Sylvia's Journal

We are no longer going for our weekly airing around Habibia highschool. Lately the guards wouldn’t let us in. A new arrangement has been made with the Ghazni Olympic stadium. It is the place where supposedly adulterous women (women who had been raped I suspect) were stoned to death and men executed while people watched from the bleachers, during the Taliban days. It is also the stadium where we watched a bushkazi game 31 years ago.

Now it looks like an innocent and run down old stadium. It’s better than Habibia because it is protected from the street and we are just about the only people there except for the ultimate frisbee team and a few people practicing boxing. When you walk up the bleachers you can walk around the stadium and look out into the city: a lovely Moghul type of mosque on one side and what looks like the Afghan cousin of the Air and Space museum, the poor cousin, on the other side.

We joined Steve on his weekly Chicken Street outing for a few very specific items which completes the Christmas shopping.

We had invited a few people over for dinner, a young Afghan midwife who is going to study public health in Dhaka, her brother who is my friend on facebook and two colleagues from MSH.

Although we have a refrigerator full of dishes that the cook prepared for the weekend, Axel was intent on cooking himself. He had bought some cans of various beans. When we returned home from our walk and shopping expedition we realized we did not have a can opener. We asked the guards how they do this and they indicated they open cans with a knife. Axel preferred something a little safer. We also wanted to serve a spinach salad but did not know how to wash the spinach given that we are not supposed to drink the water. We are wondering how the cook has been washing (or not) the vegetables that we eat raw.
When we forget to buy something or missing critical things like a can opener and bleach (to use for washing the spinach) we can’t just go back to the store; it requires calling the transport office and asking for a car, even if the store is a quick and easy walk down the street.

The driver didn’t understand why Axel couldn’t just use a knife to open the cans; and why he needed bleach (‘white maker’ in Dari) was entirely beyond them, but he insisted and they took him to a local grocery store, while I made another Dutch apple pie since we have too many apples and the previous one was a great success.

It was nearly as if we were living on our own and taking care of ourselves, bleaching, cooking, cleaning; only the noises that come from the guards at the back of our house, and the low planes droning overhead remind us that we are someplace else.