“The burqa is invisibility cloak that makes the journey possible”Test story

Journalist Kristin Solberg moved to the “death room” in a commune in Kabul — the room that was nearest road. After three years she leaves Afghanistan. Read her farewell with women who risk their lives for an education that gives second life.

The world is blue. Peripheral vision is gone, I’m struggling to breathe, and I squint through the wire lattice to curb the nausea. Nylon fabric crackles in his ears, and I have to concentrate to hear what Dr. Khadija Safi beside me in the backseat says.

- My mom says that if I go to Wardak, I’m going to be killed, she said.

- But we will all die sometime. If it happens in Wardak and Kabul, does not matter to me.

We drive from Kabul to her midwifery school in Wardak, one of the most volatile provinces in Afghanistan, and we have just received bad news:

The school has been bombed by the Taliban.

It’s not really totally unexpected. Wardak is a place where girls’ schools are bombed, burned and threatened to close, where people like Dr. Khadija some are considered traitors worthy of death, where the night letters with threats will be awarded to teachers who teach girls, of women who dare to working.

Where foreigners risk being abducted and killed if they are discovered.

Burka or peace?

To go there I have to hide myself under a burka. At the moment I enter it whatsoever I become transformed from an all seeing, a nobody notices.No rebels along the way care about a seemingly Afghan woman in the back of an old, dented Toyota Corolla.

The burqa is invisibility cloak that makes the journey possible.

Dr. Khadija lived under the Taliban, and hate the burka. It is not Islamic, she says, but it’s still not the one she uses her powers.

- If I had the choice between the burqa and peace, or neither, I would definitely have chosen the burqa, she tends to say.

Now, she has neither.

“Welcome to the land of the brave”

Two and a half years earlier, in July 2010: It looks like I had imagined.When I look out the airplane window and down on Afghanistan for the first time, I see the bare, brown mountains. Afghanistan, the mountains deforested land. The country where strangers are invited on Palou and green tea, but where the wrong choice at an intersection can cost a life.

The country where Avicenna, the father of modern medicine, was educated, but which today has among the worst health and education services in the world. The country that has been raped by war, victim of power politics and his own unhappy geography, for three decades, but showing a pride and independence that scares everybody — the British, the Soviets, NATO — who come here with illusions of easy victory.

The country is known as the world’s worst for women, to the extent it is possible to compare such, but where women show greater strength and courage than I have ever seen.

But all these things I have yet to find out. It is the first time I landed in Kabul. “Welcome to the land of the brave,” it says in English on an advertising poster for a mobile phone company at the airport. In the long queue at passport control takes the women shawls from the bag and place it over your hair.

I see them and do the same.

War Profiteers and aid workers

Kabul is a city with barbed wire, high walls and Kalashnikovs. The town has infrastructure for half a million inhabitants, but is home to five million. In the streets fighting old Toyota Corolla for space with foreigners’ bulletproof firehjultrekkere.

Illegal settlements without water and sewage creeping up rocky hillside.On the outskirts live IDPs in tent camps, while huge, many-colored villas with columns and statues being built in the city. Poppy Palaces, they are called because it is said they are funded by the drug trade. They might as well be funded by corruption, by krigsdollarene.

There are more foreigners here than I had expected, they fill a few bars and a handful of overpriced restaurants in the evenings.

Here is Paddy Irishman who lost his British fiancee two weeks before the wedding, when her throat was cut by rebels in Badakhshan province.

Here is the North American feminist aid worker who after she moved to Kabul want to be beaten by their lovers.

Here is the American who build new camps for the soldiers who constantly becoming more and Rottweiler who call her “honey”.

Here are war profiteers, idealists, cynics and krigsjunkiene.

Here they are escaping from something, and those seeking something, those who have just arrived, and those who have been here too, too long.

- What feeling are you left with? he asks. — As if my soul is beaten, I reply.