The flight to Kabul is half full. I study my Dari lessons. I am at page 40 of about three hundred and fifty pages. I only recognize a word or two when the flight attendant tells us we are nearing Kabul. This is going to take a long time with these shorts bouts of immersion twice a year.
The descent into Kabul is always a little tense for me as it brings up my frightening departure, now a year ago. We circle and zigzag through openings into the mountain range; snow clad mountains on one side and down slopes and valleys with a thin veneer of spring green on the other.
I am met by staff from MSH and welcomed like a sister or auntie. It feels a bit like coming home. I am lodged at guesthouse zero again and try out another room, this one with a shower that is both warm and has some power. No one is home yet as the work day is not quite over. I learn that Kabul city now has electricity 24 hours a day; it explains why it feels different here now – without the sound and soot of generators humming from 5 AM until 10 PM.
Steve is still in Guesthouse 1 and has signed on for another year. He has bought more stuff since I last saw him, slowly moving the contents of the Chicken Street shops to his temporary lodgings. His rugs now also decorate the guesthouse across the yard, where I stay. The two guesthouses remain ugly but the wall hangings and carpets are attractive cover-ups.
Later Maria Pia returns from work with Hans, a compatriot who lives in Namibia. Hans is an architect and knows a lot about creating natural ventilation that is so important in TB wards. It is usually done mechanically using air conditioning that is both expensive to install and to maintain. A series of unexpected opportunities and chance encounters have changed his career as an architect in ways he could not have imagined. He started in a regular commercial firm in Germany and then Luxemburg, well off and successful at the young age of 28 when he tired of that life and applied for a job with a firm in Namibia.
Not even a graduate from a school of architecture (he finished a midlevel vocational study) he has now become one of the world’s authorities on low cost building adaptations for facilities that take in TB patients. It is new territory for both architects and TB doctors and he is as excited as a kid in a candy store. He was asked by a Harvard medical school professor to give a lecture about his specialty to some 40 people from all over the world. He is still pinching himself about this; something he couldn’t have dreamed up in is former life. We talk for hours in a combination of Dutch and English.
In the meantime Maria Pia’s guests have arrived; Said, who is somewhere between 11 and 13 years, who first lost his mom to TB and shortly afterwards got paralyzed because he was in the wrong place when an RPG hit the roof of his dad’s house, about 6 years ago. Since then he has spent half of his life in hospitals (first in Afghanistan, then in neighboring countries for over a year). It is hard to imagine a 6 year old going through this series of traumatic events on his own. He would be a perfect subject for a study on resilience. You could not guess any of this when you see him sitting perfectly content in his small wheel chair, babbling away in the English that was taught to him wile in the hospital. he sounds just like my former colleague and friend Miho from Japan which makes me wonder whether his teacher was from Japan.
Presumably there is a father someplace, a commander, but the boy claims he doesn’t have one. He does have a friend, Wafa, who was initially hired by his dad to look for a few days after Said while at the hospital. After sleeping in the hospital’s basement for a over a year, dad never showed up again, then was hired by the hospital to make himself useful as a cleaner as there was nowhere for the boy to go. Wafa became something like a surrogate dad. Said was finally ousted from the hospital (this is not an orphanage) and thanks to his own wits secured a room in a small clinic at the edge of the hsopital grounds where he has lived with Wafa fro the last year. But they will have to move from there sometime soon.
Said and Wafa travelled down from the northeast to stay with us for a few days. Maria Pia opened a suitcase full of gifts: a Rosetta Stone level one English course, an external hard drive, Charlie and the chocolate factory and other films to lure him away from the violent movies he tends to watch. For Wafa she brought shoes and a Steripen, a new LL Bean product that sterilizes contaminated water by stirring it with a UV wand. We try the pen out on bottled water that doesn’t need it. It’s high tech in any surrounding and will be even more so when it is taken back to its destination in Afghanistan’s northeastern country side.
Said goes to school and is doing well, at the top of his class. His ability to speak English while not in an English speaking country puts my feeble attempts at studying Dari to shame. From time to time he translates for Wafa whose doe snot speak English and cannot write or read – the two complement each other nicely and have bonded strongly over the years. He has offered to give me some Dari lessons tomorrow and started with teaching me to say goodnight when I retired. Tomorrow I plan to demonstrate the giant bubblething that I brought for the guys in the office. I think I found a better destination than my doctor colleagues from the capacity building team.
Sylvia's Journal 
Recent Comments