Sylvia's Journal

My boss left at the end of the morning, after an inspiring speech that illustrated something about the kind of leadership we are encouraging: making a connection between the village women, men and children who need medical care and all the conceptual and analytical work, the planning and organizing that sometimes seems so remote from all that.

Sara left with him and both are now safely are back in Kabul. Part of me wanted to go with them but duty keeps me here. The intense Dari immersion continues but it’s not enough for me to follow closely the discussions and understand the reporting out. I couldn’t tell much about the quality of the reports and the underlying reasoning and so I kept quiet. I am always a few sentences behind when someone translates and few people can do this.

In between translations I did some house cleaning of my mailbox, reading stuff saved for later and tried to keep my feet warm by rubbing them under the table. While it is nice and warm outside, on this inside of this marble and stone building it is kind of clammy, a cold that gets in your bones.

Outside spring is not only in the air; new grass is covering the hills with a thin green veil and the gardeners were already busy preparing beds for planting. Still, snow is predicted for tomorrow.

I was asked to close the four day event with a final speech which I needed to improvise on the spot. Luckily, while one sentence was being translated I was able to think up my next sentence.

After lunch the participants in the event from the other provinces were taken on a tour of Herat and I joined the ride. We paid a visit to Ismael Khan’s Jihad museum that I had already visited last October, then by night.

Last time I had labeled it a monument that celebrated war but now I saw it differently as I watched the Afghans intently stare at scenes and speak in muted tones to one another. It is not an abstract thing for them and they recognize names and dates and faces. I kept wanting to ask them, where were you when all this was happening in Herat, but decided not to.

I kept looking at a small replica of a traditional village house where the roof had been blown in and the adult-size dolls were all crumpled under the debris while an infant was sleeping peacefully in its crib – a yaatim, I learned, an orphan. I calculated that the real life model for this baby would now be about 16 years old now. Would he be full of revenge or dead already?

We visited the site of the Jihad House high on the hill with its unwelcoming blue glass mirror windows (no entry) and surveyed what may have been a battle field. Driving back to the main road we passed much war debris: rusted tanks in various states of dismantlement.

At the main road we passed the Five Star Hotel where the US consulate had just settled in when a mortar destroyed part of the 4th and 5th floor. There is still a gaping hole. It is a miracle no one was killed, the mortar hit the staircase, right in between the guest rooms.

We visited two more sites, one a shrine of a famous poet, surrounded by white marble graves and another of a spiritual leader whose name I name I can’t remember. Next to the shrine, in its enclosed yard, is a gravel patch with a narrow marble slap.

Legend has it that if you place your head on the stone, pray, fold your arms, you will roll towards the edges of the flat surface as if you are rolling down a steep hill. Under loud and irreverent laughter several of our group tried this, most without success, until some elder called our party to order and all the doctors became quiet like a bunch of reprimanded boys in class.

They were living right up to the stereotype that western-clad and educated men are breaking with tradition and are doing things that are bad for Afghanistan. This tension runs like a deep fissure through this country.

At the second shrine several male and female beggars showed the really desperate side of this society. I usually don’t give money to beggars but the sight was so sorry I couldn’t stop the impulse. I was immediately reminded that the men were heroine users and would use my 10 Afs to by one fifth of their next hit. This is the dilemma of giving to beggar: you care enough so that you can’t say ‘I don’t care what they do with the money.’