route to and from my office in the States, and now voraciously consumed mostly from Qais, Zia, and my other friends here, is frustrating.

They wave, and I wave back. They chatter at me, the gist, I gather is that they can throw anything that they want.

Acknowledging that they know they are being bad, they disappear behind a mud abutment. So I do likewise from the window. De-escalation is the only way that this won't end badly. They're only being kids - Afghans love mischief, and laughter. But they are Afghans. They will not stand down from a fight, and I'd be a fool to take it to 'em.

One more splash. Yes, that was predictable. Wait.....

The silence grows.

Then peals of laughter and they race across the roofs to find other amusement.

Sometimes one has to fight. as I watched the Towers burn that awful September day, one of my first thoughts was, "Well, now maybe at least, we will go root the Taleban out of Afghanistan." And doing that was the right thing to do.

But perhaps we can learn from the Afghans. There are fights we should not pick. I'm not a fan of backing down when it's brought to us, but Afghanistan is very different from Iraq. Here we are wanted, here people are grateful. There we are the aggressor. Escalation will only end badly. Well, it's already bad. We can't run Iraq. Our interventions there have lead to a "Constitution" that will enshrine utterly unconstitutional values. We're paying more now per week for that mess than we did at the height of Vietnam. And as Bush just admitted, it's all over protecting access to "our" oil.

Others don't see it quite that the Mideast oil is destined to drive inefficient American autos. And increasing U.S. fleet vehicle mileage another 4 MPG would displace the need to import any oil from the Gulf.

Across the street the local mullah cranks up his amplified invitation to anti-American agitation. Quis occasionally, disgustedly, translates some of his rants. Pretty incendiary. I love the somber singing of the muezzins, but this ol' boy could sure put a cork in it. He's annoyed that the Taleban are gone and implores their resurgence. The neighbors dismiss his politics, but admire his Islamic scholarship - an ability to differentiate few Americans could display. The Afghans in the Fort then grin at this American and dish out a lesson in democracy: his right to be so vocal; all that is why Afghans are now fighting side by side with the Americans.

And indeed, last night at the play, a young man wearing a special forces jacket, seeing my blond hair peaking out from beneath my head scarf, came over, took my hand and asked, "Amricoi?"

"Balle," I answered. He regaled me with how grateful he is to the American's for coming back, for helping to free his country, for the elections, for the freedom to put on a play, for giving Afghans the chance again to laugh. There were tears in his eyes.

And in mine. I never cease to be touched by the gallantry, and the immediacy of these people. Life to them is so very real. And relationships.

I thought to myself, as he pressed his hand to his heart and repeated "tashekor" - thank you - George Bush would love this guy. Then I remembered another young Afghan who observed that everyone thought Laura Bush was so brave to come here, but that all she did was to cause American money to be put into an American University. What is wrong with Kabul University? It so desperately needs help.  One of the reasons I am here is to help Dr. Bernard Amadei (of the University of Colorado Engineering for Developing Countries Program and Engineers Without Borders) convey an offer by CU to provide tapes of engineering classes and distance learning program free. The CU Engineering Department is offering to become a sister program with the University of Kabul. I told the young engineer this. He started in on how I was the truly brave one.

I laughingly disabused him of that line. Not me, I'm here because I love it. Qais put his arm around me and proudly announced that I was his sister. And we both laughed in the delight that it is true.

Posted By: LHL

Recommended Reading:
Engineering for Developing Countries web site
The Engineering for Developing Countries (EDC) program is a new educational, research, and outreach program that fits under the Earth Systems Engineering (ESE) initiative in the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

[Click Here] to email a comment to Hunter

Date: 29 August 2005 (6:14 am)

Location: Flight to Kabul from Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Subject: Wheels up out of Dubai bound for Kabul

Content:

06:14 and we're wheels up out of Dubai bound for Kabul.

The glitter and mosques of the Las Vegas of the Middle East slide beneath us as the venerable 727 floats its way aloft. I wonder in passing whether this is the same bird that was backfiring as we landed last time in Istanbul (and no, backfiring is not within the design tolerances of 727's. . .but they do it . . . guess we will find out on landing.)

