While Axel was talking business in the Kabul Coffee House Ankie and I picked Janneke up at the old German Club and went for real coffee in the Wakhan Café, spending a delicious two hours of speaking only Dutch – a rare treat. My re-immersion in Dutch short-circuits my English now and then when I keep talking Dutch to people who stare blankly back at me.
We left Ankie and Janneke to their shopping and made our way to the Russian quarter called Mikroyan for lunch with the aunt and uncle of my brother Reinout’s doctoral assistant at the university of Tilburg, a transplanted Afghan who had invited us to become part of his family. Armed with a dictionary and in broken English we talked our way through a spectacular lunch with grandma, daughter, son in law and grant child.
The family story was sad, as so many others, one brother who disappeared during the mujahideen times and, after much waiting, was finally declared dead, but apparently there was never a body. The picture of a handsome young man in uniform eternalizes him, never growing old, like his brother-in-law. The other handsome young man in the frame is the brother who left with his wife and small children and ended up in Holland. All that grandma has left with her in Kabul is one daughter and her husband and small child.
After lunch Axel had another interview in a part of the city that gives us the creeps. It is where many foreigners and their offices hide behind barricades, blast walls, sand bags and heavily armed guards in bullet-proof vests. This is where MSHers used to live and where we could walk freely seven years ago, with very little outward signs of a city under siege. At the time it wasn’t. Our current quarters are much like that except for the prohibition on walking.
While he had his interview with a Dutch friend of Pia, I had a heavenly Thai oil massage that was badly overdue. After the massage I killed time till Axel was done in one of the local supermarkets where I bumped into the minister of health who was shopping and wished me a merry Christmas. I usually see him on official duty when he is always surrounded by armed guards and people with wires around their ears, as if he was a president. It was comforting to see him as an ordinary citizen, shopping.
Christmas is arriving here and trees can be bought. The German club has a tree with light outside the dining room.
After a brief moment at home we headed out again for another social event, a dinner in the fancy Intercontinental Hotel offered by my boss to our man in Herat and his government counterpart, the provincial health director who had also brought his wife and 5 year old daughter. I was surprised, and then again not so surprised, when I was asked to sit at another table with the wife and daughter. This mirrored my experience in Herat where I was asked whether I wanted to spend the evening with the wife or join the men. Then I joined the men but now I was prepared with my dictionary. I took it as yet another impromptu Dari lesson and learned a few words more and made a new little friend in Herat.
Sylvia's Journal 
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