Modulars get modern.

Work commitments yet again prevent me from devoting time to lengthy blog posts the way I often would like, but maybe this is a godsend for my readers. My previous post on condo(m)s in Dayton managed to arouse more interest than I’ve achieved in some time. One topic from which I have shied for the most part—probably more than necessary—is the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Having lived in New Orleans at the time of the storm and a few years after, I have hundreds of personal photos, as well as more provided by some of my enthusiastic readers, which I included in a recent post featuring the Mississippi Coast. Considering the wealth of opportunity I have for featuring the Gulf Coast photographically, it’s time I explore what I know in depth while remaining sensitive to the swirl of emotions that surround this as-of-yet unsurpassed fiasco (at least in the US). And if I don’t have time to be as sensitive and nuanced as I would like, at least I can be brief.

For the vast majority of the US, the words “FEMA Trailer” conjure an image largely supplied through the extensive media coverage in the early years after the storm: a non-descript white RV that can easily hitch itself to a large vehicle. For the million or two in the Gulf Coast sitting directly within Hurricane Katrina’s path, a FEMA Trailer was just a part of daily life. They were everywhere. In metro New Orleans, you would have been hard pressed to find a street block without at least one perched in the driveway or front yard. Only a shut-in could claim not to see a trailer on a daily basis; a huge portion of the population lived in them, sometimes for years.

Many individuals suffered losses too catastrophic to justify simply “camping out” in their front yards as they repaired their homes. They had to move into “FEMA Villages”—essentially makeshift mobile home parks. These structures were a fair amount larger and less movable than a trailer. Though funded by the government (either leasing the land—or the trailer pads—from a private vendor, or buying it and installing all the infrastructure), the goal was always for these settlements to transition back to private operation, coincident with their residents rebuilding their homes or by moving permanently into these federal villages.

But both the Villages and the Trailers have had their ardent detractors. To many, they were ugly, soulless settlements, more poorly thought-out than New Orleans’ public housing (an achievement in itself) and distributed through an inefficient process. FEMA/Homeland Security built many Villages out of expediency, in places where the land was cheap or readily available, rather than being convenient as a temporary settlement for evacuees. Some of the trailers got lost in bureaucracy and sat languishing in fields in Arkansas, long enough that they could deteriorate. Other naysayers saw FEMA’s Individual Assistance process as a pseudo-solution that fostered long-term government dependency and opportunities for fraud. These critics noted the absence of clearly articulated plans for relocation or eviction after a deadline that the feds pushed back time and time again. The trailers, in turn, were often so flimsy that they’d succumb to the next major storm, resulting in further squandering of public dollars. And individuals on both sides of the political spectrum criticized the sudden public health/public relations debacle two years after the storm, when studies revealed that the levels of formaldehyde were enough to trigger serious and often dangerous respiratory allergic reactions.

Accompanying this pound of cure, however, was an ex-post-facto ounce of prevention. The seemingly sloppily administered government aid after Katrina elicited a variety of smaller, frequently for-profit initiatives attempting to rectify some of the problems posed by FEMA housing peppered liberally across the Gulf Coast by offering alternatives. Various companies attempted to tame Americans’ general aversion toward concrete as a primary construction material in housing, touting its resiliency and low cost of maintenance. Private consultants devised ways to engineer FEMA villages under neo-traditionalist principles so that the infrastructure installed could support desirable long-term mixed use developments vaguely akin to the much ballyhooed resort community of Seaside, Florida (popularized through the movie The Truman Show), after the trailers and mobile homes moved out. Neither of these proposals took off—in fact, they left such a meager ripple that most internet search engines would yield nothing. Slightly more successful—and a non-profit venture—were the aesthetic alternatives to FEMA trailers known as Katrina Cottages: cheery, affordable little structures built much more durably than typical mobile homes, intended to withstand strong winds, offer highly efficient storage as an antidote to small square footage (usually under 700), and in keeping with the architectural vernacular of New Orleans’ pastel single shotgun homes. One city in particular, Ocean Springs, Mississippi, pioneered the Katrina Cottage community by leasing a few acres adjacent to downtown to host a small cluster of these much heralded residential alternatives.

