Cleaning up Kabul

Washington Post:

The road that rings the old city district of Murad Khane is thick with smoke from the hearths of a row of blacksmiths. Until recently, few people in the Afghan capital had much reason to venture beyond the plumes of black smoke into the district.

For decades, Murad Khane has been crushed beneath tons of garbage, a monumental wasteland to the conflict that has gripped Afghanistan for 30 years. The trash heaps made the homes there so inaccessible in places that residents had to burrow through the refuse to enter their front doors.

These days, however, many of those who walk the warren of residences and tumbledown Silk Road inns that make up Murad Khane are there to rebuild the district in what some have billed one the most ambitious efforts yet to pump new life into the long-ailing city.

Work to restore Murad Khane began in 2006 under the auspices of the Kabul-based Turquoise Mountain Foundation. The development organization was born of a meeting of minds between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Britain's Prince Charles when they met during a state visit in Britain in 2004.

Turquoise Mountain is run out of an old fort a few miles from Murad Khane by Rory Stewart, an Oxford-pedigreed Scottish writer and diplomat. Seed money for the group came from Prince Charles and proceeds from Stewart's book, "The Places in Between," a chronicle of his 600-mile walk across Afghanistan in 2002, three months after the fall of the Taliban.

In a country where aid workers like to talk of "capacity building" and "local empowerment," Turquoise Mountain stands out as one of the few groups that is actually transforming trash into treasure. Since the project started in August 2006, workers have hauled away an estimated 10,500 cubic yards of garbage. About 50 homes that were awash in refuse have been restored or received emergency repairs.

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Turquoise Mountain employs about 350 local people, many of them women, who work both at Murad Khane and at the organization's current headquarters. It operates three schools for woodwork, calligraphy and traditional pottery and will soon open another for jewelry making. The schools will eventually move from the headquarters to Murad Khane, where there is now also a literacy center and a women's clinic.

There is work yet to be done in Murad Khane, however, before the move. In the courtyard of the once-crumbling building called the Great Serai, a remnant of the neighborhood's status as a Silk Road stop for merchants and tradesmen, a dozen men use long cedar branches to stir mud for the building's new walls. There are sprinklings of straw in the heaping mud pit. The straw strengthens the mud, making it impervious to the ravages of Kabul's harsh environment for many more years than cheap Pakistani concrete, the false coin of postwar reconstruction that inevitably seems to crack within months or years of being laid.

Turquoise Mountain staff members sound almost evangelical when they talk about the organization's use of traditional methods in rebuilding the district. The approach represents in some ways the organization's philosophy: Take the raw elements of Afghan culture, and use them to rebuild what has been lost after years of violent conflict.

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There is more.

The use of straw mixed with the mud is an ancient form of construction that is described in the biblical story of the Israeli slavery in Egypt where they complained of being denied straw for making bricks.

Hauling away trash does not sound like that novel an idea. What is unique about the project is what is being done with the places after the trash is hauled away. Whether they want to use the goo-goo phrase of "sustainability" which is big with greenies does not change the fact that much can be accomplished by not fouling your own nest and taking care of it.