Sylvia's Journal

Everything was about comfort today. I stayed the entire day in my jammies, reading, knitting, embroidering and planning my birthday later this year. Sometime in the morning Axel helped me disentangle a ball of cashmere yarn which was symbolic for and got my mind off the entanglements in our life.

I cooked comfort food for lunch, chicken soup and baked corn muffins, which we shared with our guards.

While knitting a hat and booties for yet another baby scheduled to arrive in May I listened to few hours of Lewis Sinclair’s Main Street. Main Street life in that small prairie town in the early 1900s wasn’t all that different from what I observe here, the petty squabbles, the gossip, the moralizing, the tattling and spying on neighbors and the fearful renunciation of ‘otherness.’

Being a parallel reader, I am also reading William Dalrymple’s Last Mughal, describing Delhi a few decades before Main Street. I find the same social phenomena with a little more power and money thrown in. If anyone thinks the madrasas, the fundamentalism, the warlords, the corruption, the proselytizing is anything new, reading history will quickly correct that misconception. I don’t know whether it should make me feel better or worse.

In the afternoon we got a call from Z who returned from Kunduz to find the school closed and the dorm girls dispersed. She was told to return home but the Salang Pass is closed and Kunduz is out of reach for now. We offered our house but she is staying with one of the other girls who lives in town.

Ted has taken the threats to his school seriously. He moved himself and the girls out and is rethinking the school’s future. For now the school/house is empty and classes cancelled. Axel and I are thinking how we can continue the classes in another form. The six books for our next reading (Three Cups of Tea) are already on their way to Kabul. Maybe we could do a Skype reading class. This is a place where one has to be resourceful, an art Afghans have had to master a long time ago.

I had a skype call with a friend of a friend, a pediatrician of Pakistani ancestry who has the energy to do good work in Kabul. She is as enthusiastic as I was two years ago. It is good that there are people in the wings to continue the relay race and take the baton from disheartened folks like us.

Our after dinner attraction was a Morse mystery which made it, all in all, not such a bad day.