Most Enjoyable Moment Meeting the Kids

It’s quite a bit different than what you would find here. I think it’s hard to describe. I mean culturally they are actually a fairly warm and welcoming people but you don’t just have Afghan culture you are dealing with because the Taliban really is an export from elsewhere so you have kind of got this clash of religious ideas into Afghan culture. We had the opportunity once to take a diplomat to the UN compound in Kandahar city and they didn’t let us go into the compound, they made us
wait outside for whatever diplomatic reasons there were and so we spent a few hours outside and we weren’t there very long and next thing you know there’s kids coming out of the woodwork and my one and only really enjoyable time with the locals in close proximity was with all these kids coming out and that was a great deal of fun, like kids everywhere. The language, of course, didn’t understand what people were saying but they could have been kids on your block or my block without any doubt whatsoever. Two young fellas wanted to take a picture with me. I had my digital camera out and I am trying to record all these events and they come over and they’re pointing at my camera going, you know, so we took a picture and then they wanted to see it and they are like… in their language. They are kids right? That was a lot of fun. The only time I really got to interact with the kids. I carried candy for the rest of the tour but they really didn’t want candy, what they wanted was, they wanted pencils. They kept trying to take all the pencils and paper you would give them because of course they could use that in school, that was more valuable than just about anything.