One of my colleagues in Cambridge told me that the EPA did a survey back in 2004 that found the suspended fecal particulate matter in Kabul to be the highest in the world. This has to do with all the animals in town and the dry desert climate. Giardia too may be airborne, as some other colleague here in Kabul told one of our house guests. This may explain the constant throat clearing that we are all collectively engaged in. Hearing others doing this throat clearing drives me nuts and doing it myself is mostly ineffectual, also driving me nuts.
I am imagining the layers of soot, fecal matter and other debris that are floating in the air and then settle in my lungs and wonder whether it is worse than the smoking I gave up some 30 years ago. It is one of the less attractive side effects of living in Kabul, aside from the restricted movement – but so far all of it is worth it.
I just wrote in mirror script on the inside of my office window that is covered with a thin film of soot: please clean me. I could have written it in Dari as I know both the words and the letters, but writing Dari in mirror script is still a challenge.
In our language classrooms there are traditional diesel stoves; a little more primitive than the German designs we have in our house. The bukhari wataniye as it is called is the most basic of designs: a small faucet is turned to slow down or speed up the drip-drip of drops of diesel fuel from the storage tank on the right into a tiny funnel attached to a fuel line that runs into the chamber of the stove on the left. You light a match which lights the fuel and voila…drip, drip, drip. The alternative to the traditional fuel stove is the traditional wood stove which is equally bad for your health according to Axel who read something about our various inefficient heating systems in the New Yorker.
Sylvia's Journal 
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