Sylvia's Journal

One of Axel’s students, the one who went through 12 revisions of his college application essay (over which both lost several pounds) has gotten a job as international staff in East Timor. He invited us for a goodbye lunch in a pricey western restaurant near our house. We had to order for him because he didn’t understand the choices (ham quiche, chicken sausage pie and croquet madams and monsieurs).

It was the day of my SOLA class again, something I always look forward to and immensely enjoy. We read another few pages of A Thousand Splendid Suns, a chapter about Taliban abuses. Two of the girls only knew about the outrageous acts the Taliban committed from hear-say or movies and books like this one. But one girl had lived in Jalalabad at the time, one of the Taliban epicenters. She was too young to suffer much directly but she remembers the secret schools and the women pretending to go to Koran classes. She did remember the beatings with radio antennas and tree branches.

There is no word on the missing girl. Powerful forces have been mobilized around the world to come to her rescue. We keep praying for a good ending and I was reminded tonight to always add an incha’allah to my wishes, as M. taught me since otherwise the good ending is unlikely to happen.

M. and her family are back from dangerous Egypt to the relatively peacefulness of Kabul, proving once more that everything is relative. She invited me to her aunt’s wedding tonight. As usual at such events I found myself in the company of women and watched them as they interacted free and playfully with each other in ways one rarely gets to see. It was a wedding of two older people who chose each other, not assigned by parents and family clans. It was the first wedding I attended where the bride actually smiled and the wedding was not an agonizing removal of the bride from her mother’s home but a conscious choice for a new life and a new love.

I was the only foreigner and received many stares. But unlike the previous weddings I went to I can now converse with people in their language, albeit haltingly and only when the music stops for a moment. I learned one more thing about weddings and that is that the bride’s family members are not allowed to dance; I guess that too has to do with the prescriptive behavior of brides and grooms.

In the middle of the festivities the wedding hall trembled. I was a little nervous but no one else seemed to be in the least perturbed. I had momentary visions of collapsed buildings and ambulances rushing to the scene. But the tremor passed and we continued our wedding meal, thrown on our tables and then taken away amidst much clatter and rice flying off plates onto hapless but well dressed wedding guests.

Back at home (it was an unusual early ending of a wedding party) I found Axel glued to the TV where a promise of some significant change in the Egyptian gridlock was tossed back and forth between correspondents.