Sylvia's Journal

I took Chris to the massage place to receive her Christmas present: a one hour massage. We squeezed into the tiny bedroom, me on the bed, Chris on the table, and had ourselves oiled and kneaded until we both glowed. Afterward the car dropped me off at Mary’s house where Axel had gone earlier to help with the Democrats Abroad Christmas cookie baking project.

We baked and frosted brownies, cupcakes, fudge, chocolate chip cookies and whoopee pies, put them in plastic baggies and delivered them to the troops at Camp Eggers, until we ran out.

It was a civic responsibility project organized by Mary who had her extended network of family and friends in the US contribute to Christmas packages that she handed out last week, and the baking ingredients for today’s project.

We may not agree with the military approach to rebuilding Afghanistan and the overwhelming militarization of this project we know what it is like to be away from family and friends over the holidays and we feel sorry for people who have to eat the kind of food they serve in military canteens. We hope that what we did was a tiny little spark of light in an otherwise dreary and, we are told, mostly boring set of routines.

Mary is the chair of the Democrats Abroad Afghanistan chapter and she is also working to protect wildlife in Afghanistan. Confiscated rugs and coats, made from bearskin, wolf hides and even sealskin (mostly from Russia) were stashed in her house to serve as examples what not to buy. I imagine that it will take a lot of effort and public education to stop this trade.

A few others showed up in Mary’s lovely old house in a pleasant and very low key part of town where I would have chosen to live if we’d had the choice. For lunch we walked over to the Flower Street Café next door. The place was empty as most of the foreigners who frequent the place had left Kabul for the holidays.

We abandoned our plans to organize a board game night because we don’t know any board game players and besides it is a school night – I will be working with the Environmental Health team to start on something that could be called a new beginning. It seems the right thing to do on the first day of the new year, even though for Afghans it is just an ordinary day.