Seeds for Afghanistan
By Jennifer Heath, with photography by Sheryl Shapiro
http://www.seedsofchange.com/enewsletter/issue_35/afghanistan.asp

We're riding along the Shomali road north of Kabul, Afghanistan, with a van full of seeds and engineers.

This highway was once called "The Green Tunnel," there were so many trees lining it on both sides. In 1979, as Soviet tanks trudged toward Kabul, they knocked them down, every one, for fear of mujahidin snipers. This is farm country: vineyards and wheat and orchards or fruit trees for family use shading the fields from the hard arid summer sun. In the 1990s, the Taliban, mostly Pakistanis, with young fundamentalist-trained Afghans in tow, came up from the South to conquer Afghanistan and in the process ripped all the grapevines and small fruit trees out by the roots to send back to Peshawar. They burned the homes and villages nearest the Shomali road. We drive past stubs of scorched vines here and there that the Taliban missed, past ruins of mud-brick buildings that now look like rock formations in Moab.

There are few trees left in Afghanistan. War combined with abject poverty contributed to an almost absolute deforestation throughout the country. The capital city of Kabul, the prize for all the brutal factions fighting across twenty-three years of war--once pristine, clean, full of glorious pines and spruce--is today a dusty landfill, a dump with tall empty dried trunks, few gardens, and none of the exquisite flowers that Afghans love. There's not a shrub left in what was once a magical, fragrant Land of Lilacs.

As if this weren't enough, Afghanistan has suffered a five-year drought and the famine that goes with it. War is a major cause of environmental destruction, worldwide. In post-war Afghanistan, the water is polluted, the climate changed by the constant heat of bombs and fire, and animals die or flee. It was a joy, and a surprise, just to see doves and magpies, to realize they had somehow survived.

I am an American who grew up in Afghanistan. I've been involved with that country's fate, one way and another, for decades. When the United States began bombing the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan after the tragedy of September 11, 2001, I saw, as did many Afghans, the opportunity at last for reconstruction. I am by profession a writer, and by passion, a gardener and environmentalist. So it was natural for me to think immediately of Seeds for Afghanistan. I put a call out through the internet, to friends and family by e-mail, made flyers and distributed them everywhere, and alerted the newspapers to my project. I asked only this: bring me seeds-- vegetables and flowers, anything that will grow in Zone 4, and I will see to it the Afghans receive them.

Of course, I had no idea how, in fact, I would get the seeds to Afghanistan, but as a believer in the "if you build it, they will come," theory of living, this seemed like the least of my worries.

Seeds for Afghanistan may have been the easiest campaign in the history of humanitarian efforts. People responded with astonishing generosity. It was not long before I was inundated. People dropped them anonymously by the hundreds in a milk box on my porch labeled "Seeds for Afghanistan." Word got out far beyond my home in Boulder, Colorado, and schools, church groups, garden clubs, and individuals took up the cause, so that each day my mailbox was chock-a-block full of manilla envelopes that vibrated like maracas as I carried them into the house. The internet and e-mail is a great blessing despite our society's cyber-imbalance: someone knew someone who knew someone and eventually my e-plea reached Seeds of Change.

In no time, my living room, my dining room and my den were covered with seeds. I think about 10,000 of these came from Seeds of Change, and they were, of course, a dream-come-true, for they are risk-free. We don't always know what seeds are treated with, but we knew that since they were organic, we could rely on Seeds of Change seed to be clean.

I spent hours sorting seeds. I tossed seeds that were inappropriate environmentally. No way, I told myself, do I want to go to Afghanistan and see a hillside covered with, say, kudzu, and my name all over it.

The first batches were sent through a group in Washington, D.C. called Kabultec and through a French outfit, Negar. But it wasn't long before I was recruited to join a non-profit out of Washington, D.C. called Afghans4Tomorrow, and as members traveled to the country, they carried suitcases full of seeds and medicines. We acquired cargo containers for sending clothing, school supplies, furniture, computers, even copying machines, and, of course, more seeds. The idea was to distribute seeds by hand to the needy, to avoid any black marketeering.

