Sylvia's Journal

Once more we are staying in the Nazary hotel that was designed by people who have a very different idea of what hotel room should be like than I do. The bathroom is designed for small people, much smaller than the average Afghan or American. I think the Chinese were in on this deal. The bathroom has a callipgraphy still life design and stickers on everything indicate the manufacturer in Chinese characters.

There is no place to put clothes, only a coatbandi, as the Afghans call the ubiquitous multi-knobbed coat racks. That and the beautiful Herat carpet ar the only non Chinese things in the room. The mattress is hard as a plank and has a sheet put on top of it that is too small to tuck in. The bed is not made up and I wonder what the idea is of the small sheet that is folded on top and that looks like a johnny. Am I supposed to wrap it around me? A clean johhny sheet is put on the bed each night, wrapped in plastic.

The Chinese blanket has the weight of the lead aprons that the X-ray technicians use. I cannot pull the blanket over me because it requires two strong arms and shoulders; with my still inflamed right arm and shoulder I cannot do this. It is good that it is not very cold yet in Herat, so I manage sleeping rolled up in my sheet-johnny.

Our workshop is held in the vaccination training room of the EPI program. Instead of posters, all the vaccine-related information deemed important for trainees is painted on the wall, permanently affixed in bright colors, including a map of Western Afghanistan. All the lettering is in Dari so I am perfecting my reading skills while discussions happen around me that I cannot follow.

We sit on plastic chairs that still have the manufacturer’s plastic protective wrapping around them, half peeled. I cannot help myself peeling the plastic off even further until I encounter a piece of old scotch tape that has melded into the chair’s metal armrests.

At the end of the workshop we check out the cold room to see if the boxes that we sent at great cost to Afghanistan to protect international travelers from seasonal flu had arrived. They had. That required a victory picture. This took some explaining as the employee did not understand Churchill’s victory sign; if I had held up a Kalashnikov with one arm he might have understood better. But I did get the picture with a somewhat tentative V and a puzzled look.

Our security man allowed us to walk back to the hotel across the hospital grounds, an untold freedom. One of my colleagues showed us around telling stories about the time he was a student doctor there; stories about the Taliban waking up students with sticks at 3 AM if they weren’t praying; the removal of the women’s recovery ward from the operating theatre to separate the sexes – this meant that women coming out of surgery had to be wheeled in mid winter on gurneys over uneven ground – it was not uncommon for them to slide off the gurney; and then the bearded men slipping into the nurses quarters at night when no one was looking.

For dinner we walked across the street to a restaurant that presented itself as a small store front. But once inside the store opened in the back to a grassy courtyard with carpets spread out on the lush green grass and amidst rose bushes. It was nearly surreal, seeing groups of men here, a family there, sitting cross legged on the carpets eating kebabs and drinking fermented yoghurt, the closest to alcohol we have had. We asked for chairs and a table, to spare our knees that aren’t used to eating on carpets. All this on a mild autumn night on Sita’s 29th birthday.