The Katrina Cottage was a drop in the bucket amidst the flood of federal housing assistance (an ill chosen pun, I know). It could hardly compete as anything more than a niche market when it had only a fraction of working capital of such juggernauts as FEMA and HUD. But Ocean Springs also hosts the innovative, privately initiated solution I saw last summer, five years after the storm, when most other affluent homeowners along the Gulf had either fully rebuilt or thrown in the towel completely. But this home just blocks away from the Mississippi coast was still undergoing repairs.

The glare from my car’s windshield doesn’t help things, but the configuration is the same one you might have seen on the Gulf Coast just two or three years earlier: a mobile home poised in the middle of the front yard, with the permanent home partially hidden behind it. Approaching it from the other direction better reveals the relationship between the two structures:

This home is close enough to the water that it clearly could be influenced by violent storm surge; it might even be vulnerable to an uncommonly strong tidal surge. The elevation of the foundation is probably nothing new—most houses nearby have been raised—but the length of the supportive piers is probably greater than before. The first of the two photos reveals that the garage was a conventional one, which, it would appear, the unusual elevation has now rendered useless as a carport. But the most notable feature here is that modular unit out front. By most judgments, it looks a far lot comfier, sturdier, and more attractive than a FEMA trailer. Could the homeowners have been inspired by what they saw elsewhere in Ocean Springs, through the winsome Katrina Cottages less than a mile away? I can’t help but think so. It’s highly likely the improvements to the main house no longer have anything to do with disaster recovery. After all, Katrina struck five years prior, and the deadline for Individual Assistance applications has long since expired. Still, the owner may have liked the approach of living off his or her infrastructure on personal property while making significant changes to the home. Those homeowners with the wherewithal for something nicer are likely to seek an upgrade from the spartan, formaldehyde-laced FEMA trailers. The result is a structure like this: still highly efficient but much easier on the eye, and probably more durable too. And it is likely far more movable than the average modular home.

The clichéd crisis/opportunity dichotomy can’t help but ring true. Not only does it take a cataclysmic event to shake the populace out of complacency (which is precisely what we had become in our relation to hurricane evacuation and general emergency preparedness prior to Katrina), but it takes further muddling through the solution to discover that a mitigating approach would have borne more utilitarian fruit in the long run. Although the median home size has shrunk over the past few years (for the first time in recorded US history), we aren’t yet exactly considering the Katrina Cottage, much less the modular home, as the typical piece of the American Dream. But we are coming closer to parity than ever seemed possible before the bubble burst. Average household sizes have been shrinking for decades: since more people live alone, it is probable that they will, at least in aggregate, demand less space. The Katrina Cottage or the smartly accoutered FEMA trailer may someday seem less like an idiosyncrasy and more like a brilliant act of foresight—a widely cheered solution within a persistently dour housing market.

Dressing the wounds with paint.

My suspicion is that the majority of the readers here have at least a vague knowledge of the Broken Windows Theory, and how it can apply across a variety of social contexts. For the unacquainted, it’s simple: an inanimate object showing signs of neglect or a general lack of maintenance invites the further degeneration of its own physical condition, because the perpetrators causing further damage safely assume that the lack of stewardship will preclude any consequence to acts of vandalism. In short, if a building lets a single broken window remain unrepaired for long, in due time all the windows will end up broken. Shattering glass, is quick, easy, and usually anonymous; for those seeking a deviant outlet, it’s hard to think of a better option. Even graffiti—probably the next most popular means of exemplifying the Broken Window Theory—still requires the procurement of a certain object, the spray paint can, which investigators could easily trace to the perpetrator. Breaking a window can involve anything one finds on the ground. So in a structure perceived to be abandoned or long ignored, the windows are usually the first to go, then the graffiti artists tag it, and before long, thieves have most likely plundered it of all its copper.

Only a few large American cities are lacking in a certain district with a high concentration of abandoned structures. In some, the abandonment is relegated to the most disinvested areas; others are replete with them across the entire city limits. All too often, the diminished tax base that arises from a collection of unused buildings robs the city leaders of the best tools for tackling blight and abandonment, whether in the form of demolishing the most neglected buildings, restoring them, or—as is often the case—“securing” them by boarding up those windows. Plywood boards are frequently the first line of defense: they’re cheap, they effectively deter window breakers, and they pose a barrier for burglars. But they’re ugly, by most people’s perceptions. And they flag a structure as abandoned far more boldly than those without the boards; a building is obviously abandoned even from a distance if the windows are boarded, far more so even than if they’re uncovered and most are shattered.