As we turn north, the dusty dawn now on my right, I soak in the delight of hearing Dari spoken around me, picking out a familiar word here and there. I've been listening to the Farsi tapes Stephen got me in the car driving hither and yon, and can catch some of it. But mostly it is the soft lilt of the language that delights me this morning.

Why do I so love these people? At once kind, and fierce, gentle folk who have broken the teeth of empires going back to Alexander, gallant and enduring.

What earthly good can I do this trip? Three weeks that could be spent giving more speeches, more meetings, more consultancies back home . . .

What earthly good do those do, either?

Some times the only way I can keep going down the road is to just trust that it's all doing some good. I am very humbled and very proud when someone comes up and tells me that a speech I gave 30 years ago launched their career in renewable energy. Or in community service.

Yet the news keeps getting worse. Are we kidding ourselves that turning this juggernaut around is even possible? At the hotel this morning in Dubai, the solicitous desk clerk agreed that, yes it was hot. Even at 4 am, it was sweltering. This summer has been very bad, he observed. Worse than he has ever known. He fears for his country's ability to get enough water if this keeps up.

I didn't mention that the black wealth beneath its sands is in part to blame. And that if the peak oil theory is right, the looming exhaustion of the underpinnings of Dubai's opulence will likely follow.

Met, before leaving San Francisco, with Elliot Hoffman, Gail Horvath, Dan and Meredith Beam and others who are creating The New Voice of Business, a progressive but non-partisan, independent group of business people who want answers to how to build a vibrant, sustainable economy. As we sat in the lovely sun by San Francisco Bay, in the lovingly tended gardens of Cross Roads Cafe - the work of the rehabilitating parolees at Delancy Street - Elliot read a piece from the New York Times about how Bolton, now America's representative to the United Nations, was objecting to language proposed for the upcoming summit of the world's nations saying that the gathered leaders acknowledged the need to respect nature, stating that it could harm American businesses.

The U.S. is apparently now ready to scuttle the talks over the issue. The World Wildlife Fund was protesting, and all the attention was being shifted from the substance of the proposed agreement on how to achieve development, and the need to limit carbon emissions.

After listening to the hand wringing about the table, I suggested that this was exactly why we were here. That there needs to be a legitimate voice of businesses that can stand up and say why it is in the interest of American businesses to use resources more efficiently--because it is the cheapest way to meet our needs, because doing it will enhance and increase jobs, reduce national vulnerability and drive innovation. We need, I suggested, to stop reacting in predictable knee-jerk environmentalist ways to such agenda-setting tactics of the rad-cons, and become the leaders in setting the agenda that the American people are hungry for. Elliot and Gail, founders of Just Deserts, and Meredith and Dan, principles in a major marketing and communications firm, and the other assembled business people (investors, industrialists and small business people) might just be able to do it. It is sure past time that someone did.

It reminds me that the brass ring of developing an alternative to the way development has been done in the past, and is why I'm springing from bed only a few hours after falling into it. And now winging north.

I know also that I am following my heart home, in part. As the steward begins to distribute the kebabs and nan, the wonderful bread of Afghanistan, served with gallons of chai sabs, the green tea of that desert land, I smile, We have just crossed out of Iranian airspace and entered Afghanistan.

Posted By: LHL

Recommended Reading: An Unexpected Light: Travels In Afghanistan
by Jason Elliot (If you can't buy this book locally, purchase it through our link to Amazon and NCS makes a percentage!)

[Click Here] to email a comment to Hunter

Date: 21 August 2005 (4 ish am)

Location: Flight to San Francisco

Subject: Cali to Kabul, on my way . . .

Content:

It's 0:dark thirty, passing through 30 thousand feet and I'm on an airplane again. The 3am alarm sure came early, especially as the last time I'd looked at the clock it was midnight. Packing to be away a month always takes longer than I think it will. This trip will take me not only to the usual haunts of San Francisco to teach at Presidio, and a couple speeches along the way, but also to Afghanistan. So despite the early hour, my heart sings.

