bizzare at the bazaar

Once again, I feel the need to share with my faithful audience the experiences, the sounds, the smells, the cold, the sights, the feel, the taste of everyday life in Kabul. So, today's ditty is about a visit I made to the bazaar recently.
As an organisation we purchase enough food to feed 3000 people three meals a day. In terms of rice alone this is equivalent to 15 tonnes a month, not counting beans, peas, ghee, onions, potatoes, bread, meat, milk, tea, tomato paste and fruit. Yes, folks my shopping bill is around $20,000 per month. A very impressive one million Afghanis. So I decided to find out exactly how we go about making this purchase.
We send a man to the bazaar, he goes round the bazaar and gets the quotes. I inspect the quotes, choose a supplier and the purchase is made. BUT how exactly do you go about buying tons and tons of food in one go, so off I trotted to the bazaar to see how it all went.
Of course this requires the obligatory armed guard and armoured vehicle for the journey (which I am sure you are tired of me telling you, but it will become a relevant part of the story).
Now shopping in Kabul is fairly orderly, the stationary shops are all in one place, as are the motor parts, the dentists, the computer shops, the TV shops (again this will become relevant) etc. So we were heading for an area in West Kabul were there are the dry goods markets. West Kabul was the most heavily bombed area during the civil war and is still a collection of badly damaged falling down type buildings. Think of a demolition site that they stopped demolishing ¾ of the way through and this is West Kabul.

The bazaar is a rabbit warren of small holdings in narrow alleys with people running around everywhere and the noise of a thousand deals being struck. As you approach it you begin to be drawn into smaller and smaller alleys full of stalls with all kinds of dry goods. Hessian sacks are in front of each “shop” with the tops open and rolled down displaying the goods. Rice, lentils, peas, beans; a whole myriad of products. Each “shop” is no more than either a wooden lean-to or a 20-ton container with the doors open as a shop. Men stand outside each one calling you in, tempting you with chai (tea) and a seat to do your deal. I am led through by our buyer, walking along muddy paths with a gully in the middle, water and various other liquids slowly wend down the gulley as you take care not to misplace your step. There is snow and ice on the ground and slush where hundreds of feet have trodden there way through. Deeper and deeper he leads me, my armed guard following in my footsteps behind me until we reach the appointed seller. We are buying half our rice allocation, 184 sacks of rice.

At the entrance to the bazaar we have parked our enormous Kamaz 6 wheel-drive lorry. It is a beast with tyres almost to my full height. This will take our food back to base, but how on earth are we to get the goods to the truck. We must have come down 300 yards of muddy, narrow paths barely two men wide between the stalls.

From nowhere appears a group of likely lads with wheelbarrows. These lads, I presume, are the equivalent of Tibetan Sherpas. They are young, ragged, smiling, happy and willing. Wearing just barefoot sandals on their feet they march into the dark back of the stall and start appearing carrying the sacks. They carry them on their backs to the weighing scales, each sack is individually weighed and the sack inspected then they each load the sacks onto their wheelbarrows. The boys are small, slightly built but incredibly strong as they pick up sack after sack and carry to their wheelbarrows. All the while there is a ceaseless banter going onto between loaders, buyer and stall holder. I have been sat on a chair with a cup of chai and am left to watch the proceedings. Once they have 5 sacks on their barrows they are each off through the crowds, down the alleys racing to get the sacks onto the Kamaz, they return and the whole process continues. In the meantime, I go to inspect the bean and pea seller, soon the boys will move onto these to make the same transfer of sacks. Next we make a very civilized visit to the tea seller, in the tea corner of the bazaar. Wonderful smells of the various teas on offer, again with large sacks open out front for inspection. We are buying green tea and black tea, both of which have to be tasted and selected before the transaction can complete. The tea seller is a very jolly man with little English, but much humour. We pass a very agreeable 15 minutes trying teas, laughing and gesticulating about the various teas and generally around the bazaar. Things are going so well, what could go wrong?
Next we leave this market and wander down the road the the Ghee seller. Ghee is equivalent to butter, in a way but is used for cooking and is very important in eastern asian coooking. The Ghee seller is in a strange courtyard in what appears to be a block of flats. The snow is beginning to melt and water is pouring from the roofs onto the stairs, the area is filthy and smelly with rotten produce in the gulleys, it is not a place you would walk into without reason.
However, we meet the Ghee seller and all is well, the guard is standing outside the door and we are conversing, when all hell breaks loose. My guard is attacked by a group of men shouting, shaking fists and pushing him back. I go out with our buyer and try to work out what the hell is going on. In the end I have our buyer on the phone to my assistant in the office to tell him in Dari what the problem is and then he can translate and tell me what is causing this to kick off. It turns out some armed men (dressed as police) were in the market earlier and kidnapped a stall holder and they think my guard is one of the gang. This I am being told on the phone while the aggro is still going on in front of me. Once I have the story we beat a hasty retreat; getting your guard beaten up so far from base is not a good move. I grab the guard, the buyer leads the way and we are heading for the stairs with the shouts ringing in our ears and the fists being shaken at us.

We get out onto the street and I call up the armoured car. All is now calm and as the car comes round the corner we get in. The trip to the bazaar is over for today for me and the guard, the buyer finishes the deals, supervises the boys loading the Kamaz and pays the stallholders. This takes around another 2 hours. Meanwhile me and the guard head for the office. You see, I told you the guard was relevant to the story!!