Sylvia's Journal

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.