Afghanistan in the 50s & 60s
 

Some surprising photographs of Afghanistan like this one.

In the late 70's I worked with a guy from Kabul. He was from a family of 14 kids. He seemed pretty normal, a bit shy. I asked him about his siblings and he told me about 5 of them had died very young. I was really shocked and asked him how they'd died, and he said, rather nonchalantly, "You know, sometimes it's too cold, or there isn't enough food, or you get sick..."

You know?

Up until then, I didn't know people still lived in the early 1800s.

So wait, 5 of the 14 had died? Or 5 died and another 14 lived?

5/14ths died.

Though a few years ago I was teaching photography at a Vermont college and two of my students came from big families. One from a family of 17 kids, the other 18 kids. Day-um. (Did your mother live in a shoe?)

I wish that I'd been old enough in the early-mid 70s to have travelled through Afghanistan.

If you want a look at older Afghanistan and the changes, a good book is The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. One of the best books I've read, methinks.

Followed up by A Thousand Splendid Suns, which shows the lives of two Afghan women. Breathtaking book.

I've said this before somewhere but. I remember a report on the radio where they discussed that the current ultra conservatism in muslim countries was a newer movement that came about in the late '60s ( or so ?) Older people remember when things were much more less restrictive, especially for women, in many parts of the muslim world, as pictured in the OP in Afghanistan.
In the modern rhetoric these counties are often reffered to as stuck in the Dark Ages, when in fact they only Europes Dark Ages and at that same time the muslim world was the cradle of science and learning for the world.

We were talking about this at the salle last night. I was wondering aloud how much impact warring with the West had made (am back to reading The Siege of Vienna) when a guy mentioned two things which probably harmed them more. Good Muslims can't charge interest and instead of giving property to the oldest male heir they traditionally split things up evenly. Specific to Afghanistan, I'd say a lot of the problem was the conflict between communism and liberal democracy exacerbated by isolation.

I read both last year (in Spanish....they both sounded very translated, but perhaps because they were translated into Spanish-Spanish rather than Latin American Spanish) while on my 6 month subsidised holiday in Northern Chile. Well worth reading and I'd recommend them to anyone although they were both very hard to read in terms of some of the subject matter.