Sylvia's Journal

I awoke to a French toast breakfast (my first, etc.) and a loving husband serving me tea. The birthday massage was cancelled because the masseuse was sick and the only other one available was the young inexperienced one who sliced of part of Janneke’s toe some weeks ago.

Instead we went to find the nice gentleman, agricultural student and manager of a women’s spinning and knitting coop, for some more yarn. It was a long ride to the edge of Kabul, a Shia neighborhood that was getting ready for some big religious festival that requires many large colored flags (green, red and black).

The woolman came to our car with a bag of sheeps wool, cashmere yarn and several knitted hats. After I haggled a bit about some cashmere yarn, and we had agreed on a price he gave me the remainder of the bag. “Please find us some buyers,” he said. I have never been in the wool/yarn/knitted hats business but I promised I would and promptly announced his request on facebook. We will see where it goes from here.

We had lunch in the garden of the Wakhan Café, sending the driver and guard off to prayers and their kind of lunch, before a few more errands that involved large cushions to accommodate our party guests and camembert to go with the French Bakery bread. That camembert came in handy when the delivery boy for the food was about an hour late.

We had forgotten to put ‘no presents’ on the invitation and so presents came along with the guests. The best one was a large orange camel with a Christmas bell around its neck and two camel bags that, I discovered, can hold a cell phone. There were also several bouquets of the type that you give to Olympic champions or opera singers, some bottles of grape beverage, a few cans of adult hop beverages, some made from cherries, a winter snuggly for adults, a Nooristani wooden box and, from Axel, a dress made by Razia jan that he bought last summer at her fashion show/school fundraiser – and kept hidden somehow in this small house that hardly has any hiding places.

The big joy of this evening was the connecting of people – we connected pilots with pilots, neighbors who live across the street from one another, knitters and colleagues. Many of our friends used to be fellow guests at one of Razia jan’s fabulous dinner parties – things clicked and we went on seeing each other when she was not around.

After all the guests left we prepared leftover platters for the guards who had been busy guiding people to our house and opening and closing the gate for everyone, with or without cars. The only disappointment was that none of our friends and family in Holland and the USA came. After all Axel had sent them all invitations with precise directions to our house. One of my brothers cheerfully replied that he was checking out the bus schedule from The Hague to Kabul and then reported there was no good connection.