Sylvia's Journal

We heard about the rocket attacks on the Peace Jirga via sms from our security folks but when we watched live coverage of the Jirga it was as if nothing had happened. The insurgents are bad shots, people say here and shrug their shoulders. But 100 meters away from the tent is a little too close for me. We are probably about 5 to 10 miles away from it all and didn’t hear a thing, other than the beep-beep from my cellphone that there was a message.

I watched the jirga open, the speeches and the patriotic songs with the ethnicities of singers carefully chosen so as not to offend anyone. Row after row of dignitaries, male and female, were sitting in respectful attendance. It looked very boring to me.

We are in lockdown until the whole thing is over, I believe at the end of Friday. That sucks because it means we can’t go on our usual Friday jaunts around town. And so we keep ourselves busy with housework, work-work, cooking, watching TV, preparing for our trip to the US, OBTC and deleting emails.

I was happy to see pictures of Tessa and Steve paying their respects, on behalf of all of us, to the ancestors. The planting of geraniums (maybe it was something different this year) at the Magnuson graves is an annual ritual that always ends with a vodka toast to them; we drink some and dribble some on the graves. And then it is Memorial Day, a day that is meaningless here; in Bamiyan I forgot all about it. Which soldiers would you honour here when you never know who are the bad and who are the good guys until much later and even then many people will disagree?