Sylvia's Journal

After my first good experience here with the internet it stopped and didn’t come back for the night, nor the next morning; As a result I was not able to post an entry yesterday even though there was much to tell. And there certainly was no chance of putting the wonderful pictures up that I took during our tour yesterday later afternoon.

Alain and I took the facilitator team out for dinner to a restaurant that was recommended, the Kefayat Clup. It is a large complex that would have been called a pleasure garden in Babur’s days. Several halls, restaurant and even a coffee shop surround gardens and walk ways.

Outside one of the restaurants are the now familiar 6 by 8 feet carpeted eating platforms with their sitting (tushaq) and leaning (balish) pillows. We found it too cold and instead opted for sitting in the empty restaurant with a large and centrally placed flat TV screen and harsh fluoresecent lights; it was slightly less cold inside, the only redeeming feature.

The food was great: kabobs, manto, homemade yogurt, spinach, rice and ‘shepards’ salad (any dish labeled as a shepard dish indicates that it was and can be put together quickly).

Colored lights outside outlined the shapes of trees (real) and giant flowers (not real) shaped like daisies and tulips. The tulip is everywhere: embroidered on ancient textiles, knotted into carpets, as giant shapes on top of the mosque, in advertisements for cell phone service. The tulip came from these parts of the world; the Dutch only exploited the commercial opportunity it provided by perfecting its shape and colors to match the whims of the buying public. But nature had given the tulip to the people here first; they just left it small and wild.

Back at the hotel I finally had to figure out the bedding arrangement. There were two small beds and one large one. Each had a mattress with a scratchy tweed-like cover, then a curtain-like shiny piece of cloth put over that and then there was one sheet, all slightly smaller than the mattress. Folded at the foot of the bed where a few of the giant and heavy Chinese blankets that are ubiquitous here. It was a little too cool to do without them.

I pulled the cover over me and its warmth quickly dispelled any thoughts of all of the hotel customers before me who had slept under the same cover. I marvel once again how easy we humans adjust to change – we may not like it, but we have no choice. That’s how things go here.

I was up early and joined Ali in the large meeting room in the basement where he sat in the half dark reading the book that we wrote at MSH some 5 years ago about leadership development. It is in its third printing now and we hope to have a Dari/Pashto version sometime in the future.

When Afghans have breakfast they ‘eat tea’ and so I was invited to do so. Breakfast, served on long tables, consisted of two kinds of breads, one small and savory and the other large and sweet with black cumin seeds sprinkled over them. The breads are served with small saucers of jam and cream, foreigners’ cream they call it, but this foreigner, who otherwise loves cream, declined.

Breakfast, as most other communal meals I have observed in Afghanistan, is hardly a social affair – everyone eats in silence and fast – as if it is nothing more than a biological requirement.