All through the night and the day snow fell, softening the sharp edges of Kabul. Any place is lovely with snow on it. The heavy wet snow also covered our internet antenna and so we were disconnected from the world. That’s the down side of snow.
In my Dari class I finished, after months of slow reading, a history of Afghanistan book. I learned about all the fighters/warriors and craftsmen/poets/scientists that crisscrossed this country, two streams of invasions that have both plagued and uplifted Afghanistan over the centuries. The sad outcome of all this is that there are more signs of the former and less of the latter.
After our Dari class it was still light and we invited our guard to help us make a snow man, an ‘adam-e-barfi’ as such is called here. The snow was perfect for this purpose, solid and heavy. Rabbani, our guard started packing the snow with his bare hands. Afghans appear to have very good circulation in their extremities, wearing flipflops all year round and rarely wearing gloves. Last year I had given each of our staff a pair of gloves fit for New England weather but I never saw them wear them. I suspect they were sold in the bazaar.
For dinner we had Alisa over. We have many intersecting interests, share part of the network of the former Institute of Cultural Affairs, and the experience of trying to change things in Afghanistan, the ups and downs of it all. We treated her to a family home experience (in contrast to her dorm experience in one of her employer’s guesthouses filled with introverted people) with a three course dinner to offset the overdose of Ramen noodles in a cup.
We sent her home with the movie “The Message” which will undoubtedly be shown on Afghan TV, in Dari, on the Prophet’s birthday next week.
This morning our Afghan snow man looked a bit like George Washington with the white snow that had fallen on his headdress overnight.
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