Ep 3: A Seat at the Table - Monuments Woman

Transcript

00:02
Laura Tedesco
And in the year that I started working in Afghanistan, Ghazni was given this auspicious designation as the cultural capital of the Islamic world. I was tasked to go out to Ghazni, this is what I was told, go out to Ghazni and figure out the lay of the land and— What do you got out here? Oh, you've got some amazing minarets. Oh, there's a big Buddhist site with some Hindu stuff. What are the needs? How do we approach preservation in this desolate, dusty, scary place? You just figure stuff out.

00:36
George Gavrilis
This is Monuments Woman with Laura Tedesco. I'm your host George Gavrilis.

00:43
George Gavrilis

The title of this podcast, 'The Monuments Woman': what's your feeling about it?

00:49

Laura Tedesco

You know what it seems like? A pair of shoes that's not really your style, and they don't fit well. But someone's asked you to wear them. I'm not very fond of the title, The Monuments Woman. What does that mean anyway? And, yeah, it evokes the movie The Monuments Men, which was okay. But there weren't really any women in that movie. There was one character who was a woman— the librarian, I think. And so it doesn't feel fitting— like a bad pair of shoes that don't fit well. It doesn't feel right.

01:30

George Gavrilis
I get the simile. But why exactly doesn't it feel right to you? I mean, somebody could say, Laurie, you're just being falsely modest. The work you did was amazing. And you should take credit for it, even if it wasn't entirely your doing.

01:44

Laura Tedesco

I guess somebody could say that. Let's think about it, George, and come up with a different one that's auspicious, but not... I don't know.

01:54

George Gavrilis

I wanted 'Indiana Jones Was A Woman'. That's along the same pair of shoes that you don't want to wear. But, you know.

02:03

Laura Tedesco

Do you know what the nickname assigned to me was?

02:06

George Gavrilis

What?

02:07

Laura Tedesco
Both in Ghazni, and really, in many places? I did not ask for this nickname. But it's obvious where it came from— was Laura Croft. And I had never seen the Lara Croft movie. I was, vaguely, doesn't she do something with, like, treasure hunting? I didn't really know what that was, other than vaguely had something to do with antiquities. Maybe?

02:34

George Gavrilis

The Laurie Croft show.

02:36

Laura Tedesco

Yeah, that even sounds more pretentious.

02:43
George Gavrilis
Okay, switching gears, let's do a couple acronyms, if that's okay. I mean, we could organize an entire game show on the basis of acronyms that relate to Afghanistan, right? Everything from FOBs, to PRTs, and so on. But you've mentioned a couple during the course of us talking.

03:01
Laura Tedesco
Yep.

03:02
George Gavrilis
I don't want to assume that every single listener is going to be familiar with some of these acronyms that are ultimately about gruesome things. So Laurie, what's an IED?

03:14
Laura Tedesco
An IED, George, is an Improvised Explosive Device. It's a homemade bomb that's rigged, and placed nefariously to do great damage to a vehicle or a person or a donkey cart rolling by.

03:33
George Gavrilis
And what's an MRAP?

03:35
Laura Tedesco
An MRAP—it's a big armored car. Have you seen those cars Hummers? It resembles a big Hummer that you might see on the road, you know, in New Jersey.

03:45
George Gavrilis
Yep.

03:46
Laura Tedesco
But an MRAP is a big armored vehicle. It's not a tank, that's something different. An MRAP is a Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle. That's what MRAP stands for. It seats people. There's a driver in the front, it's sort of like a huge van that's armored to the teeth.

04:07
George Gavrilis
I love your descriptions. Now, PRT and FOB.

04:12
Laura Tedesco
So a FOB, "F" "O" "B" stands for Forward Operating Base. And it's basically a kind of fundamentally military outpost, but there would be diplomats also living and working at a FOB which is why I would have visited FOBs. A PRT stands for Provincial Reconstruction Team. Those were set up all over Afghanistan, in the first 12 years, 12, 13 years of U.S. engagement there, and they were diplomatic and military outposts. The PRT refers more to a diplomatic endeavor, but there would have been military present also.

04:55
George Gavrilis
Cool.