And boarded windows essentially serve as a promotional canvas for graffiti artists. Already flagged as abandoned, the boards encourage those already enticed by delinquency to leave a mark on a hardened shell that is by this point reasonably impenetrable. A talented graffiti artist may create a breathtaking display on the side of the building, but the market tells us that graffito-strewn areas generally suffer far lower property values than those that lack it. (A more sociological assessment would surely reveal that it’s a chicken/egg dilemma, and the concomitant social problems in low income areas encourage abandonment and thus attract graffiti.) Regardless of the origins, securing vacant buildings with plywood may result in a stalemate: the boards amplify as many of the visual consequences of deviant behavior as they deflect.

Some communities have attempted other outlets at staving off blight by providing at least a rudimentary level of stewardship to their abandoned buildings beyond plywood. Camden, New Jersey is a city that, after decades of deindustrialization, has suffered far more disinvestment and abandonment than most, along with a heavily impoverished tax base that often stymies the City from being able to fund blight management. The image below reveals what I suspect is a civic-led initiative to mitigate the eyesore effect of those boards.

The photo comes from the neighborhood center of Fairview, the southernmost part of Camden. Three story multi-family housing surrounds a central park-like square in which I’m standing, flanked by first-floor retail at the corners (seen on the left in this photo). Despite the obvious signs of disinvestment, Fairview is still a curiosity in Camden: it was originally conceived in the 1910s as Yorkship Village, a carefully planned community of curvilinear streets, abundant shared green space, an inward-turning and self-sustaining neighborhood character, and a reasonable price range for its architecturally uniform rowhouses (and the occasional detached home). In short, it was a prototype for the Garden City, modeled after Ebenezer Howard’s conception that came to fruition in the form of Letchworth and Welwyn workers' communities in the UK just a few years prior. The Garden City movement never grew beyond a curious experiment on either side of the pond, but the surviving examples remain interesting footnotes to urban planners and scholars, while certain features to Garden Cities like Yorkship Village/Fairview have retained their cogency as manifested in the design of some suburban apartment blocks or Traditional Neighborhood Development (New Urbanist) projects across the country.

As Camden began sinking into a seemingly ineluctable economic decline caused by rapid deindustrialization in the mid-1900s, Fairview managed to hold its own for decades as a stable working class and lower middle class enclave. Cut off from the rest of the city by both an interstate highway and a creek, the only way for vehicles to reach Fairview was through the economically healthier city of Gloucester City to the south. As our tour guide told us from her experience growing up in the 1950s and 60s, it was like Mayberry—an analogy so popular that no further explanation is needed. Fortunes changed for Fairview in the 1980s, when the City of Camden built a bridge across the north branch of the Newton Creek, connecting it to the rest of the city. The City of Camden also absorbed Fairview into its school district. Previously, Fairview’s children had attended Gloucester City public schools; at the stroke of a pen, the city leadership shepherded Fairview’s student population into one of the worst performing districts in the state. The desirability of Fairview immediately plummeted—attributable more, I suspect, to the shifting school district than the construction of the bridge—and the community’s residents began selling their homes en masse. Within just a few years, this previously overwhelmingly white community with little poverty came to mirror the demographics and socioeconomics of the rest of Camden. The result is the same widespread abandonment visible throughout the rest of the city, seen in a photo below where I pivoted slightly to the right from the prior one:

Fairview remains one of highest-income census tracts in Camden, despite the fact that its socioeconomics place it significantly below the New Jersey average. A fair number of homes in Fairview may be boarded up, but few have been demolished. Virtually none are in danger of collapse. The same cannot be said of elsewhere in the city, which I featured in a blog post long ago. The rest of Camden ranks consistently as both the most crime-ridden and impoverished city in New Jersey as well as one of the worst in the country. Abandonment is everywhere; tall grass waves across the copious fields where much of the housing stock is already long abandoned.

