Sylvia's Journal

Yesterday’s supermarket suicide bomber was sobering as it signaled the re-appearance of the some or other Taliban group in our midst; too close for comfort. And so we stayed home, watching what is unfolding in Egypt and rejoicing that I am not stuck at the airport there with twenty Afghans.

The only escape from our self-imposed hunkering down was the short trip to my language school for two hours of reading a history of Afghanistan with way too many new words and complex sentence structures that don’t lend themselves to word for word translation.

Back home I baked cookies which I shared with the guards as Axel’s stomach cannot handle all that butter. I worked patiently on my Quaker sampler and washed a few of my scarves; the dirty water revealed how black the air is inside and outside our house (and thus inside our lungs).

Axel’s lungs suffer more from this than mine. Once again he had some sort of bronchial infection which literally knocks the air out of him.

We had Ted (from SOLA) over for dinner and talked about his successful scholarship-raising trip and a thousand other things related to getting Afghan teenagers up to speed to study in the US before coming back to change this country. This is the only antidote to such barbaric practices as the recent stoning of a young couple in Kunduz.