Farhad and I are killing time inside a Turkish restaurant. We walk around the room looking at photos of American cities that hang on the walls.

That's San Francisco, I tell the young man who's serving as our translator and guide in Kabul. You can tell by the trolley.

There's New York City, I say as we move to the next photo. You should really go there, Farhad. It's amazing. He nods. He'd love to go.

Then we reach a famous American photo, another, older shot of the Big Apple. You've no doubt seen it — 11 men, dressed like characters in a John Steinbeck novel, sit on a steel beam a mile above the Manhattan skyline. They eat lunch and smoke cigarettes, taking a break from building what will soon be the tallest skyscraper in the world.

We stand silently for a moment inside the restaurant. I marvel at the utter calm of the workers in the photo, who wear no safety straps or harnesses. Farhad looks confused.

"So, was that picture taken 20 or 30 years ago in New York?" he asks.

"No, Farhad," I say quietly. "It was taken in the 1930s."

I pause, realizing how absurd my next statement will sound to a 27-year-old Afghan who's known nothing but war.

“We call that time the Great Depression.”

For two weeks in October, Farhad patiently led photographer Dior Azcuy and I through the confusion of modern-day Kabul.

He scored us sit-downs with top government officials. He got us through a maze of police barricades during a not-so-peaceful protest.

He translated flawlessly during interviews with the country’s second-most powerful politician and powerless schoolchildren, a joyous radio talk show host and an angry medical student, a wise mullah, simple shopkeepers and dozens of other Afghans of all colors, ages and mindsets.

He wowed Raheem Yaseer, assistant director of the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Center for Afghanistan Studies, who proved invaluable as an advisor and simply a friendly face during the toughest assignment of our short journalistic careers.

On our own, Dior and I could’ve seen these Afghan faces, most of them visibly worn by what they’ve endured.

But we couldn’t have understood them without the help of Farhad Peikar, an Afghan journalist and Kabul University graduate student, a family man and a good old fashioned hustler.

He analyzed complicated political themes easily, explained the country’s ethnic divisions honestly and didn’t even complain when we chugged Coca-Cola right in front of him during Ramadan, when he couldn’t eat or drink anything during daylight hours.

Farhad is, in some ways, every bit as red-white-and-blue as Coke, a latter-day embodiment of the same spirit that allowed men to dream and build the Empire State building with their heads and hands.

He taught himself English, learned how to use a computer and descended on the foreign reporters who flocked to Afghanistan after the September 2001 U.S. invasion.

Do you need a translator, he’d ask. Of course they did.
Farhad didn’t stop there, even though he was making more money than he ever had.

He took to reporters, and reporting, and soon he was spending his nights at an Internet cafe, comparing what he’d written about the latest terrorist bombing in Kandahar to the New York Times story on the same subject.

Today he is employed by a Spanish news agency and can file stories that, if you ignore a missing article here or a dangling participle there, look like they came from the Kabul bureau of The Associated Press.

He is doing all this in English, his third-best language.

In other ways, Farhad, despite his clean-shaven face, button-up shirts and new blue jeans, is very much an Afghan.

He has taken care of his mother, sister and brothers since he was a teenager. He speaks of things like sex and beer very quietly, if he speaks of them at all. He never once drank Coca-Cola along with us, even though we wouldn’t have blamed him for it.

Bring his two sides together and you are staring at the face of a better Afghanistan, a country that can steer away from its last three decades, if only men like Farhad get the chance to drive.

But that face, it is turning crimson, embarrassed he didn’t know that the photo, “Lunchtime on a Crossbeam,” was taken in 1931.

I’ll remember how his face flushed and what he said: “In Afghanistan, we are 500 years behind.”

I’ll remember how I wanted to ignore the social norms of both Kabul and Nebraska and throw my arms around him.

I remember what I wanted to say, so I’ll say it now.

I will never understand why one of us lucked out and grew up on a peaceful family farm outside Red Cloud, Neb., worshiping the Chicago Cubs, playing Nintendo and worrying mainly about girls.

I will never understand why the other grew up in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan worrying about mid-day rocket attacks and land mines shaped like butterflies and lived to hear the news: His father had been murdered.

But I do understand this.

You have nothing to be ashamed of, Farhad. It is the rest of us who should be ashamed.

Readers -- Here's a note from Sunday editor Cathie Huddle, who is coordinating the Afghanistan project:

They're jetlagged and a little loopy, but the reporter Matthew Hansen and photographer Dior Azcuy are back safe from Afghanistan. We thought we should let those of you who followed their travel for the past couple of weeks know.

The pair flew into Lincoln late Tuesday night and were back in the office on Wednesday morning.

A planned two days of R&R in Amsterdam was cut short when a six-hour layover in Dubai turned into a 36-hour stay. It's safe to say Dubai will not rank high on their list of places to recommend or go back to themselves.