These pictures are by now fairly old, taken about eight years ago. But Camden’s rank as a socioeconomic cellar dweller prevails. And though I haven’t visited Fairview in as many years, I suspect its status as Camden’s “healthiest” neighborhood endures as well. As superficial as it may seem, those painted boards on the first floor windows of the building at Fairview’s town center provide ample evidence: it’s the only place in a city replete with plywood where some agent has made the effort to spruce them up. It very well have been the Fairview Historic Society, the agency that provided us with a tour of the town and the anecdotes; it could have been a church group; it may be the product of an initiative from an independent activist. I don’t know what these buildings look like now, but at the time of these photos, the disinvestment in Fairview appeared far more recoverable than elsewhere in Camden: fewer broken windows, less graffiti, minimal structural compromise of the sort that would necessitate demolition. Though still distressed by most measurements, Fairview is indisputable less blighted than most of the rest of Camden. One could perhaps argue that Fairview declined much later than the rest of Camden; it’s still slightly better off and not yet visibly beyond hope of improvement, so of course the appearance is better. But abandonment can age structures remarkably quickly, and the twenty years or so that Fairview has ceased attracting middle class families is more than enough time for vandals to have broken the windows and plundered the interior piping. The painted boards here aren’t much. Many of them simply and crudely mimic what the windows would portray if the rooms inside still had inhabitants: flowers in vases, air conditioner window units, perched cats, people staring back out. But Fairview has a few more pairs of eyes and hands that are voluntarily keeping it afloat. Its unique configuration as a Garden City prototype may not have been enough to salvage it from its host municipality’s decline, but it would be hard to argue that it remains the neighborhood in Camden most likely to enjoy a renaissance.

One other city featured in this article that has attempted to minimize the impact of its abandonment through a brush and acrylics has fought back from a completely different hostile force—not deindustrialization, but the natural fury of a hurricane. Long Beach, Mississippi sits on the Gulf Coast, just east of the much larger and better-known cities of Gulfport and Biloxi. It has hosted a satellite campus of the University of Southern Mississippi, with a number of structures just feet from the beach.

The Category 3 & 4 winds and the storm surge induced by Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the Mississippi Coast, the other regional victim of a catastrophe in which New Orleans’ fate dominated international press coverage. The Gulf Coast didn’t marinate in floodwaters for weeks on end, the way New Orleans did; the overwhelming majority of the damage occurred overnight, so that recovery could begin within days. But the irrecoverable losses on the coast may actually be more severe: while many homes in New Orleans could be refurbished after they had been gutted and treated for mold, only foundations remained for a considerable number of Mississippi structures.

This Administration Building fared better than many other directly fronting the shore in Long Beach. Regardless of whether it is structurally intact, it is still standing. Though new buildings have risen since the storm, the majority of the Long Beach campus remains unrestored. Since this photo series was taken in June of this year, almost six years after Katrina—by veteran photographer Nici English—it is clear that the admin building has not been a demolition priority for the university. Plans to renovate it may be pending: though weathered looking, it does not show any indications that it is of eminent danger of collapse. And each one of the boards on the windows has a unique painting—though none are a surefire successor to Matisse, some show at least a moderately high level of skill and time commitment.

Similar to the apartment building in Camden where only the first-floor windowboards received artistic attention, only the front side of the USM Admin Building received a paint job; on one of the other sides, the windows are unsealed.

Like the building in Camden, few, if any, of the windows are broken—graffiti is nowhere to be seen. Long Beach is not an epicenter of deindustrialization the way Camden is, which means that the social ills that often elicit vandalism and other deviant behavior are not looming large in Long Beach the way they are in New Jersey’s poorest city. But graffiti can appear in a moderately unattended building in a cozy, affluent suburb just as easily as a community plagued by poverty or natural disaster; an intruder can break a window in an occupied house. But both criminal acts are more likely to occur on property that is unmonitored, even if only temporarily. The painting of boards on windows, though hardly a panacea to blight, provides a much-needed stamp of stewardship that may repel vandals from a building’s unbroken windows the way cedar repels moths from wool.

DUST: Pedology 101, Part II – Just add water.

In the first half of this post, I explored my limited familiarity of Afghanistan’s pedology—the physical characteristics of the soil that allow scientists to place regions into different taxonomies, governed at least in part by a variety of temperature and moisture regimes. Without using any more terms that strain my word processor’s spell check feature, I’ll focus this time on those physical properties from a more empirical angle. I have scores of pictures to show the vast array of characteristics that force us—at least here in Afghanistan—to be conscious always of the conditions of the ground we walk on. The analogies for Afghan soil are limitless: the oft-cited moon dust, talcum powder, Pixie Stix, cosmetics, beige cocaine, cement mix. Aside from the generally agreed-upon observation that the ground is quite soft to the touch whenever it’s dry, none of the descriptions are flattering. The mere tire tracks from a vehicle manifest the torripsamments with dunes condition; the treads of a tire don’t imprint themselves into Afghan soil; they just displace the powder together into little rounded piles. If people were to get their faces close to the ground and exhale heavily, those “dunes” would disperse.

