Snap and Scribble

 

The end of Sally Cooper’s book, A Burqa And A Hard Place, made me sad. Not so much because it was about the sad goodbyes when she left Afghanistan, but more because i’d been enjoying reading it and now it was finished.

I had the pleasure of meeting Sally at Sanjar’s birthday party a month or so ago (see my earlier post on that). She knew Sanjar from her days working in community radio in Kabul. I didn’t meet her when i was there, though, as she left Afghanistan a few months before i arrived.

Sally was the manager of IRIN – a United Nations community radio organisation that i’d never heard of until i read her book. The fact that i could work in community in the same city for eight months and never even know they existed says a lot about the total disconnection between the various foreign “development” organisations operating in Afghanistan. I’d even met Sally’s successor on several occasions, and he knew what my job was, but nobody ever bothered telling me what he did!

Anyway, Sally’s book tells the story of the three years she spent working in radio in Kabul. Reading it brought back lots of memories of places, people, and events from my time there. The main difference was that Sally was working in a very small unit inside the “bubble” of the UN. I think i would have found it difficult to have to live within the claustrophobic embrace of that extraordinarily dodgy organisation. Sally managed to find ways around the rules they tried to subject her to, but it still seems to have been a very restrictive way of life.

Sally’s a typical Australian (yes, another member of the Australian community radio mafia that operates in Afghanistan!) and she doesn’t take kindly to being pushed around by authority. For her own sanity, as much as anything, she ignored a lot of the rules the UN imposed on her – even going as far as wearing a burqa so she wouldn’t be busted! It’s a shame i wasn’t there when she was, as i’m sure we could have had fun breaking rules together.

The one jarring note in Sally’s book is her insistence on constantly referring to Afghanistan as “The Ghan”. That’s not a term that i’d ever heard used to refer to that country. “The Ghan”, as far as i’m concerned, is the train from Adelaide to Alice Springs, named after the Afghan camel drivers. They operated the only transport on that route for more than half a century between the 1860s and completion of the railway line in the 1920s. For the first third of the book, every time i read the phrase “The Ghan”  it threw me – and it was repeated constantly. After a while, though, i got used to it and it didn’t bother me any more. And Sally’s book is entertaining and flows well enough that her constant use of it was only a minor irritation.

She only really hints at the complete and utter uselessness of what she calls “Development Inc” – in other words, the massive global “development” industry, which the UN is a key player in. That’s probably wise if she wants to get another job in the field – as you have to at least pretend to believe in it. But her book does give a small glimpse into the massive waste of money and energy that the multitude of international NGOs represents.

I’m sure this book will be eagerly read by people who have had the dubious pleasure of working in Afghanistan themselves. But it’s a book that will be enjoyed by anyone, whether they’ve been there or not. It’s an excellent book and it deserves to do well.

A Burqa And A Hard Place is only published in Australia at the moment. I bought my copy from Abe Books, but it seems to have disappeared from their catalogue for some reason. If you’re not in Australia and you’d like to buy a copy, you can probably find a bookshop to buy it from in the Pan Macmillan’s online bookshops list.

Tags: Book Review, Travel and Places // 1 Comment »