Sylvia's Journal

We took off from Kabul airport in the rain and clouds. The Hindu Kush mountain range forms a bowl with Kabul at the bottom. It wasn’t great weather for flying but also nothing unusual for the pilots of the UN flight who shuttle between Dubai and Kabul year in year out (since 2002) several times a week. I thought a lot about my three colleagues who perished in a Kam Air plane that flew into the mountains as it approached Kabul, three years ago. I am acutely aware of the risks of flying in bad weather in the mountains. But I am also acutely aware of the thorough training that pilots receive and that dealing with emergencies is a big part of their training. So I settled in my seat with the intent to sleep all the way to Dubai. Little did I know that we were to need the pilot’s experience very soon.

Suddenly the plane started to shudder and bank first left then right, then left again. I felt the plane’s nose going down and I could sense that we were losing speed and altitude. The view from the window was solid white; we were still in the clouds. A loud roar coming from the back accompanied the shaking and banking of the plane. I don’t think I have ever prayed that hard in my life. I later understood from a veteran pilot sitting across the aisle that the plane went into a stall on its climbout over the mountain. In July my plane went into a stall which makes it uncontrollable and we crashed. Now we were over high mountains. Taking the nose down is only possible if you have enough clearance. I had no idea whether we did.

In my little Piper Warrior I had to practice stalls all the time and learn what to do. It is very simple, you put the nose down and gain enough speed to produce the necessary lift so you can pick up speed again and climb out. It becomes problematic when you cannot put the nose down. This happened in July. We were lucky to crash in a pond. I have never in my 30 years of flying around the world experienced a stall in a big jet. I knew that if our altitude was too low to clear the mountain we would not survive this stall. The passengers were all looking at each other in great fright and I kept thinking about Carmen, Cristy and Amy, wondering whether it had been like that during the final last minutes of their doomed flight. My body was preparing for a calamity (the body knows), with a surge of adrenaline and a fast heartbeat. It was nothing like the serenity of my last fall out of the sky. I wondered, would I be lucky, again, this time or would this be another one of those early morning calls to Jono, his third.

The whole thing lasted only a few minutes but it felt like an eternity. We saw the flight crew run to the back, I smelt gasoline and wondered wether the plane was dumping its fuel for an emergency landing (where? I wondered). And then the crew returned from the back of the plane with two thumbs up and smiles on their faces. From the hard to hear explanation over the intercom I heard something about ice and windsheer, a potentially fatal combination. Later the second pilot made the rounds, shaking hands with us. I asked him what really happened and that is when I found out that we just escaped what may well have been the same scenario that killed our three sisters. As the plane was climbing to clear the top of a mountain, wind surged over the mountain top and pushed the nose down; trying to bring it back up caused the stall. As I am writing this I realize how close a call it had been and that it was much worse than I had thought. In aviation this event is called an ‘incident’ which requires investigation. Why did the plane go in a stall and why was there so little clearance. The veteran pilot across the aisle who flies for USAID in Afghanistan is going to find out.

Although the second pilot, a Ghanaian, claimed that God, not the pilot had saved us, I knew that the pilot’s experience and strength to hold the controls, was an important part of our narrow escape.

Later I was asked to fill in a standard customer survey questionnaire about cleanliness and politeness of the crew and all that. I put a big line through the whole thing and wrote in the comment section that none of that actually mattered; the only thing that did matter today was the pilot’s skill and whether the aircraft was airworthy. That is really all I want from an airline. It is amazing how quick your priorities change. I learned that in July and I am reminded of it again.

The passengers bonded instantly as we recovered from our scare. In front of me sat an Ethiopian looking gentleman. I ask him if I had identified him correctly and the answer was yes. He was a USAID IT contractor from Ethiopia who was on his way home. I might see him in two weeks. When you have been scared to death together, you become instant friends.

With the adrenaline still coursing through my body I could no longer sleep and all my tiredness was gone. So I wrote; it helped to get some of the fright out of my system. Going to a hot flat place suddenly felt very attractive. And then there is that thought…. that someone is watching over me.

