14 Quotes by Kim barker

But at the time, a mark of how far down the rabbit hole I had fallen, I saw it as just another tragedy I needed to stuff in the growing box in the back of my head. Shut the top and move on.

I was also trying not to date in Kabul, as Afghanistan resembled Alaska if you were a woman – the odds were good but the goods were odd.

It wasn’t necessarily the booze and brothels. It was the growing gap in the country between the haves and have-nots, the corruption, the warlords now in parliament, the drug lords doubling as government officials, the general attitude of the foreigners from aid workers to the international troops, and the fact that no one ever seemed to be held accountable for anything.

I had seen more death – the tsunami, two different earthquakes. But I could somehow understand natural disasters. This was a human disaster, and I couldn’t make sense of the hate.

Regardless, I told my boss it was no longer a good idea for me to see Sharif. He was married, older, rich, and powerful. As a pleasant-looking, pedigree-lacking American with hair issues, I was an extremely unlikely paramour. But Sharif had ended our visit with a dangling proposition – the mysterious identity of a second potential friend. I decided to stick to a tapped-phone relationship.

I stood back from the tape. I felt almost done. I didn’t need to see any more bodies, didn’t want to stick my hand in any more human flesh, didn’t want to scrub any more people off the bottom of my shoes.

As the crisis in the country deepened, the Westerners would segregate themselves and retreat into their compounds, building a separate world in Kabul, free of the hassles of Afghanistan, free of Afghans.

Only in this madness was it possible to feel such purpose.

Afghanistan seemed familiar. It had jagged blue-and-purple mountains, big skies, and bearded men in pickup trucks stocked with guns and hate for the government. It was like Montana – just on different drugs. So.