My translator in Kabul was Dr. Ebadullah Ebadi, a 30-year-old physician who had taken medical exams in a Kabul bus that moved around the capital to avoid shelling during the civil war. He had dodged bullets in his short life, jumped into ditches to avoid rockets, seen death in the streets where he grew up and had never left Afghanistan. He wore a constant smile.

Our most memorable excursion was to Mazar-i-Sharif, a wild city in northern Afghanistan near Uzbekistan and the scene of ferocious fighting during the campaign against the Taliban. The journey to Mazar took an entire day, across the Hindu Kush mountains and through the Russian-built Salang Tunnel, the world's highest. Along the route, we saw shattered tanks beside the road, warnings for landmines only 10 feet from the highway and some of the most beautiful mountain scenery I have ever seen.

Camels trudged slowly across the desert to Mazar in a tableau unchanged for centuries. Locusts, billions of them, fluttered across the former breadbasket of Afghanistan in a no-quarter feeding frenzy that ravaged what had promised to be a bumper crop.

After leaving Mazar, following interviews with warlords from feuding factions of Uzbeks and Tajiks, our entourage of four--myself, driver, translator and photographer--stayed in an unlocked hostel in Taliban-friendly Pul-i-Chumri, only 50 yards from a checkpoint on the country's major north-south highway. Screams of beaten or tortured men emanated from that checkpoint every hour or two through the night. There was nowhere to go. I resigned myself to the situation and, to my own surprise, managed to sleep during the gaps between the cries.

That bizarre and troubling night aside, and despite logistical planning that literally involved questions about the probability of our lives or deaths, I felt more comfortable in Afghanistan than I had in Pakistan. Although scarred by war, the Afghans seemed more open and friendly than their neighbors to the south. Everyone I interviewed in Afghanistan, from tough military commanders to wounded teenagers with prosthetic legs, expressed what seemed to be a sincere desire for peace.

Being a Westerner still attracted enormous amounts of attention, especially in places where foreigners rarely ventured such as the crowded bazaar in Kabul or a village street in the shadow of the Hindu Kush. But rather than resentment, I sensed genuine curiosity among these people. Their faces were open, and surprisingly bright, despite the wrenching poverty that cloaked Afghanistan like a blanket.

After I'd worked a month in Afghanistan, the Globe called me home. Walking across the war-scarred tarmac to my plane at Kabul Airport, I looked forward to a rest, but with mixed feelings. Many of the sights I had seen over nine weeks in Asia had been horrific, but the experience had been a profound testament for life itself.

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