Off to the Rose Garden

Saturday dawned with the promise of an outing.
Our housemate was taking us to see the rose garden and distillery.......an amazing business  that involves nearly seventy women during the season's heighth.

We hired a van, it's driver and took a few friends, driving the 'long' way around to avoid a demonstration we'd been alerted to.  As you can see, the traffic is a bit congested on a Saturday, most 'lanes' going out of town.  We had never gone north on the highway the Soviets built to enter

Kabul in it's conquest in 1979......leading straight to Russia. Ten years later they had to leave by that highway.  What had been fertile land, rich in agriculture soon was destroyed in the ensuing strife between warlords and the Mujaheddin over control of the country.   That destruction continued under the Taliban until they were outed in 2001.  Today there is a slow recovery of resources......water karezes (underground water channels)
needing reconstruction before the valley can blossom again with orchards and crops.  In fact, we
saw how the fertile valley was being built upon.....
the warlords still selling off the land for their profit.
    

Above is a meat market alongside the road.....with the product, freshly butchered.

To the left is a Pole shop. These poplar and bamboo poles are instrumental in the building industry as they support the freshly- poured cement floors of multi-storied buildings.  You can see a nice house of three levels behind the 'shop.'

Not long after leaving the industrialized edges of town,  we reveled in the beautiful clear, clean air, noticing the recently snow-covered mountains were looming closer.  We arrived at the walled and gated project site which  a ChaokidAr guards round the clock.












There around 3,000 Damascena rose bushes - a variety which makes excellent rose water and oil.  These are picked by about 70 women in May and June.
In the early morning they are high in oil content and have to be processed within a few hours.  Our friend learned the fine art of oil extraction from Germans in Jalalabad who have high-tech equipment, but these wood-fired vats and cement cooling pond work just as well today as they always have.

The small building at the other end of the pond
is the outlet for the extraction and is the favorite place to work....where rose water is dispensed
into containers...the aroma is mood-enhancing, to say the least!  The water sorts out with a thin layer of oil rising to the top. Here we are looking at a small vial of the precious commodity.  Rose water is an ingredient in many products...cosmetic, culinary, health.  Rose oil is needed for high-end perfumes.

 The local women are very much involved in the production of this garden's products, even taking cuttings of roses home to plant and harvest. They then bring the petals to the Center and sell them back for a profit.  The goal is to make this business a co-operative that can benefit the community and women in particular.                                                 






This Center also houses other activities.  A class of newly-trained tailors have just graduated.  Shown here is the training room.In the distance, thru the windows, the barren land is going to be fashioned into a women's garden... designed as a Persian garden...a Charbagh, with fountains and divisions of four quarters.

It is the vision of people like our housemate who love the people of Afghanistan and look for ways to enrich their lives, hopefully giving them the resources, knowledge and motivation for moving their country forward.....that impresses us the longer we are here.  We applaud and are amazed at the ingenuity and commitment so many people have for the nation of Afghanistan.  Most of it is just plain hard work!  And faith in the vision they have 'caught' for the people and the country.  Each project and effort is a gift to these people who have struggled so long under oppression.  Afghanistan was once a beautiful place.  There are untold natural resources to be found and used for the good of all.  We hold out hope for the reclamation of Afghanistan's leadership and future.

We took the dirt-track back to town, passing old landmarks and this Kuchi, or nomad, camp.  Some still follow the independent lifestyle famous in the folk literature of the Afghans....picking up their belongings and moving according to the seasons, accountable to no one but themselves.