A long time ago, magazines and newspapers would receive feedback from readers via letters. These consisted of words in ink or pencil committed on paper. Most shockingly, the information was often handwritten. Other times a type machine was used. The writer then had to place the paper in an envelope, fix a stamp on the corner, and drop it in a mailbox. Editors would receive these letters a few days later. Those were the days. Today, feedback is efficiently relayed in a matter of seconds through electronic mail (and at times not well written, rash, or incredibly offensive). But this still is not the case everywhere. Fans of Radio Free Afghanistan will write ornate letters and send them to the Kabul station, which in turn sends them over by the rice bag to Prague. According to Akbar Ayazi, director of Radio Free Afghanistan (known in-country as Radio Azadi), some 300 to 400 letters are sent their way each week. In his office he has me lift the bags and rifle through the correspondence, mostly on loose-leaf paper. I can’t make sense of any of it but Ayazi tells me the listeners tell the station they are fans of the show, their likes and dislikes, and pretty much whatever else is on their minds. And then he shows me one of the longest letters ever sent. Glued together and unscrolled, it came to about 6 meters. It was written by a 14-year-old Afghan boy and broken into sections about himself, his country, the drug problem, girls, and poetry. Radio Free Afghanistan is the most listened to of all the RFE broadcasts, with 52 percent of the market tuned-in to them (12 hours of talk, news, and music). In my years at the magazine, I’d seen my fair share of handwritten letters. But none of them came to that length. Ayazi says there is even a crank (my word, not his) who sends him a letter each week from Istanbul, Photoshopped with women’s bodies and images of politicians. I saw this letter and can confirm this is crank material. But it is not the worst I’ve seen. That would date from the late 1990s: A crayon illustration of Uncle Sam with his pants down, and Bill Clinton and Al Gore on their knees. The “artist” even pasted human hair to certain sections of Uncle Sam. Like I said, the worst.
