Tough travels in a religion-haunted, ruined land. There are three
phrases, writes Italian novelist and poet Albinati, that a
humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan needs to know how to say in
both Dari and Pashto, the country's major languages: "I am a good
man. I work for the UN. Please do not kill me." Not that Albinati,
to judge by this journal of three months in the field in the spring
and summer of 2002, is often in danger of being killed by an
assailant close enough to speak to; mostly, whether tucked away in
a crummy hotel room in Kabul or roaming from town to town in a UN
truck, he's imperiled by rockets and mortars fired from afar. He
faces other dangers: the strong desire to take up smoking again
after having quit a dozen years earlier, the temptation to drink
too much scotch ("Three glasses is the right number, the perfect
number to get rid of the day's rage without ending up completely
wrecked"). In between trying to suggest ways to impose order on
chaos-Albinati allows that, if elected mayor of the bombed-out
capital, the first thing he'd do "would be to give every street in
Kabul a name and put up a sign, so that everyone would have an
address, even the prefabs, the shanty towns, the muddy open spaces,
the heaps of stones"-and conduct a census of the countryside
(involving, among other things, counting sheep), Albinati marvels
at the resilience of the Afghan people and their capacity to endure
what would have broken just about any Westerner. Some of his
journal entries are oddly mundane (as when he watches Disney's
Jungle Book, humming the Italian version of "The Bare Necessities"
to himself), while others are thoughtful and moving, as when he
writes of the lives of street children: "What they want more than
anything else is to play." A solid contribution to a rising genre:
the noncombatant's war memoir. (Kirkus Reviews)
Winner of the prestigious John Florio Prize for Italian
Translation; A solid contribution to a rising genre: the
noncombatant's war memoir - Kirkus Review; First time that we see
the war through the eyes of a novelist and a poet; Royalties to be
donated to a charity providing housing for refugees in the
highlands of Afghanistan March 2002: the repatriation of Afghan
refugees begins. It is one of the largest migrations in history, an
exodus of biblical proportions, yet this time people are not
fleeing, but returning to their own country, where they find
demolished houses, mined fields and no water supplies. Edoardo
Albinati spent four months in Afghanistan working in the UNHCR
centres where the tide of returnees was at its peak. He travelled
around the cities of Kabul, Kandahar, the deserts and the rural
areas in search of solutions for the reintegration of the refugees.
This book - written with the zest of a diarist and peopled by a
myriad unforgettable faces and stories - is the daily account of
what he saw, heard and did (or tried to do) while hundreds of
thousands of people struggling for survival rolled past in
overcrowded trucks. It is the critical, impassioned testimony of a
gigantic collective effort whose outcome is still highly uncertain.
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