EDITOR'S NOTE: Bill Wright is a self-employed businessman turned photographer. He travels exotic locales and captures in photographs the lives, emotions and cultures of people for his love of art, and because it helps him make better business decisions. He was recently named one of Abilene's 10 Most Influential by the Abilene Reporter-News. Following is an e-mailed journal entry to family and friends about his newest adventure - a trip to Kabul, Afghanistan.

I woke up to bad news this morning. There was another bomb blast on the outskirts of Kabul about 30 minutes ago and two were killed and a taxi demolished. Four other persons injured. This occurred on a road heavily traveled by the U.S. Military as they travel between one of their near-by bases and downtown Kabul. It will be interesting to see what the reaction is when I head for the school. J.B, Leedy, the Public Affairs Officer, at the embassy wanted to come by this morning early to meet some of the students but this latest incident will probably restrict her to the embassy campus.

I am certainly grateful for the tight security here at the Serena Hotel and my experienced “fixer”, Faideen. At any rate, the day goes on. Everyone will be looking over their shoulder, which is good. We will visit AINA, a program founded by a National Geographic Photographer, Reza Deghati, who assisted my friend, Sue, in securing the books for the students here.

Before breakfast, I walked for a while in the garden of the hotel. The rose garden was in bloom and the doves were flying about. What a strange contrast with the events of violence that are occurring in the country. It was very peaceful and the sounds of the city coming to life were much the same as I would expect to find in any American city. Of course the similarity ended as soon as I exited the secured gates of the hotel.

Faideen delivered me to the school and we began to gear up for the trip to Reza’s party that turned out to be a party celebrating his 54th year.

Before we left, Jean Leedy, our State Department contact came by the school to see what was going on and to take some pictures of the children working at the computers they had funded. She would continue on to Aina and meet us there. She couldn’t ride with us because she had to ride in the Department’s armored Land Cruiser that stood out like the red nose on a clown’s face. It is hard to know what is the best approach. I am comfortable riding with Faideen in a non-descript van, on of a thousand of like design scuttling about the streets of Kabul.

The organization Reza founded, AINA, is a school dedicated to developing photojournalists and design specialists and his photographs are hung about the patio. After the French clowns entertained the assembled guests including 150 or so children including ours from the school, he took our group on a personal tour and explained each photograph, pointing out the features that made it exceptional. While I could not understand the language, by his gestures, I could tell that he was re-enforcing many of the lessons I had already communicated to the kids. A lot of pixels were stimulated during the morning.

We returned to the school with Faideen’s van stuffed full of wiggling kids. It reminded me of popcorn in a heated can! Our van was certainly a heated can. Sweat was pouring over me even though the top panel was also open. It was about 102 in Kabul and of course there is no air conditioning except at the hotel. The kids didn’t mind.They were laughing and teasing each other and popping about like crazy.

I wondered what would happen if Faideen made a driving error. No seatbelts, of course, and aggressive driver as Alice considers me to be, I was no match for Faideen. My abs will be in good shape on my return because I do the tightening exercize every time he pulls if front of a oncoming bus or speeding motorbike. I wouldn’t want to compete with him with a computer game. His reaction time is measured in milliseconds.

I continued doing the formal portraits of the kids for the calendar project and designed the mats and presentation for the school. The plan is to sell the calendars with the children’s photographs to State Department workers as they go home for rotation and this posting will have about an 80 percent turnover by the end of August. A real problem of continuity. Most people take about 6 months to settle into their jobs and by the time they are in tune with the local situation it is time for them to leave. Of course, they are professionals and trained to operate with these kinds of restrictions. More on my thoughts re: our state dept later.

We worked hard all afternoon, photographing and teaching computer skills of file management, downloading and viewing images. I started reviewing various student’s work and using the crop tool on photoshop elements, showed how they could tighten their images. In a way, it was like using the “double L” cut outs that could be placed over a print to demonstrate different compositional approaches.

A BBC reporter came by to see the project at 5 pm and several of the students were able to continue working with their images beyond the normal closing time. They had discovered “filters” in photoshop and were laughing as they prepared bizarre treatments of the photos they had taken earlier in the day---pushing the saturation and contrast to extreme limits, adding blur and noise, and using other techniques. It was learning by exploration and kids who weren’t afraid to make a mistake could really soar.

By 6 pm I was back in my hotel room with the cold water of the shower running over me. I will admit to being a little tired as I had not had much sleep the night before getting up early to organize the student pictures I had downloaded into my laptop computer. Just after getting dressed, Sarah called from the lobby and she was ready to take me to the Embassy for a dinner in Jean’s apartment.

It was a nice evening. We entered the compound where all the State Dept employees who were not “nationals” lived under tight security. Contract security guards, loaded with weapons, checked and secured our passports, assigned us to an escort officer which happened to be Tim who was to dine with us that evening, and issued each of us a visitors badge to hang around our neck.

Jean had a small but very nice balcony off of her tiny dining/livingroom/kitchen and we sat there talking about business. The party consisted of Tim, who had just arrived on station from Lithuania, another lady who worked for State and was in town for a conference from Jalablad [sp], Sarah’s husband, Mark, Jean and myself as “guest” of honor. I had an Australian beer, the first alcohol since leaving Abilene. It was cold and reallll good.

I was ready for bed when we walked down the guarded street to meet Faideen and the van.

I slept soundly.