I wrote to my family there, the people who have adopted me, to tell them that I was coming home and to ask what I could bring them. My brother Qais wrote back:

My dear sister

I read your letter to our parents, they appreciated it a lot and said "You can find anything in the world but not your child, you specially gifted kid." Our parents said "The fathers and mothers always looking when they could see their children. It is their wish to see them after a long time." The young ones said "she could be everything to come back. Nothing could be special for me, Just you, only you!!!"

I got that e-mail a little more than a week ago, while sitting in a little bed and breakfast in the small town of Oregon Illinois where I'd overnighted to keynote the Illinois Renewable Energy Fair. Various assembled energy policy experts and solar vendors looked at me quizzically as my eyes filled and my smile grew irrepressible. So I read it to them.

"Afghanistan?!" they sputtered. "Why would you go there?!" It is a question I get rather frequently.

"How many of you think that we should have troops in Iraq?" I asked. No one.

"How many of you think we should have troops in Afghanistan?" A few faces grew puzzled.

"You're right," I replied. "It's different. In Afghanistan we actually have a chance to give gallant people a chance. These people fought our surrogate war against the Soviets, and we deserve to give them a shot at peace, and a stable country. It was the right thing to do to take the Taleban out. Just as we should now be responding to the genocide in Darfur."

"But none of the fighting will make any sense unless we can also deliver real development, aid that enables people to begin to take care of themselves. The technologies that we'll be talking about here at this fair are exactly what are needed in the rest of the world. Even more than they are needed here. Left to the beltway bandits and consultants, all of the sacrifices that our young men and women have made to give the Afghans a chance will go for naught. It's people like you and me who should be going there. We need to give people in the rest of the world the ability to meet their needs for energy, sanitation, water, food, transport, housing health care--all the basic human needs--sustainably. And we need to implement these best practices in sustainable technologies in ways that create real, viable locally controlled businesses. Otherwise you and I and every American taxpayer will go on pouring money and lives down a rat hole. If we ignore them, the $4 billion people who live in the developing world, and the half of the world's population that live on less than $2 a day, will become our implacable enemies. And in Afghanistan, the United States made a promise to these people and they believed us. I'm going to do what I can to see that we don't let them down."

I told them of the meeting I had over a year ago at a meeting in California of the Society of Afghan Engineers. I was invited to speak of what is possible using sustainable technologies, how that is what the Afghan people can choose, if they wish. As I left the room, an old blind Imman, who had spoken from the Koran to open the meeting held out his hands to me. I took his hands. He spoke. Through a translator, he said that he felt in my heart the love that I have for the people of Afghanistan, that what I spoke of was so needed by his people. And he looked at me, a face sightless, but in some ways seeing in ways that I cannot, and pleaded, "Please do not forget us. Do not forget the people of Afghanistan."

I told him, "I will remember you. I will remember the people of Afghanistan." And it was true. Every day. Wherever I am, whatever I do.

It's hard to know, each moment, what I can do to help. Yet it is in my heart. Each day. Inshallah, I will be guided to be able to do what may make a difference.

"That is why I am going to Afghanistan," I told the breakfast table. "And because nowhere else is there such a chance to make a difference on a global basis." We have the chance to demonstrate a new way of doing development.

That's also why I work with Engineers Without Borders (EWB). I had breakfast yesterday with Bernard Amadei, the saint who founded EWB - USA. He has just gotten the University of Colorado to give to the University of Kabul the library of engineering courses that CU has on DVD's. When I am in Kabul I will be meeting with the professors and administrators at the University to help with the arrangements. If necessary, I will purchase the video monitors and DVD players to enable these courses to begin to train Afghan engineers.

Bernard also told me that EWB just has two teams back from working in the Tsunami ravaged areas, one in India visited over 50 villages rendering aid. Another in Sri Lanka worked in over 35 villages. Check out www.ewb-usa.org for what this organization is doing to apply on the ground the ideas of sustainability and Natural Capitalism. Over breakfast, Bernard and I talked about ways that we can work even more closely, teaching classes together, developing curriculum on this approach and actually get these ideas put into practice everywhere around the world that we can.

