Inshallah

I have hit writer’s block with the insane amount of work that I have to do, so I thought I would write a quick blog entry. I am really feeling it here now – I have four proposals to write in five days, including one that literally grows by the hour (in the last twenty-four hours they have added eight documents to the list required for submission!) and am wondering how I will get all of this, plus a ton of other stuff done, before I leave for R and R next Monday! Additionally, it is incredibly hot here, and I am having a lot of trouble sleeping. Last night, I tried the suggestion of a colleague and soaked a towel, draped it over a chair and directed the fan onto it. This cooled the room down a bit until the towel dried off about 3.00a.m. and then I was back to suffering!! It is especially bad in the early morning – around five or six. The city power goes off about six o’clock and the generator is not switched on until six thirty so I lie there sweltering for half an hour. Or more usually, I am up running around the tennis court (early morning is the only time that is bearable to do exercise, although even at five thirty it is pretty hot now!) It is only going to get hotter and I suppose I will just continue to suffer and long for the winter!

I am back in Herat after my tour of the zones. I really enjoyed being out in the field and seeing the work that we are doing. There is a problem here as the rains have not come this spring – there has been a drought. So crops are failing and people will not have enough food to survive the winter. Some villages decamp en masse and go to camps around Herat where they are fed for the winter. Others just say that it is Insh’allah that they die! I kid you not – that is what I was told in one village!!

Insh’allah is an interesting concept here. It literally translates as ‘God’s will’ and means that everything that happens to you in life is because God willed it to be so. This removes most personal responsibility in day-to-day actions – if you make it safely to the end of a car journey it is not because you drove well, but because God willed it to be so (and the inverse is also true). This concept is remarkably easy to see displayed on Afghan roads! When a pilot comes on to do his P.A. announcement at the start of a flight, he literally says “…we are cruising at an altitude of 30,000 feet and God willing will arrive in Kabul in one hour…” Just what you want to hear from the guy directing you through the air at 1000km/h in an inescapable metal tube…

However, I can see how, when faced with a history like Afghanistan’s, people would cling to a concept of Inshallah. We see this frequently in the Christian church – people with a miserable life clinging to the hope of the glory of heaven – often it is the only joy in their life. Similarly, people who have been through the tragedy of the Russians and the Taliban need to feel that it is part of some higher purpose – life simply cannot be that cruel. If it is all a part of a bigger plan and we are just pawns, then you can accept your fate at God’s hands and relinquish your worry. Worrying about things here won’t fix them anyway – so why not put them in God’s hands?

And on that cheerful note, I will leave you and get back to trying to play my small part in this bigger plan – writing a proposal for funding, so maybe some of these people will actually survive the winter after all. Makes my concerns seem fairly petty in comparison, hey?