Sylvia's Journal

Events of today reminded me of two important things: (1) when you travel pay the extra 100 dollars or so for travel insurance and emergency or medical evacuation and (2) put every new contact in your electronic or paper address book. Together these two simple acts combine to be a powerful set of tools to take care of people in case of a serious accident away from home.

We, and our children, know about this first hand of course from our own accident, but when the heat of the moment is gone, you grow lax and complacent, and eventually you forget.

Both tools were needed today. Early this morning I received a call from my colleague, the distressed father and uncle of yesterday (ISAF) accident victims. He asked me to mobilize my network and make contact with the embassies of the two countries his sons (and one daughter) have made their home. They had all come to Kabul with their wives, husband, and children for a joyful event, the celebration of the wedding of their brother, tomorrow. But all that has changed now.

As I racked my brain where to start I realized that I did not have all the numbers I needed to call at my fingertips. To track numbers down I required more phone calls (and because of poor phone lines and constant dropping of calls, even more calls than I care to remember).

A medical doctor of very high rank in ISAF who I had met at a conference some months ago, and then in a meeting at USAID a few weeks ago, sprung into action. As a result of that the three young men are now receiving the best possible care they can get in Afghanistan, at the NATO hospital at the military section of the airport.

I also tried to mobilize the consular sections of the German and British embassies but they may not be able to do much because assistance (medical evacuation) is a costly affair (hence the travel insurance bit).

It will be interesting to see how the two different health insurance schemes (German and British) deal with such tragedies suffered by its citizens abroad.

The Germans already made it clear that domestic health insurance does not cover an accident in Afghanistan and other than giving names of evacuation companies I don’t expect much else.

I am pretty sure that the victims did not have the kind of insurance that will cover the expenses of flying them and their wives and children to their homes in Germany and the UK. At such occasions, even membership in national Automobile Associations may have helped.

Axel noted that with all the bad press the Germans got for killing civilians in Kunduz, some months ago, they’d jump on this opportunity to correct their image and come to the rescue of an Afghan who lives in Germany and whose wife and child carry German passports. You’d also think that ISAF with its direct air link between Baghram Airfield and Germany for injured soldiers, could solve our problems in a flash. But that assumes two things: that the patients can travel by air and that all parts of the system communicate and, together, look at the whole. In the latter case, maybe they do. But maybe they see a different whole than we do.

As if he knew about the sad turn of events, even the ice cream seller outside our gate has selected a mournful song from his (limited) Chinese megaphone repertoire. He usually plays ‘Fur Elise.’ Not is is something in a minor key.

Axel’s birthday did not quite go as planned. It started out OK. We picked up a friend in town and went for a lovely walk in Bagh-e-Bala, toured the little pleasure palace again, took pictures of the caretaker, and promised to bring him medicine that will make him strong. We finished our walk with a cup of green tea sitting on a carpeted platform between the rose bushes.

After that I went for my usual Friday massage. Monalisa had made a slip in the bathroom and had pulled a muscle in her arm so I got to have Jamila work on me. Massages are not very Afghan. Afghan women would probably be horrified with the idea of total strangers touching their body, even if female. But Afghan-Americans brought the practice here and Jamila became a masseuse, a very good one.

For a birthday party we had planned to go to a fundraiser for Razia-jan’s girls’ school but then things started to go bad. An ISAF SUV hit a vehicle with four young Afghan men in it. As it happened, these four men were the sons and nephews of one of my staff, on their way to buying supplies for an upcoming wedding – my sewing project for the day had been for that very same wedding. One of the nephews died instantly, the others were taken to the hospital in critical condition.

In the meantime demonstrators set the ISAF vehicles on fire and a large crowd collected shouting and throwing stones. It was good that we weren’t anywhere near. We are not exactly sure what happened; there were reports of gunfire and efforts by the local police to quiet things down. We decided to stay put and skip the fundraiser.

The party dress for the wedding is done now, but the wedding is probably not going to take place any time soon. My colleagues all rallied around the very shaken fathers and said their prayers for the 24 year old who died.

There are really no words for this tragedy. It is all intensely sad, especially since it was not an ordinary traffic accident. It made us realize that even when things are quiet at the surface, underneath there is much resentment against the foreign military who have hijacked the city with their blast walls, occupying enormous tracts of Kabul’s prime real estate, who have blocked streets and now this, convoys that make everyone stop in their tracks, except these kids.

It was not a good ending to Axel’s birthday and it wiped out all the positive thoughts I had during my massage about my work here and things lightening up.