Brian Conley's News & Notes

Kabul’s been quiet for me thus far (knock on wood) so today I’ll leave you with a funny story I heard the other night from a friend.

In Kabul the ice cream man has a push cart and a mini-megaphone, rather than a truck as happens in so many western countries. It just so happens that one particular ice cream man in Kabul, has slightly more sinister plans than many others. If you hear the ice cream man at a certain hour of the evening, it never bodes well. In some parts of the world that’s because the ice cream man is secretly dealing/transporting heroin. In others it has to do with children and such.

Now kidnappings of foreigners have allegedly gone out of fancy in Kabul,  however Afghan kidnapping is still in vogue. So when some certain foreigners noticed their dog was missing after hearing the ice cream man at an odd hour, they didn’t initially think anything of it.

A few days later the Ice Cream Man showed up at their door in the evening and suggested that for $300 dollars it might be possible for him to locate the dog.

You might be thinking what you would do in this instance, $300 is a lot of money for a dog that might have just as well run away or been killed.

But what else is an expat stuck in Kabul to do? They paid the man.

The next day he returned with the dog and said “Let’s never speak of this again,” and with a jolly tune on his wagon he rode away…