Sylvia's Journal

I took Katie along to my physical therapy session, for yet another taste of Kabul, part of her Afghanistan primer.

It took us more than an hour to get across town. Some roads were blocked with heavy construction equipment and angry policemen waving us into a direction we didn’t want to go in; no one quite knows what’s goin on behind the blocades but we all assume it has something to do with the upcoming peace Jirga and the mobilization of thousands of men in uniform. Is anyone seeing the contradiction?

As there are fewer and fewer back roads these days to get to your destination, the traffic jams become more frequent and massive, especially since there are always people in the traffic jam who manage to turn their car around and then try to drive against the traffic to wherever they came from.

Police presence is visibly increading by the day. It is as if the grimmest looking police officers have been mobilized – sometimes it felt like even smiling at them was an infraction. We were pulled over but we were prepared with all our papers, most of which they can’t read anyways.

It is hard to understand why they’d pull us over but may be they have been given quotas: stop x number of people who look like Arabs with bad intention, x number who look like potential suicide bombers, and, for good measure, x number of blond or grey-haired female foreigners.

Eventually we made it, albeit quite late, to the orthopaedic center where we found the female treatment room fuller than I have ever seen it before. The three PTs were all treating several women at once, putting this one in a neck stretching machine, that one on a bench with a hotpack on her back and a third one with the e-stem, the electrical stimulation to activate muscles or reduce pain.

I did not complete my treatment because we had another appointment, with the Thai massage ladies, that I didn’t want to miss for the world. After yesterday’s khakbad (dust storm) my skin was so dried out that I was craving an oil massage. Katie chose for the, much more intense, Thai massage. We agreed that both had been sublime.

Back home we had lunch and I had a little nap before language lessons – I am now about one third through a literacy primer that teaches adult Dari speaking Afghans how to read and write. This meant I was ready for a 12-page Dick, Jane and Spot kind of reading booklet. I am learning about Asad and Nasim, two brothers, who are working on their plot of land. I am halfway through the story and I have no idea how it is going to end; I can’t bear the suspense!

Tomorrow Katie and I are going to Bamyan. I have flown from Kabul to Bamiyan and back on the way to Herat. It is no more than a 45 minute ride; but tomorrow we are scheduled to leave Kabul at 9 AM, touching down on Bamiyan’s small gravel airfield a little before 4 PM. I think Katie is going to get the aerial tour of Afghanistan, Kandahar, Herat, and who knows what else, before getting to our destination.