Sylvia's Journal

Today is the second year since our miraculous survival in that pond at the end of the Gardner municipal airport’s runway 36. We plan to celebrate it in style, in a nice restaurant someplace in town.

Yesterday Axel was introduced to my new boss and colleagues and the compound where MSH is housed, a 2 minute ride around the corner. We are not allowed to walk which is beginning to hit Axel. But one of our Indian colleagues who shares the guesthouse with us went for a walk downtown. We don’t know whether he can do that because he looks more like people here or whether that part of town is considered safe. But of course what is safe one day can suddenly become unsafe.

We received an extra detailed security briefing, one that I now know by heart, for Axel’s sake, while sitting in between a revolver on my right and the TV showing the latest bad news from Afghanistan at the other side of the room. Yet we are quite comfortable here. The security people know what they are doing and have been with MSH for a long time. Of course you can always be at the wrong place at the wrong time, but you can do that anywhere in the world even in places that are certified as safe.

We are beginning to get invitations to people’s places, from the Afghan intelligentsia that we are networking our way into thanks to Ghia from Massachusetts, who knows many Afghans. We are very grateful for these contacts with interesting, bright and courageous people who probably know others like that. It’s a good start.

At noontime we went home for a quite lunch together and then a long nap. I am having some sort of allergic reaction to either the dust or dry air, producing many sniffles, much coughing and red eyes. Since most of my colleagues are either in Bamiyan or Herat there is no rush to be in the office so I can take it easy. Today it will get busier as people will be trickling back in and tomorrow there will be a workshop that I am to play an, as yet to be identified role in.

Guesthouse zero now has plastic garden furniture. Axel dusted it off and we sat on the terrace enjoying the beautiful afternoon, the roses, the grapes dangling in bountiful clusters from the arbor, reading, while drinking our pretend gin tonics (soda water with lime).

We are contemplating our living options. One is to move into the entire second floor of the guesthouse I have been staying in for my last few trips. it has 3 rooms, 2 bathrooms and a small kitchen, a balcony and a roof terrace from which we can look down on the street and into the compound of the Ariana broadcasting corporation.

With a good cleaning and a replacement of ugly curtains and lamps, we could make this into a pretty nice place that is already fully staffed and furnished. We would be living with one other permanent staff, Steve, and then the transients, consultants who come and go and always include interesting people. Right now these transients include an Indian, a Rwandan, a Virginian, a New Mexican, a Bostonian and us. Tomorrow a Nepali will join the team.

We talked with Sita on Skype after discovering on facebook that she had been in the emergency room for an accidental stab with an exacto knife, exactly into a major artery. Seeing a picture of Sita, eyes closed, in a bloody hospital bed on facebook shook us up quite a bit. When we discovered it she was already on the mend, sleeping soundly at home with hero Jim by her side.

When we talked at the end of our day, the beginning of hers, she described the scene as fit for a horror movie with blood pulsing out of her arteries. We were glad she lives close to a good hospital; as if I needed a reminder that such things are not to be taken for granted in this country. Here she would probably have died as so many others do for much less spectacular afflictions. This and our recovery from the crash deserve an ‘alhamdulillah,’ no matter what Richard Dawkins says. We are very grateful.