This video arrived in my Facebook news feed through Upworthy today. And it really made me think.
It made me think of the things about Iran that I loved, you know, on those days - every day - when I loved something and hated something on the same day. There are so many similarities between the scenes in this video of Afghanistan and the scenes of my every day life in Iran. The hats that the construction workers who stacked and mortared the bricks in arches between iron I-beams to give strength to the ceilings were the same hats as many of the men in this video are wearing. You know, the ones that look a little like a beret with a ring of fat caterpillars as the brim. The orchards serving as the child's playground reminded me of the lush gardens of roses in parks and behind nearly every wall that surrounded the houses in town. The women weaving rugs look just like the images of women and children weaving the elaborate designs into the carpets we bought in the bazaar. And the food - eaten with flat lavash bread, just like what we got in Iranian restaurants outside of Tehran, where there weren't so many options for western food.
The mountains at the beginning of the film reminded me of my trips to the Caspian through the Alborz mountains. The turquoise tiles on the mosque in the background reminded me of the mosques and buildings from the Safavid era in Isfahan and Shiraz.
The film made me think of the things about Yemen that I loved - every day, without the burden of competing things to hate. In spite of the bad reputation Yemen has currently, I loved every day I spent there because the people I met there, including lots of anonymous Yemenis who may have been able to guess that I was with the U.S. embassy, but couldn't possibly be sure, were unfailingly kind to me. They smiled, just as the people in this film - men, women, children - smiled. The images of young boys in this video reminded me of the boys who surrounded my car whenever I went shopping for groceries, always with their hands out, looking for whatever I could give them. I had been told I should just point upwards when they approached me, to indicate that Allah would take care of them. One boy who had told me his name was Saddam, responded to my upward pointing finger by pointing downward, towards his feet. When I leaned out the window of my car to see what he was pointing at, I saw that his toes touched head on, the most extreme case of pigeon-toed-ness I had ever seen. And still he was smiling at me.
The image of a man riding a donkey weighed down with his crops on a dusty country road, followed by the scene of three men riding motorcycles through a cityscape reminded me of the feeling I had every day in Yemen that I was experiencing a living museum - examples of nearly every century from the year of the birth of Christ until today appeared before my eyes whenever I traveled around the country. The Old City of Sana'a, a UNESCO world heritage site, was not set aside to be preserved as it was to be an exhibit for tourists. It was a place where people lived in the multi-storied, mud, stone, and brick structures just as their ancestors had done for centuries. It was a place where people worked, selling goods, making goods, baking bread, making available to the people, not just the tourists, what the people needed.
It made me think of the conversations I overheard in the office of National Iranian Radio and Television in Tehran between two colleagues who had visited Afghanistan. The two used the same words to explain why one loved the place and another hated the place. They used the same words, words like there was no electricity so we had to eat our meals by candlelight. One used those words to express how primitive, and therefore distasteful, she found the place. The other used those words to express the joy she found there.
It reminded me of the Afghan students who came to Tehran to study at NIRT's College of Television and Cinema and were told they had to complete a Farsi as a Second Language course before they could attend the classes, most of which were offered in English. The Afghans spoke better English than almost all of the Iranian students. And their native language was Dari, a language that does not differ significantly from Farsi, the two languages being mutually intelligible.
The call to prayer, just a few seconds in the film, reminded me of all the days I spent in Iran, in Qatar, in the United Arab Emirates, in Yemen, as well as my visits to Bahrain, to Oman, to Saudi Arabia, to Jordan. Initially the call was such a foreign sound that it reminded me that I was the foreigner, that I was encroaching on the land of others. But over time, the call became a reminder that I was surrounded by so many believers who did not try to impose their beliefs on me, who allowed me to worship - or not - and who only asked in return that I not try to prevent them from worshiping as they were taught. I was, after all, in their countries, in their environment.
And the man with the piercing blue eyes at the midpoint of the film served as a reminder that the west has left its imprint on these lands even before the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began.
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