In Kabul, I will also be working with On The Frontier Group in their efforts to make Afghan industries globally competitive. And meeting with agronomists, bringing copies of Dan Dagget's new book, Gardeners of Eden (buy it from our website: www.natcapsolutions.org/resources.htm, if you can't buy it locally) that describe how people who have learned to be native to a place are working in harmony with nature to bioremediate even the most poisoned of landscapes, using cattle and other livestock, but managing in the way that brittle ecosystems and grazing animals co-evolved. Dan is a gifted writer with a message of real hope, and the pictures tell even more - a message that will be invaluable to a land where there are still native peoples, and nomadic herders.

I will also be carrying the donations given by you, our supporters, to put solar panels on the roof of an 800-boy orphanage. David Elliot and I will go to the orphanage to begin that process. It's not a lot, in the grand scheme of aid, it is a drop in the bucket. But these are real dollars going directly to a real need - no middlemen. Just a Colorado cowgirl going back on the road to carry the cash to Kabul.

I wrote back to my brother Quis to thank him and to tell him that I was finally coming:

"I can not tell you how much I look forward to finishing my engagements here and turning east into the dawn. And I will look for your face at the airport. And know again the joy of being home."

Posted By: LHL

Recommended Reading: Engineers Without Borders and On The Frontier Group web sites and Gardners of Eden: Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature by Dan Dagget
(If you can't buy this book locally, purchase it through our link to Amazon and NCS makes a percentage!)

[Click Here] to email a comment to Hunter

Date: 17 July 2005 (4:30 pm)

Location: Longmont, CO

Subject: Jet Set Cowboy...

Content:

Sweat's digging ditches down the dust between my shoulder blades. The only shade in sight's what's under my cowboy hat.  No, the hat's not just a trademark - I really live beneath the thing, and today am real glad of it.  Stephen Self, our Operations Director is only wearing a ball cap.  And that's scant shade out here in the Pawnee Grasslands.

I'm atop my good buckskin mare, moving cattle.  Three of us from Natural Capitalism are helping a neighbor who needed to push cows from a pasture that's been grazed enough out to another with good grass.  Best antidote I know for too many months riding airplanes, too many hotel rooms and weary nights on the road.  It's what I'd do for a living were my calling not ceaselessly roaming the planet implementing sustainability.

An Australian friend once asked, as we were on the three-week, five-gig-a-day run through Australia, "Why is it that sustainability advocates live such unsustainable lives?"

He's got a point.  Dana Meadows used to ration her trips by her carbon budget.  Guess I blew that excuse when our sister company, Natural Capitalism, Inc., joined Chicago Climate Exchange, Richard Sandor's marvelous invention to enable those of us who use fossil fuels in things like flying or driving around, to buy someone else's extra decrease in using carbon fuels, in say, their industrial applications.  And it's not just shuffling the cards.  We all pledge to reduce our emissions one percent per year.  So this year at Natural Capitalism we have switched our offices to 100% wind power, put in insulated windows, worked to car-pool as much as we can and undertook a variety of other good housekeeping measures.  But we also bought a ton of carbon reduction to cover all the driving and flying that this job takes.

I still go down the road a lot.  Between early March and mid June, I reckon I was home maybe three weeks worth of days, and few of them all in a row.  My friend Jeff Nourse, a cowboy singer/songwriter wrote a song about that kind of life that I'm mighty fond of, called Jet Set Cowboy.

It goes something like:

He tears into the airport down in Albuquerque
There's horsehair on his shirt, and his brand new boots are dirty
Runs up to the counter and pulls out a wrinkled ticket
Ticket clerk just looks at him and says, "I guess we'll take it"

Airplane's sitting on the ground, nosed up to the gate
A smiling flight attendant says, "Cowboy, you're nearly late"
He hurries down the ramp and caves his head into the door,
curses in a whisper as his hat falls to the floor.

Finally gets strapped in his seat, last row budget class.
His mind begins to wander... as to himself he asks:

Why he's a riding these ol' rodeos?
the only life he knows,
cost him his family somewhere back down the road,
might be the singing of the anthem,
or the whistles from the crowd,
does something to his soul,
guess it makes him proud

I'll keep a tearing through these airports,
and a climbing on these broncs,
looking for that perfect ride,
living like I want
I've got no one a-binding me down to an eight to five,
I'm a jet set cowboy
trying to survive....