04:56
Laura Tedesco
Everything has an acronym.

04:58
George Gavrilis
It does. It does.

05:02
George Gavrilis
Holy shit every time I Google something there's 20 articles about Afghanistan just going down the toilet.

05:07
Laura Tedesco
Did you see Kandahar fell?

05:08
George Gavrilis
I did not.

05:10
Laura Tedesco
Yeah.

05:11
George Gavrilis
Wait, what happened in Kandahar?

05:11
Laura Tedesco
The Taliban got it.

05:14
George Gavrilis
They did. Shit.

05:15
Laura Tedesco
Today. Today.

05:16
George Gavrilis
Did they take troops hostage?

05:18
Laura Tedesco
That I don't know. I didn't get through the whole article. I caught it on The New York Times.

05:22
George Gavrilis
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah, they attacked yesterday and entered it today. Man, and more border posts. Great. Great.

05:52
George Gavrilis
Tell me about the Polish archaeologists, because Poland is a country that most people don't associate with archaeology.

05:58
Laura Tedesco
The first time I arrived in Ghazni, which was soon after I had arrived in Afghanistan— I might have still had jet lag, even, it was pretty soon after having arrived in Afghanistan. I knew in advance I would be meeting these two Polish archaeologists who were embedded with the Polish military, and the Polish military, as one of the many international military forces with a presence in Afghanistan in 2010.

06:29

Laura Tedesco

The Polish military's so-called battle space, or the area of the country they were responsible for patrolling and taking care of— maybe that's not the best way to describe it, but it was their area, in Ghazni.

06:42
Laura Tedesco
They had two archaeologists embedded with them, Marek and Agnieszka, but I called her Agha. And the reason that the Polish archaeologists were with them was because of something that was similar to why the State Department created the job that I have.

07:01

Laura Tedesco

It dates back to some things that happened in Iraq, when the site of Babylon was damaged very badly by activities of both the U.S. military and the Polish military who were occupying the site of Babylon during the Second Gulf War. I believe it was a helicopter landing pad, as well as some other installations built on the top of Babylon. And ultimately the militaries were held responsible for this oversight, for this colossal error.

07:34
Laura Tedesco
To prevent something like that from happening again, the Polish military decided they better bring some archaeologists along to be embedded with their military in Afghanistan, to make sure that no mistake like that happened again, because someone didn't know what they were building on.

07:53

Laura Tedesco

When I met Marek and Agha the first time, I don't know how long they had already been in Afghanistan. Maybe it was only a few months, but they seemed already seasoned and grizzled and dusty, and very knowledgeable. They were very fine archaeologists, and they would go out on patrols with the Polish military and survey archaeological sites, and make records of what they were finding and document the condition—and really invaluable research. I considered them friends as I got to know them, but also as people that I was learning from.

08:29
George Gavrilis
Where are they now?

08:30
Laura Tedesco
That's a good question. I don't know. I've lost touch. But I think of them often.

08:37
George Gavrilis
Oh, maybe that's a good reason to track them down, reconnect.

08:40
Laura Tedesco
Yep.

08:55
Laura Tedesco
In addition to looking at some built monuments, we envisioned two books, one for very young readers, grammar school age, so it would be mostly illustrations but with a little bit of text, and then a second book for slightly older readers, maybe at the high school or adult level, also illustrated, but with more information in it. And the idea was to talk about the history of Ghazni presented in a compelling way.

09:21
Laura Tedesco
So the United States Embassy, we devised this plan in collaboration with UNESCO at the time. The U.S. was a member of UNESCO and so we could engage with them directly on projects in the cultural and educational sector. UNESCO put together these books.

09:42
Laura Tedesco
We had to coordinate with the Ministry of Education to make sure that the books were distributed. And the sum total of what happened is the books were written, thousands of copies were printed in Pashto and Dari to be distributed widely across Afghanistan, and the books were never distributed.

10:04
George Gavrilis
Why?

10:05
Laura Tedesco
That is a question for the ages. I don't know what happened to them. Are they still sitting in a store room in the Ministry of Education? I don't know if they were shipped to provinces, and then were never distributed. I spent about 18 months trying to track down where the books ended up. And the answer was, well, they never got out of Kabul. But I could never understand why or how, that was beyond my realm of what I could access. At some point, I had to move on. It was the cost of doing business in Afghanistan, some things end up successfully, and some things don't.

