The first place we went was to an underway flood channel, or humongous ditch, take your pick. Ghor doesn't get much precipitation, but when the snows melt, the town tends to flood. So the idea was to dig a very deep, very wide channel to redirect the flood waters away from the town and toward the river, which will probably overflow its banks and flood the downtown part. There are always trade-offs. Anyway, these men - that's right, only men; women can't dig ditches here - are the workers. The first photo shows a hundred or so men just standing around, while the others are actively digging and pushing wheelbarrows filled with large rocks and what looked like very poor quality concrete toward the ditch. Who are those guys standing around, you might ask? No, they're not the foremen; there are no unions here. These guys are waiting to get paid. It's Thursday, and that's when everybody gets paid. There's a guy in the white tent with a big bag of money and a book with everyone's names; he's the paymaster. They come up to the tent in groups of a dozen or so to get their money.
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