Oxfam's Zahra Akkerhuys spent a week in rural Afghanistan visiting Oxfam's team. This is her diary.
Monday
It's hard to get a handle on Afghanistan. After a few days in Kabul, where security restrictions limit movement and ex-pats are forced to spend most of their time in gated compounds, it's so refreshing to get out of the city and into the provinces where ordinary people live.
Badakhshan, in the far north-east, is picture postcard pretty. To get there, we cross the majestic Hindu Kosh mountain range on a UN plane, landing in Faizabad, the capital of Badakhshan, where the river Kokcha runs like a necklace through the town. Badakhshan is well-known for being the one province that resisted Taliban rule and is generally accepted as being the safest province in the country.
During the winter months some parts of the province are completely cut off from the rest of the world with deep snow making many roads impassable.
But it's now the summer-time and every patch of cultivated land is being farmed - wheat, barley and vegetables grow in patchwork quilt formation - but Badakhshan does not produce enough food to feed its people and the province relies heavily on food aid and imports.
It's easy to idealise life in this beautiful province if you're a visitor but I must not fall into that trap. The pace of life may be slower here away from the hustle and bustle of Kabul, but this is no rural idyll - a grim reality underpins life in Badakhshan where more mothers die in childbirth than in any other part of the world and just under half of the population are surviving on less than a dollar a day.
Today I arrived in Faizabad - a sprawling town of around 40,000 people, from where Oxfam's Badakhshan work is co-ordinated.
Tomorrow I will visit the district of Argo, where Oxfam's water and sanitation programme, funded by the Khalifa Foundation, will give me my first taste of life in an Afghan village. The roads are notoriously bad here - and in some places you have to give up entirely on the four-wheel drive and finish your journey on horseback.
Inconvenient at worst if you're a visitor like me, but imagine if you're a sick or a heavily-pregnant mother on your way to hospital to give birth. It may be pretty here, but life is not easy.
Tuesday:
The stereotype of Afghan women being downtrodden with nothing to say has always seemed a false image to me. Many of the women I've met in some of the poorest countries in the world have a steely strength about them which means that in another life they might have been tough traders on Wall Street or headmistresses.
The image of the floating blue burqa that has become so familiar on our TV screens has become a by-line in the west for male oppression, but the women I met today - including those who were wearing a burqa when out of the house - challenged that stereotype head-on.
The women living in the village of Petwan e Bala have seen it all. One tells me how she was widowed during Soviet times but has gone on to raise her family despite all the odds. Another tells of the severe headaches and backpain she used to get from the back-breaking task of collecting water up to 12 times per day from the stream.
This village, sitting on top of a hill with a breath-taking view (and sharp gradient) is one of 33 in Badakhshan that has recently benefited from the Oxfam-Khalifa emergency response programme. , which has provided support to hundreds of families in Badakhshan through the construction of new latrines, water taps providing clean water, and, to the very poorest families, some financial support and work opportunities.
There's still a long way to go in terms of development for these 33 villages, set in the rolling mountains. The road running through the village provides a rocky roller-coaster ride to anyone trying to drive along it; there's no electricity here and families eke out a living on the wheat and barley that grows in the surrounding fields.
But having clean, fresh water within just a minute's walk of their front door is making a difference to these women's lives - and they appreciate it. After years of fetching dirty water for their families and animals, watching their children get sick from the water they give them to drink, they can enjoy the relief that the new tap provides. Already, just two months after the water tap was installed, mothers say their children don't get diarrhoea so often and their homes and clothes are much cleaner because they can use more water for washing.
I'm under no illusion. Life is still tough for women living in the village of Petwan e Bala - but it has certainly become just that bit easier.
Wednesday:
It's day three and Afghan children have already stolen my heart. I don't have many maternal instincts - and at 37 and after having been married 10 years they are unlikely to kick in now - but the children I have met here are just adorable.
There was little Rizegol from Qara Moghol, who washed her face in the clean water flowing from the new water tap while her mother washed clothes in the stream nearby; and little Karima, a serious seven-year-old girl who is currently studying in grade one. Girls in rural Afghanistan often drop out of school in fourth grade (aged around 10 or 11) because there are usually no female teachers in the schools and so their parents keep them home or marry them off to someone in the village. I silently pray that Karima will finish school and have a choice about what she does in life.
Anissa, aged 13, village of Razak
But if anything, it is the little boys who I am more concerned about. I meet six-month-old Shams Al Rahman, who sits on his mother's lap, laughing and charming the visitors. And I meet five-year-old Farod, who looks up at me as I talk to his mother by the newly-installed water tap, and I wonder what the future holds for these boys. There is so much concern about girls education in Afghanistan. But what about the boys? Because the reality in this country, where the men still hold so much of the power, is that boys like Shams and Farod will really determine what sort of country Afghanistan develops into.
Thursday:
Afghan roads are a problem. Everyone at home complains about pot-holes on the roads after a cold snap but Afghan roads are something else.
Oxfam's programme in 45 villages in Shar-i-Buzurg district is three hours drive on a good day from Faizabad, the capital of the province of Badakhshan and much of the way is along a dried river bed. It's just about manageable in a vehicle with four-wheel drive, without that it would only be possible on horseback.
