World Student Community for Sustainable Development

by Laurent Demarta, Pertuis, France

I recently lived for three months in Afghanistan. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) had sent me with a team of three others to a remote valley in the Indu Kush, at an altitude of more than 2000 meters. The weather was clear and icy cold. Our house was built of round stones and mud, with walls three-quarters of a meter thick and beams supporting a roof of mud. The interior was painted in bright colours, and cheap carpets lined the floors. The main room was heated by a diesel stove, and we had smaller stoves in each of the bedrooms, though they didn^‘t provide much warmth. Nothing was done with more urgency than diving under our heavy piles of woolen blankets.

We had showers – that is to say, a small room with a stove and a water tank above it. An hour after lighting the stove, the room was hot, the water was hot, and mmm. This was the best moment of the day.

Diesel stoves had been chosen to avoid having to cut down the few trees growing at this high altitude. Water was delivered every day by a little truck.

A small generator provided power from 6:00-10:00 in the evening; the rest of the time, we used batteries. Thus, we had light, television, computers, music, a copy machine, and more. We even had a satellite connection for the Internet, though it was a bit expensive.

Our three Land Cruisers comprised about half the total fleet of vehicles running in the valley. Their energy consumption was excessive, as they required half an hour of running to warm them up each morning. (I even saw a fire being lit under a vehicle to thaw the axle oil!)

Every second month, a van from Kabul brought us chocolate and other fancy food, and stationery.

Life was fine.

I sometimes had the feeling I was experiencing one of those “alternative life” villages, in the sense that we had another way of life than the one I am used to in Europe, but not without the comforts I’m used to. We had all that we needed: fancy food, computers, hot showers, TV . . .

But I would be lying if I pretended we used energy in an exemplary manner. A quick calculation would show a consumption of 80 litres of diesel per day for four people, which is approximately twice the amount recommended for the “two-kilowatt society.”

On the other hand, this was not only our personal consumption. It also included the energy required to run two medical clinics, and our car use was mainly for professional purposes. Furthermore, this was winter consumption, which I would estimate to be twice what we would use in the summer. That means that our yearly average would have been 25 percent lower.

Still, I am less interested in the exact amount than I am in the fact that our total energy consumption was easy to determine, since we received everything via a single road. We could simply count what came to us from this road: a truckload of diesel, one of chocolate, a box of spare parts . . . Thus, our daily consumption could be readily calculated, whereas it seems almost impossible to produce such a calculation in Europe.

When I returned to our headquarters in Geneva, I was a bit shocked to see that every office had a printer-fax-copier. On the bus, I saw a couple wearing cheap T-shirts made in China that advertised “natural food.” And somewhere, a glossy magazine announced “How to consume without polluting,” as if consuming was an aim.

Overall, I was seized by how sad people looked. Much sadder and more violent, in fact, that the Afghans we are supposed to fear so much! I wondered, Did we lose our way? Have we not given up to some internal movement of technology that makes its own demands? Will no one raise their hand and ask, “Where are we going?”