Sylvia's Journal

This morning I walked into our Herat conference room where we have our program managers’ meeting each Sunday at 9 AM. I found several of my colleagues standing quietly, looking somber, jaws tight, in their dark clothes. I quipped, ‘hey, what’s the matter, did someone die?’ and immediately regretted my words because that is exactly what had happened.

One of our colleagues had lost his father-in-law to a stroke; another lost a cousin over the weekend at a wedding when something when awry in the handling of guns used to shoot in the air out of joy, an odd habit that is rampant in parts of the Arab world and here as well; and the third and fourth were deaths that occurred during a house search in Laghman Province, by coalition forces; the kind of deaths that can quickly lead to more deaths to revenge the first ones. The relative of these two is one of our housekeepers, who walked around all day with eyes red from crying.

And here I stood, the only female, the only one wearing something other than grey/brown/black, with my brightly colored Bangla scarf and a smile on my face that quickly froze. Deaths is a lot closer in this society that it is back home but that doesn’t make each loss any less painful. I had learned how to say ‘my condolences’ in Dari but of course had forgotten the words at that moment. Actually, words aren’t all that important at such a time. We can speak with our eyes and hand gestures (hand on heart), and the response comes in the same form.

Although there was a whole day that followed, this sad opening of the day stayed with me and made other things less important.