Monday, 31 October 2005
11:59pm

S

o I've returned, so finally here is some explanation of my journey. My church sent a non-evangelical medical missions team out with a bunch of meds to Afghanistan. Non-evangelical meaning that we weren't going out there with the purpose of converting people to Christianity. We were going out there to provide people with much needed medical care. I was asked to go with them to make a video documentary of the work being done.
We are affilliated with a church in Tajikistan that is run by a Korean guy by the name of Pastor Choi that's been there for over 10 years now. He has been making weekly trips from there into Northtern Afghanistan by car since October 2001 (basically since the American invasion started), bringing food and digging wells and providing many other much needed services to the people there. They also have sent their own long term missions teams from Tajikistan into Afghanistan, and it is with those teams that we stayed.
Our medical team consisted of two doctors (one surgeon and one ER specialist that actually teaches emergency medicine at a teaching hospital), a registered nurse, a dentist, two pharmacists and an acupuncturist. I was there to make the video and there were a couple of other folks there also to help out, in total we had 11 people.
Thursday the 20th we took off on a nonstop flight to Münich where we'd have a day's layover before getting on a plane to Tajikistan. I wish I had more than a day's worth of time to explore Münich, but at least I got to visit the real Hofbräuhaus instead of having to settle for the fake-o replica one that they have in Vegas.
Anyway, we got to Pastor Choi's church in Dushanbe, Tajikistan late on the night of Saturday, the 22nd. Sunday we attended their regular church services (they have services in Korean, Russian, Tajiki and Uzbek). I've never seen people worship and pray with such intesne fervor in my entire life. Many of these people have suffered extreme persecution and have been disowned by their muslim families for converting to christianity... thus the strength of faith they have just plain blows away what you see in people who have it really easy like those for example, in America. These are people who have sacrificed a lot for their beliefs.
Monday we drove about 3 hours south to the Panz river which forms the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. After clearing customs, our drivers went back to Dushanbe and we took a (tiny, rickety) ferry across the river where were picked up on the other side of the border by some of the missionaries from Tajikistan and we drove about another 90 minutes into Kunduz along a freshly paved road. With the old dirt road this journey used to take more than twice as long, according to the folks I went with that had been down that way before. We stayed in the missions center there in Kunduz.
It's absolutely amazing how poor northern Afghanistan is. Tajikistan is probably in the bottom 25% of the list of nations from richest to poorest, but driving into Afghanistan, the difference between Tajikistan and Afghanistan was as drastic as the difference between going from the U.S. into Mexico... and we're starting from a point that is much lower than Mexico.
Tuesday morning we set up our medical clinic at a school in Konduz that was built by Pastor Choi where both boys and girls are taught. All the kids were sent home from school early and told to tell their families that doctors had come with medicine and to bring their sick people. Pretty soon the place was an absolute madhouse, with people mobbing us from all sides, kicking up a choking cloud of dust. But despite all that, we saw a lot of patients and got a lot of work done. Many of the folks that showed up had the same symptoms, much of it caused by dehydration. A decent, clean water supply would go a long way to improving health and comfort around there, but right now there is so little infrastructure.
Wednesday we set up shop at a different school, which I believe was also built by Pastor Choi. We learned a lot of crowd control lessons from the day before, and it was much less of a madhouse and we got to see more patients that way. Also the fact that we were indoors and not inside of tents made for much less dustier working conditions and easier crowd control so we were able to be much more efficient and saw many more patients that day.
Pastor Choi is a pretty amazing man, and is very well known in the area and the people love him as he does a lot to help the community. He seems to command a great deal of respect from the local military and governmental leaders, despite not only being Korean, but a Christian. In many ways it is only because of these relationships that he has built that we were able to move about the country so easily, freely, and safely. That day, the man who basically controls the border (and allowed us to breeze through customs a couple days earlier with all of our medicine and equipment that might very well have all been seized if it were anyone else trying to bring it in) brought us some fresh fish to eat which he had caught in the river earlier that morning..
Thursday we drove back north toward the border to Imam Sahib and set up shop at another school there. This area was much more rural compared to where we had been in Kunduz. Being there was a surreal experience -- I didn't feel like I was really there cuz it every direction I looked, it was like something out of a movie like Lawrence of Arabia0 or Indiana Jones. This was probably the easiest of the three days we had these clinics going. We learned a lot from our experiences the past two days, and also, while we probably saw just as many patients as we had on any of the other two days, the people weren't able to all show up at once since they lived further away... I think this helped regulate the flow of traffic even more for us so we weren't just hit with a flood of people all at once like we were on the first day.
We stayed Thursday night at the missions center they have in Imam Sahib where the missionaries from Tajikistan live. This compound was guarded by dudes with AK-47's -- there have been attacks on this place by Al Qaeda in the not too distant past, though through some miraculous events, no one from the church has been injured, though the attackers once ended up killing one of their own men during an attack. This day however, Pastor Choi did not anticipate much trouble -- he believes that the Al Qaeda network was severely crippled by the earthquake in Pakistan. Whether or not this turned out to be true, we didn't run into any trouble while we were there.
Friday we drove back to the border and went back to Tajikistan. Early Saturday morning we flew out to Münich where we spent another day on layover. This time a few of us spent a good deal of time exploring the many parks they have in the city on foot. Münich is quite beautiful in the fall with many trees turning color and all that other stuff that I really don't get to see much of in Southern California. Some others took a car ride over to Saltzburg in Austria for a tour.
Early saturday morning we flew back home with a short layover at London Heathrow. It certaily feels good to be back home. There are actually quite a few details I left out, which I will probably be filling in later also with some pictures and some other stuff. So expect this entry to get longer as I have time to fill it in. In the meantime, check out the photos at the Giant Repository of Pics and here are a couple of quick additional notes for now:

- The afghan people, at least in these more rural areas (when compared to say, Kabul), have no concept of standing in lines and waiting their turns. I'm sure that can be attributed to the fact that after decades of war, it has been most of their experiences for most of their lives that that when you wait, you get nothing. This made crowd control extremely difficult.
- Because the people we were with were from the church in Tajikistan who do not speak english, many of our tranlations had to go from english -> korean -> farsi or english -> korean -> russian -> farsi -- I'm just calling it "farsi" for now. Farsi (the language of Iran), Tajiki (the language of Tajikistan) and Dari (the langauge of northern afghanistan) are actually all dialects of Persian, so someone from tajikistan can communicate with someone from northern afghanistan with little more difficulty than say an American and an Australian. The written languages however are different as Tajiki (due to Tajikistan being a former Soviet republic) is written using cyrillic script, while most of the rest of the folks are using Arabic letters.
- In Tajikistan the most popular cars were the Daewoo Nexia and the Lada Samara, whereas in Afghanistan, 99% of the cars I saw were Toyotas... many of them being wacky 4x4 vans.
Oh and the reason i didn't want to discuss details of my trip before were... well, i felt it was better for Al Qaeda not to know the details of where and when we were gonna be :)

And now I must go to bed and try and get some sleep. Last night I only got about 4 hours of sleep after being up for probably about 36 hours straight with all the time zone changes and with me not being able to sleep well on planes. Today ws my first day of school, and it was pretty awesome, and it certainly is proving at least this far to be just as hands-on as they claim -- I've already brought home one of their Canon XL2 video cameras for my first assignment! But I also almost fell asleep in class (and while sitting in trafficon the way home!!) so I better try and get as much sleep as I can right now. So. Good night!