Product localisation in a country where under the Taliban female faces were scratched from shampoo bottles.

Out on the trail bike, stop in on a building materials supply yard where branches are clustered by thickness and stacked up around simple rectangular frames – the pocket of shade inside this occidental shelters becomes the perfect place to take respite from the intense midday heat.

This blows away anything I’ve seen in a art gallery in the past decade.

It’s striking how Tupac/Che/Marley-like the photos of Masood are.

Wheelbarrows are the Afghan market trader’s display-transport of choice – with the wares on sale -from fruit to underwear. This seller sacrifices one fish to the midday heat to advertise what is under the wetted cloth sack.

Didn’t pop inside, but if its anything like my experiences from other working districts

Darting around Mazar e Sharif on the back of a trial-bike doing ad-hoc interviews with manual labourers. There are consequences to asking questions and taking photos where-ever you go, but I haven’t felt experienced the risk/rewards quite as acutely as these last few weeks.

Take a photo of a building site in London or Los Angeles and the biggest issue you are likely to come up against is illegal labour – undocumented and/or untaxed. But in Afghanistan the primary issue of turning up on a building site is likely to be who owns the property being built, and where they got the money to fund the construction.

Some conversations you want to get into, and some you don’t.

Having said that – working at the pace we’re at – hopping onto and off of the bike to shoot photos, and the fact that my motorbike driver’s identity is obscured by a headscarf that covers his entire face save for his dark glasses, I suspect that we’re the ones under suspicion.

Male libido enhancers for sale on the Kabul streets. Given the high volume of fakes, how do consumers judge what is real? Related presentation on the packaging of such products in China here.

How to market medication at a illiterate/semi-literate consumer base?

Any kite that comes too low is fair game – the first person to catch it, owns it – hence the cricket/baseball style person-spacing on the hillside.

The great thing about layered airport security is that you get to meet the same people over and over and over.

Today I get to eavesdrop on the minutia of the American who wore a shirt large enough to accommodate a bullet proof vest, and his compatriot who whispered to no-one in particular “this is just like basic training” as we hung onto the frame of an open shuttle bus door en route to the international terminal

This is just like basic training.

But training for what?

“There was a Major in Fort Bragg that could speak about 8 languages – Dari, Pashto, Russian, Mandarin Chinese all the difficult ones – he could be in a room with different people and switch between them without pausing.”

“Shit”

“Yeah, Amazing”

“He could absorb new languages like that, it was scary”

“It’s not about intelligence – some people have it, others don’t. I know some smart people who really struggle with it – take Brad, months in and he still doesn’t get it”

“My wife struggles with English on the phone sometimes, and my Arabic is not good enough either. We have to be in the same room for it to work”

“What lanaguages to they speak at the Bureau in Cairo?…”

I walk up to a guard who waves me back to an imagnary line. “Wait there”

By the time we shuffled through the forth checkpoint their conversation had moved on, and my mind drifted to the coming weeks of meetings and presentations and conferences and client pitches and hotels with showers that work and electricity that doesn’t cut out and bread that is round not flat, and where the sounds that travel over the compound wall don’t include imams, helicopters or hand-pulled ice cream carts. I’ll miss the opportunities for conversations that I couldn’t have elsewhere but I won’t miss the razorwire.

Every trip needs a bit of decompression. This is mine, right here.

An apparent thief caught and about to be repeatedly, violently hit by one of the officers. The need in any society for people to see that justice will be done and our faith that the legal system will meter out justice?

The street where this was taken is close to the hawala agents and money changers – with so much cash openly exchanged the need to project the rule of law, and the consequences when those laws are broken is high.

Given the situation in Afghanistan how smart is it to conduct street/ad-hoc research on the ground? To answer this it’s worth reflecting on the working models for 3 different foreigner roles in Afghanistan: the military; NGO staff and journalists.