I shared a taxi to my hotel with two Brits, one military and one carpenter. Neither one had realized that we had just had a very close call. The military guy was not perturbed the way I was. I guess death is a professional hazard for him. The British taxpayer paid for the ride.

I am at Kabul international airport. Everyting is in slow motion. That includes me, someone who is rarely in slow motion. All the adrenaline that had carried me through the last few weeks is gone. I feel totally drained and putting one foot in front of the other takes effort and concentration. I am looking forward to collapse in my seat of the UN plane that will take me to Dubai. But everyone else is also in slow motion too. This airport has nothing of the usual airport hustle and bustle. This is partially because only passengers are allowed even near the entrance hall to the aiport; and the people who facilitate their arrival and departure, up to a point. Those people have a special badge that opens gates and makes uniformed people step aside. My counterpart doesn’t have a badge like that and so he was turned away 100 m before the airport building, which is were we said our heartfelt goodbyes.

People also look a bit glum. Where I live that would be explained by the weather, it is gray, drizzly weather. But here such weather is a gift that may shorten the annual summer drought by a few days. I have a suspicion that people are glum because they are leaving Afghanistan. It is that kind of a place. You lose part of your heart here. I know no other place in the world where I have that feeling when I leave. From the outside you would expect people in the departure hall to be smiling because they are going home and leaving a dangerous place. But never have I felt threatened here. Instead of the bad and scary side of Afghanistan that is shown in the western media, I have seen people of all ages painstakingly putting one stone on the other to rebuild their country, or supporting those who do, with a smile and a great deal of commitment, patience and faith.

We women have our own security path from entrance to exit. I am constantly directed to tiny curtained spaces marked ‘females’ as if they are toilets. Inside, these spaces are about the size of a toilet.  Each time I am told to enter such a place (there are three from beginning to end) I feel like I am intruding on an intimate women’s party. Sometimes there are as many as three women packed into a space that barely holds us. Adding luggage gets tricky. They don’t speak a word of English; they are huddled together around a space heater and a water kettle with a giant and well-used rusty coil heating the water for tea. There is much smiling and a cursory review of my belongings. Last time I was here my scotch tape was taken way (Why? She demonstrates me taping someone’s mouth shut. Oh, I say without getting it, but I did not protest. I can live without scotch tape). The final body check is only for men, at the entrance to the tarmac. There are no women to check us females, so we get a free ride.

My luggage needs to be opened because the scanner noticed a stone. It was the map of Aghanistan made from various types of marble and lapis found here, a gift from the MSH team. A bit heavy to carry in my hand luggage I had stuck it in my checked bagage. They were looking for rubies, more precious stones than those. I was allowed to keep it.

In the waiting hall there are a handful of foreigners who also respected the 2-hour-before-check-in boarding convocation. Customs and immigration actually didn’t take all that long and I have plenty of time, especially when the plane is not showing up at the appointed hour.

There is Indian TV; a documentary about Indians (or maybe Pakistanis) playing marbles on a gutted dirt road. It reminds me of our schoolyard marble games where we would sit down on the concrete tiles with four small marbles or 1 large one sitting on a ridge between tiles, spread a few inches apart from each other and are legs creating a basin that would catch the incoming marbles that missed their mark. That would be our profit, the purpose of the game.We would advertise our wares by shouting at the top of our lungs what we had to offer, such as 4 from the 6^th, which meant that anyone could try to hit one of our marbles from an imaginary line between the 6^th and 7^th tile. You could trump the competition by shouting 4 from the 5^th which would bring in more traffic but also more chance of losing. We all took advantage of the little kids by telling them that they should put their marbles really close together, like a short wall. We would pretend it was more difficult, and then of course we had an easy hit and accumulated our wealth of marbles. I suspect all but the most intrepid and smartest kids had been victimized by this when we were young and naïve but then the tables turned when a new batch of credulous youngsters came in. It was a good preparation for the world of the grown up where things are not fair for those who are small and powerless. This is how school prepares us for life. Adults who are interfering with such behavior are not necessarily doing kids a favor. At school and in my (large) family I learned much about resilience and assertiveness that has helped me greatly in my adult life.