The tea heater on the main street

A lucrative business in Kabul.

It smells of coal fire, but that is only the fuel for a monstrous samovar. A Kabul resident has built the big tea kettles right on the roadside in one of Kabul's main traffic arteries, in the Shar-e-Naw district. Life pulsates all around, many small retailers, brisk construction activity and a rich residential area are the catchment area for the resourceful tea maker. For a few Afghanis you can buy a halfway drinkable green tea. The tea cups are washed in a grubby plastic bucket after consumption.

Aziz, he introduced himself, has been running his "tea room" for two years. He doesn't have any official permission, no, he doesn't know anything like that, after all he has to earn money for the family and so far no official authority has complained to him. There is no food control or hygiene police in the city anyway.

He is not bothered by the car exhaust fumes and the smell of sewage in the ditch next to his workplace, nor by the constant noise, horns, trucks and rattling mopeds. In the evening, when the stores close, the utensils are packed into the wooden shelves, several jute bags as covers then protect the tearoom. Then Aziz can return to a different part of town to his family's house and is perhaps a few Afghanis richer.