Within a year, A4T had identified a beautiful rural area called Farza, 60 kilometers north of Kabul, off the Shomali road, which was desperate indeed for seeds, but more desperate for water. We recruited volunteers from Engineers Without Borders-International and headed to Afghanistan, me for the first time in twenty-six years. Our duffels were overflowing with seeds, as well as medicines.

In Farza, we not only made plans to build a girl's school, at the request of the residents, but the EWB-International team surveyed for well sites and considered how best to advise about water management. And here, we distributed most of our seeds, though in Kabul we gave out hundreds of flower seeds, for Afghans love flowers. Even the Afghan army features a gulkhana or flower house on each of its bases.

In Kabul, we also gave seeds to humanitarian Mary MacMakin's PARSA (Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation Support for Afghanistan) for her Widows' Gardens. Mary has been in Afghanistan since I was a teenager, so I was not only delighted to reconnect with her, but overjoyed when she asked me to help teach some of the widows, whose backgrounds were varied and did not include gardening, how to plant the seeds and care for them. The day spent with these women was one of the most satisfying of my life. Each of the twenty widows in the program has been given a small house and a yard where they grow vegetables and flowers for their own use, and to sell for a small income.

When the work at Farza and in Kabul was done, and the engineers safely returned to the States until July when they'll return to Farza to begin the drilling, photographer and traveling pal Sheryl Shapiro and I headed north to Mazar-I-Sharif. As a child of the elite, I had never visited an Afghan farm, but now we found ourselves exploring a five-hundred-year-old homestead, where food is grown and cows, goats, sheep and chickens are raised for a family of at least fifteen.

While we tend toward "raised beds," many Afghans use "lowered beds," and an ancient, highly effective system of juies or irrigation ditches, which are flooded once a week, or in drier times, once every two weeks. The yields are incredible and I wished I had a whole season to spend with these folk--and those in mountainous Farza to learn what these extraordinary gardeners know from thousands of years of practice.

There are always new ideas in organic gardening--or water management--that can be shared, but I have often felt that the West has little business presuming to "teach" Afghans how to farm, or herd sheep, or impose any sort of "progress" upon people whose knowledge has been refined and passed down through millennia.

What is needed in Afghanistan are resources to feed and empower Afghans in their efforts toward reconstruction and a lasting peace. We need to help provide the trees for reforestation. We need to provide medicines against dysentery and other diseases, and help them clean up the water poisoned by war. We must help the Afghans build schools--then let them run the schools as they wish to--so they can educate their children, a dream every Afghan holds dear to her heart. We need to help Afghanistan enact environmental laws against the onslaught of opportunists who want oil and pipelines and mines and against those would turn small farms into agro-biz and against biopiracy such as we are now witnessing in India, among many other places.

And we need to continue sending seeds--good, clean and non-genetically modified. Peace begins one seed at a time.

Jennifer Heath is the founder of Seeds for Afghanistan in Boulder, Colorado. Seeds for Afghanistan has thus far sent more than 200,000 packs of vegetable and flower seeds to the Afghan people. Heath is the author of the novel A House White With Sorrow: A Ballad for Afghanistan, The Echoing Green: The Garden in Myth and Memory and forthcoming from Paulist Press in fall 2003, The Scimitar and the Veil: Extraordinary Women of Islam.

Sheryl Shapiro is a nationally and internationally published travel writer and photographer. Her work has appeared in Practical Horseman magazine, the Melbourne Herald Sun, and the Brisbane Sunday Mail, to name a few. She is an experienced Third-World traveler and teaches courses on lightweight travel. In recent months, she has been volunteering with Afghans4Tomorrow, and has garnered large donations from American corporations of medicines for clinics in Kabul and Farza, Afghanistan.

Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
(805) 962-2571
P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190
margie@sbpermaculture.org
www.sbpermaculture.org

"We are like trees, we must create new leaves, in new directions, in order to grow." - Anonymous