magazine - Somerville College - University of Oxford

Somerville Magzine | 19
Mountains
Pottery in the Hindu Kush foothills
THOMAS WIDE
(2003, Classics) Afghanistan was never far from my mind while
I was a student at Somerville. I arrived at
Oxford in 2003, two years after the invasion of
Afghanistan by American and coalition forces, and could
not ignore the stream of parallels between my studies
in Classics and Arabic and the war there. My degree
confronted me with exchange and resistance between
what was traditionally considered ‘East’ and ‘West’:
Greeks and Trojans, Aristotelian and Islamic philosophy,
At night, I would
sleep on the floor
of the office, and
wake at sunrise to
eat a bowl of
bread and cream
with our guard,
Dawoud.
Alexander the Great and Darius. The reports and
debates about Afghanistan seemed prone to the same
stereotypes and confused oppositions as those two
thousand years before. I knew that when I left Oxford I
wanted to go and work there to try to understand better.
In 2007, Somerville generously gave me a Horsman
Travelling Fellowship to fund learning Dari (a dialect
of Persian) and Pashto; I spent a summer in Kilburn
drinking tea with Afghan immigrants running
unsuccessful rug shops and selling mobile phones
on high streets, while talking of the great Kings of
Afghanistan and the poetry of Rumi. I fl ew to Kabul in
August, a trip broken by a night at Dubai’s Terminal
3 – known as the ‘Axis of Evil’, as the only fl ights that
left there headed for Mogadishu, Baghdad, and Kabul
– surrounded by Pashtuns with all their possessions
wrapped up with twine in cotton sheets, and Texan
private contractors with gargantuan biceps and wraparound
Oakley sunglasses.
I spent a year working for Turquoise Mountain, a Non-
Government Organisation, set up by the diplomat and
writer Rory Stewart, based in Kabul. Its aim was to revive
Afghanistan’s traditional crafts, and to regenerate Murad
Khane, a historic area of Kabul’s old city, known for its
rich cultural heritage. I ran two programmes, one based
in a Shi’ite district of Kabul, another in a predominantly
Tajik community in Istalif, a village in the foothills of the
Hindu Kush in Central Afghanistan. Istalif was renowned
for its beautiful turquoise pottery, but had been burnt to
the ground by the Taliban in 1996, and villagers had only
recently returned to try and rebuild their shattered homes.
Our project worked in tandem with the Istalifi potters to
improve the quality of their ceramics, provide material and
teaching resources, and find new markets, both national
and international. We also set up a museum and prototype
eco-lodge, using traditional materials and in the vernacular
style, complete with composting toilets, solar panels, fruit
gardens and bee-hives. It was a place of great hardship,
but also of great beauty. Long days of work in difficult
conditions were matched by weekends of fishing trips
along the river and hikes up into the mountains. At night,
I would sleep on the floor of the office, and wake at sunrise
to eat a bowl of bread and cream with our guard Dawoud.
By chance, our small team of internationals contained
another Somervillian, Anna Morgan, who came to
us on loan from the UK Department for International
Development (DFID) in order to run all our operations.
When in Kabul, we all lived together in a 19th century
fort on the outskirts of the city, which was repaired and
restored as part of the regeneration project. It was a
ramshackle structure, made of thick blocks of mud earth
that provided a perfect home both for us and sicklylooking,
translucent scorpions that held quite a sting.
Looking back on that experience from the uncomfortably
comfortable environs of Harvard (supported by a
generous Margaret Watson Postgraduate Award from
Somerville), I am racked with what I did wrong as much
as what I got right. Much of that was inevitable – the
delicately-balanced power relations of a rural village
could not but be irrevocably changed by a rapid infl ow
of money and by our presence there – but much
was not. I know I made many mistakes – backing
the wrong man, spending money on a lost cause,
misunderstanding the subtle currents that fl owed
between people – and I know that anything that seemed
to be a right decision may well turn out in the long-term
to have been extremely counter-productive.
And yet I know that, in the end, I was working with
communities of several hundred, rather than several
million, and that I would not have had it any other way;
I wanted granular knowledge of how a village worked,
what it wanted, and how we could help it achieve that,
not grand ideas of how we might like a model country to
look. This cannot help but make me extremely sceptical
of the state-building projects of the last eight years: if we
struggled and struggled to understand a village, how can
we ever hope to understand a country?