Swimming across Guantanamo
Afghan humor… and beaches
‘Guantanamo!’ says a woman, pointing at me. She smiles and gestures to me to sit down. I hesitate, but then all the women in her circle are beckoning me, saying ‘Gauntanamo’, nodding, and smiling.
I’m in a chai khana, or tea house, in central Afghanistan. I’d wandered upstairs to look for a bathroom but instead found this roomful of women eating qabuli, a traditional dish of lamb covered in rice, saffron, carrots, and raisins.
Three days earlier, when I’d touched down in the province, I learned that Guantanamo has a special meaning in this part of the world. I know the women aren’t associating me directly with a prison camp that still detains dozens of their countrymen.
So I sit down and we try to exchange pleasantries, quickly running through all the local language I know. We resort to smiling and gestures. A woman pretends she’s swimming and the others laugh. She holds up her index finger: first.
The Afghanistan we read about in the news is a terrifying place. But — and this is so obvious it only merits saying because most foreigners never consider it — it’s also home to millions who live relatively normal daily lives. A friend of mine, Nick, from Rochester, NY, had become one of them. He moved to Kabul to work for a telecoms company after college, then ended up playing professional soccer on one of the Kabul city teams.
In the summer of 2013, we traveled together to Bamiyan, a province in the center of the country best known for a pair of monumental 6th c. Buddha statues that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.
The region is also known for the Band-i-amir, a series of turquoise lakes that have squeezed their way out of the mountains over the last million years.
The smallest of the lakes, and the only one not clear to the bottom, is called Gola Panjeer, or the Lake of Cheese, but the locals have a different name for it. Because it is hard to get to, surrounded by cliffs and accessible only by a steep path, they call it Guantanamo.
Despite the hike, the lake is a prime destination, and on the day we visited was ringed with families barbecuing meat and wading in the shallows.
Nick and I had befriended a pair of Afghan cousins, Shams and Jawad, who were staying in the same guesthouse, and they had suggested a trip to Guantanamo for a picnic.
Shams and Nick prepared a barbecue while Jawad and I swam. Like the local women, I kept all my clothes on in the water: a loose, long shirt, skirt, and headscarf.
The weeds at the bottom of the lake were soft, nothing like the slimy Atlantic seaweed of my childhood. I searched for shells in the shallows, but there were none. The waters of the Band-i-Amir were not left by retreating seas or glaciers, like most lakes, and no rivers run through them. At 10,000 feet above sea level, the water has simply bubbled out of a series of faults in the unconsolidated rock near the earth’s surface. The altitude and isolation mean that any wildlife here either evolved locally or has been imported by humans.
On the other side of the lake, a group of Americans and Europeans had set up a small camp. We’d been on the same plane in but Nick and I had avoided them. They had spent the flight discussing, loudly, the cooler full of booze they were bringing into the province, which seemed rude to me. And they were clearly on a different spending track than we: they were staying at one of the two ‘western’ style hotels in town. By ‘western’ style I mean a fortified compound with multiple gunmen and two sets of security gates. Nick and I were staying at a traditional Afghan guesthouse with no security, for a couple of dollars a night.
I said I wanted to swim over and visit the foreigners’ camp, and Shams was aghast. Surely you can’t swim that far, he said. I assured him I could: it was less than a mile, and I was a swimmer in high school. I wrapped my headscarf tightly around my head and took off.
At the other side I felt overdressed. The foreigners were wearing bikinis or their underwear. They hadn’t had an opportunity to work on their tan in months, and the sunlight bounced off their white skin.
We talked about where they were from, what they were doing, who was dating whom. There is a saying that any foreigner who does time in Afghanistan comes home a hunk, a chunk, or a drunk: you either work out, eat, or drink to excess. They agreed they were all drunks, but they hadn’t brought enough booze to really make a trip of it. The only two who had managed to get tipsy, a British woman and Dutch man, danced to a tinny Rihanna track playing on someone’s iPhone.
Looking back across the lake, I saw families barbecuing, kids playing soccer, groups of women chatting while bouncing babies on their laps, old men smoking pipes and saying nothing. I could have been looking at a beach in Spain or California. Except here, the lake was called Guantanamo, and the women swam with their clothes on.
I can only imagine what the Afghans must have thought of the collection of pale bodies drinking and gyrating to inaudible music on the other side of the lake.