Pretty song, when Jeff sings it.  I told him he must have written it about me, and he raised his whiskey glass and grinned.  And that's not far wrong.  This life's a lot like going down the road to rodeos.  I used to do that, riding the Colorado professional circuit, back when I had a really fast horse. And yes, the buckle I wear is a real one, too.

But none of that will help when it comes to moving these cows and their calves.  They'd far rather stay brushed up here at their leisure.  Happily my good buckskin mare is keen to go.  She lives to cut a cow, and days like today are her idea of happy.

So we rouse 'em, and start 'em drifting, spin out to catch the herd quitters, popping through the cactus and puckerbushes.

Mark, whom we're helping, jumps up a rattler.  All I see is a badger.  We give 'em all a wide berth, and keep the cattle drifting.  The art is moving 'em so's not to run the weight off 'em, but deliberately enough to keep the herd in line.

And once they are moving it goes pretty quick. They know the drill, and likely have gotten tired of munching short grass. They line out and head for the hole. There's water there, and feed.

And there's cold ones at the trailers for us. And shade. We sit on the trailer fenders and tell tales. Other drives, other ranges. Tomorrow I catch an east bound plane for Alberta, Canada. The folk there who helping communities implement sustainability thought perhaps I would relate better to townspeople who value the cowboy culture of the province than perhaps some other consultants.

Guess I'll do.

Posted By: LHL

Recommended Reading: http://www.rightlivelihood.org/

[Click Here] to email a comment to Hunter

Date: 13 June 2005 (5:30am)

Location: Wilmington, DE

Subject: avoiding a bar fight in Delaware

Content:

The DuPont hotel is definitely more elegant than the St Virgil religious retreat.

After twelve hours of flying from Austria thru Frankfurt to Philadelphia, then Wilmington, it was so nice to settle in to the dark wood bar, sip some Talisker, and nibble on lump crab from the Chesapeake. And now to be set up in a king bed with American TV to divert me to sleep. Tho that ought not to be hard. As I write, huge yawns split my face.

But I'm not real sure I want to drink the water - the spendy bottle of Figi water on the mini-bar might be a better answer for my night thirst. The soaring Austrian Alps were a far finer view than the rooftop mechanicals growling now in the growing dark. Outside there is not a living thing to be seen - just walls, roofs and plumbing. And none of the menus here boast over half the entrees being organic, as is common in Austria.

I guess one trades one sort of elegance for another.

This morning I bid farewell to the laureates of the Right Livelihood Award. The conversations centered on how to achieve environmental protection, social justice, participatory democracy, respect for all life on earth with people like Inge Genefke, a leader in the effort to end torture around the world, Nicanor Perlas a leader in the efforts to create a participatory democracy in The Philippines as a way to deal with some of the ruinous effects of corporate globalization , Ari Avnery leader of the Israeli peace movement working for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, Helena Norberg Hodge who works in Ladakh helping to meet basic human needs in ways that use culturally appropriate technologies....almost a hundred of the world's leading experts on how to create a better world.

Tonight I about got into a bar fight with a guy who, as the television in this toney pub reported on the debate to deal with the shameful abuses at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo and the Baghram Air Base in Afghanistan, spat and declared that we should just shoot em all.

I stared at my comfortable glass of Talisker, then turned to ask whether he had ever been in Afghanistan?

"No," he said, "But they're all terrorists. We should nuke em all."

"if you did that," I replied evenly, "You would kill my adopted mother. And my brother Quis, who is working now to bring a Shakespeare festival to Kabul....I have been there and....."

"I was in Vietnam," he broke me off, snatching up his briefcase and abandoning his seat, "And I killed lots of gooks!"

Wanted to tell him he was a son of a bitch, but I held my tongue softly saying to his back, "I am so sorry...."

He hunched as if struck, but marched on disgustedly away.

A man sitting a few stools away regarded me and asked where I was from.

"Colorado, sir," I grinned. He looked out the now empty doorway, and shook his head. "We're making the world a much more dangerous place with attitudes like that, aren't we?"

"Yes, we are," I agreed.