As one of their editors on the project, I got an early preview Wednesday morning of what they'll be writing and showing us in the weeks to come. That's the good news. The bad is that we'll all have to wait a couple of weeks while they sort through more than a thousand photos and seven reporters notebooks filled front and back -- front to back.

But I think we can safely promise the wait will be worth your while. So stay tuned. The special report, "Beyond bin Laden," will begin in the Lincoln Journal Star on Sunday, Nov. 20, and will run four consecutive Sundays.

They'll tell us about Afghanistan today, what it's like and how it got that way. They'll introduce us to a young boy who has memorized the Koran in Arabic and members of the Nebraska National Guard stationed in Kabul.

They'll report on the University of Nebraska at Omaha Center for Afghan Studies, its presence in Afghanistan and the folks who run the program from Omaha. They'll take us on a visit to one of the school principals they met when she was in Nebraska to study at UNL.

And they'll let us all in on what it was like to be a couple of young American journalists on the other side of the world.

Well, it looks like this will be our last blog from Kabul. Tomorrow at 5 PM we board a plane to Dubai to begin the long journey back home. We have an action-packed day tomorrow before we board that plane and hopefully we will get everything done. Our last blogs will come from Amsterdam on Saturday.

There are so many stories that haven't yet been told and so little time. A lot of what we experienced will color Matthew's writing when this series appears in the Journal Star. However there are many experiences that we have had that don't lend themselves to news writing.

To be completely honest I am distracted right now because I am really sad to be leaving. That is no exaggeration. I have really come to love Kabul. I remember that before we came here no matter how much research or interviews we did nothing could paint a picture in my mind of what Kabul was like. Everyone that we talked to before we left that had been to Afghanistan could not say enough about their love of the country. For some reason, Afghanistan seems to find its way into people's hearts. They forge strong, life-long ties to Afghanistan.

Before I came here I really couldn't understand why people loved this war-torn country so much. There is so much media coverage of Afghanistan and unfortunately it focuses on the negative. So I kept thinking, 'How could people possibly enjoy a place that has seen about 30 years of war?' During that time Afghanistan has suffered massive death, rampant poverty, warlords and a huge drug problem. Most of all, the women still wear burkas.

The burka is a topic that has been well-covered in the US and as a woman myself it seemed like a personal jail woven out of fabric. But my feelings about the burka have changed a little since I arrived in Kabul. I in no way have any desire to wear a burka or to even consider for a moment that women should walk the streets completely covered in stiffling material. But after talking to people here and observing the streets of Kabul myself, I feel that Afghanistan has much bigger problems than the burka. Many women here have chosen to take off the burka. On the streets of Kabul there are modern-dressed women walking side by side in conversation with women in burkas. I think that many women have chosen not to throw away their burkas, not yet. A lot of women have spent the majority of their adult lives wearing a burka. The thought of not wearing it, as one woman described it, makes them feel exposed and uncomfortable. I can say that I sympathize with that. A woman walking around without a burka attracts a lot of attention around here. After years of moving around like a ghost and walking down the street unnoticed, this change must be a drastic one.

To say that this is a male-dominated society is an understatement. Women are rarely seen no matter where you go. I even remember mentioning to Matthew and Farhad that I was discouraged that so many of my photos are of men. Farhad responded by pointing out that my photos would document how things are in Afghanistan, and here, women are rarely seen.

Over dinner last night, Farhad was telling us how he had told one of his friends something funny that I had said the previous day. And when he told his friend what I said he didn't use my name, he didn't even say, "SHE said..." Farhad called me a HE. At first I thought he had confused the words SHE and HE because that happens every once in a while.

But no. He purposely called me a HE to his friend because to explain why he was with a woman who wasn't a relative would be too difficult. Men don't have female friends here and the explanation of who I was would be a long and complicated one.

That really surprised me. I have mentioned before that I have been in situations here that women in Afghanistan are usually not included in. So my perspective can be a little skewed. So although I am saying that I don't view the burka as negatively as I did before, I have realized that the culture here does not make it easy for women to feel comfortable without the burka.

My hope is that Afghanistan will continue to move forward and these years of war and pain will only be faded scars on the land and it's people. Most of all I hope that women are able to walk down the street comfortably amongst men, however they choose, and that maybe their very own skin will be enough of a shield from the past, and society, than a piece of fabric.

9:30 a.m.
A boy, maybe eight years old, sticks his face against my passenger-side window and pleads in a language I don’t understand for money he knows I have.

I turn away, embarrassed. From the corner of my eye I see he hasn’t given up yet.

Child beggars are everywhere here. They carry smoldering cans and surround you with the smoke they emit, an act that supposedly brings good fortune. They offer to clean the windshield with a dirty rag. A 60-pound tough guy offered to be my bodyguard last night, for the low, low price of $45.

Mostly, they beg, for dollars and afghanis (the national currency), for pens and food.

