A week in Kabul

This is one of my favorite pictures I took while in Afghanistan. A picture is worth a thousand words and there was definitely a story behind it.

I’d like to say I roamed the city. On the contrary, I saw very little of it except for what I saw outside the window of an up-armoured vehicle the during Passover week in 2012. The streets were bustling with people, and there were many advertising signs and marketplaces. Women were seen walking around wearing more modern clothes and hijabs compared to those I had seen in Kandahar. I don’t claim to be an expert…far from. But observations say so much.

During that week, I had visited the National Military Hosptial, which is the largest in the country. The smaller military hospitals in the various regions of Afghanistan (Kandahar, Herat, etc) branch off this main one and aren’t as large or as populated with medical workers. The rest of the trip consisted of briefings. Exciting, huh.

This isn’t a political post, but political events did lead to that picture. The graffiti seen here was the second part of, possibly, an activist’s way of protesting the burning of Qurans at Bagram AB two months prior. The burning of Qurans made the news and resulted in protests and deaths of coalition members. The graffiti clarified the importance of reading the Quran, not burning it.