In transit to Kabul

Greetings, readers! Thank you for taking the time to check out this account of my experiences in Kabul, Afghanistan. Most of you will be friends, family, and colleagues, but I hope that you will share this with people who might be interested or have similar experiences of their own. I will welcome all comments, questions, critiques, and ideas!

So what will I be doing in Kabul? In short, I am participating in the Winter Festival of the Afghan National Institute of Music, teaching and performing chamber music. This trip came about with relatively little warning-- in mid-December, my good friend Karen Birch Blundell (who keeps a great vlog on the perils and pleasures of life as a professional musician), introduced me via facebook to William Harvey, who is teaching at ANIM. They were in need of a horn teacher for their winter festival, and Karen thought of me because of my previous experience teaching in Iraq (read about that trip here). I fortunately had some availability and the trip was arranged!

In typical musician fashion, this trip had to be squeezed between other performing and teaching obligations, so my schedule to travel here has been tight. I left my home in Tampa on the morning of Sunday the 29th, heard entry auditions for USF, where I am the horn instructor, dashed to Opera Tampa's last performance of Cav and Pag, and then to Clearwater for a concert with The Florida Orchestra. There, I loaded up my car with a final batch of donations from my colleagues at TFO (more on that later), and drove to Miami. Since I have performances in Miami immediately on my return to the US, it was simplest to depart from there and leave my car there. I had my last horn practice session in the US at the New World Symphony's spectacular new facility on Miami Beach. It seemed like an interesting juxtaposition to make use of one of the world's best facilities for music study before heading to a place which is undoubtedly one of the more challenged!

From Miami I flew to Washington Dulles, and from there to Dubai, a 12 hour flight. It was interesting to notice that our flight path took us over Moldova and Iraqi Kurdistan, two other places where I have engaged in this kind of work. We flew into Dubai over the Persian Gulf at night, speckled with the lights from offshore oil rigs and tankers, and ringed with cities punctuated by lights from the enormous flames of the oil facilities. The approach to Dubai took us right by the sparkling towers of downtown, where I could easily make out some of the more famous landmarks and the tallest building in the world!

This post comes to you from the airport at Dubai, a dizzying hub for Middle Eastern and African travel. A riot of languages and ethnicities are here, and the chaos (despite the modern facility) that comes from 10,000 strangers trying to negotiate complicated travel. Soon I will be checking into my flight to Kabul on Safi airways. So here are some last thoughts before I plunge into my Afghanistan experience.

I find myself coming in with quite a different mindset than what I had nearly four years ago as I headed to Iraq. Then, I viewed my trip as largely selfish in motivation: I wanted the excitement of traveling to a place that everyone was talking about but few had experience of, but I wasn't sure that I could make a worthwhile contribution or that this kind of work was important.

This time, I'm actually more starry-eyed than I was. My experiences there left me with the strong feeling that we were doing important, lasting work. I had the impression that the interactions not only with the students, but with their parents, and even our translators all went towards creating lasting goodwill, a sense of connection among nations, and hopefully the basis for more art and music in both places. I think the world was a slightly better place because of our work there. And I hope that the same will be true of my experiences here. The little I've been able to see of the work that ANIM is doing through facebook posts and news stories has deeply impressed me, and I'm excited to be part of it for even a short time!

Of course, the selfish reasons remain too. Afghanistan looks like a fascinating country with an amazing history. Kabul may be poor and war-torn, but it is still a cultural center and an international city. I have no doubt that I will meet amazing people, see surprising sites, and (important to me) eat interesting new foods. I am only there for 8 days, and I plan to savor it all!

I will make every effort to update this blog daily. As I said at the beginning, all comments are welcome! It's so nice to know that some people are taking an interest in what I write. My batteries are dying and the Safi check-in counter is opening, so farewell from Dubai, and soon greetings to Kabul!