They run along the car as it creeps through rush-hour traffic, building American guilt with every step they take. They force out sobs because they know tears are the quickest way to cash.

For me, the hardest sight is the women in tattered burquas who sit at the road’s edge and beg by holding up an infant who will be lucky to make it to a fifth birthday.

We’ve given out a few pens and granola bars since we’ve been here. We plan to give out more tomorrow, our last day in Afghanistan. Most of the time we’ve hardened our hearts and turned away.

This morning, nothing works for our eight-year-old companion. He stands at each of the car’s four windows. He sticks his smoke can into my face. His friend tries to open my locked car door.

He runs along the car for blocks. He unnecessarily helps Farhad back our car out of a driveway. Finally, he picks up a rock, fakes a throw at the windshield, smiles, and scampers away.

1 p.m.
We’re stuck in the car as Farhad runs an errand for us. We pass the time by watching another young boy fly his homemade kite in the breeze. He zigs it left, right…and right into a tree.

In case you haven’t heard, kite flying is big in Afghanistan. They fly big kites and small kites, colorful, expensive-looking kites and dirty plastic bags.

They do battle just as described in “The Kite Runner.”

Two or more kites gather in the sky. The goal is to fly your kite into another kite’s string, cutting it and setting it free for the assembled onlookers to chase down the street. In Afghanistan, whoever reaches the freed kite first is the new owner.

We’ve seen a decent amount of random kite flying while here. Tomorrow is Friday, Afghanistan’s day of rest and its main day of kite flying. We’re going to spend some time standing on a hill preferred by all the top, pre-teen kite aficionados.

But today’s kite kid seems out of luck. He pulls his ruined flier down from the branches. Strangely, though, he doesn’t seem all that upset.

Then we see why. He immediately starts to fashion a new kite out of plastic and wood, an act no American boy would even attempt, much less succeed at. (Don’t they have kite flying on PlayStation 2?) The neighborhood children gather round him, watching. In no time at all his new homemade kite is in the sky, darting left and right and steering very carefully away from the low-hanging branches.

Again we are having technical difficulties here in Kabul. It just took me over a half an hour to get on line and our fixer Farhad is wasting away as Iftar is upon us.

This is the time of day during Ramazan when everyone breaks their fast. The guy hasn't had anything to eat or drink since before sunrise and I don't want to keep him from food and drink any longer. I feel a little pressure to make this quick, but it is hard because I have so many things I would like to write about. I am feeling a little down today. We leave the day after tomorrow and it is sad to realize that this incredible journey is about to end. I have really appreciated every aspect of this trip.... even the little things like the power going out for good at night when I have soap in my eyes, the kids running after me down the street yelling, "Sir! Sir!" or even waking up every morning at 4:30 AM as the mullah yells out the call to prayer. I think it might actually be strange not to be woken up to, "Allah Akbar!" in stereo from like 3 different mosques at once.

I was even feeling a little sad to leave Kabul Military Training Center today after spending the day there with the Nebraska National Guard. Even though those guys are from Nebraska who knows if I will see them again when we are all back. I actually spent the majority of the day with Cpt. Scott Geary of Lincoln and Staff Sgt. Chris Sterns of Sutton. They were out at the range with their kandak (or battalion) as the soldiers of the Afghan National Army ran through training exercises with their AK-47s. I strapped on a ANA helmet and some earplugs and followed behind them as they ran forward in alternating pairs toward their target. It was actually a pretty strange vision: the ANA soldiers crouched down moving forward with their AKs, Staff Sgt. Stearns holding his rifle, and then me armed and ready with my finger on the trigger of my Nikon. Don't mess with me, man!

Then after spotting an explosion not too far off we checked it out. The French military was out there detonating land mines. They let us hang out and watch an explosion with front row seats. Another typical day in Kabul for us, huh?

But, again it's the little things that stick out. Like I had no idea that the guys at KMTC were reading this blog. Hell, we didn't really think anyone was reading it. But when we showed up there today I can't even tell you how many guys asked if I was feeling better. (I guess they read it.) Or what a great relationship Cpt. Scott Geary has formed with his interpreter Qaseem who was proudly wearing a red long sleeve Husker t-shirt today. I asked him where he got it and he motioned at Cpt. Geary with a smile on his face. Or Lt. Mark Ruiz of Florida who tirelessly showed us all around for the two days we spent at KMTC (and fed us some darn good ol' American food that these Afghan-converted stomachs sure appreciated.) But when people like Staff Sgt. Chris Sterns shows you photos on his computer of his wife and two daughters, sitting on the front lawn, or at a pumpkin patch, or his daughter in dance class, you feel privileged to be invited into people's lives, as we have this entire trip. And those are the kind of experiences that probably won't be a story or photo in the newspaper, but make saying goodbye to Kabul and this experience difficult.