Views out of the window are stunning; the mountains look like they have been draped with green velvet and wildflowers are scattered like confetti across the landscape. We pass countless donkeys, many of them with carrying burqa-wearing ladies. Some of the burqas are spotless white, not the traditional blue.
The women look majestic sitting on top of the donkeys with their husbands walking alongside them and their burqas billowing out behind them. Some of the donkeys are working and they are carrying huge piles of fodder - I hope that means they will have a decent meal tonight. You can barely see anything of them except their head and long ears at the front - and tail swishing the flies away from behind.
We head to the village of Khordakhan, where Oxfam's office is based. It really seems to be in the middle of nowhere. We are met by Oxfam's Social Organiser Malalai Momand. Malalai is one of the most inspiring women I have ever met - and it is people like her who make Oxfam what it is.
Malalai has a blue burqa hanging on her coat-hooks - the grill has been mended with perfect delicate crochet.
The author and Malalai
Friday:
Today I have eaten a lot of cookies. If I stayed in Afghanistan for very long then I would soon start to pile on the pounds.
We went to the Oxfam supported bakery, in the village of Kordakhan, here in the district of Shar-i-Buzurg. Last December, Oxfam helped a group of around 20 women set up a small bakery - with four ovens and a worktop and the necessary equipment (mixing bowls, baking trays and cookie cutters).
And, boy, are they now in business.
On baking days, they bake hundreds of shortbread-style cookies. Each cookie has a green stripe painted with food-colouring. The women set up a production line (two people mixing the dough, two more rolling, two cutting the cookies and another two on the ovens). It's hard to work out which is the hardest job but it's probably working on the ovens because it gets so hot here - some days the temperature climbs to nearly 40C which would make it absolutely sweltering in the bakery.
We chat to the women as they rhythmically produce piles and piles of biscuits. They taste delicious and I think they'd be great with a latte. For a fleeting moment I imagine giving everything up and running away to live in this village and make cookies for the rest of my life. But it's a brief fantasy which I don't think my husband back at home would appreciate.
The women clearly love being out of the house and working in the bakery. They chatter away as they work and they appear to be able to read each other's minds during the production process.
These women are not just bakers though, they are businesswomen and they have big plans for expanding the business and making a decent profit. Their ambitions for the future are inspirational. These are not down-trodden women hiding behind a burqa - they are entrepreneurs.
They bake an awful lot of biscuits and I wonder if they eat some along the way but not a single cookie passes anyone's lips until we're about to leave and they press a small bag of them into our hands. These cookies are made with a lot of love, laughter and determination - and they taste so good...
Saturday:
Life in these villages in the winter months is grim. Snow falls several feet thick and the villages cannot be reached by car between November and April. Oxfam staff rely on horse-power to help them go about their work. In the village of Khordakhan, where Oxfam's Shar-i-Buzurg office is based, Oxfam's two horses are stabled. They are pretty frisky and look like they would be lots of fun to ride. But these are working horses and regularly carry Oxfam staff to some of the remotest villages of the district when the snow is thick on the ground.
But it's now summer-time - and the temperature is around 35C. Beautiful blue, yellow and red wildflowers grow alongside the wheat and barley crops, their heads bobbing in the faint breeze and colourful birds I have never seen before dive into the valleys playing with the wind currents as they glide through the air. Cows and goats munch the day away on the hilltops.
So little is known about this side of life in Afghanistan and it's hard to believe that I am in the same country that we see in the UK on our TV screens each night - where suicide attacks occur at the rate of three per week and one person each day is killed by assassination (UN figures); where troops fight for their lives and a political war of words is being won and lost.
It's peaceful here in Badakhshan. The people are some of the poorest in the world but at least their children can roam the mountains free as they look after the goats and cows. There are few jobs opportunities, schooling is basic at best and healthcare is almost non-existent but it's not a war-zone - and I find some comfort in this. Not all Afghans are living in fear for their lives each day - I hope that the peace of the mountains will one day spread further than the province of Badakhshan and across the entire country. I also hope that, one day, I will return here.
Sunday:
Tomorrow I will take the UN flight back to Kabul. It's a world away from Badakhshan. The city is surrounded by mountains yet the air is polluted and there are no wildflowers or birds to be seen. The lack of security is inescapable and my movements will once again be dictated by what is considered safe - and what is not.
It's July now - the month of the big Kabul Conference (the follow-up to the London Conference, which took place in January). Representatives from about 70 countries are likely to attend the event on July 20 - mostly at Foreign Secretary level. It's unclear at this stage what will come out of the conference, due to be hosted by President Karzai.
Reintegration of combatants and combating corruption will be topping the agenda of the event, but I hope the agenda is far wider than that - and that it will be practical and not just full of fine words, good intentions and pledges of recycled money. This conference needs to make a real difference to the ordinary people I met this week in Badakhshan - otherwise there's just no point.
Learn more about Oxfam's work in Afghanistan
All pictures by Elissa Bogos: http://elissabogos.com/
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