The military and those that work alongside the military consider themselves targets every time they step off the base – they’re armed and they typically don’t ride in anything less than a SUV. Where traffic allows – their convoys prefer to go at high speed through the city, and on a mundane level they are disliked by everyone else because they generate traffic jams when they go by. If you’re sitting in traffic – your phone call may be dropped when they drive by because they carry mobile phone signal jammers, to foil the remote detonation of IEDs. (Those of you interested in how the Army applies anthropological skills to their own operations here should read this and this).

Most of the NGO staff here live in compounds with barbed wire-topped high-walls and Kalashnikov wielding armed guards at the entrance and if they wish to keep their jobs, they abide by strict rules that dictate where they can go when. Their compounds may have a safe room and planned escape routes, the larger ones have meaty barriers, layers of protection and look-out posts. NGO staff will have a list of places they can and cannot go in the city – based on a security assessment plus current chatter. As an example – a number of restaurants and cafes in Kabul that are frequented by foreigners have previously been considered secure enough, but are now off-limits because current chatter suggesting that they are active targets.

NGO staff forays outside their compound are approved by their security team and a trip through the city might not actually involve their feet touching the ground: personnel climb into a car inside their compound; drive through the city, and if the destination venue allows they pull the vehicle into the compound before stepping out. Many venues such don’t have space for parking so the car pulls up and the passenger walks the 5-10 steps from the car door. For NGOs and other organisations operating in at the more secure/paranoid end of the scale an interview with a farmer might require a back-up vehicle; 2 drivers and 3 or 4 security – which obviously affects the dynamics of any conversation that takes place. Protocols dictate that field staff don’t go out before 10am – more ‘security events’ happen in early morning apparently. In an environment where you need to sync with the driver and wait for clearance to leave spontaneity is deliberately impossible. NGO staff generally avoid hanging out anywhere where the military, or military contractors are found partly because the the latter are more likely to be targeted; and partly because of the stark difference in attitude about what is going on here and what to do about it.

The journalist model involves hiring a driver and/or fixer, travel light and rely on an unpredictable schedule to throw off any pre-mediated violence or kidnapping – though since their work sometimes involves spending time with people who are targets this risk can be extended to them. The judgement call about where to go when includes contextual understanding; personal network; and relying on the advise of their fixer, but is ultimately made by the journalist.

The research that we’ve been conducting these past weeks in Afghanistan have been based around the journalist model – and broadly speaking its worked well. A core team of myself and Panthea rotating in mixed-gender local fixers depending on the city.

One area where we’ve deviated from the journalist norm is in our use of transport: motorbikes have helped us beat the traffic and frankly are a more interesting way to traverse the city. Hiring a driver with a trial-bike can open up a whole world that is otherwise logistically off-limits, although most bikes are of the on-road variety. We’ve tried three-on-a-bike, but its a bit unwieldy. A motorbike + driver can be yours in Afghanistan for anywhere between 1,400 to 3,000 Afghanis ( 25 – 50 Euros) a day. Those interested in conducting street research here should read this.

There are numerous people here who don’t fit neatly into what I’ve described here, for example NGO staff may live in a regular compound with no distinct security.

When it comes to security and organisations I’ve long learned that its best not to ask the question if you’re not prepared to listen to the answer. If you ask and don’t follow the rules someone’s job can be on the line as and when you get into trouble, and to put it simply when that happens it’s likely that someone will be tasked to pull you out of it. Risk is rarely personal, and sometimes its best not to ask.

Each visit to Afghanistan builds on my understanding of what works and what doesn’t and I appreciate how much there still is to learn. How do the risks of working out on the streets stack up compared to other countries? I’m not pretending its a cake-walk but I probably have a greater chance of being shot in Chicago, of being run over in Shanghai, of being pick-pocketed in Milan. The same goes for you.

Our local guides here schooled us on Afghan romance 101 – how boys/men and girls/women find ways to bridge the significant gulf between the sexes here in a country where, aside from family males/females are kept apart, and where chance encounters are lessened by women covering their faces in public. As a affordable, pocketable device that supports private communication the mobile phone is well positioned to nudge couples towards romance and even love marriages, but how do couples meet in the first place? Amongst the relatively limited face to face opportunities is the practice of randomly calling a phone number and staying on the line depending on who picks up and what they say. Think Chatroulette but for phones.

