Veterans For Peace
Fridays, in the Muslim world,
are days of relative rest and the gathering of family and friends.
We decided to go on a picnic, and twelve of us crammed into a van to head for a peaceful area about an hour outside Kabul’s downtown center. Those of you who have experienced traffic in Cairo can get a small sense of how challenging it is to cross Kabul. There are no lanes, no signals, and no rules; there are hundreds of potholes and honking horns. However, the Afghan Peace Volunteers (APV) are young and we cross town, bobbing and weaving and honking our way through traffic, clapping and singing with music blaring from our radio.
The land is bone dry clay, hard as rock, and I couldn’t visualize a park, but we wove higher into the hills, following dozens of others trying to escape the incessant heat, to an area that was cooler with more trees and a bit of grass. Continue reading
The sky framed by the oval plane window on the last of 4 legs, is ablaze. The charcoal horizon elevates a deep orange bank of clouds which are churned into a paler, lighter orange, and the hills of Afghanistan rise from behind this striking colored curtain with dark contours, sharply outlined with ochre highlights.I’d been less optimistic when the flight was delayed without warning; when the call to board finally came an hour late, a tsunami of passengers raced towards the security check—all seeking to be first, only to be queued again for a transport bus to the actual plane. 
Veterans Community Media Center of San Francisco 