As annoying as it may be to fend against the steady accumulation of dust/dirt particles indoors, at least it is generally harmless to wooden or plastic furniture. It poses a much more serious problem to the electronics needed for basic operations here.

I’ll admit that I’ve been remiss in cleaning my computer top, partly to make a point, so the environment in that photo above is a bit contrived. But imagine how long it would take to achieve this level of dust accumulation in most environments in the US. Here’s a co-worker’s desk:

And here is a more authentic depiction of dust patterns on a laptop that I use—one that I have cleaned with pressurized air about two weeks ago.

Compare the keys that are commonly used (most letters) with those that generally remain untouched (the function keys at the top row, or the letter Z) to see what even a couple days of accumulation can achieve. It has undeniably caused the demise of some expensive machinery, and I have no doubt that particles of soil effectively killed the camera I referenced in a recent post.

And yet these wearying images and descriptions are only indicative of the soil conditions in Afghanistan during the dry climate. When the soil is wet, which is often the case during the rainy season (running from late January to mid April), it offers an entirely different array of unpleasant burdens.

In early April, we received an early morning sprinkle over the course of maybe two or three hours, though never enough to justify an umbrella by most people’s standards. The photo above and several below demonstrate the aftermath. Sure, they're just puddles, but puddles wouldn’t typically form after a sprinkle, even accounting for the relative imperviousness of the gravel base. The conditions are far worse in other locations.

For the most part, the soil here does not support anything more than scrappy, intermittent herbs and grasses, which is the yin to this abiotic yang. If the earth grew more plants, their root systems would facilitate drainage, but since the soil’s percolation ability is poor—characteristic, no doubt, of the Psamment suborder mentioned earlier—most plants simply can’t grow. These helicopter views are poor quality, for which I apologize, but it still manifests the conditions in Afghanistan after a minor shower, which is generally all we get here:

It looks like a mud slide engulfed the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, but this just shows the typical conditions after rain—an endless sheet of beige slime, punctuated by occasional grasses (but only during the spring growing season). Viewed from the ground, the ponding is much worse in one of the lower points of Bear Village, the American Army compound at Camp Marmal:

The poor folks who live in these tents have to deal with days of standing water; it only diminishes through evaporation, and in the peak of the rainy season (which this year was February) minor sprinkles occur every few days. Although the rocks would seem to impede drainage, the gravel bed is the only preventative measure to keep pedestrians from slurping through ankle-deep mud. Witness these slippery stairs nearby:

And the conditions on the less heavily graveled side of that wall:

Puddles emerge after even the mildest of rains—and virtually all rains in Afghanistan are insignificant, yet they are hardly ever inconsequential: the mildest ones still take at least a full day to evaporate, remarkable given the arid nature of the climate through much of the year. Drainage simply does not occur to any measurable degree. Thus, the German engineers who first broke ground at Camp Marmal several years ago decided to build a full array of drainage ditches, partially visible in this earlier blog post, to prepare for no more than a half-dozen modest drizzles over a four-month rainy season in the late winter and early spring. The rest of the time, those ditches will sit idle.

Thus, the engineers and planners for this base had to invest in a drainage system to prepare for a situation that usually occurs no more than a half dozen times each year. And many years the rainy season passes by without a real thunderstorm. It seemed like 2011 was going to be one of those years, but around the 10^th of April, just days before the anticipated end of all measurable rain, Balkh province in Afghanistan got pummeled. Well, not really: the storm was no more than a half hour of moderate rain; not enough to make people in Louisiana open their umbrellas. But it was significant enough for this arid country. The immediate aftermath of a shower at this scale is predictable, given the conditions of the soil:

Ponding is especially problematic in the back of these tents, where the HVAC systems and circuit breakers rest. Fortunately it didn’t appear too bad this time:

But it was more than enough to fill those roadside drainage ditches:

And elsewhere, the water just sat in pools atop the nearly impermeable mud.

It turned out this was just the prelude to our apocalypse. About an hour later, as the sky was fully brightening, we encountered this unpleasantness:

Water had come surging down the mountainside, accumulating velocity and volume as gravity took its course, so that the landlocked tsunami forced its way through the opening formed by the base’s Commercial Entry Control Point (ECP), continuing on down what used to be a road—a paved one, mind you:

At the next major intersection, the low point formed by two streets allowed the water to disperse…

…right into our compound.

