On one occasion my counterpart, Ghulam Saki and I went into a shop that sold watches and they has a few pocket watches on display. I took out my pocket watch and showed it to the shop keeper. He took the watch, looked at it and said something I could not understand and tossed my watch out the door of the shop where it bounced off of the sidewalk and went into a ditch full of water. I was dumbfounded. I asked Ghulam what he had said and why he had thrown it out the door. Ghulam told me he said "Oh, unbreakable" because all of the pocket watches he is familiar with were unbreakable and he thought mine would be also. He was a dumb founded as I was when he was told it was not. We fished the watch out of the ditch and by that time it was about half full of water. The shop keeper made his apologies over and over and promised to repair the watch. He did and I picked it up the next day running as good as ever. It lasted to the end of our 2 year tour and I gave it to Ghulam when I left.

A short time before this Paul and Marion Baxter arrived in Kabul, followed a few weeks later by the arrival of their air freight, containing those items essential to their survival until the sea freight arrived in 5 or 6 months. There had been a little mix up in their shipment and they received a box containing a toilet instead of one of their boxes. No tank and no seat, just the toilet. Paul immediately wrote to the agent telling him of the mistake and shortly received a copy of a cable from the agent to the shipper saying , "It seems Mr Baxter is under a box and over a toilet". Yes, Mr. Baxter was over a toilet and at the next opportunity took that toilet to a White Elephant Cootie Party. It was a big box, wrapped in white tissue paper with a big red ribbon. Very attractive and was selected first at the table every time.

At the end of the evening the lady who had won the big white box was very excited--until she opened it. She said, "What do I need with that thing. I already have one". Friends starting making suggestions as to what she might do with it. One said, "It would make an unusual punch bowl". Another said, "You could fill it with dirt and plant flowers in it". Then someone, without thinking, said, "You could fill it with sand for people to but their butts in".

That was a hard act to follow.

The house Habib and Virginia lived in was quite modern in style but without electricity and running water. But it did have an air conditioner--the Afghan version of a "desert cooler". In the US we know these as humidifiers, but in areas with low humidity they work very well as evaporative air conditioners. In Afghanistan they pile up a great pile of camel thorn against the open windows which they keep then wet by throwing water on them now and then. Any breeze will carry cooled air though the camel thorn into the house. Not the most efficient system in the world but when the temperature is over 100 degrees, any little bit of cool air feels mighty good.

Habib and Virginia had a tiny baby. They had a cow to provide milk for the baby but, for the life of me, I could not see how they could keep the milk from going sour without any type of refrigeration. I had grown up on the farm and I knew about cows and about milk. I finally had to ask Virginia where they kept the milk and she said, "In the cow". And that they did. They only milked the cow shortly before feeding time and only enough to feed the baby. They boiled the milk and then cooled it down for the feeding. I don't recall it, but I suspect that baby was fed on a schedule and it would take a while to prepare the milk.

But the most interesting thing about the visit was the prison which was right next door to the Sub-Governor's house Without electricity for lights, how do you guard a prison in the dark? Lanterns and flashlights are not enough. You do it by shouting. There are guards stationed at different points around the prison and all night long they call out to each other. They call out on a fixed rotation schedule, one to another all around the prison. If one of them fails to call out in his turn, someone has to go see why. Habib said that one night he was awaked by the silence of no one calling out at all. He went to check and all of the guards has gone to sleep. The system does work, but it is a little hard to get any sleep when you live next door to a prison until you get used to it, which I did not stay long enough to do.

One of the main problems in Afghanistan is the shortage of food so there is great emphasis on the provision and production of food. To us as Americans the answer is simple-grow more food. But it is not that simple. Agriculture in Afghanistan is entirely different from anything we know in this country.

To begin with, Afghanistan is about the size of Texas but only 12% of the land is “farmable” and there is only water enough to irrigate 5% of it. Unfortunately, many of the fields have not been cleared of land mines and cannot be farmed making matters worse. I am sure anyone who watches the news on TV knows that it is a very mountainous country but there are also vast areas of desert.. And we can tell by just looking at the pictures that much of the land is not “farmable”. It is only in the valleys along the rivers that crops can be grown. The soil in Afghanistan is adobe. We are familiar with the word in the term “adobe bricks” . In the early 50s when we first when to the country all resident houses were made of sun dried adobe bricks. Adobe brick are not very strong so the walls of the houses were 2 feet thick. In recent years cement has become the main material for housing construction.

Adobe soil is not well suited to farming especially when using oxen and wooden plows to till the land. When you think of oxen do not picture the big animals we see in western movies. Don’t think of the bulls like those seen in rodeos either. Well, you could think of a rodeo bull but only about half that size. They are not very powerful animals. The plow is made out of wood and has a metal point on the front about the size of a man’s hand. It is not a “turning” plow but only runs through the soil breaking it up into clods-adobe clods. It is a general practice to plow the land again and again as many times as they have time for. They do have a 2” by10” by 8’ plank that they pull over the field with the driver standing on it to break up some of the clods. It helps a little.

