Guns and Roses - A Voice From Kandahar......Sarah Chayes

[Guest guest]

This was e-mailed to me and I figured some folks here might find it an

interesting read!

 

*Smile*

Chris (list mom)

http://www.alittleolfactory.com

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Guns and Roses

 

Photo by Sarah Chayes

 

Ali Ahmad of the Arghand cooperative.

 

An e-mail message arrived last week, from a woman in Canada: " I bought

some of your soap; it is poetry that fits in the palm of the hand. "

 

Excessive kindness, no doubt. And yet, when I watch Nurallah - a former

police bodyguard - sit cross-legged to sort rose petals, or shout, his

face split in a grin, to come quick and look how much essential oil this

batch of Artemisia produced, I have to say that poetry is also the word

that comes to my mind.

The idea for our cooperative, Arghand, grew out of a conversation with

village elders in the district of Arghandab, a tangle of pomegranate

orchards on the far side of the hulking rocks that watch over Kandahar

to the north. At the time, I was running a dairy cooperative, and we

collected much of our milk from this village, our truck stopping like a

school bus for children hauling jerry-cans and pails and 2-liter Coke

bottles. I was about to leave Afghanistan for six months, and I was

meeting with the village to say goodbye. We touched on what might come

in the future. " Milk is all very well, " said one of the wizened elders,

wrapped modestly in his shawl and kneeling within the circle of his

peers. " But for us, really, it's pocket money. Why don't you work with

grapes, or pomegranates? Our fruit is our mainstay. "

 

Indeed, though it seems incredible given the desolation of the

landscape, fruit has been the mainstay of this region for millennia.

Cuneiform tablets record Kandahar's tribute to the Sumerian Empire in

Babylon, counted in grapes - perhaps the same tiny oval grapes that are

coming ripe now, tender green and almost painfully sweet. The scruffy,

slender-twigged trees that give Arghandab the look of an abrupt swatch

of forest produce tons of ruby-packed pomegranates. And there are

almonds and apricots and ambrosial melons - now heaped up on street

corners all over town, shaded by scraps of cloth held up on four sticks.

Farmers extract these treasures from the earth with painstaking effort

and love.

 

Listening to the villagers, a few thoughts jostled into my mind. These

jewels they grow are valuable, I reflected. There is no need to

introduce unfamiliar cash crops like saffron or jojoba. The main

challenge is getting Kandahar fruit to a high-paying market - a

challenge that could be met in part, I thought, by transforming it into

something lighter and less perishable than fresh produce. Whence came

the idea of skin-care products. Sweet almond oil, apricot kernel oil and

many other luscious oils we girls hanker to slather on our skin are

derived from fruits grown around Kandahar. And what about pomegranate

seed oil? I was fantasizing, but I was sure it was possible.

 

I am a recovering journalist. All my life I've made words, not soap. But

after watching the owner of a New Hampshire company called Luscious

Lathers cook up a batch on her kitchen stove, I realized the process is

not rocket science. With soap, as with most concoctions, the secret is

in the ingredients. And those we would derive from Kandahar's treasures.

 

And so I embarked on 18 months of study and discovery. During my break,

home in Paris and in Boston, I pored over Internet descriptions of seed

oil extractors and essential oil stills. I bought a book called

" Soapmaker's Companion " and wore out its pages. I learned about

" saponification values, " lipids and lye formulas. Back in Kandahar,

botany and chemistry presented themselves to me. Pomegranate juice, I

was astonished to learn, is pH sensitive and acts like litmus: if you

pour a jug of the magenta liquid into fresh soap, which is strongly

alkaline, it turns . blue.

 

Equally exciting has been the plant lore. The Arghand guys - young men

who had worked for me before, plus Nurallah, who joined us last summer

after the police chief was killed - outdid each other discovering

things. Karim found castor beans growing all over Kandahar. Abd al-Ahad

came back from the bazaar one day clutching bundles of roots. One was

golden yellow and sweet: licorice. Another was twiggy and pinky-orange

in cross section: madder root, the source of the red dye used in carpets

here. And then there was a thick, fleshy black bundle with layers of

papery skin: alkanet root. Another litmus-like plant, alkanet provides

the purple-blue swirls in our anisette soap.

 

Nurallah brought a little bag of peacock-blue beads the size of large

peas. They crunched in my mouth and gave off an evergreen flavor. A call

to my local agriculture guru and a search on Google told me they were

Pistacia khinjak, a variety of wild pistachio. They will make the base

for one of the bath oils we plan to market next year.

 

The discovery with the greatest economic potential has been that the

scraggly local rose that grows almost wild here - with pungent blooms

that burst open like pink fireworks for a few days in May - is Rosa

damascena, the one variety that is distilled to make rose oil, a

foundation for fine perfumes and that is worth about $10 per milliliter

on the international commodities market. Distilling rosewater is a

traditional craft here, I learned; women used to do it in homemade

stills. But war and drought have killed many of the rose bushes, and the

market has contracted. Now, only dried petals, not fresh ones, are

available in the bazaar. (People buy a handful now and then for

medicinal purposes; herbal medicine practitioners here prescribe roses

for depression.) So this spring, Arghand contracted with eight farmers

to plant a half-acre each of Kandahar roses. We provided the cuttings,

the tractor time and the labor for planting, and a guarantee of purchase

for five years. It is a tiny step. Still I can't help conjuring the

image: fields of roses replacing poppies around Kandahar.

We have suffered plenty of false starts and dead ends. For a month, we

slaved over 400 kilos of grapes, cooking them down to jelly that few

people bought, all for a pitiful yield of seeds. (Grapeseed oil will not

be incorporated in Arghand products anytime soon.) And yet our labors

have also resulted in seven varieties of unrivaled soap, which look like

river-polished lumps of marble, and give lather like silk.

 

(A small group of pilot retailers in the United States and Canada now

stock them. And over the past year, volunteers have gathered around us:

A French-Canadian Web designer helped us with our site, and high school

students in Wellesley, Mass., and Marin County, Calif., have helped us

with sales and logistics.)

 

Equally important has been our effort to establish a friendly and

egalitarian working environment inside the Arghand compound - basically,

a walled one-story building with space for two workshops, an office, the

guys' sleeping room and mine and, below, a vaulted cellar where we cure

the soap. Afghan society is formal and rigidly hierarchical, and for all

who work here to enjoy the same status shatters convention. I described

our system to another expat recently: the three Arghand men take turns

by week, the man of the week doing all the shopping in the bazaar, as

well as the meal service, washing up and housecleaning. " Ha! " said my

friend. " How many have you fired? " Not a one. It has been a pleasure to

watch men and women feel increasingly free to hazard their opinions, and

to suggest improved ways of doing things, or a new plant to distill.

 

I know: We are talking about a total of eight cooperative members.

Nothing I have just described makes the least difference to the big

picture. And yet, in some ways, I experience Arghand as an antidote to

the big picture. This work - tactile, clean, fragrant, collaborative -

is such good therapy. If we can't clean up Afghanistan, or effectively

encourage its democracy outside our gates, at least we can take pleasure

in creating something beautiful inside.

If only the big picture did not keep intruding. The village where I used

to buy milk does not want us to fetch pomegranates after all. The elders

are afraid of retaliation. And our rose gardens are in Panjwayi, now a

battlefield.

[Guest guest]

That’s fascinating. Thanks for a ray of hope concerning that region!

 

 

 

Dave

 

 

--

 

 

Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.10.1/391 - Release 7/18/2006

 

 

 

--

 

 

Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.10.3/394 - Release 7/20/2006