John Proctor (carrietown)'s Public Profile in the Diigo Community

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Google Earth tour 1 on 2010-01-05
- Massive
  
  outdoor shopping
- outdoor shopping, especially shoes. Ministry of Education on the north, Municipality
  in the east, and the Mosque of Haji Abdul Rahman (pictured below) further southeast,
  next to the Municipality building.
  
  Menar-e
  Istiqlal (Independence Monument). Commemorating those who died fighting the
  British for independence in 1842 and 1919. To get here we have passed through
  the Lion's Gate, where the Kabul River flows between Kuh-e Asmayi (Sky Mountain)
  on the northwest, and Kuh-e Sher Darwaza (Lion's Gate Mountain) on the southeast.
  Immediately west of the monument is the Kabul Zoo.
  
  34 30 36.27 N, 69 09 28.73 E
  
  Char Rah-e Deh Mazang, with the Ministry of Transport on the north side.
  
  34 30 38.30 N, 69 09 11.67 E
  
  Lysa
  Ghazi. One of the three leading high schools of Kabul in the 1970s. It remains
  unrestored, although thousands of students attend classes in the blasted shell
  of the building and the tents outside. Why is it unrestored? As I understand
  it, this was Zalmai Khalizad's high school. He wanted to restore it himself,
  but he got distracted by Iraq, etc. So Mr. 'market-led reconstruction'
  has left a testament to what the market can do for public infrastructure.
  
  34 30 39.03 N, 69 08 43.69 E
  
  Faculty of Engineering, Kabul University. Workmen are preparing the entrance
  path for new paving, which was designed, funded, and contracted by students
  in the Faculty.
  
  34 30 57.41 N, 69 08 22.47 E
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- - Lysa
    Ghazi. One of the three leading high schools of Kabul in the 1970s. It remains
    unrestored, although thousands of students attend classes in the blasted shell
    of the building and the tents outside.
Afghanistan Online: Afghan Women's History on 2010-01-03
- Afghanistan's version of Joan of Arc.
- , Amir Abdur Rahman
  Khan abolished the tribal custom of forcing a woman to
  marry her deceased husband's brother.
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- - right to
    inherit property.
  - daughter of Afghan intellectual
    
    Mahmud Tarzi, wife of
    
    King Amanullah and future Queen of
    Afghanistan was born
  - Amir Habibullah
    opened a school for girls that even contained an English
    curriculum.
  - He had his
    religious clerics use twisted religious
    interpretations and had the women declared as
    servants, concubines and harem ladies.
  - discouraged polygamy, was against the veil, as
    well as
    pushed for greater personal freedom for women.
  - Religion does not require women to veil their
    hands, feet and
    