At this level the use of western type farm tractors and equipment is not possible.

The main crop is wheat. They plant it by broadcasting it by hand on the plowed field and then plow it in with the wooden plow. They plant 3 bushels per acre but 1/3 of it is so deep it does not come up and 1/3 of it stays on the top of the soil and the birds eat it. So, they really only plant one bushel of seed to the acre. That, or even a little less, is about what we plant in the US. The average yield of irrigated wheat was said to be about 10 bushels to the acre. In the US we get about 10 times that much. You have to remember that they have to save 3 bushels for seed so they actually only get 7 bushels to the acre. More about this later.

The only farm implements that the Afghan farmer has to do his farming are: a plow, a plank and a chain. He has very few hand tools. He has a hand sickle which he uses to but the wheat when it is ready to harvest. He has a similar tool which he uses to weed the wheat field as well. Attempt to introduce scythes for harvest wheat were unsuccessful. The people in Afghanistan are squatters. They squat to do everything. And I do mean everything. They prefer that position. Partly it maybe because they do not have tables and chairs in their houses, or maybe it is the other way around. They squat to weed the wheat, they squat to cut the wheat. They show no interest at all in standing up and using long handled tools. He does have a long handled shovel for digging and a wooden pitch fork for winnowing the wheat but that is about all.

When your think about Afghan farmers don’t think about farmers as they are in the US. In Afghanistan farmers live in villages and they farm the land around the village. There is a village blacksmith and a village carpenter who make the plows and the metal points. Afghan farmers are not the jack-of-all-trades that American farmers are. Also, the government of Afghanistan does not subsidize farmers like our government does in this country. When we first signed up to go to Afghanistan we were told by some man of great wisdom that “the King of Afghanistan is King of Kabul’ and a few of the major cities in the country. It is true. The people outside of the big cities live in villages and these villages are little countries completely independent. They do not pay taxes to the federal government and the central government does nothing for them. The villagers farm the land around the village and they live or die on what they can produce. Plus, they do not, for the most part, have water for irrigation. If the irrigated wheat yields 10 bushel to the acres, how little does the dry land wheat produce? I don’t know, but I have seen fields of dry land wheat where the plants were one foot apart and about one foot high.

In a good year everyone may live until spring. In poor years some of the old and the young will not. Efforts are being made even now to get food to the people in isolated areas. The food has been made available through the UN but they are not able to deliver it to those in need because the drivers of the trucks refuse to go because of hijackers and bandits.

The situation is a little different in the areas where they are able to irrigate the fields. This land is often owned by “wealthy land lords” who usually live in a city. They “rent” 10 acre plots to the farmers in their area. Ten acres is about all you can farm with a team of oxen. The landlord supplies the oxen and the farm implements as well. The rent fee is paid in bags of wheat at harvest time. However, the tenant farmer often runs out of wheat and has to borrow some from the landlord to make it to harvest time which is paid back at harvest time as well. However, the wheat which was borrowed was worth 5 times as much as it is at harvest time so the farmers must pay back 5 bags for every bag he borrowed. Needless to say the farmers are deeply in debt to the landlord and will be forever and ever.

Another complication is the “extended family system”. Distant relatives can come to their relative and request him to feed them because they have not food and no money. It is the tradition. Social pressure can be brought to bear on anyone who does not do it. They might even be expelled from the village if they do not comply. Unless they have only enough wheat to feed their family through the year and seed for planting in the spring. If this is the case they can refuse. Early in my time at the agriculture school I asked the students how they stores the wheat over the winter. They said they buried it. I thought that a bit strange and mentioned that it might spoil. They agreed but said, “Yes, that is the point”. When a farmer threshed his wheat he puts aside (in large clay jars) the amount the will need to feed his family and enough to plant in the spring. The rest he buries so he will be able turn away hungry relatives. From my experience I have noticed that the hungry relatives do very little to help their host while living in his home.. They are his guests, you know.

There a resistance to change in all people. Part of the reason is because we are afraid of what the neighbors will say. This is true in developing countries even more than among us. You can convince people that you have a new and better way of doing something, but they will not do it. What would the neighbors think or do-to what I am doing-or to me. In order to introduce the improved rice and wheat in developing countries, which brought about the Green Revolution, farmers had to be bribed to get them to plant the new seed the first time. Resistance to change has its price.

The use of western farm tractors and equipment in Afghanistan is often considered but the dryland farms are often on very steep land in the mountains. Irrigated fields are often very small because they must be perfectly level for the “bathtub” type of irrigation which is necessary on adobe soils. We worked in the Helmand Valley for a couple years where tractors were used. This was a big agricultural development project constructed by an American construction in the early 1950s. The big farms there were government farms at that time.