We talked a while - economics mostly. He helps large companies with large bond issues. I told him a bit about my work and travels. it took him a while to integrate how I could care about the environment and social justice, but not be anti-business, describing how his father had been a black union organizer, and how he'd gone into business, feeling that unions were not the way.

We wrestled with how the economy works, then gave it up and watched the end of jeopardy. He'd finished his burger, I my crab, so we bid goodnight and he left for his drive to the suburbs - guess prosperous folk don't live in Wilmington these days. I returned to this room big enough to play a tennis match in, to write to you.

Posted By: LHL

Recommended Reading: http://www.rightlivelihood.org/

[Click Here] to email a comment to Hunter

Date: 9 June 2005 (2:50pm)

Location: Salzburg, Austria

Subject: the Residence of Salzburg

Content:

Old Europe surely knows how to entertain in elegance.

We dined tonight in the Residence of Salzburg. Built from 700 to 1070, it is a massive limestone-block chateau. Home to the Archbishop, when the Holy Roman Empire reigned. Mozart wafted from the balconies as we crossed the crushed limestone courtyard, past ornate fountains of mer-horses frolicking amid cherubim. A marble staircase of chipped wide treads mounted to the reception line to shake the hand of the governor, a fine lady who gave a rousing talk memorializing Ken Sara Wiwa and Munir, the Right Livelihood's murdered laureates, and Mordechai Vanunu, our imprisoned colleague, who annoyed the Israeli authorities for letting the world know that Israel has nuclear bombs.

In a four storey high ballroom we listened to the current Archbishop of Salzburg, the Governor, and other notables, interspersed with very exquisite renditions of Mozart.

In due course the multitude repaired to the drawing room where liveried servants bearing goblets of wine and flagons of beer refreshed us. Chefs carved veal and lamb, and struggled to offer Austrian dishes to the vegetarians among us.

An 8-person band, horn, bass viol, harp, violin, guitar, flute, clarinet, and oboe played stately Tyorlean tunes, that suddenly morph into a Dixieland version with squeeze box, electric digerido, maracas, and African drums. Their lederhosen knickers and blousey derndels rock with the transformation. Stately religious chants liven into heavily drummed jazz, the harp tinkling heroically along.

In the next drawing room a gypsy band entertains those more interested in ethnic music. The Tyrolean jazz players are better, with subtle back beats from the guitar, but I drift back and forth, nibbling on strudel and sipping coffee, at which Austrians excel.

Above, lushly painted battle scenes, depictions of centurions hacking their way thru ancient Jerusalem, and horsemen challenging camels gallop across the ceiling vying with life-sized plaster cherubim and Roman warriors. I sit at a corner table typing up the declaration of the working group on how we can frame a progressive agenda. Various dignitaries drift by and make small talk. An aged Malaysian gentleman naps in a chair vacated by the musicians who are tieing into the beer and schnitzel. Women in evening gowns and bejeweled shawls look frustrated as their escorts seem more interested in jean clad laureates. Some dressed up, but most of us were working up until the busses left. An African gentleman wears purple spangled pajamas. The Indian ladies are in saris, and I of course, have my hat on. It makes the film guys who wheel great gantries through the crowd very happy - lots of eye candy.

But the party is breaking up. We drift into the night, washed by the Residence's great flood lights. As we pass under the 20 meter deep portcullis, an elegant Austrian lady pedals by us waving good night

Now back to my monks' cell to finish the declaration from the working group.

Posted By: LHL

Recommended Reading: Right Livelihood Awards

[Click Here] to email a comment to Hunter

Date: 9 June 2005 (9:45am)

Location: Salzburg, Austria

Subject: unconnected in the Austrian Alps

Content:

Dark is settling over Salzburg. This afternoon, as a storm swept through, and new snow rimmed the rock ramparts of the Austrian Alps the valley glowed with a majesty and vastness. Now the light is softer, quieter. The black timber quilting the soaring limestone cliffs that tower over this place seems to be oozing the growing night.

I'm just in from trying to walk off the frustration of being unable to connect to the Internet. My work is largely done by e-mail, and being unwired is a bit like being strangled. So I write. I've agreed to try to communicate regularly here about my travels, and our work, and this is a good time to start.