I swam back. Shams and Jawad gave me a round of applause. You’re going to be famous in this province, Shams said, I bet most of these people have never seen someone swim all the way across the lake, much less back again, even less a woman.
We hiked out of Guantanamo and drove to the shores of another, larger one of the Band-i-Amir lakes. The local municipality had banned motorboats but bought a series of paddle boats, and we hired one for a few cents. A half-constructed pier served as a diving board for dozens of boys, who jumped and flipped into the water. Some wore full clothing, like the women, but others stripped to their shirts and calf-length trousers. It was obvious the lakes drew visitors from all over the country, including many who had different values about proper dress and etiquette. But no one seemed to mind what others were wearing. They were on vacation.
Word of my Guantanamo swim traveled faster than we did. Someone who had been at the lake told Mukhtar, the proprietor of our guesthouse, about it, and he prepared another barbecue for dinner, saying I must have worked up a real appetite. Shams later told me he’d had more meat in one day than he usually ate in a month.
Over dinner, I was told that I look like Amanda Knox, the American student accused of murdering her English roommate while studying abroad in Italy. It’s true, Jawad said, Knox appears to have murdered her friend. But she is good looking, so it is a compliment, not meant to offend you.
This led to a discussion of which ethnicities we thought were the most attractive. It was a toss-up between Dutch and American men for me. Nick leaned towards Swedish women. Shams preferred the Japanese, but misunderstood the question — he thought we were talking about what race of people we liked and respected most, rather than which we found most physically attractive. The Japanese are peaceful, Shams said, and they have built many good roads in this region, much better than the roads the Indians build.
Jawad had no trouble deciding which race he thought was most attractive: the Pashto! He said, and shrieked with laughter at his own joke. The Pashto are the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan, and make up the majority of the Taliban. Jawad and Shams were of the Hazara ethnic group, which embraces a more liberal version of Islam and suffered terribly under Taliban rule. (Hazara militias were hardly innocent, as Nick reminds me when reading this. No one made it through that conflict with clean hands).
It was one of the few times that references to Afghanistan’s violent past ever came up in our days together. Americans, when they think of Afghanistan, think of it as a country at war. But for the people who live there, the conflict that has dominated international headlines for nearly four decades doesn’t take up much thought.
When Afghans I met talked about other ethnicities, they seldom referenced past injustices. The default was to make fun of the other group, the same way New Yorkers might make fun of people from the Midwest. According to Jawad and others, the Kandahari Pashto are all flaming homosexuals. ‘Wardak jokes’ (Google it) are the blonde jokes of Afghanistan.
Shams and Jawad assured me that they have plenty of friends from all ethnicities. But Shams’s wife is Hazara as well, and he agreed it would have been very odd if he’d chosen to marry a Pashto woman.
The next morning was spent in Dragon Valley, named for a giant-lizard-like rock formation that frames its edge. The dragon’s head has two gurgling mineral streams coming from what might be its eyes, so it is always crying. Shams seemed sad as well. He pointed out a field of solar panels nestled between two peaks to our west. They are ruining the beauty of this place, he said. There’s nowhere in the world like this and I don’t want it to change.
To me it was still spectacular. I’d fallen asleep on the plane ride in and hadn’t been able to appreciate the landscape. Now, from the top of the dragon’s head, I felt properly dwarfed by the mountains. The tallest in this area, Baba (‘Grandfather’), reaches nearly 20,000 ft. It always boggles my New England-bred mind to see mountains scratching the sky.
Walking through the bazaar later that evening, we ran into Najeeb, Istmatullah, and Hazan, a group of young men we’d encountered a few times over the holiday. Najeeb and Abdullah live in Kabul and work for international organizations, but Hazan lived in Bamiyan and was showing them around. They congratulated me on my swim across Guantanamo.
Najeeb and Abdullah were on their way back to Kabul the next morning by bus, which worried me, as the Kabul-Bamiyan road had been particularly unsafe in recent months, with lots of Taliban and insurgent activity. I asked them to text me when they got back to Kabul.
They didn’t. I got worried. Then they friended me on Facebook.
The Afghanistan I experienced — a land of holiday destinations named after prisons on the other side of the world, of solar panels blooming between ancient mountains, of Facebook — felt cosmopolitan and safe. Soccer, days at the beach, and peculiar visitors are much more interesting than dwelling on what’s happened in the past.
Too often we forget that there is life, and quite a lot of it, behind the headlines.
