Donkey Taxi, Herat
Afghanistan
If camels are the trucks of Central Asia, then donkeys are the jeeps. While kids often drive them, it's not unusual to see a heavy man plus luggage on them as well. In fact it is astounding how much weight these donkeys will carry. Like most places where it gets hot, the traffic to market swells in early morning, like this misty morn in Herat.
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lilli holm writes:
We had been travelling through Asia in a fire-red Range Rover and when we came over the Bosposrus and drove trough Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India such roads where alongside the motorways. Very often the kids and young men started a race with us and our car. I remember some of them accompenied us for for many kilometers just to show us that their donkeys or horses could endure as much as our car.
Sassan Mehrabian writes:
I grew up in a small town in Iran, called Loshan. Loshan was primarily a conglomerate of 5 villages approximately 3-5 miles apart. As part of the industrilization projects implemented by the previous government of Iran, they built a cement factory about a mile off of the main highway that connects Tehran to Rasht (Capitol of the State of Gilan). Along with the modern asphalt roads, street, alleys and modern housing (by the standards of 40 years ago: having 3 bedroom, a large kitchen, a bathroom which was always seperate from the oversized shower area), along with it came a slew of educated and semi-educated intellectuals and psudo-intellectuals as the white-collar workers to run the plant.
Us, the second generation of the comparitively wealthy children of the area who are currently mostly living in the U.S. and Europe grew up playing around with the less fortunate villagers' kids who used donkeys as the main transportation, while we treated their valued possessions as our toys. Every day after the school, we the "affluant" kids would have teamed up and gone to the arid lands who were abondened by the farmers since they all had turned into industrial workers, looking for a few donkeys to reign, ride, and race. It would have always followed by an angry confrontation of the owners who would have chased us all the way up to the streets of the government own housing which were gaurded by the security personnel. Very often we would have raced the donkeys against the jeep-driving teenager who had just learned how to drive and was driving the family jeep without permission while his father was still at work.
As I said before, most of us are now engineers and doctors graduated from reputable American and European universities. We drive fancy cars, travel worldwide, and carry a cellphone with the "secret service type" earphones in our ears. But this picture and your story was a reminiscence of the sweet, simple, but not so innocent lives that we left behind. We are all part of the melting pot now. Dazed and confused by the deeply routed memories of our childhoods and 25+ years of Americanization. We don't know if we should hate W as our roots dictate it to us, or root for the cause since it carries the big promise, the promise for which we left our motherlands: "Don't be surprised if one day you find this kid in a Versace suit, behind a Lexus without the smile." That's what happened to me..(to all of us).