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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
i mentioned in the previous post that we were going over to an afghan friend and colleague's house this afternoon to fly kites from his roof... here's some shots from just a few hours ago...
Preparing the kite
Launching the kite
Kite-flying intensity
High-flying kite (right) and crescent moon (left)
and, finally, a video clip of some of the action...
there's nothing i like better than watching all the kites soaring in the skies over kabul and the absolute pleasure the kids - and adults! - get from flying them... this afternoon (friday), we're heading over to an afghan colleague's house to fly kites from his roof... we did that last year in november and he managed to take out the kites of three neighbor kids - much to their dismay - before another kid a couple of streets over cut his loose...
Kite-fighting in Kabul during the Eid holiday
then there's this sobering reminder of that "other" reality...
Surveillance airship over Kabul with two kites in upper left
that little number is new in the kabul skies since i was last here... i'm pretty sure i'm not only on live tv while i'm taking my ease on the roof terrace, i'm also confident it's reading my emails...
The plan to deploy an autonomous, free-flying, surveillance airship to Afghanistan is gaining, er, buoyancy. A consortium led by the US Army’s Space & Missile Defense Command is scheduled to be established by October 1 and a contract awarded for the Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) demonstration by the end of December.
coming soon to a neighborhood near you...
final thought: they're really missing a bet by not selling display advertising a la the goodyear blimp...
this story reminds me of when i arrived in kabul in late march (see previous post here)... it was still kite season and, in the afternoon, after school let out, the skies over the city were filled with kites... there's something about a kite that lifts my spirit...
Mahmoud Abu Teior (13) knows it's Abdullah's kite up in the skies, though he has never seen Abdullah. But that kite rises into the skies from just that place on the Egyptian side of the border across from Gaza. And, Mahmoud knows Abdullah's voice because they speak sometimes. They have never met, and likely never will, but they are connected through their kites.
It's that time of the year. The holidays bring scores of children to play together – across the dividing line. And despite the iron wall of separation, they form friendships.
Mahmoud has always known the border as playground. This is where the family home was before it was demolished to make room for the border wall. "I always come here because this is where our house used to be," he says, launching his kite.
Most children still play from 'home', where Block O, Yebna, Block J, or the al-Salam neighbourhood used to be. The playground is that strip of no man's land known as the Philadelphia corridor, created over 2,400 homes razed ahead of the 'disengagement' by Israel in 2005. That 'disengagement' made about 16,800 people homeless here, according to UN figures.
Only kites can now cross the border. And up in the skies you can almost tell some of the Gaza kites apart. These are the ones made with newspapers and with plastic bags as sail, with some thorns stuck on for the dogfight up there. The usual materials like paper and glue to make a kite are scarce in Gaza.
Khalid Zanoun, 12, like the others, always picks the spot where his house once stood. Up in the skies, he suddenly loses his kite in a dogfight. "He ran away from me!" he screams, looking at his disappearing kite, fists clenched. But soon he is beaming again, preparing another kite for the next battle with his unseen mates on the other side.
Curiosity led him some time back to scale the wall and see what his mates look like. "This is not allowed any more," he says. "The Hamas guards on our side and the Egyptian border guards on the other stop us."
Not entirely, though, because boys will be boys. If nothing, they climb up just to say hello to the Egyptian guards.
It's the better world on the other side. The Egyptian boys have better kites, and they have shoes. In Gaza, most children run barefoot on the sizzling hot soil. Shoes have been priced out of reach for most people, as so many things are nowadays as a result of the Israeli siege.
as long as there are still boys who fly kites, there's some hope for this world...
two of the friends i've made here in kabul were kite fighters as boys... one of them, now a 30 year-old office professional, was out flying his kite just last week and came to work the next day with cuts on his fingers, the traditional kite fighter injury...
the first couple of weeks i was here in late march and early april, i could see kites flying all over town in the afternoons... i've been told, however, that prime kite fighting season is in the winter when the cold winds blow...
i confess, i read this article with tears in my eyes... i feel sad for basir beria, the subject of the story, who certainly deserves a better life, and especially sad for my friends, who deserve to be able to live in their country in peace...
be sure and watch the video...