10:42
George Gavrilis
Maybe they're in several undisclosed locations.

10:45
Laura Tedesco
Yes, they probably are.

10:48
George Gavrilis
A very Afghan story where a lot of stuff just— money spent, but nothing ever came of it.

10:53
Laura Tedesco
The idea was great, but somehow the implementation, the follow through, just wasn't there.

11:01
George Gavrilis
Okay, but let's go back again, to the question of what exactly is at stake. Why does it matter what is still standing in Afghanistan? Or what's under the ground? Who is it important to and you can talk about all of the who's, it doesn't have to be just the Afghan people. I mean, it should be, but who else? Who else is this important to and why?

11:21
Laura Tedesco
It should be important to everybody. I'm not thinking that people are going to be thinking about this every day. But it should be important to really anybody with an interest in or a sense of culture, history, human achievement? Certainly to Afghans, it can be important, and I think that it is very important to Afghans.

11:50

Laura Tedesco

I'm hesitating because for me, it's sort of like well, why wouldn't it be important? And it's not saying oh, let's put all of our attention on Afghan heritage and therefore we're going to ignore other important aspects of say, maternal health or children's education. These are all separate issues. But cultural survival is, or culture needs a seat at the table. Its preservation is merited. And not just for Afghans, but globally. That's my view of it.

12:23
Laura Tedesco
And I hear a lot, people ask, well, aren't you taking money from building girls' schools to help preserve these old minarets? No, that's not how it works. That's not how money is appropriated for support and for development. It doesn't quite work that way. You hear even the same arguments in the United States— all this foreign aid we're giving, isn't it taking money from bridges and roads and schools in the United States? No, that's not how Congress divvys up the money.

12:55

Laura Tedesco

But back to your central question: who should it matter to that Afghanistan's heritage is preserved? I think it should matter to everyone. Same with heritage in any country. My view is that it's all of our heritage. Really. It's shared.

13:20
Laura Tedesco
I was rereading my journal, and it's deeply personal. 90% of it is deeply personal.

13:27
George Gavrilis
What do you mean by that? Personal, how?— Give me an example.

13:31
Laura Tedesco
Personal, how?— that one of the reasons I moved to Afghanistan in the first place with a one-year-old child at home, was I was unhappy in my marriage. I'd rather go to Afghanistan than, like, stick around. And it was a good professional opportunity. But a very unorthodox decision for a woman to make with two young children at home, one of whom, as I mentioned, was only one-year old.

14:02

Laura Tedesco

I realized in rereading my journal, it's all grappling with—What was wrong? What was wrong with me? What kind of mother goes to Afghanistan, blindly— I didn't know shit— and leaves her kids at home? And you know, who did that make me, as a woman and a mom?

14:20
Laura Tedesco
So it was a lot of that rumination, and some of it is interspersed with, Oh, I had dinner with the French archaeologists tonight, and we had cheese and pork. And isn't that interesting, in Kabul, where they don't have, but suddenly they had bacon? Like, where did the bacon come from? Some of my journal is interspersed with these, oh, I met this four-star general today. That was interesting. He seemed very nice. I didn't know four-star generals could be nice. All my naive observations as I was getting to know what I was doing.

14:55
Laura Tedesco
I knew my kids were getting plenty of love, and all of the care, that wasn't a concern for me. It was just, what kind of woman leaves her baby at home, and voluntarily goes to Afghanistan with one suitcase, to do a job that no one has ever done before? And you're just supposed to figure it out.

15:18
George Gavrilis
So when did you get an answer to that question for yourself?

15:22
Laura Tedesco
I don't know if I ever really got an answer for myself. But the work continued, and it's more than a decade, and my kids are older. And, life evolved, and actually, I consider having gone to Afghanistan for so long as a blessing in saving my family. But that was definitely not evident at the beginning. I haven't figured out an answer of why I did it. Although, this might sound weird. But I think I was supposed to in some bigger cosmic way.

