Sylvia's Journal

Okcana from Uzbekistan cut our hair this afternoon, in the kitchen; first Axel, then me. She has the pale look of a Caucasian. Her parents left Moscow and Belorus to settle in Samarkand. She doesn’t speak Uzbek nor Dari because everyone spoke Russian under the USSR regime.

She came to Afghanistan with her teenage son and worked in a beauty salon. Her son is about to graduate; after that she doesn’t know what will happen. She lives just down the street. We are both pleased with the result. Axel no longer looks like a conductor with wisps of hair flying loose around his face and I have a new look.

For dinner we met the very young and pregnant Bureau Chief for Afghanistan and Pakistan of Time magazine. She and her Afghan American husband are flying to Massachusetts in two months to settle in Rockport and, when the time comes, deliver their first born at the Beverly Birth Center, how wonderfully strange is that? They were pleased to have a firsthand account of what it is like to deliver there. Our memories are still very vivid even though it was 24 years ago.

We met in the Korean restaurant, which was one of the few open on this second day of Eid. It is unmarked from the street and so you have to know; even if you pass the first barricade and heavy outdoor fence you couldn’t tell you were about to get into a restaurant/guesthouse. For a brief and unsettling moment I felt like we were in a trap of the kind that James Bond always gets into, a kind of airlocked sluice with nothing but high and unscalable walls. And then one of the walls opened and we walked into the smells of Korea.

Over a delicious dinner we discussed child bearing, working in male environments, working moms, and life in Kabul that is not dictated by security rules. Our new found friends have a car each, drive around, and mix with the local population in ways we can only dream of.

It’s part of the schizophrenia of living in this place: one the one hand life is very ordinary, with shopping, cooking, working, getting pregnant, antenatal visits, driving around town to get from A to B, while on the other hand we are constantly reminded of the ugliness of war and fighting, by blast walls, men in uniform with guns and armored cars/humvees in camouflage, tons of them.

As if to illustrate this juxtaposition of the ordinary and the dangerous, just this morning a family feud got out of hand near our house as we later found out. Our colleagues reported small arms fire. That’s the problem here – Thanksgiving dinners in the US may also bring out family feuds but at least people usually don’t pull out their guns. The fight here ended badly for one person at least who lost his life (I assume his), and possibly more if the police gets the perpetrators.

We ended the day with a video call to our friends in Charlottesville in Virginia who showed us a chocolate Charlotte, leaving us wishing for a more advanced kind of technology that allows virtual licking of mixing bowls. We showed off our Chinese-Pakistani furniture and the fancy and hideous lamps as well as our new haircuts while peaking into our friends kitchen for other things to drool over. One day I am sure we can beam stuff up and partake in faraway Thanksgiving meals and beverages. For now this remains in the realm of fantasy.