Unwrapping the Fab Lab

The Fab Lab is slowling starting to blossom as boxes get ripped open and funky, little gadgets start to appear. The garganteous shop bot is almost complete and the laser cutter, which has been the display machine of the lab, has been up and running for days. Most of the rooms have been painted and the electricians are in the (slow) process of of making sure each room has reliable power.

I was given the mentally numbing but oddly satisfying task of organizing the electronics room. With air conditioning flowing and Old Crow Medicine Show blaring in the background, I spent the better part of a day finding homes for little processors and resistors. I'm pretty sure I ruined some of the bits and pieces by taking them out of their anti-static compartments, but I say that if the little buggers can't handle a little static then they'll never make it in the real world. It's a mean, lonely, staticy world out there.

Rashid and Masoud, two IT fellows from Nangarhar University, have also been helping prep the lab. They've been working on setting up the network and other computery-type things.

Guess who has experience with a gun...

Fieldtrip off the Compound

So after a week of pleading, we somehow talked the boys into taking us on a fieldtrip to the mountains. We loaded up the car with two cases of water and lots of guns, the two necessities for a car trip in Afghanistan. Our first stop was an isolated village about an hour outside of Jalalabad. The area saw a lot of fighting during the Afghan civil war and many of the villagers have not returned after fleeing to Pakistan 20 years ago. Shem had met the village doctor on a previous trip and so we tried to track him down. Unfortunately he wasn't around, but Shem woke up a couple villagers and we had a brief chat. The picture below is of the village clinic, two bed racks underneath a bamboo cover.

There were at least three graveyards in the village, filled with large blocks of stone marking all of the lives lost. I would guess that there were about 100 graves for every villager.

The closest village to the one we visited had been completely abondoned during the civil war. The mud buildings were pockmarked with bullet and rocket holes.

On our way back to the main road (and to the firing range!) we followed a canal that served as the only source of drinking water and irrigation for the area. It was a hot, hot afternoon so men, women, kids, goats and cows were all lounging under the trees by the canal. The road also went by an old UN refugee camp that is still being used by some families. Several of the kids dove into the canal as we drove by, I don't know if they were showing off or trying to hide.

A Taj Family Portrait

An Intro to the Taj

Life at the Taj ain't all that bad. It's a huge walled-off compound in what one might call the suburbs of Jalalabad, sans the soccer moms in SUVs. The compound houses a large guest house, a (slightly warm) pool, a garden, a decent-sized soccer field and of course ample space for the Fab Lab. After getting the tour and settling in a bit, Tim, our entrepid security guru and zen master, gave us our official 'Welcome to Jalalabad' security brief. At the very least, we now know how to detect a ticking time bomb.
There are a number of local Afghan men who work at the Taj, including guards, gardeners, cooks, and of course the "Dinner is Served" announcer. I'm not quite sure what he does for the rest of the day but he becomes slightly disgruntled if you don't follow him immediately to the dining room at meal time.

There are two gardens at The Taj, one managed by the locals and another managed by Japanese ag specialists who have been staying at the Taj. They are both chock full of veggies, including tomatoes, eggplants, watermelon and corn, although the uniform bamboo structures gives away which one the Japanese have created.


The jubiliant Ken can often be spotted hanging out on the Baba deck; it's alluring amenities make it prime habitat for a Nanjemoy fellow.

Ah, the pool and bar area of the Taj. A relaxing place to grab a drink and spend a few hours (or more) chatting with the expats and hearing war stories that involve big guns, armored trucks and beer runs. Since it's a holy day, Friday is a day off for locals and expats alike. Meaning...Thursday's are a big night at the Taj bar. During our last Thursday night I think the bar went through five cases of beer and plenty of bad Russian vodka.

Girrl Power in Afghanistan

The picture on the right served as a welcome sign for the Director of Education's compound. After meeting with the Director, we visited a computer class at the Teacher Training Center. It was a women’s only class and we had a chance to speak with several of them after class. They showed us what they were learning in class, which was basically an introduction to Word, Windows and Excel. The course lasts four months and they go to class every other day for one hour. Since most of the students don't have electricity in their homes, much less a computer, the time they spend at the the Training Center is the only time they have to practice their computer skills. The Training Center offers computer classes to men, women, orphans and street children and you can check out their blog at: http://www.rihr.blogspot.com/.


Since my Pashto consists of manana (thank you) and a badly gurbled sengay (how are you), we used English as our main form of communication. The women spoke English pretty well, especially considering we were the first Western women some of the ladies had ever spoken to.

The next day, four of the women and their instructor came to visit us at the Fab Lab. Since most of the equipment was not set up, Amy used her laptop to show them how to work the laser cutter. The women spent the next two hours designing and creating plexiglass keepsakes.

We sat around for a while before they left and chatted about our home lives. The women were curious to know more about how women live in the U.S., namely when they get married and what type of jobs they have. There was definitely an aura of feminism in the room. A couple of them declared that they were never going to get married, a daring thought given that most Afghan women are married by age 17.

The Road to Jalalabad

Some pics from our journey from Kabul to Jalalabad...

Dress Shopping in Jalalabad

For our first foray into town, we took care of the essentials: dress shopping. It was my first time having both an armed escort and a translator when shopping but I think I still got ripped off. Zee took Amy and me to his buddy's dress shop and gave us fashion do and dont's, Afghan style. He absolutely refused to let me buy an orange dress, swearing that only fat, old married women wear orange. I later learned this wasn't true, Zee just didn't like the dress. Our armed guard Shem seemed bored out of his mind, I don't think this is what he had imagined when he signed on for a security detail in Afghanistan.

Zee modeling the hideous orange top

So I picked the white one instead
Shem wondering how he is going to explain this to his army buddies

The Mall of Jalalabad