High Fever

A road to dusty death" aptly describes our journey from Kabul to Jalalabad. In the good old days, the journey took two hours. That was before the tanks rolled in and reduced the road to rubble. Now it takes six. All along the route little boys stand shovelling stones out of the path of oncoming vehicles, then hollering for money for services rendered. We pass several garishly decorated trucks bursting with refugees returning from the camps in Pakistan. At a wayside petrol station, a man approaches us. He has been on the road from Karachi for five days and his daughter is running a high fever. He’s looking for medicines so we part with our paracetamol supply. He’s grateful for the tablets, doubly so when we refuse money. We’re travelling in a group of six and I am the only woman. Not knowing how safe I am, as a foreign female travelling out of Kabul, I offer to wear the ubiquitous blue burqa. An offer promptly turned down by our cameraman fearing the team might be arrested for spiriting away an Afghan woman.