June 2006

Jemal Mena

The sunlight was fabulous again this evening, so I went out to take pictures of my neighbors. Here is Mohammed Nader again. Now I need to find a local photo-finishing service that will do a good job at hardcopies; I owe him a print. I dearly hope that at some point I can get a […]

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Picnic in Paghman

Today Samiullah brought me and his cousins to Paghman, an area just west of Kabul. It is the favorite Friday-picnic spot for Kabulis, so we shared the mountain site with about ten thousand fellow citizens. As we headed west through Kabul we passed through the Kota-e Sangi commercial district, which is dominated by Hazaras. This

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Construction in Kart-e Sakhi

Karte Sakhi is adjacent to Kabul University. As with Deh Mazang, and most of Kabul, it is a vast (re)construction site. The houses look neoclassical–not in the European sense, but as if ancient Mediterraneans were building their houses with materials available today. I like the new warm color palette, compared to the popular 1970s Kabul-green.

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Sunlight

Here I am in the lovely, garden-like campus of Kabul University. Within the trees is the Faculty of Agriculture, and the field in the foreground will be used as a demonstration/laboratory field once the irrigation system is restored. In the background is Deh Naw (new village), on the south flank of Kuh-e Ali Abad. The

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Reconstruction

The neighbors of our guesthouse are rebuilding the lot-line wall to make it higher. When A4T rented this guesthouse, it was the only inhabitable building on the block. Still, about one third of the lots are just ruins; but construction proceeds apace on both sides of us here. I took this photo in 2003 on

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People

Here are Engineer Dehyar and Sabri, whom I worked with in 2003. At that time one of my tasks was to go through the International Building Code and identify passages for translation from English. The two sections that seemed useful were 1) the approach to exiting design, and 2) post-construction testing of concrete structures (a

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Kabul old and new

I arrived in Kabul on Weds, May 31, two days after the worst rioting in the city in several years. News of the riot began to emerge several hours after I had begun my journey, so it was disconcerting to be in transit, glimpsing news in airports to find out how bad the situation was.

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