Sylvia's Journal

I watched Hillary call the bad people in Pakistan names (cowards) while drinking something that comes out a can that looks like a real beer but it is actually 0.0% alcohol Bavaria brewed lemon malt beer. It is not bad when you have forgotten what real beer tastes like.

Last evening I watched endless reruns of the bomb blast in Peshawar and the attack on the UN Guesthouse in Kabul while answering emails inquiring about my safety from concerned friends from all over the world. I try to explain that there are many guesthouses in Kabul, more than there are hotels, and that Kabul is a big city and that we live far from where most of the foreigners live; but I do understand the concern and I am grateful for all the good vibes and prayers that are sent our way.

In the meantime Axel’s sewer project has hit a snag which may mean a delay in his arrival, which would have to be at least a week’s delay because of the run-off lockdown. We are receiving instructions from our security men to lay low and refrain from our weekly Chicken street outing; even our walk around the highschool is cancelled. Maybe this is a signal that I should finally try the elliptical in our house or go for a rowing visit to house nr 26.

Half way through the morning I went to take pictures of the hajjis receiving the seasonal flu vaccines at a local mosque. The vaccines have been donated by the American people and arrived at the right place and the right time thanks to many sleepless nights, thousands of phone calls and emails and much sweat and tears from many of my colleagues. My guide was the vaccination chief at the regional health office and he introduced me left and right to bearded men, sometimes introducing them as ‘he used to be a talib!’ and then everyone grinned. I would have loved to find out why the change of heart and label but my Dari is not good enough for such conversations and their English wasn’t either.

At the end of my visit to the mosque I was formally thanked on behalf of the Afghan people by an impeccably dressed religious official who, I was told later, was an official in the provincial health office at the time of the taliban.

Later one of our participants in the workshop told me how you could get your fingers or even your head cut off if the taliban police found you in the possession of a pen drive, as this meant you had a computer and that was of course a machine invented by the devil. He would hide his pendrive in the ashtray in the arm rest of his seat on the bus and pray that they would not find it.

It is hard to imagine that this was no so long ago and it is always surprising how people tell stories about the taliban as if that period was just one big joke. It seems that for my colleagues here taliban means ‘incompetent fanatics’ and sometimes I detect a hint of compassion, as if these poor sods didn’t know any better.

I had lunch again with the only other female in the room; women don’t seem to be able to eat together with men. We occupy her husband’s office and unpack the many wrappings our lunch comes in, always the same: naan (flatbread), a small plastic container with raw vegetables with a packet with low fat mayonaise on top, a plastic spoon, fork, and straw wrapped inside two tissue papers and a plastic sleeve, a plastic container with white rice, some saffron rice mixed in and tiny red berries that i am told are hard to find and good for lowering cholesterol. The last container has a big chunk of mutton, bone and fat included.

We returned early to our hotel because it is Thursday and people go home for the weekend. I came home to a hotel on back-up power which meant I had to get my mail sitting in the lobby. I sat right behind Murad from Jalalabad who was talking on Skype with his fiancée in Pakistan. I could look right over his shoulder into a living room somewhere in Pakistan where he fiancée was sitting next to, presumably, her sister and her mother lying on a mattress in the back, all very intimate, the women only half veiled.

I asked Murad if he could interrupt his video call for a brief moment so I could download my mail and he immediately obliged. As it turned out he also works for a USAID project and pursues similar objectives as we do, except he does procurement, a very tricky field, full of mines as one can expect here. He told me he missed he fiancee so much, emphasizing the ‘so’ so very much that I did not dare to download all my mail for fear of separating these lovebirds.

Tonight we will go out across the street again for dinner in the restaurant with the carpets on the grass and eat kebabs with sabzy (cooked greens) and drink the fermented yoghurt, imagining it is beer.