Sandbags worked as valiantly as possible, but they were no match for these water levels, some of which easily topped a foot in height. The sandbags on the closest side of this tent were completely submerged.

Here is the front of our row of tents, after the flood had peaked and begun to recede:

And the back, where it mercifully appears that the Environmental Control Units (ECUs) weren’t badly affected:

While our one-acre compound bore the brunt of the flooding because of our proximity to the Commercial ECP, other parts of the base felt the impact as well. The large drainage swale, empty 96% of the year, came close to topping over.

Fortunately the engineering for this swale is superior to that of these smaller channels, which exceeded their capacity, resulting in some minor water intrusion in the back portion of the American gym:

Though the channel below looks unremarkable as a static image, the water had crested above its banks just 30 minutes earlier, and the flow speed at the time of this photo was still so fast that a person falling in would likely result in a drowning.

And, of course, combining all that water with the infuriating Afghan soil results in one ubiquitous condition: ankle-deep mud. The photos below show the conditions the next day, approximately twenty-four hours after the rainshower:

And inside the tents, which, at the time of this photo, were in the process of being dismantled:

It’s hard to capture depth or thickness of such a large planar surface with a camera, but let it be known that if one’s boots were not tied tightly enough, the suction of that thick stew would easily pull them off. After wading through it for just a few minutes, a person would come out two inches taller, with newly formed platform shoes.

It took three twelve-hour days to restore most of our compound, which truthfully was probably not a long time considering the vast amount of work to be done. It could have been much worse: no tent received more than 16 inches of water and, most importantly, no one was hurt. But it remains a curiosity to most Americans that it happened at all. The rain volume, even for a largely arid environment, were not particularly severe, and yet it elicited flash flood conditions at the base. My suspicion is that the intensity of the rain was much greater in the nearby Hindu Kush mountains, which would help to explain the deceptively large surge that came barreling down the slope and hour later. The change in grade also undoubtedly intensified the velocity at which the water tumbled down. But the soil remains the key player; its imperviousness contributed to both the volume and the speed of the run-off. By no means does Camp Marmal have the greatest drainage infrastructure: as mentioned in a previous blog on cost-cutting measures at military outposts, it's hard to justify the steep expenditures for a top-of-the-line flood prevention system at a base which its creators never intended to be permanent. Nonetheless, one can only imagine what the permanent Afghan population has to contend with during the rainy season: according to a report on the province of Balkh released by the Afghanistan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, only 49% of the province's households have electricity, 31% have access to safe drinking water, and only 12% can access safe toilet facilities. Incidentally, Balkh's standard of living ranks much higher than most other provinces in the country, thanks to the presence of a large city such as Mazar-e-Sharif. Within the urbanized areas in and around this nation's fourth-largest city, the above statistics are superior: 95% of households have electricity, 67% have safe drinking water, and 15% have safe toilets. However, like most of Afghanistan, Balkh is significantly rural, and remote settlements lacking good infrastructure are abundant. If systems for providing water are scarce or poor quality, it is reasonable to suspect that water removal and drainage are also less than advanced. We've experienced what happens on base during a minor rainstorm. How do the Afghans manage?

The soil in Afghanistan is a palpable impediment to the nation's citizens' ability to attain a higher standard of living. Those who live in cities like Mazar-e-Sharif still sometimes maintain garden plots outside the urbanized areas; the aforementioned report reveals that 40% of households in Balkh province depend on agriculture as the primary source of income, either through direct cultivation or trade. The parched climate and friable soil results in a remarkably short growing season for most grasses, suitable for the nomadic ethnic Pashtuns known has Kuchis, but undeniably a challenge for more permanently settled populations. Though the cultivation and consolidation of food no longer precludes urbanization in most developed nations, it most likely plays a role in Afghanistan's ranking as one of the world's most rural countries, with only 23% of the population living in urbanized areas. The dust impedes operationality of electronics, making it an unlikely place to attract foreign technological investment, a barrier further exacerbated by the incredibly low literacy rate (less than 30%, and barely 10% for women). The filmy layer of soil makes routine living for outsiders unacquainted with these levels of dust—which includes practically everyone—a constant frustration. It's miserable in the dry season and impedes visibility enough to pose potential problems for air travel, while eclipsing those mountain views much of the time. A person is never far from a spectacular mountain range, but he or she can often only see it half the year, as indicated by the visibility rates in the chart below:

My experience of southern Afghanistan around Kandahar was that it was even worse than Mazar-e-Sharif. Down there, everyone I spoke to felt as though the hands need washing every five minutes. And, of course, the rains, as rare as they are, not only elicit pools of muddy water in the best of times and catastrophic flooding at the worst, they render many of the roadways impassable—a tremendous problem in a region where only 38% of the roads can handle car traffic in all seasons. A mud-filled unpaved road is unusable.

