Mark Manley

Documentary: Afghan Impressions: - People

Afghanistan makes you tired. The need is bone jarring. It's raw and it is relentless. It wears you down.

When I was last there in the Spring of 2007 there seemed still to be pockets of hope. I saw it mostly among women working for local NGOs that had been founded and were led by Afghan women. It was also apparent in the faces of street children going to school for the first time.

But in 2007 hope in Afghanistan felt tentative, dwindling, and like so much else in the country, tired.

I imagined it like a piece of gauze cloth stretched tight. You could see the misery through it, waiting on the other side.

Everyone I met seemed to carry a sense, spoken or unspoken, that the cloth was tearing...

A young girl in a literacy class at the Khair Khana Center for street children in Kabul.It seemed to me that resignation had seeped into the outlooks of most of the men I met in Afghanistan. The politicians and warlords had resumed their dominant status and the rest were resigned to their lot, a familiar male hierarchy reconstituted. But among some of the women, and the young girls going to school for the first time, it felt there had been a shift, an opening, and they were holding tight to a glimmer of hope that new possibilities and opportunities might yet be realized.
   
  
     
  
There are lots of literacy classes targeting children in Afghanistan, but she was enrolled in one of the few classes specifically for adults. At first I thought it was the light. Then, the angle at which she was leaning forward in the chair. I kept photographing her. Eventually I realized it was the look radiating from her face. I was never gonna catch it, but it was mesmerizing.According to UNICEF estimates, 87% of Afghan women can neither read nor write.
  
His face was broken. Caved in. It was in Balkh near the Uzbekistan border. He approached me, no words spoken. I'm sure he didn't speak English and I didn't speak Pashto, or Dari. He simply pointed at the camera around my neck, then towards himself. He wanted me to take his picture. I did.
   
Early morning, shortly after sunrise, I wandered into the tea house. It wasn't just quiet inside, it was soundless. For a moment it seemed like serenity had settled into that room and enveloped all of us. Then, it was gone.
     
  
   
  
     
  
   
  
     
  
   
  
Graves and graveyards litter the landscape in Afghanistan. He happened to be passing through this one, where we were, on the hillside on the edge of the old town above Kabul. He said nothing to me. I didn't know what to say to him.