Tom Kraner is a surgeon from Boise who sought adventure and satisfaction helping to reform medical practice in Afghanistan at a government hospital in Kabul. He has been there since 2006. The challenges are more than he imagined, as he faces a system broken by years of war, on going corruption and apathy. Patient care is a constant daily struggle for healing and survival.

A tale of two Thanksgivings

On Thanksgiving, a suicide blast rocked Massoud Circle near the U.S. Embassy, killing four people and sending some of the wounded to our nearby hospital.

I was thankful I had decided against going on a 5k run for ex-pats at the Embassy that day.

The patients’ wounds were mostly minor, but we did have a couple of casualties and with all the events of the last few weeks here, several of my colleagues were shaken.

A Thanksgiving celebration

The upside was our local staff had planned a real Thanksgiving dinner for us and had even cooked a turkey. Ayub our head foreman organized it. His wife cooked the turkey, but she stayed at home as he does not allow anyone but the women among us to see her. He is protecting us men from having lustful thoughts and all. We even went around the room and stated what we were thankful for, and it was just like in the states when everyone sort of hems and haws and says they are thankful for friends and family, etc. It did cause me to reflect on my first Thanksgiving in Afghanistan, in 2004.

Thankfulness can wear out

I was here for the first time and living on a different compound for about three weeks. At that time, Afghan President Hamid Karzai was being inaugurated, and there was great hope among the people, who thought he could bring the country together and provide the glue to hold it there. Kabul shut down for two days and military helicopters circled the downtown to provide security for U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and other dignitaries to attend. Local rural folk dressed up in multi-colored pun jabs and rode their horses into town to parade in front of the palace, but were turned away and had to parade at the stadium instead. We watched the inauguration on TV and thought about our own contentious election that had just occurred. We had vege-loaf for Thanksgiving dinner because everyone was vegetarian except myself and the Afghans, but it was still Thanksgiving.

Random violence

The only security threats at that time were rockets launched from outside the city that landed randomly in the city and never seemed to hit anything important. The mood was cautiously upbeat, and we could walk into town to Chicken street, the famous Kabul tourist trap, and drink tea with the carpet sellers. Conversation over dinner was about how much potential there was in the people and what could be done in the country.

Things have changed, not necessarily for the better, but there are exceptions. The airport continues to look more and more like an international airport, instead of a bombed out subway station.

Traffic is more orderly and people are starting to obey the 4 or 5 traffic signals in town, without a traffic cop directing the traffic.

Getting rich on aid money

New office buildings and wedding halls continue to be constructed, along with palatial mansions built with aid money that was been siphoned and then rented back to the very organizations that distribute the aid money, making a few, in the the power circle, very rich. Despite the progress being achieved with corrupt means, it is still progress; the city looks more modern. But underneath there is a growing poverty group that is growing desperate, and more continue to stream in from Pakistan and Iran. Driving is better, which is good because walking is of questionable judgment, and hiking the beautiful hills in town is taking a chance.

Dying of Desperation

Now the radicals have come to town and paid the poor to blow themselves up and they have takers, who have lost all hope in a secure, prosperous economy. Even those with jobs are at risk. One of our nurses lives in a province on the Pakistan border and has been blindfolded, transported to a hideout and forced to care for Taliban wounded under threat of death for both himself and his family.

Karzai and poppies

Karzai is up for re-election, and many feel he needs to be replaced, but he now has a hold on power, supported in no small way by refusing to interrupt the poppy trade in which his brother, family and supporters in the south around Kandahar are heavily involved. He knows the poppy trade also benefits the Taliban, but reasons they are the US military's problem, not his. In the north, warlords who once fought the Taliban now sell them arms, because keeping the country in a state of war keeps them rich. Peace is not profitable, for those who do not value it.

“Kidnapped or killed”

Usually those who do not value it are those who have the guns or money or both. Conversation at this Thanksgiving drifted to what would be more preferable ... being kidnapped, or killed.

Yet, I remain thankful. Thankful that there is a place to go home. A place where I am so insulated from such realities that I can concentrate on living a life under no threat from someone kidnapping me and demanding of my family everything they own for my return, that I can go to a doctor or dentist, and while not liking the cost, at least know that minimum standards are in place and be fairly confident of a good outcome and walk and drive at night with little fear of being hijacked.

Home sweet home

I know I can go anywhere and find safe public water to drink and a public restroom to relieve myself, without contributing to a public cesspool of a gutter. I’m thankful there exists a place I can breath the air and only note a feculent smell if someone passes gas, and then only briefly, as the embarrassing smell dissipates. I know that place, that I know as home, still has its share of corruption and power circles and those who do not value pursuit of happiness for everyone, but the power of such persons is kept in check by the system we have and is not facilitated by the system for the most part (recent bailout excepted). I just don't really know how any of this will come to a place like Kabul. It remains a mystery. But I do know it won't happen without continued restraint of forces that can only be described as evil and the restraint of the worst that man has to offer his fellow man. So I'm also thankful that this place I call home is willing to try, no matter how ineffectual the effort seems at times, and no matter how much the real agenda might be some political agenda associated with oil and money and power. At least the smoke screen is still about doing good.

Peace,

Tom