August 7

This morning I obtained permission to visit a girls' school. Outside in the courtyard stood two large tents for classes of fifty students each. I found out only after my visit that the headmaster had feared if any of the girls mentioned to their parents that a Western man had taken their photograph, they would be pulled out of the school. I felt guilty when I heard this.

During the afternoon, I stumbled upon a U.S. special-services mission in the hills around Bamian. When they saw me carrying all my cameras and with my guide, they were not happy. There they were, with ridiculous amounts of guns and equipment, talking to the village elders of a remote refugee camp. When I asked about the soldiers' visit, I was told that the refugees were offered new homes and were asked for information about the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

August 8

Kabul's chief of police granted me a visit to the city's quite congested jail. Most prisoners were unchained, save for a few murderers, and their quarters were cramped. In one tiny room I spotted children, who looked to be the age of twelve, locked away.

Outside, women and children brought food and communicated through a grill in the fence with their relatives on the inside. They handed the meal through a hole in the door to the waiting guards, who picked at what they thought looked good before passing it on to the prisoner.

Later, I took a walk to an empty swimming pool at the top of a hill. It was quite surreal. Here, too, were the shrapnel marks and bullet holes that decorate nearly every building in Kabul. I started talking to the guard. He was eighteen, and had been a soldier for about a year. He gleefully recounted how, during the Northern Alliance offensive, he had killed thirteen Taliban soldiers. Here was a young man, who could have been enrolling this fall with the Class of 2006, relating unimaginable deeds. Perhaps the greatest tragedy for this country is its loss of innocence.

August 11

Cultural divides: a Kabul woman's burkha billows in the wind, top;a Kabul tea merchant oversees the arrival of tea into his warehouse, above; photo: Barnaby Hall

I noticed a new set of traffic lights today in Kabul. No one was heeding them. I am not even sure if the Afghans knew what they were. They looked with wonder at the flashing colors and drove on.

At a kebab restaurant in the bazaar, a technician playing with a satellite dish made from tin drums managed to tune in to an Italian TV commercial featuring a bikini-clad female. The room went silent and everyone stopped eating, mesmerised by an advertisement for muscle toners. The audience was intrigued: "Do Western women wear these instead of covering up?"

August 12

At the airport I ran into the journalist who had stayed at the guesthouse with me. He was writing a piece on two Afghan children who were flying on my flight to India for heart transplants. A very nice English girl of Afghan parentage, Seema Ghani, had arranged their transport, visas, and operations while working in Afghanistan.

The airport's X-ray machine and metal detector were broken. One guard glanced over my luggage and the other guard never bothered to look up. Waiting in the lounge, I was going over all the possibilities of what could happen, when suddenly I heard a large explosion and a plume of smoke rose high into the sky from somewhere between the runways. A surge of people, mostly foreigners, dashed to the window. The Afghans just continued with their conversations.

As we taxied to the runway, the plane's ceiling panel fell to the floor. That was the trip's last eventful moment. By the time I descended the stairs and put a foot down on Indira Ghandi International Airport in Delhi, I felt great relief to have this venture behind me.

--Hall is a senior history major from London.