Sylvia's Journal

We left early for the airport, the UNAMA part of the airport, a separate small building that has its own entrance (please unload your weapons in this box), its own fleet of planes and its own tiny business center and canteen. If it was a commercial enterprise it would be broke by now but the Canadians and Japanese are keeping the fleet in the air and we help a bit by paying insanely high airfares, for extra safety and reliability.

Security at the airport was ratcheted up to a level I had not seen before. For the first time our car was not allowed to enter the airport grounds and Sara and I walk the distance that we are usually driven. We didn’t mind because we don’t get much of a chance to walk. We passed the women’s checkpoint where bored female employees watched a grainy TV screen, drinking tea and chatting.

They gave us a cursory pat down and resumed their talking. As we discovered later all this extra security was because the Afghan president was flying someplace (this also caused a three hour delay in our departure but we didn’t know that at the time).

We passed through the parking lot C that, as Sara noticed, doesn’t have any signs to say it is C. People just know, just as people know that behind it is parking lot B, also without signage. We walked through the small building with snack shops and coffee places (not like Starbucks, this is Nescafe land, there is no critical mass of demanding coffee drinkers here). Finally our office guard was blocked from further accompanying us and we were on our own until my boss joined us some time later.

We didn’t arrive in Herat until 2 PM even though the flight is barely 2 hours and we started our journey at 7:30 AM.

Sara may have expected people with guns trying to ambush us on the airport road (such things sometimes happen as Steve had told her not realizing that this kind of information makes people nervous). Instead we watched an entire planeload of new army recruits empty out of the airport – mostly young boys walking three abreast with nervous smiles on their facing. Each three-some was holding hands, while marching someplace in a slightly disorderly way as only new recruits can get away with, under the stern gaze of their trainers. It would have been cute if it wasn’t for the fact that they were about to be turned into men-in-uniforms-with-guns.

Our guard, who had flown ahead of us, waited for us at the airport and took us to the provincial health office, built by the Italian PRT (=military) and opened in October 2009 when I came here first.
This is my third visit to Herat since I arrived in Afghanistan at the end of September. My Dari lessons are paying off; I can follow a lot more than 2 months ago although I am still far away from participating in Dari. I am frantically thumbed through my Dari-English dictionary to find words (or rather sounds) that I heard repeatedly. That is how I discovered that ‘to choose’ in Dari is, literally, to make happy. Huh?

At the hotel I noticed that the rooms are now equipped with an armoire, a piece of furniture that had been missing on my previous trips – everything was hung on an elongated hat rack. Now I have hangers. They clearly do listen to their customers.

I thawed my frozen feet in the tiny bath tub and then watched Bollywood soap operas until dinner time. They are love dramas and some play out in halls that look like the Afghan wedding halls. Now I understand where the Afghan wedding hall fad comes from. The funny thing is that the Indian wedding hall is full of women and men together, the women rather exposed in comparison to their Afghan sisters (arms, midriff, ankles, neck, cleavage)