Sylvia's Journal

All day I found myself in the presence of pilots, three American pilots who are here with their young families to ferry NGO staff to faraway places to do their good work. So now I can count pilots of another company among my friends which opens the door, quite literally, to fly in another cockpit someday.

They all understood the thrill of flying from Dubai to Kabul in the cockpit. If I am to cash in my present from Axel – a long weekend in Bamiyan in July – it is these guys that will probably take us there.

My colleague AB and I are following an orientation to Afghanistan course, the same Axel was so enthused about several months ago. Today I learned that we should really sleep under a bednet because there is malaria in Kabul, especially near stagnant water. Since we live on River road, the river little more than a trickle and stagnant water on the side, this may be good advice.
The malaria is not of the lethal kind that can kill you but the other kind that doesn’t kill you but that can make you miserable from time to time for the rest of your life.

In the kitchen management course I learned that chlorine kills the bacteria that are in the dust (poo dust she called it) that covers nearly all the food that is produced here, including Afghanistan’s famous dried fruits and nuts. Thus, raisins, nuts should be washed, soaked and then dried again in the oven. This makes the consumption of dried foods a little too cumbersome for my liking. I also learned that chlorine does not kill the worm eggs that hatch into the dreaded long tape worms. So Iodine is now on my shopping list.

I was pleased to learn that we can eat the yummy-looking strawberries that are sold along the road from push carts as long as we let them sit for 20 minutes in water with 5 drops of iodine per liter. That may be worth the effort.

We learned about development philosophy from a compatriot of mine whose family comes from the same town in Holland that was the home of my father’s family for several hundred years. He started his development career as a water engineer in Bangladesh. Battling water (too much of it) is something the Dutch have in common with the Bangladeshis.

We listened to a, somewhat rushed, lecture about the history of Afghanistan, accompanied by slides with neat pictures and too much text. It is time to re-read my smudged and poorly photocopied exemplar of Louis Dupree’s Afghanistan.

Some parts of the program are lectures by expats who have lived here for a long time while other parts are delivered in interview format with an expat, fluent in the local language, asking questions to an Afghan.

And so we had a chance to learn about Islam and family life from the horse’s mouth so to speak. The session about Islam was at times a little awkward when our questions could not be satisfactorily answered with other than the regurgitated answers from mullahs, especially those about sin, forgiveness and the treatment of women.

Religion and tribal customs are so firmly intertwined here that most ordinary people cannot tell them apart, leaving Islam to explain, in very convoluted ways, some of the most striking contradictions, such as why bad things happen to good people (young girls setting themselves on fire to escape abusive husbands their father’s age or small boys being used as playthings by bearded men) and good things happen to bad people (filthy rich drug and/or weapon dealers with much blood on their hands flying first class to Mecca to wash off all their sins).