15:56
George Gavrilis
Well, I love this story, because of the many, many, many billions and horrible projects and horrible consequences that the U.S. has had in Afghanistan, it is pretty awesome that saving your marriage was one positive outcome.

16:13
Laura Tedesco
You know what? I think that's true. I do think that's true. Yes.

16:20
George Gavrilis
Well, but in all seriousness, I want to bring you back to something that is not about you, but is at the core of who you are. And that's your desire to give credit to people around you. Which I think is part of your existential angst. And it's also why you're uncomfortable with the title of the podcast, 'The Monuments Woman'. Whether specifically or at a high level, tell us what you mean, when you said you weren't the only one doing this work? Who was doing this with you? Who was supporting you? Who were the people that allowed you to do this?

16:50
Laura Tedesco
There are too many to be named. It's a whole sort of community. I had Afghan colleagues I was working with at the Embassy, who would help me figure out how to submit a request to get on a helicopter to go to Ghazni. Like, how do you do that? And then, then, once you get there, there's somebody who has to have arranged for you to have a place to sleep at night, once you get to these new locations where you don't normally belong.

17:22

Laura Tedesco

Nothing is done in isolation. And then you've got to go through 13 layers of supervisors to get permission. Oh, I'm supposed to go out to Zabul for four days, is that okay? The commanding officer invited me to Zabul to go scout for heritage sites. It's very collaborative and collective effort. And that kind of thing comes naturally to me, because I was born into a family of six children. Nobody gets all the credit for anything. It came very naturally.

17:56
George Gavrilis
I love that. I love that conclusion that you reached. Tell me though, a little bit about some of the Afghans around you, particularly the archaeologists, the museum curators. And I'll tell you something, Laurie. One of the enduring images that is out there in the media, when there's a civil war, or war and destruction in general, is of the heroic archaeologist or the museum curator that goes into the museum and saves pieces, or prevents a mob from entering the museum to destroy it. Who are those Afghans that played that role in your eyes?

18:31
Laura Tedesco
There's one Afghan in particular. His name is Omara Khan Massoudi, Mr. Massoudi. I may get choked up because he's elder. I don't know his exact age— maybe close to 70? I'm not sure. I met him within my first days of arriving in Afghanistan and know him to this day and just this week, sent him greetings for a happy Eid. It's an unusual, maybe friendship to have for a younger American woman to have become friends with an elder Afghan Pashtun man.

19:11
Laura Tedesco
Friends isn't quite the right description. Mr. Massoudi is what you were describing, the picture of a museum curator or a museum director running into a burning building to save the valuable artifacts. Well, he may not have done that particular task, he truly can receive a great deal of credit for having preserved Afghanistan's heritage, its patrimony in some of the most grueling, brutal years of civil war in the '90s.

19:45
Laura Tedesco
I'd like to write a biography about him one day. I don't think I would ever have access to that personal information, like his childhood— would maybe be too strange for me to ask him about that— I don't know— in order to write a true biography. I really know very little about him. I know he was a refugee in Pakistan for a while. He came back to Kabul. He's an elegant, very important elder Afghan who I think of so fondly. And he refers to me as Laura-Jan, which is a term of endearment. I think it's authentic. I think he really says that authentically to me and not in a patronizing way.

20:33
George Gavrilis
I was gonna say some things, stream of consciousness that are on my mind. I was making some connections as you were speaking. And so one is to bring Ghazni full circle to where we are today. You were saying, in 2010, when you arrived in Afghanistan, the security situation was deteriorating steadily. But it was a great time for the international community because of all the money that was being pumped into the country. And so the mood was really mixed. There was still a lot of optimism.

21:02
Laura Tedesco
Yeah.

21:03
George Gavrilis
And that is not the situation today, because we're in the wake of a delayed, but firm, US withdrawal of all the remaining troops except maybe some mentors and trainers here and there.

21:16
George Gavrilis
A lot of Taliban attacks recently, including a pretty horrific one that the Taliban didn't take credit for, on a largely Hazara girls' school in Kabul. 85 people were killed. And a couple districts were recently overrun by the Taliban, including a district in the province of Wardak that sits right on the Ring Road that connects Kabul to Ghazni.

