mine

Bamiyan – The De-Miners

Our job is to clean up the area for your safety, Sir! This is the life of those people, who risk their life, to find mines and unexploded materials around the Great Buddha statues of Bamiyan. They are those in uniform with Farsi letters: Main Paki, and English writing: De-mining. They are the de-miners working in Bamiyan. The encounter the day before with Saboor and Jamil brought me to learn deeper about the life of the de-miners. Achmad Saboor, a Tajik driver from Panjshir, picked me up to see their work around the Buddha hills. In that car I knew Waisuddin, or Wais, a Pashtun man in his thirties, with very strong short body. He was bearded but it seemed that was just trimmed, he also speaks very good English. Wais is among the most important persons in this demining project of Bamiyan Buddha. I was lucky to know him personally. And he was happy that he could practise his English with me. He is the commander of MCPA (Mine Clearance Planning Agency). The previously introduced Achmad Saboor and Jamil, work in other organization: MDC (Mine Dog Center), sometimes also called as MDG (Mine Dog Group). Saboor is the driver [...]

June 21, 2006 // 0 Comments

Bamyan – A Day in Bamyan

A happy day in Bamiyan From a tailor in the second floor of a wooden simple building in the bazaar of Sharh-e-Nao, I heard an interesting story from a man named Ramazan. When I told him where I came from, he said, “ooo Indonesia,” then he named some Indonesian islands: Java, Bali, Roti. He suprised me in two ways. First, it was already surprising that an Afghan in this little village of Central Afghanistan, where some people still thought that Indonesia was somewhere near London. The second thing was Roti. Roti is a small island, with such far flung location even most of Indonesians don’t know whee it is exactly. So how Ramazan knew about Roti? There is an interesting story behind this. In fact he had lived in Roti for fourteen months between 2001 and 2002. Besides Roti, he has been to Jakarta and Bali also, and attempted to get into Australia by risking his life on boat with other 240 fellow refugees, trying to get a new better life in ‘modern’ countries, escaping the rule of Taliban administration. It cost them 5000 Af to get to Karachi, where then they got the boat with ticket price 700$ per [...]

June 20, 2006 // 0 Comments

Bamiyan – The Mined Buddha

War and Peace. This is the first impression of Bamiyan Buddha I saw back in 2003 This is still re-visiting trips of what I have visited three years ago. The devastated Buddha statues of Bamiyan are still quiet empty niches on the hill surrounded by green farming land. It was extremely quiet this morning, as children were already in the school and men started working. No other obvious ‘tourists’. But it was not that quiet either. This time there were many workers working in the area. There were two groups of them. First, those with yellow helmet, working near the big niches of the Big Buddha (55 m) and further on the Small Buddha (38 m). The Buddha niches are both fenced now, requesting visitors to pay for ticket to enter (I don’t know exactly about the ticket stuff as it seems it was OK to wander around without ticket, and the ticket office was always closed). Actually the workers just started working today. Their task is to remove the rubbish stones from the area. A worker told me that they wanted to re-build the Buddhas, but I didnt believe him. There have been many organizations saying so, but it [...]

June 18, 2006 // 4 Comments