Sylvia's Journal

The MSH office was originally built as a house for a person with visions of grandeur and a large family. It has a nice garden with a long pergola that will give wonderful shade when the temperature rises and the grapes will practically jump into your mouth. Now it also has its own petrol station, enormous bars to protect the compound from uninvited loaded cars or trucks and several gates, barbed wire, guard houses on the top of a wall and more that I have not explored and probably won’t.

I finally took some pictures of the two houses that make up Guest House Zero where the Tech-Serve project puts up its visitors from abroad. I am staying in the one with the chimney. In between the two houses is a lawn and rose beds. The grass has started to grow and the dandelions are already seeding the lawn.

We eat wonderful meals cooked by an invisible chef who I never see and who leaves the food in the oven for us to serve whenever we are ready. Mirwais and I are the only ones left and we enjoy quiet meals together. Mirwais is an engineer/architect who is checking out the reconstruction of health facilities, something he supervised under the previous project. He is Afghan but has made himself and his family a life in the US a long time ago. He is one of the few beardless Afghans I have met.

It was only yesterday that I discovered the door handle to our hideous bathroom. It consists of a leg kicking a football. Here is the picture. I quickly scanned the rest of the house to see what other surprises there were by way of doorhandles but there were none. I was trying to imagine the thinking process that led to the installation of such a handle. Is the owner of the house a football fan? Was it put in by one of its occupants over the last few years by an MSH colleague or consultant, or the maintenance man?

When you leave your familiar surroundings and go out into the wide world there are so many strange and funny things that you could easily miss if you didn’t look for them. I got more of an appreciation of this when I started traveling with Sita; first to Burkina Faso, in 2001, then to Senegal in 2005 and finally to Dubai and Kabul in 2006. Sita has a third eye for strange, funny or ugly things that, in their ugliness take on a certain beauty. It is the artist’s eye. My family is full of artists with third eyes: Axel’s eye for Beauty, Tessa’s eye for things that are practical and visually pleasing, and then there is Sita’s for the strange, the quirky, the ugly.

I have now developed my own version of Sita’s third eye, and it has made the experience of living in this guest house rather interesting. My house mate Steve left and I moved into the room he vacated. It is the largest room in the house, the size of our Lobster Cove living room and dining room combined. Although it is as ugly as the rest of the house it has a balcony and I can open windows and look out onto the street if I push the white window covers aside. It also has a garish little bedside lamp that has tiny pulsating red and blue lights in the bottom, twirled around fake pink and purple roses encased in the glass base.

I had dinner with one of our students from the BU course in which I actually taught (July 2006) rather than the one where I was listed as faculty but was indisposed (July 2007). Meghann had suggested we have dinner in one of the few restaurants in Kabul that MSH security staff allowed me to go. It is a congenial Tex Mex place owned and run by a woman who, in her day job writes the good stories about interventions that help Afghans to get back on their feet again.

I was taken there in a sturdy SUV with driver and guard. I don’t know if he was armed but imagine he was. It was a little tricky when I left the place a few hours later to find my car and driver/guard combo among the line up of similar cars and grim looking men, in the dark because you are scanning for exactly the kind of people and cars that you imagine your kidnappers would look like. Luckily they recognized me and brought me safely home through the empty and barricaded streets of Kabul.

A war zone it is, especially without the people. The Serena Hotel that was bombed in January and where Sita and stayed two years ago looked liked it was the Pentagon. Whole streets are blocked by large chunks of concrete and barbed wire everywhere. This is the scar tissue of armed conflict. It is what is left after the bombs have exploded and the fear is firmly planted in people’s minds. And then there is the futility of it all; the barricades go up afterwards, like the shoe checks at the airport. The Serena is unlikely to get bombed again and may well be the safest place in Kabul now with all that protection.

Axel and I also have scar tissue. We don’t know exactly what scar tissue looks like but I suspect it is ugly too and looks and acts like those barricades as it obstructs the flow of things. Axel’s scar tissue is more severe and problematic, especially in his hand where the muscles have not worked properly for so long and have shriveled up to make movement very hard and stressful for the remaining muscle strands. I have scar tissue in my foot and try to break it down through exercises but it is slow going.

I am also struggling with some scar tissue in my heart; that too obstructs the flow of something. I once wrote a little poem that came back to me yesterday: The other day I found/this hard spot in my heart/The one called me and mine/That keeps me separate/From the divine. My heart’s scar tissue is about relationships that have been damaged and obstructed flows of communication. It is creating puddles of stagnant water. It stinks.