Word: kabul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Rodriguez was a disaster at disaster relief, but she brought along some tools that proved providential. "I never travel without my scissors," she says in The Kabul Beauty School, her amusing, inspiring account of good intentions gone platinum, with streaks. Rodriguez had worked as a beautician in Michigan, and when word of her skills got out, fellow aid workers besieged her for haircuts. Before long, she realized her real destiny was training Afghanistan's oppressed, burqa-encased women to support themselves as hairdressers...
...reason enough. As an American living in Asia for six years, now in Delhi, I find running to be a routine that travels well, a way to create constancy in a life of motion, and a wonderful way to see places at a slower pace. I hope to add Kabul and the Mongolian countryside to the list of far-flung places where I've managed to run. But for now, here are six standout choices for the discerning globetrotter...
When posted to Kabul, most people dress like they're on a mountaineering expedition. Rory Stewart, on the other hand, gets fitted out on Savile Row. Settling into a tattered armchair in the Afghan capital's Gandamak bar-named after the battlefield where British troops were defeated by the Afghans in 1842 during the first Anglo-Afghan war-the Eton and Oxford alumnus looks and sometimes sounds like an unreconstructed colonial nawab. He clasps his hands behind his head, exposing a pair of malachite cufflinks that glitter against gleaming white cuffs. "The secret to a good suit," he muses...
...Stewart does it through winning community support. For the past year, he has labored tirelessly to transform the Murad Khane slum in Kabul's 200-year-old city center into a heritage district and tourist magnet for Afghans and foreigners alike. At first, local reaction was about the same as one would expect if some bowler-hatted Brit showed up at a Rio favela and proposed that he help residents spruce the place up. "I told him he would fail," says Palawan Aziz, the neighborhood's headman and now the project's strongest supporter. Stewart persevered, visiting residents and charming...
...school is based on Prince Charles' School of Traditional Arts in London, which so impressed President Karzai on a visit to the British capital that he decided to set up something similar in Kabul. Stewart-who while in Iraq had set up a carpentry school and helped refurbish an old bazaar-was asked to launch it and arrived in Kabul in 2005. Under Stewart's stewardship, the school has become a substantial development program that provides jobs and has improved the lives of the 700 residents of Murad Khane. "I wouldn't see the point of teaching this stuff unless...