Sylvia's Journal

A gorgeous day in Kabul, sun out, blue skies, white mountains. It was a good day for sleeping in and then going for a long walk to the pleasure palace, one of our favorite outings these days.

At the end of our walk we sat down on one of the platforms that are sprinkled among the rose bushes and pine trees and enjoyed a cup of green tea.

Afterwards we had ourselves dropped off at the Wakhan cafe which has an American menu in terms of prices and the best coffee. The only thing that tells you that you are not in America is the large glass of freshly squeezed pomegranate juice. We read up on the Afghan news from the one English language newspaper which we would like to have home delivered but we haven’t quite figured out how to make that happen.

Axel has started to make videos with the little Flip camera that came with our new internet account in the US and we are amazed what it can do and how easy it is to use. We are finally entering the camcorder era. Axel filmed our entire trip back from Shari-nao to our home and you can see where the roads are free from the speed and where they are broken the pictures is a little bumpy. I’ll try to post it.

People were out on the streets and the nice weather made everything look peaceful and people friendly. It’s hard to imagine the violence on a day like this.

When we came back home we set on our terrace in the winter sun and anticipated spring. I discovered that we have three young apple trees and one pear tree and of course there is the grape arbor covering our terrace. In a couple of months we have to decide what we want our garden to be like; no vegetables, as these are plentiful, delicious and cheap. I think we’ll have a garden full of flowers when the time comes.

But at night when the sunny skies were gone we were once more confronted with the dark side of this society. One of our dinner guests was sms-ing with a young bright woman, hiding in the family bathroom, who is about to be sold for 25.000 dollars to a country bumpkin cousin to become a household slave and baby maker.

The young woman (21) speaks and writes fluently in English, and is about to get her masters from Kabul University. She has offers from two American universities to go for her PhD with full scholarship. But her life is about to end and all options are bad: get married with all the consequences of marrying into an uneducated family (this includes ending her education), run away (and be ostracized, not able to ever come back) or be killed by relatives. There are tens of thousands of stories like this. Kabul doesn’t look so sunny anymore.