21:42
Laura Tedesco
Yeah.

21:43
George Gavrilis
And so if you want to drive from Kabul today, down to Ghazni to see the minarets, you would be passing through a district that has been overrun by the Taliban. So it's a pretty grim situation. In my mind, I wonder what this means to the heroes of the cultural heritage that you seek to protect, especially your Afghan colleagues that care so much about the country.

22:07
George Gavrilis
But here's what I wrestle with. When it's true that the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas are an enduring image of the cruelty of the Taliban, and what's at stake for a lot of people that watch this happen in early 2001, I think.

22:22
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, March of 2001.

22:25
George Gavrilis
Yes, it's an enduring image for a lot of people rooted back before the U.S. went into Afghanistan, and before 9/11. But for me, it's something else, it's this— And I don't remember where I watched it. I remember watching a news clip before 9/11, before the U.S. went into Afghanistan, watching a Taliban policeman in Kabul, flogging a woman on the street, because she was begging to feed her child. He was flogging her because she was out in public when she wasn't supposed to be out in public unattended without a man. And for me, that resonated more than the destruction of the Buddhas.

23:09
George Gavrilis
And so I guess my question to you is, what does that mean about me? What does that mean? What should we care about at the end of the day? And how is the fate of that woman, or women like her, tied to cultural preservation? How do you answer that for yourself?

23:24
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, that's a very good question, George. I don't parse out what to care about. I hear you, I mean, an image of a woman being flogged in the street because she's unaccompanied with a male family member. She's begging for her children. That's, it's unspeakable. I don't even know how to put words to the brutality of that. The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, also brutal. I'm struggling to even find a word to describe it.

23:56
Laura Tedesco
So your question, what kind of person does that make you to feel more strongly about the woman being flogged, than having seen the Buddhas of Bamiyan be destroyed? I won't make that judgment on you. I wouldn't prioritize what I care about. It's all part of a whole basket of concerns and fears and outrage, and a sense of powerlessness.

24:27
Laura Tedesco
It just so happens, I've built my career around cultural preservation. So that often comes to my mind first, but I think about Afghan women every day. I read the news, I read a lot of news about Afghanistan. So I feel quite informed about what's at risk. And what's at risk of being lost in terms of Afghan women's presence in society being recognized and acknowledged.

24:57
Laura Tedesco
And that's an enormous topic. But you're right. I mean, the clock is ticking. U.S. military is going to fully pull out. I think everybody wants to be optimistic about what can happen, but I think there's a kind of a view towards— ugh what if it doesn't go well? One has to keep that realistic eye— what if this doesn't go well?

25:20
George Gavrilis
I'm glad we're doing this because even though I was a little bit of a devil's advocate with the story I told, I think at the end of the day, this podcast is important, because it is about these cultural things that can stitch together a nation, particularly one that's been in conflict for so long. And so many of my Afghan friends are so very proud of the country's richness. But it is not the image that goes beyond the country's boundaries.

25:45
George Gavrilis
And another way I thought about it, was this— imagine England without Big Ben, without Stonehenge, without some of its most iconic castles and sites, without Hadrian's Wall. I think when we don't care about these things in Afghanistan, it's a little bit of a double standard, because we would never say to ourselves, imagine Greece without the Acropolis and the Parthenon, without Mycenae, Turkey without Ephesus, without the Hittite sites. And so, I think it's only fair that we get to do this and to talk about Afghanistan and what's at stake, so, so thanks.

26:23
Laura Tedesco
Yep. It's great talking to you, George. I'm so glad we met.

26:28
George Gavrilis
Me too. And we'll talk about that too one day.

26:35
George Gavrilis
You've been listening to Monuments Woman with Laura Tedesco. I'm your host George Gavrilis. Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. To stay in touch, also follow us on Instagram at the_monuments_woman. Join us next week when we dive deeper.

26:52
George Gavrilis
This show is produced by Christian D. Bruun and May Eleven Projects. It is recorded by Audivita Studios, and edited by Shaun Hettinger and Greg Williams. The theme song is This Love by Ariana Delawari, featuring Salar Nader.