Is there a region in North America at all comparable to Afghanistan? A superficial research of climatological patterns—an admitted problem when I understand northern Afghanistan's climate far better than my native country—suggests to me some parts of the US might share at least remotely similar pedological characterstics. The temperature and rainfall data for Mazar-e-Sharif in the charts below, as well as the previous visibility chart, comes from the Joint Meteorological and Oceanographic Climatology Segment from the Department of Defense. (I wish I had included this material in Part I of this essay, when I referenced temperature and moisture regimes, but at least I've managed to integrate it to Part II before it goes to post.)

In the US, from the information I could determine, the region that most closely mimics Afghanistan's alternating mountain/desert plateau topography falls, not surprisingly, in the West. But much of the Rockies receive far more precipitation, or the temperatures are far more consistently warm or cool than the extremes that Afghanistan experiences. The best that I could determine is that northern and central Nevada—a virtually waterless region that includes only a half-dozen counties (Humboldt, Churchill, Pershing, Lander, Elko, Eureka, White Pine) but covers a significant land mass (about half of the state)—may have soil that most closely resembles that of Afghanistan, in terms of the moisture and temperature regimes. However, north-central Nevada does not exactly meet the war-torn southwest Asian country's demographics.

While Afghanistan has a land area comparable to and a population somewhat larger than the state of Texas, northern Nevada (approximately 55,000) is virtually uninhabited. The largest communities in this region, are Elko, Fallon, and Winnemucca, which only total approximately 30,000 people. The famed U.S. Route 50-- “the Loneliest Road in America”--bisects the region. If it were to quintuple in size, which is about what it would take to be comparable to Afghanistan, it would still have fewer than a half million people. Afghanistan, by contrast, has a landscape more austere and certainly just as rural, but it claims a population of nearly 30 million. Obviously the distinguishing factors between northern Nevada and Afghanistan—which include birth rates, colonization histories, stability of governments, sovereignty and enforceable boundaries, among other things—are complicated enough to generate an entirely different article. Suffice it to say, though, that population distribution in the US has proven that, given the choice, a significant portion of America has not found northern Nevada suitable or desirable for settlement, where as Afghanistan's similarly unforgiving landscape hosts more people than any US state but California.

The soil conditions in this war-torn, remote—yet hardly unpopulated—country are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of impediments to long-term prosperity. By many metrics, Afghanistan enjoyed a higher standard of living under monarchy in the 1960s and 1970s than it does today. The Soviet occupation throughout the 1980s fostered an additional soil condition that prove a bigger onus to Afghan quality of life than any dust piles or flash floods: the land mines buried within. The statistics for the country are grim. According to the 2010 Landmine Monitor, Afghanistan had the highest number of casualties in the world, at 859—over 20% of the world's total. It is one of the five most mine-enriched countries, with an estimated 10 million total, so that every square mile of the country averages 40. The popular site Listverse estimates that mines kill or maim an estimated 10 to 12 people every day in Afghanistan. Fortunately, the country also benefits from some of the most intensive mine clearance initiatives in the world: Landmine Monitor reports that it ranked top globally in 2009 and the square kilometers of mine area cleared there comprise nearly 30% of the global total. Nonetheless, land mines will inevitably impede any other form of investment, until they are eradicated, which could easily take decades—while assuming that no other events will throw the demining process off course, or, inshallah, foster a new reason for planting land mines. This article may depict the living conditions in Afghanistan as bleak, thanks to its infuriating soil. However, the relics of war—and land mines are hardly a relic since they perpetuate a culture of conflict-related casualties long after a treaty has been signed—transcend most if not all of the intrinsic pedalogic features. Who knows—after the nation is liberated from its broadly scattered landmine catastrophe, maybe that moon dust will seem like small potatoes.