These photos were made in 1967 by professor of Arizona State University, Podlich, during a two-year trip in Afghanistan with UNESCO whi...
These photos were made in 1967 by professor of Arizona State University, Podlich, during a two-year trip in Afghanistan with UNESCO while teaching at the Higher Teachers College in Kabul. He visited Afghanistan with his wife, and two teenage daughters Peg and Jan. This family is happy to share these photos and their impressions with the world to show how this country looked like before terrible wars.
Of her father, Dr. William Podlich (second from left), Peg Podlich said: "He had always said that since he had served in WWII...he wanted to serve in the cause of peace. In 1967, he was hired by UNESCO as an expert on principles of education for a two-year stint in Kabul.... Throughout his adult life, because he was interested in social studies, whenever he traveled around [in Arizona, to Mexico, and other places] he continued to take pictures. In Afghanistan he took half-frame color slides [on Kodachrome] and I believe he used a small Olympus camera."
"I grew up in Tempe, Arizona, and when my dad offered my younger sister, Jan, and me the chance to go with him and our mother to Afghanistan, I was excited about the opportunity," says Peg Podlich (right). "I would spend my senior year in high school in some exotic country, not in ordinary Tempe.... Of course, there were loads of cultural differences between Arizona and Afghanistan, but I had very interesting and entertaining experiences. People always seemed friendly and helpful. I never got into any real difficulties or scrapes, even though I was a fairly clueless teenager! Times were more gentle back then."
Peg Podlich (in sunglasses) during a family trip by bus from Kabul to Peshawar, Pakistan.
Jan Podlich is pictured during a shopping trip to Istalif, a village about 30 kilometers northwest of Kabul. "We arrived in Kabul one sunshiny morning in June.... My dad met us and was able to whisk us through the customs. We proceeded into Kabul in a UN 'kombi' (kind of an old-school SUV). I was tired, but I can remember being amazed at the sight of colorful (dark blue, green, and maroon) ghosts that were wafting along the side of the road. My dad explained there were women underneath those chadris and that some women had to wear them out in public. We never called the garments burqas."
Afghan men gaze out over the village of Istalif, some 30 kilometers northwest of Kabul.
Jan Podlich (left) and Peg Podlich at Paghman Gardens in Kabul. Then a lush oasis, today the gardens no longer exist.
Afghan schoolgirls return home after attending school, an act that the Taliban would ban some 30 years later. "Afghan girls, as well as boys, were educated up to the high school level, and although girls [and boys] wore uniforms, the girls were not allowed to wear a chadri (burqa) on their way to secondary school," says Peg Podlich. "Able young women attended college, as did the men."
Young Afghan students dance on a school playground as a teacher and a student accompany on instruments.
Men and boys washing and swimming in the Kabul River.
Afghan students learn chemistry in a mud-walled classroom.
"For the year that I was in Kabul, my family lived in a house in Shar-e Naw, up the road from the Shar-e Naw Park," says Peg Podlich. "My parents had lived in Denver, Colorado, in the 1940s. My mother would say that Kabul reminded her of Denver: about a mile in altitude, often sunny, with beautiful mountains in the distance. I thought it seemed somewhat like Arizona because of the arid landscape and lack of rain. Since I was born [in Arizona], it was very easy for me to appreciate the stark beauty of the landscape there in Afghanistan."
The Shah-Do Shamshira Mosque, near the Kabul River
A boy decorates cakes, cookies, and other sweets.
"In the spring of 1968, my family took a public, long-distance Afghan bus through the Khyber Pass to visit Pakistan (Peshawar and Lahore)," Peg Podlich remembers. "The road was rather bumpy in that direction, too. As I recall it was somewhat harrowing at certain points with a steep drop off on one side and a mountain straight up on the other! I remember that before we left Kabul my father paid for a young man to go around the bus with a smoking censor to bless the bus or ward off the evil eye. I guess it worked -- we had a safe trip."
The 2.6-kilometer-long Salang Tunnel, which passes beneath the Hindu Kush mountain range, was built with the help of the Soviet Union. It opened in 1964.
Theo http://amazyble.com/creativity/afghanistan-wars/
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