Mediacheck

A Tyee Series

The Story behind the Afghan 'Heroes' Stories

Terry Glavin on his effort to chronicle a war-wracked nation's rebuilders.

By Terry Glavin, 15 Apr 2010, TheTyee.ca

glavin-in-afghanistan.jpg

Glavin: 'Swamped with candidates.'

Text size:

Rate this:

Login/Register

Also in this series:
Afghanistan's Hidden Heroes

Related

[Editor's note: Today begins a series (running Thursdays and Fridays) about everyday heroic citizens in Afghanistan written by Victoria-based Terry Glavin, a Tyee regular contributor not at all shy about sharing his views on that country and what role Canada should play there. We asked him to explain who supported his reporting for this series and why, and here was his reply.]

This began as a joint project between the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee and the Funders Network for Afghan Women. They sent me to Afghanistan to write stories about all the people we never hear about -- ordinary and extraordinary Afghans working to rebuild their broken society. Human rights activists, young lawyers, women building alliances of entrepreneurs, teachers, soccer players, anti-poverty activists -- all these people who are just completely off the West's radar. From the outset, the Solidarity Committee has tried to get Afghan voices into the Afghanistan "debate" in Canada, and the Funders Network is an NGO that wanted North Americans to get to know the kinds of people the Network had been backing. So it was a nice fit.

We got Afghan NGOs to pick the "heroes," and they really got behind it. We advertised in Dari and Pashto, and we were swamped with proposed candidates. In the end it came down to just figuring out a more or less representative sampling of people, mainly from Kabul, Parwan and Kandahar. That's the really interesting part, actually. You want to write about heroes in Afghanistan, all you have to do is walk down a street. The old man selling oranges and almonds on the corner, the woman in a burqa lining up every morning for her computer-training course, the craftsman rebuilding the ancient verandahs of the Murad Khane, the young horticulturalist restoring the Babur Gardens outside Kabul -- there are millions of heroes in that country. Where do you start?

That's the human landscape of Afghanistan we never even glimpse. This isn't to criticize the Canadian reporters who work embedded with our troops down in Kandahar, but think about it. At any given time, there are only maybe three or four Canadian journalists in the entire country, and they're almost always embedded behind the wire.

I've spent only a few days behind the wire in all the time I've spent in Afghanistan, but outside, there's an entire country of about 30 million people, picking up the pieces after 30 years of war and unspeakable savagery.

The way Canadians see Afghanistan is the way Afghans would see Canada if they had three or four reporters here who spent pretty well all their time in the back of a police wagon cruising Vancouver's downtown east side. That's not what Canada is about. So this "heroes" project is just our small contribution, a way of helping Canadians to see a country that actually exists in the real world, and to meet some of the people.

More than an online series

What you'll see in the Tyee series is the words and the pictures, but the project is really a traveling exhibit, like portraits in a gallery, and it's moving from place to place, wherever people want it.

It opened first in New York, and in Canada its debut was at the BC Teachers Federation convention in Vancouver, and then it went to the National Archives for an event in Ottawa. It's going all over the place now. It's being translated into Bulgarian, it's going to Estonia, and I hear some organization in Montana wants it too.

To learn how people can see the exhibit or host it, click here.

To find out about Afghan cultural, education-oriented, economic and agricultural development and fair-trade initiatves the project supports, click here. [Tyee]

Victoria-based Terry Glavin is an occasional columnist for The Tyee. He is a co-founder of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee.

9 Comments:

Login or register to post comments

  • zalm

    2 years ago

    Is this live or Memorex?

    Terry's trying to do some good. I appreciate that. I don't understand Afghanistan at all, though I suspect it's not so far off my ancestral Montenegro in outlook and relation. Does this mean Terry's going "outside the wire" to gather his stories? A risky business, but one that foreign NGOs engage in every day. Without protection? Not likely. But it's important to clear this up - we don't want to fall prey in our reading of Terry's work to the same kind of interpretation that US Special Forces fall prey to when they take a scrap of "intelligence" and launch another rocket attack on a wedding party or something.

  • Takuan

    2 years ago

    so long as we have a military presence there

    we are part of this:
    http://theantipress.blogspot.com/2010/04/media-waits-four-months-on-and-still-no.html

  • Jeffrey J.

