Sylvia's Journal

After delivering my chapter by email to the author and editor of the Third Culture Kids book, I had myself dropped off at the ministry to attend a few meetings with government officials. I wanted to hear the same thing as our consultant about their expectations for his work. Aligning language, strategies, work plans, units, divisions, and expectations is probably the central part of my job here. It wasn’t in my job description but after 8 weeks that’s what it appears to be. It requires a lot of listening and a lot of questions.

In the middle of one of these meetings our consultant, unknowingly to himself, was smearing his forehead and face with blue ink from a leaky pen. Once alerted to this he tried to rub the ink from his forehead and cheek which made it worse. We continued the conversation as if nothing had happened until I couldn’t stand it any longer. Maybe that’s one of the differences between men and women. I remember my mother spitting on her finger and then rubbing whatever dirt was on our faces.

Spit cleaning didn’t seem quite the proper thing to do so I filled my tea cup with hot water, dipped tissues in it and walked around to the other side of the table to rub his forehead and cheeks clean. Someone donated a small piece of hotel soap because the ink wasn’t coming off. All through this the meeting continued, with questions and answers across the table; our consultant didn’t miss a beat.

Towards the end of our last meeting Axel called from the project car parked outside the ministry. He had come to pick me up to attend the opening of a new Japanese restaurant and gallery space. It took our driver a long time to find it but we knew we were in the neighborhood when we found several other cars with foreigners driving around with the same invitation in their hands.

The galleries were still being installed in a beautiful old house that had been destined to be wrecked and replaced by one of the new hideously extravagant mansions that dot the Afghan urban landscape.

Various craft organizations were settling in just in time to present the foreigners with an unusual and spectacular array of Christmas gifts. A fashion group was selling spectacular one-of-kind- woolen and silk women’s apparel, hardly anything below 100 dollars (Zarif Design). An interior design cooperative, boumi, had already completed its display of beautiful textiles made into curtains, table cloths, pillow covers and napkins that would not be out of place on Fifth Avenue in New York. A third was still hanging its Islamic illuminations, oil paintings and water colors from teachers and students from the Herat School of Art, priced between 100 and 1500 dollars.

Downstairs, next to the Japanese restaurant a craft cooperative was selling various brightly colored bags, clothes and tables full of small teddy bears in white, blue, red and yellow burqas and other traditional Afghan outfits. The carpet place was still unpacking its new and old carpets of spectacular designs and colors.

On the ground floor the Japanese owner, relocating from Bamiyan now that her hotel there has closed for the winter, had put out several Japanese dishes, including sushi rolls so we could sample her new restaurant’s offerings. She is a friend of a former colleague, also from Japan, who had alerted me to the opening in an email sent from Ethiopia.

Hours later, back at home, over a second, non-Japanese dinner, we discussed the impossible US mission in Afghanistan with our housemate. Axel quoted several passages, one even more depressing than the previous one from Ahmad Rashid’s latest book Descent into Chaos. It makes you wonder whether we can do anything good here. I left the dining room table to watch House in Farsi with all exposed female flesh fuzzed out by moving rectangles.