Pull the kids out of school early, tell grandma that she can't have that second dose of Cipro, put on your Friday's best and head on over to your local thoroughfare to find out all you need to know about the candidates. It's election season and you can see and feel the buzz all around! Over the past 2 weeks or so, campaign posters have started marring the beautiful Kabul landscape and they stand there tall and proud, ready to the tell the city who the best candidate is. Since illiteracy is a huge problem here (close to 70% of the population is illiterate), the IEC (love them!) and the government have issued symbols for each candidate so that on election day, a few words won't get in the way of exercising democracy. So while one candidate is 3 fish, another one is a desk, and yet another one is a lantern. I have seen keys, swords, candles, light bulbs, bicycles, you name it. And sometimes you have a guy with 3 fish instead of one or 2 keys instead of 3. I am fascinated and in love and have vowed to take pictures of as many of these as possible. 
So I started asking locals if they knew what in the hell these symbols represented. No says they. OK. So I started asking if there was any kind of campaign for the campaign that explained what the symbols meant. Again no. So then I asked, where in the bloody hell do these symbols come from? Well, apparently they are given out by the IEC when a candidate registers (click here for the final IEC list). No rhyme. No reason. No meaning. Just a symbol. So if you can't read and you happen to like the way the guy or girl on the poster looks, then at least you know they're symbol so you can vote for them. Too bad everybody I asked said that they wouldn't vote. C'est la vie...
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