It was a different kind of traffic jam.
Marc Weinblatt of Port Townsend sat in the car and waited with his hosts until they could proceed. The passengers sat grimly, waiting to exhale their sharp breaths of Afghan air filled generously with gray dust. They counted the NATO armored vehicles as they crept by in the lane to their right on a street in Kabul.
The military vehicles emitted green laser boundaries aimed at the ground. If anyone for any reason should cross over any of them, the army would shoot with no warning or questions asked, for this kind of target is a favorite among suicide bombers.
Someone in the car tried to joke it off.
The more vehicles that passed, the higher the odds became. First one, then two and three...until eight finally rolled by. Then everyone could breathe and everything started to feel normal again - except normal is a relative term when it comes to city traffic.
It was not the theater of war that brought Weinblatt to Afghanistan. He came because of his expertise with the Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) technique - a dramatic tool designed to create mutual understanding between opposing groups.
TO's purpose is to create community empowerment and sustainable social change, and Weinblatt is internationally recognized as one of its facilitators. His work has taken him throughout the United States, to South Africa and Azerbaijan. In Port Townsend, he is best known for leading the Poetic Justice Theatre Ensemble, a multi-generational troupe of local actors/activists, ages 16 to 81, who use interactive theater as a tool for community dialogue and social change. They have performed for area senior facilities and schools.
A U.S. government-sponsored trip to the Congo in March 2010 is a possibility if the state department decides to give the proposal the go-ahead.
This journey to Afghanistan was funded by the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) of New York City. While in Afghanistan, Weinblatt worked "on the ground" with the Afghan Human Rights and Democracy Organization (AHRDO).
Both ICTJ and AHRDO are non-governmental organizations (NGOs). NGOs typically emphasize humanitarian issues, developmental aid and sustainable development. For three weeks in October, Weinblatt's mission was to train his hosts, who have continued to facilitate TO with Afghan groups after his departure.
"I try to work myself out of a job," he said.
Ethnic tension
Theatre of the Oppressed techniques originated with Brazilian director Augusto Boal during the 1960s. It's not theater in the entertainment sense of the word, but a vehicle of communication and dramatization of feelings and ideas.
One TO exercise employs "image theater," in which each participant is asked to create a sculpture with his body to represent a particular situation, emotion or idea. Next, the actors create a group and re-form the images. The idea is to use the body as the primary means of expression, moving quickly without taking too much time to over-analyze the process.
In Afghanistan, aided by translators of Dari and Pashto, the country's two dominant languages, Weinblatt used image theater as he worked with a variety of populations, including community workers, victims' groups, orphans, schoolteachers, university students and professional actors. Part of the three-week job included a five-day advanced training course with AHRDO staff members, members of 17 other NGOs, and some professional circus performers and actors. There were nearly 30 participants, said Weinblatt.
Working together, members of the group were instructed to create five short plays of image theater about themes of great importance to them, to be presented to an audience of their peers on the final day of the training. The group decided upon topics that included poverty, underage marriage, suicide attacks and gender issues.
Then, someone bravely suggested that ethnic tension also be addressed.
There are four major ethnic groups in Afghanistan, the largest of which is the Pashtun. Those who have read Khaled Hosseini's 2003 best-selling novel The Kite Runner are familiar with the privileged Pashtun boy Amir and his servant and best friend, Hassan, a boy of Hazara ethnicity.
"Really, if you want to understand Afghanistan, [Hosseini's books] are documentary as far as I'm concerned, based on everything I heard when I was there," said Weinblatt.
Afghanistan also has significant Tajik and Uzbek ethnic populations. "There are no heroes and villains here," said Weinblatt. He attributes much of the difficulty of Afghanistan's last 30 years to the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
"They all killed each other," he said. "Do not make one group out to be good guys or the bad guys."
After the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, the warlords were left with a lot of guns, time and money given to them by the United States. During the succeeding civil war, the Taliban seized power.