    faces or enjoin any special type of veil. Tribal
    custom must
    
    not impose itself on the free will of the
    individual.
  - established a hospital for
    Afghan women
The Outsiders - National Geographic Magazine on 2010-01-03
- He will not be able to marry his girlfriend back in Waras. "I love her and she loved me," Shafaq says, but "when I sent my mother to ask for her hand from her father, he refused. Because I am a Hazara."
- After so much hope, so many promises, the Hazaras are feeling ignored by the new government—led as it is by a Pashtun president
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- - lready, the resurgence of the Tali-ban, who recently have targeted Hazara leaders in several districts abutting their southern strongholds, is stirring difficult memories.
The Outsiders - National Geographic Magazine on 2010-01-03
- The first job of the day is from a man who needs 20 bags of plaster moved to a work site. Pahlawan has wandered off, so Baba and Assadullah load the bags, 77 pounds each. Both men grasp the cart's bar, pulling roughly 1,500 pounds as cars and buses honk and spit fumes. Seven minutes and several hundred yards later, they turn into the mud-walled warrens of Kabul's backstreets. Breathing heavily, sweating profusely, they reach the site. They'll have to carry the bags the last 30 feet. Baba throws a bag over his shoulder and walks stooped over, head down, holding the bag with one hand, white powder spilling on his clothes. Another ten minutes and they're done. Baba and Assadullah get $1.20, to split.
- such discrimination underscores how little has fundamentally changed
The Outsiders - National Geographic Magazine on 2010-01-03
- In Daykundi's provincial capital, a group of teenagers said young people are refusing to marry until they finish school. Hazara high schoolers make up more than a third of those who take the university entrance exam, and the number—including the number of girls—is rising.
- Kabul, where some 40 percent of the population is now Hazara.
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- - huge Hazara underclass made up of manual laborers living in west Kabul neighborhoods
The Outsiders - National Geographic Magazine on 2010-01-03
- A Hazarajat winter, once it arrives, stays for six months. The snow renders roads impassable even with four-wheel drive and tire chains, and closes the high mountain passes that separate districts.
- In winter greater numbers of women die in childbirth because they can't get help in time.
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- - These houses are among those the Taliban burned down in 2001. Every man in Lorcha can point to the mountain his family fled to and describe arduous journeys through thick snow lugging whatever they could carry. Today most damaged homes have been rebuilt. The villagers donated funds for a new mosque too. Money is short, but the village elder has persuaded farmers to resist the temptation to grow poppies. "It is haram," says Akbar, forbidden by Islam.
  - Even if the school is a tent or a building with no doors or windows, even if the teacher has only a few years of schooling, parents want their kids to study, far more so than elsewhere in the country.
The Outsiders - National Geographic Magazine on 2010-01-03
- Two weeks later, the fighting started anew. According to Human Rights Watch, Taliban forces burned down more than 4,000 homes, shops, and public buildings.
- Hazarajat schools today are full of teachers who didn't finish grade school. But his dreams were fading. "I was not very hopeful because I was thinking the Taliban will stay for another 10 or 20 years," he says.
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- - "I've operated in the days when Hazaras felt they were virtually faced with an apartheid system," Semple says. "Now it's a totally different kettle of fish."
The Outsiders - National Geographic Magazine on 2010-01-02
- Shafaq was in tenth grade when the Taliban rose to power in 1996, promising security to a populace tired of the bitter conflict among ethnic warlords, including Hazara factions. A year earlier, the Taliban had brutally murdered Abdul Ali Mazari—a charismatic leader sometimes called the father of the Hazara people—who had helped found "the party of unity," or Hezb i Wahdat, in an effort to stop the infighting among Hazaras. After his death, the party splintered, and Taliban forces soon spread across Hazarajat.
- "I was working with my father in the field when my sister ran to us and said, 'The Taliban are everywhere,'" Shafaq says. Villagers fashioned white flags from bags of fertilizer. Local leaders struck deals to appease the Taliban. Shafaq hid his books.
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- - Schools closed. Crops lay unattended. Families fled for Iran or for the hills.
  - The Taliban imposed a blockade on Hazarajat, prompting food shortages in a region already suffering from drought. In Bamian, the bazaar was torched and scores of families sought sanctuary in the caves near the Buddhas.
  - In early 2001, in the coldest days of a brutal Hazarajat winter, the horror came to the district of Yakawlang. On January 8, the Taliban rounded up young Hazara men in Nayak, the district center. "People were thinking they would be taken to court," recalls Sayed Jawhar Amal, a teacher in the nearby village of Kata Khona. "But at 8 a.m. they were killed. All of them." The men were lined up and shot in public view. W
  - "Because we were Shia.
The Outsiders - National Geographic Magazine on 2010-01-02
- "The Hazaras are producing the most enthusiastic, educated, forward-looking youth, who are seizing the opportunities provided by the new situation," says Michael Semple, a red-bearded Irishman who serves as the deputy to the special representative of the European Union in Afghanistan. Shafaq helped found the Center for Dialogue, a Hazara student organization with 150 members. The group publishes its own magazine, holds events promoting "humanism and pluralism," and works with human rights organizations to monitor elections. Semple deems the group part of an emerging political consciousness among Hazara youth.
- "We have a window of opportunity," Shafaq says, "but we are not sure how long it will remain open."
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- - Children in Waras customarily marry young, stay close to home, and tend the potato fields. But Shafaq wanted something more. When he wasn't helping his father, he read voraciously—novels, history, philosophy, translations of Abraham Lincoln, John Locke, and Albert Camus.
  - Growing up, Shafaq heard the stories of where his people came from, why they looked different from Pashtuns and Tajiks. He and his fellow Hazaras, the story goes, are the descendants of Genghis Khan's Mongolian soldiers, who marched into central Afghanistan in the 13th century, built a garrison, and conquered the inhabitants—a varied mix of peoples not uncommon along the Silk Road. When the locals rose up and killed Genghis's son, the conqueror retaliated by leveling Bamian and wiping out most of its residents. Those who survived intermarried with the Mongolian invaders and became the Hazaras—a genetic collaboration evident in the diversity of facial features among the region's people today.
  - the outsider lineage has been used against them
  - 1890s, when King Abdur Rahman, a Pashtun, launched bloody anti-Hazara pogroms in and around Hazarajat
  - Hazaras infidels
The Outsiders - National Geographic Magazine on 2010-01-02
- Taliban forces were besieging Hazarajat, burning down villages to render the region uninhabitabl
- oday the region is one of the safest in Afghanistan, mostly free of the poppy fields that dominate other regions.
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- - Hazaras have new access to universities, civil service jobs, and other avenues of advancement long denied them.
  - One of the country's vice presidents is Hazara, as is parliament's leading vote getter, and a Hazara woman is the first and only female governor in the countr
  - The Hazaras have no such blueprint, no sense of what a future free from persecution is supposed to look like.
  - Musa Shafaq wants to live in that future. He is 28, with shoulder-length black hair and typical Hazara features, not unlike those of the Buddhas. He stands at the gate of Kabul University in a red sweater, black jeans, and tinted prescription glasses. Classes are out for the day. In two months, he will graduate, a notable achievement for any Afghan given the country's instability. Because he is Hazara, his success signals a new era. Shafaq is poised to finish at the top of his class, which should guarantee him the job he most wants, a teaching post at Kabul University.

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