February 19, 2006

The book is a personal account of an American woman who has lived and worked among the Afghan refugees and the tribal Pakhtoons in Northwest Pakistan


Benedicte Grima writes about how she was able to set up house for her daughter and herself in a strange new place

Ahmadi Banda is a hamlet on the southern road between Kohat and Banu. There is no reason to stop there unless it is to visit someone. It has absolutely no tourism appeal, no bazar save a few shops with just the scant, bare necessities. Buses often stop in Ahmadi Banda to let passengers pray or enjoy a meal of tea and kabab in the roadside restaurant. I had been introduced to this village through Professor Perishan Khattak who taught at the Pushto Academy, and again through Aminollah Khan Khattak, a prominent lawyer in Kohat. The latter had first driven me here and introduced me to Salar. If any non-local knows of Ahmadi Banda, it is on account of Salar Mohammad Aslam Khan, a former leader in the Red Shirt Movement, a movement led by Abdul Ghaffar Khan against the British. He was 83 when I met him, living with his daughter, granddaughter, and great-grand daughter. He was my introduction to the village and area.

The village had approximately 150 to 200 houses built up from seven original families, or clans, and a few newly settled groups, including mullahs, entertainers, and of course, Afghan refugees. The village was able to boast of a boys’ school up to 10th grade and a girls’ to seventh. It had government-provided electricity, with the usual vagaries of random blackouts. I remained a guest of Salar for two months on my first visit, and decided to see about establishing another long-term residence for myself three years later, this time with my daughter and nanny, while conducting research in the Khattak region. There are no hotels in the village, and no houses for rent as in the villages of Swat, where families vacate their houses in order to rent them out during the summer months. When I had been to see Salar about the possibility of setting up an independent household with my daughter and a live-in nanny, he suggested obtaining government permission to use the girls’ school principal’s house, since she resided in her husband’s house in the village, and the school residence was vacant. It had taken some doing, but I did obtain the necessary permits, and arrived there ready to take up residence in October for the cooler winter months.

All the structures inside the village were made of mud, mud brick and some stone. The alleys were not paved, so the winter rains made for constant mud. The school and its residence sat at some distance from the village centre, north of the road separating the village in half, and across some empty fields. Adjoining my small house and courtyard were the schoolyard, and the watchman’s house. A long discussion with the watchman resulted in that he would clear my house of all the school furniture it housed, and store it in a spare room of his own house. That would leave me with two usable rooms. There was no running water but a public faucet which only produced water at a certain hour in the morning, so he offered to fill my water pots once a day in exchange for Rs400 and meals. My nanny Mina, urged me to accept his terms, claiming that if I didn’t pay him he wouldn’t even allow us near the water. Clearly, she didn’t have any intention of fetching it herself and knew that the chore would fall on her, so she tried to convince me that he could in effect control all the water and restrict us from using it. He lowered his price to Rs200 plus meals. Mina then changed her song and pleaded with him that she would get it herself, that she knew my budget and that we couldn’t pay him more than Rs100. He agreed, and we now had water for the residence.

That was the first item on the checklist. The residence came with some cots and tables, so I only had to bring a small fridge, some carpets and some kerosene lamps and burners for cooking, heating and lighting. As always, I also brought my daughter Lawangina’s swing-bed. The watchman then asked about getting groceries for me since it would be inappropriate for me to go into the bazar, but I had already made arrangements with his wife, whom I became friends with almost immediately. They had a two-year-old daughter and two goats, and my one-year-old Lawangina enjoyed playing in their courtyard. I arranged to pay them Rs200 a month for four services: her older children would run errands for me from the bazar; her husband would bring me wood and dung patties for fuel whenever he bought it for himself (all our cooking was done over a fire in a corner of the courtyard, and since the region was desert, everyone burned dung); she would bring us two breads twice a day when she cooked her own (I provided the flour): and they were storing the school furniture.

The next concern was dairy products. There were only a handful of cows in the village, and few people had chickens. No one, therefore sold fresh milk or eggs. Most people used powdered milk. I was still nursing Lawangina but wanted milk for her cereals. I arranged with one of the shopkeepers to send me a pint of packaged milk each day with his daughter when she came to school, and another friend with a cow sent me a cup of yogurt each day with her daughter in exchange for English lessons. Various people occasionally sent me gifts of eggs throughout my stay.

There was a distinct advantage to shopping without ever appearing in any shop. Many vendors cruise through the alleys of towns and villages calling out their wares, and I learned how to shop the way other women do. We would send a child out to act as a middle person between us and the vendor. The child would bring what we wanted inside the house, where we could scrutinize it and offer a price through the child. Vendors never saw me nor suspected they were dealing with a foreigner. I thus did most of my shopping from inside my or someone else’s courtyard, and found it paid greatly as no vendor ever quoted me any price but the local one.

One big problem was the nightly electric brown-outs. I allotted my evenings after my daughter’s bedtime for translating and reordering each day’s notes, but when the lights went out and I was limited to a single small kerosene lantern, it doubled the efforts.

A far stretch from the concerns of moving into a house back home, but with time all my needs were met and we ran a cheery household, with a lot of little girls from the school to entertain Lawangina each day and to attend her first birthday party.