Which makes me wonder what strategies would-be remote lovers adopt to find or be found? Given that there is a nascent marketplace for prepaid numbers – are certain numbers, or number sequences more likely to be associated with being single? With romance? What numbers increase the odds of being randomly dialed? Which of the 5 major local operators is most closely associated with the profile of a suitable partner? And ultimately what services could legitimately or otherwise increase the likelihood of connecting would-be couples?

Related: the speed dating in Tehran, and the practice of Bluetoothme in Egypt and beyond.

Billboard for one of the ~406 female candidates in the upcoming Afghan election: 68, or roughly ~20% of the seats are reserved for women: posters include the candidates face plus a number and a symbol that will also appear on the voting ballot to support illiterate voters.

Cheese separated by leaves.

One method we’ve experimented with here in Afghanistan is a varient of the ad-hoc, group street interview – an example above showing Panthea (interviewer) and Hamid (local fixer/translator) with a group of manual labourers in Jalalabad.

Group interviews are tough to pull off and gather meaningful data in any culture or context, in part because everyone wants to chime-in – but with the right approach they are an acceptable way to take a broad snapshot or pulse on a topic. Group questions like: “how many people here ….” work well to get the crowd aligned with the theme and process before targeting individuals with questions.

To start with the interviewer & translator approach the target participants in the street an act that typically draws a crowd. There’s a critical opening moment in any group interview that is especially pertinent here, where the team need to understand and react to the crowds’ intent – if there is any hostility what level of risk does it present and (how) can it be mitigated? For example the photos on this post were taken on a day when there were demonstrations in Jalalabad protesting against the continued occupation of ISAF forces in Afghanistan, a day when there’s a greater likelihood of crossing paths with someone with a bone to pick.

Intense day-time heat aside, our experiences with this method were positive – in the push-and-shove of the crowd strangers were looking out our female interviewer to ensure she wasn’t jostled or touched, and the crowd dynamics were just-about manageable. The team needs to stay aware of the crowd sentiment throughout the session.

Given that a smaller team is nearly always better, three people works best: an interviewer + translator + photographer, with the fixer/translator focusing one the interview the photographer can hang back and keeping an eye of the dynamics at the edges of the crowd. As well as exploring the subject matter, the interviewer + translator need to take on the skills of a circus ring master and occasionally strict school teacher.

One sweet moment on this study came during the an interview with a crowd of opium junkies under a bridge in Kabul – the interview circle was at any time between 20 and 30 people, with a pretty grim backdrop of ~200 people/junkies either chasing the dragon plotting how to get their next fix or passed out. Panthea’s warm up questions included the wonderfully perky “so, show of hands, how many people here rob to feed their habit?”. Hands are raised.

Memorable stuff.

How do you design a service that relies on absolute location awareness, when in this context everyone thinks in terms of relative location: “up the hill on the right, next to the second Roshan vendor, then down the alley to the first water pump and take the last door on your left?”. Oh, and theres almost no street signs. And little in the way of streets.

Spent the morning clinging off the back of a trail bike on ‘roads’ that would be considered off-road in most countries but which is resolutely on-road here in Afghanistan. Interviews with manual labourers building out the city suburbs.

CDs and DVDs are the medium of choice for the discerning Afghani, although on the mobile phone digital side-loading reigns supreme.

Interviews with a generator repair shop – in Afghanistan if you want reliable electricity you supply your own. Not sure where this oil can is manufactured but there’s something holistic and perfectly balanced about its use.

Evolution of the street charging services in a city where only a few have uninterrupted access to mains electricity, and many have none. With each battery & phone tagged with a number.

See the charging thread.

A headless couple advertising wedding photography services – Photoshop skills are fairly sophisticated here – with the background, heads and extras such as basking lions added later.

In China I’ve seen the practice of married couples retrospectively purchasing ‘ideal wedding’ photos, because when they got married the price was not an option.

The use of dense bush as a dust & window shade on this traffic police box.