    2 years ago

    Heros and Villains

    And for another view of the heros and villains of this invasion, see Rick Salutin's timely article.

    http://www.rabble.ca/columnists/2010/04/who-are-heroes-afghanistan

  • Glen Murtz

    2 years ago

    Still the Shrill Shill

    Hey Terry,
    When you get back to your comfy upper-middle class life here on the West Coast, maybe you could do a piece or two on why we need to turn Afghanistan into a modern liberal democracy that has the decency to lock up it's garbage dumpsters or provide its citizens with a decent sized homeless community to keep them in line, then maybe a compare and contrast piece on which "barbaric" country "we" should establish a presence next.
    Also - I'm gonna love hearing your spin on where "we" stand on propping up deeply corrupt, blatantly misogynistic governments like the one you're touristing under. "We" do support that government right Terry? I know you must - at least til you're home.
    Anyways, keep up the good work; your ability to talk out of both sides of your mouth and your playing at being a liberal should stand you in good stead where you are now. Tres Karzai-esque!
    Personally, I hope you never come back; but I'm betting that the horrors of not being able to find a decent radicchio will compel your return soon enough.
    Enjoy your time in the poppy fields little fella...

  • scott neil

    2 years ago

    i saw the following quote on

    i saw the following quote on a leftwing British site discussing Amnesty and Gita Saghal. it's perhaps a bit simplistic to drop in as a rejoinder to some of the comments above, but the thrust is fair (and some of the comments above are pretty simplistic.)

    "Activists are concerned at getting things done, and form all kinds of questionable alliances to achieve this. Its not pretty, but the world improves. Purists get fuck all done, but keep their souls nice and pure."

  • Glen Murtz

    2 years ago

    Amen brother...

    Re: the quote above.
    Two things.
    How different is that quote from George Bush's famous back-handed smackdown known as the "coalition of the willing"?
    Not much.
    'member how yella we wuz cuz we weren't going to Iraq?
    Nice work - George Bush is your activist buddy now.

    And oh yeh since I'm rolling - those activists have been having a field day. Gettin' er done. Before there were "activists" we didn't have Food Banks - but we did have the Grand Banks. Which one's still around?

    The left is so comprehensively stupid about the underpinnings of how society functions, and so egregiously factional that it blows apart on the slightest discrepancy. *MONEY* has the initiative - leftist simpleton's only respond to where it's going or where it's leaving.

    And they respond in a million little NGO's that commodify and professionalize the failures of governments. Propping up a shithouse. Enablers all.
    It's this kind of society - which, as but one small example, guarantees many First Nations kids will snuff out their brain cells huffing gas. This is the society Mr Glavin insists is the most suitable for export.

    Anyways, here's a few more quotes to stuff your stocking with.

    "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
    "Why can't they be more like us?"
    "The law, in its majestic impartiality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under the bridges of Paris."
    .. or one you should really, truly learn to appreciate...
    "First, do no harm."

    Apparently Mr Glavin will be happier when Afghani's finally get a Hooters outlet, because really, isn't that the female empowerment those feminists activist's have been striving towards?

  • scott neil

    2 years ago

    'First, do no harm.' quite

    'First, do no harm.'
    quite agree. (it doesn't apply to the sort of actions Glavin is getting involved in in Afghanistan, of course, but as a rule, it's pretty near golden.)

    also quite agree about money making the world go round.

    not sure how Glavin hitching his cart up w Afghan feminists and schoolteachers puts folk in quite the same basket as Dubya, but i admire your, er, devotion to stream-of-consciousness editorialising.

    amen, brother.

    P.S.
    i went in a Hooters once in Indiana. that yoghurt type stuff the Yanks smother their wings in tasted OK to me.

  • alive

    2 years ago

    Strategy

    The government is in deep shit over this!
    They do whatever to save their necks, and much like what is done when surrounded by sharks, you surrender a body they can feast on, and meanwhile paddle like hell to get out of the infested waters!
    The bodies here is Jaffer and his stupid wife, nor much of a sacrifice, but enough to make us forget the reason we were upset in the first place!
    Excellent strategy Harpo!
    Us, stupid voters will never figure it out.

  • Jeffrey J.

    2 years ago

    Harper launches Project Hero

    Project Hero recently launches, and now Mr. Glavin launches "Unsung Hero's". Amazing coincidence. For more on this, see article below where academics raise some pointed questions about propaganda.

    "We think this program is a glorification of Canadian imperialism in Afghanistan," said Jeffrey Webber, political science teacher and one of 16 U of R professors who drafted an open letter to U of R President Vianne Timmons stating their concerns.

    http://www.leaderpost.com/professors+against+Project+Hero+scholarship+dependents+fallen+soldiers/2722393/story.html

    Love the Tyee for allowing this kind of debate to occur in a public forum!

    • The discussion for this story is closed. No more comments can be added.