Sylvia's Journal

We celebrated Thanksgiving a little different than we usually do.There was no turkey on our Afghan (Chinese/Pakistani) table this year. The Dari word for turkey is fil (elephant) murkh (chicken). We didn’t even have chicken. Axel stayed home all day while I had lunch with a British-born Australian woman who works in the general directorate for human resources, the poor step child general directorate in the ministry of health.

Her Afghan colleagues have no heat and work under dismal circumstances. After the salaries are paid there is no more money for heat, stationary, and other basic supplies. She goes to work with coat and gloves and never takes them off during the entire winter work days. She’s used to it now but visitors are not and shiver in their suits. She agrees with the concept that there is no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate clothing.

With two of my colleagues we picked her up in a part of town that is called Parwan and drove to the place where most of the restaurants are. We selected a heavily barricaded Lebanese restaurant for lunch. I ordered too much food: a large selection of warm and cold dishes that are called ‘mezze’ in Lebanon. Only the arak was missing. I had wine instead, my first glass of wine since the we opened the bottle that Axel brought from Dubai, a few weeks ago.

The restaurant rewards its customers with extra dishes, ‘on the house’ as the waiter kept saying each time he put another dish on the table that I did not recollect ordering. At the end of the meal a large chunk of chocolate cake is also offered, once again on the house. The result was that 6 hours later I was still not hungry and since there was no turkey anyways, I skipped dinner.

The best part of Thanksgiving was talking with Tessa first, and then later Sita and Jim via Skype to wish them happy Thanksgiving and look into their living room. Even though it slows down the transmission rate, it is still wonderful to be able to see each other through our computer screens.

We have cable TV now and can access the BBC, Al Jazeera English, Bloomberg, EuroNews, Deutsche Welle and a Flemish Channel in addition to about 200 other channels of junk from all over Europe, the Arab world, Central Asian, Korea, Iran and Russia. We can also access a few hallelujah church channels from the Bible belt in the US and talk shows in any language you can imagine.

Not having a remote we have to sit in front of the box and click our way up or down to get to the desired news channels. Along the way we pass by endless Italian quizzes and movies, Islamic sites that have the camera focused on Mecca and, a few numbers higher or lower, titillating still and moving images of thinly clad ladies enticing the viewer to call a number (for a fee of course). We get all this junk for free, imagine that, suffering through it just to get the news. Until now we only got the local channels which are a bit limited aside from being in a language we can not yet follow.