Basir Beria
There is just a breath of wind in North Hollywood. The fan palms barely tremble.
Basir Beria steps out of his shop on Lankershim Boulevard with a red fighter kite. He walks to a planter where people drop their cigarette butts and kicks up some dust to see which direction it drifts.
The late morning light is bright and scattered, swallowing depth and distance. Beria flings the kite into the air, and after a few nimble tugs, it whirls skyward, quick as a swift.
The kite darts about frenetically at first, fighting the short leash. The Afghan shopkeeper lets the string unreel from a homemade spool. The kite spirals for a moment, until he tugs again. The red rhombus rockets up and across the boulevard in big blazing pulses.
Beria dances with this fiery apparition now. He ignores the recycling truck rattling through his vision, as he does the buses, billboards and ratty birds. He moves about the sidewalk as if he's waltzing, right arm outstretched. The kite responds to every twitch of his forefinger -- flitting this way, arching that way, carving a bit of volume in the flat Valley sky.
At 47, Beria is strong and barrel-shaped, with thinning hair and a thick asterisk of scar tissue on his little finger that testifies to a much darker day.
He brings the kite low over the tar shingle roof of American Drapery and lets it dip behind the iron fence of a Suzuki motorcycle lot. He whips it up just as a truck threatens to mow down the line.
He could do this for hours, flirting with traffic. Flying a kite is meditation, transcending purpose.
But he should get back to the cash register, where purpose knocks with a heavy hand.
A year ago, he opened a small convenience store, Smoke House and Magazines, on Lankershim just north of Burbank Boulevard. He works behind the counter 10 hours a day, seven days a week to make it pay the bills -- selling Newport 100s, Swisher Sweets, coffee, energy drinks, booty magazines and, occasionally, a handmade Afghan kite.
He misses the hours he used to while away building kites in his spare time. There is pure beauty in shaving down the slivers of bamboo, bringing lissome frames to life with swaths of rice paper and cotton string.
But after 23 years working for other people in this country, he has little to show for it. He buys his blue jeans at the Salvation Army and rents a peeling tract home in Tarzana, which he shares with his wife and children, parents, brother, sister-in-law and three nieces and nephews. He shelled out his savings, took out a loan and borrowed from family members to open this shop.
"This is the biggest gamble of my life," he says.
The kites -- and oddly, "The Kite Runner," a novel he did not particularly appreciate -- are what brought him here.
Like so many immigrants in Los Angeles, Basir struggles to retain a piece of a place and time that existed before the future slammed shut -- in a new land where the future is wide open.
For him, the kites fuse the present day with the country he loved and fled.
He hopes, in this balance, he will feel whole again.
Beria grew up in a red-stone mansion in the Kabul suburb of Karte Parwan, surrounded by thousands of grapevines owned by his family. He took to kite fighting as a rambunctious little boy, the second of seven children.
Kite fighting had a long history in his family and country. When winter vacation began each year, the leaden sky would light up with swirling birds of colored paper.
But the beauty above belied the cunning skill on the ground. Fighters used lines encrusted with powdered glass, called tar. Scattered about the mud-colored city, they brought the strings together hundreds of feet above in the communal air. The faster line would cut the other like a band saw, setting the loser's kite adrift like a leaf in the breeze.
[...]
Now he gets by -- barely.
He dreams of one day just making and selling his kites. When he can, he still steps out on the sidewalk to let his mind follow them through the sky.
And so this bright morning the red kite is hovering over the motorcycle lot, swaying side to side, like a cobra.
[...]
Beria's line is suspended horizontally across the boulevard. A bus is fast approaching, bobbing up and down with the wheels in the gutter.
At the point where a pedestrian would be well past doomed, Beria flicks his wrist as if he were whipping a conductor's baton.
The kite pulses into the dingy blue, and the line lifts like a drawbridge before the bus.
Beria draws it down to earth and heads back to the register.
i've become very fond of the afghan people... i feel very, very fortunate to have been able to spend time here... i know that some of the friendships i'm forming will last a long, long time...
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