Chapter One
VILLAGES AND COMPOUNDS
In 1948, when I was born, most of Afghanistan
might as well have been living in Neolithic times. It
was a world of walled villages, each one inhabited by a
few large families, themselves linked in countless ways
through intermarriages stretching into the dim historical
memories of the eldest elders. These villages had no cars,
no carts even, no wheeled vehicles at all; no stores, no
shops, no electricity, no postal service, and no media except
rumors, storytelling, and the word of travelers passing
through. Virtually all the men were farmers. Virtually all
the women ran the households and raised the children.
Virtually all boys grew up to be like their fathers and all
girls like their mothers. The broad patterns of life never
changed, never had as far as any living generation could remember,
and presumably never would. People lived pretty
much as they had eight thousand years ago.
That was the countryside. The big cities, such as Kandahar
and Mazar-i-Sharif, were living in the fifteenth century
or so. And the ... read full excerpt from: West of Kabul, East of New York ebook
