Thailand to Afghanistan

1. The king's sister died yesterday. Everyone is requested to wear black and white for the next fifteen days. The traffic was light on the way back from the airport. An unusual occurence. Apparently many people were outside the Palace to show their respects.

2. According to Kaaren and others, Thai people can be frustrating to work with particularly if you come from the West. They live for the day and have scant regard for time management and deadlines. Perhaps a different kind of management from our customary style. Kaaren organises her employees.

3. The business section of yesterday's newspaper carried an article about her boss who has just written a book in Thai. He was pleased that none of his employees attended the book launch, and that they were at their desks working. He reported that the concept of working rather than participating in activities just to please the boss had finally filtered through.

4. Comments on Afghanistan from Rory Stewart. 'Most of the policy makers knew next to nothing abot the villages where 90% of the population of Afghanistan lives. They came from post-modern, secular, globalised states with liberal traditions in law and government. It was natural for them to initiate projects on urban design, women's rights ....But what did they understand of Seyyed Kerbalahi's wife who had not moved more than five kilometres from her home in forty years? Or Dr. Habibullah the wet who carried an automatic weapon in the way they caried a briefcase. The villagers whom I had met were mostly illiterate, far from electricity or television, knew very little about the outside world and had very distinctive attitudes towards politics, Islam and ethnicity. Policy makers did not have the time, structures or resources for a serious study of an alien culture. They justified their lack of knowlede and experience by focusing on poverty and implying that dramatic cultural differences did not exist. The differences between the policy makers and a Hazara such as Ali went much deeper than his lack of food. Ali rarely worried about where his next meal was coming from. If he defined himself it was chiefly as a Muslim and a Hazara, not as a hungry Afghan.

Rory Stewart reports that within a week's walk he had come across areas where the local begs had been toppled by Iranian-funded social revolution and others where feudal structures were still in place, areas where the vilence had been inflicted by the Taliban and areas where the villagers were inflicting it on each other.

4. Religions, like camel caravans, seem to avoid mountain passes. Discuss.

The traveller