Sylvia's Journal

We are organizing a dinner party on Thursday. It got a little out of hand. We started with 3 people and now there are 15 plus or take a few invited. Instead of cooking ourselves we gave the cook some extra money and asked him to prepare an Afghan food fest. We also asked him to stay so the kitchen will be clean when the last guest leaves the house. I like that idea.

I am told that local cooks like to be present when the guests rave about their food. It is a matter of professional pride and advertising for when the current employer leaves (foreigners nearly always leave) and a new employer is needed. He would want people to say, remember that great meal he cooked at Axel’s and Sylvia’s back in February?

Today Alison arrived from our Washington office with a Christmas package from Tessa, a pile of books for my girls’ book club (Three cups of tea) and an embroidery ring to stretch my Quaker sampler fabric so I can see the threads more clearly and save my eyes from going bad.

In the Christmas package, aside from various drugs to preserve our health, was a book for Axel about famous’ people’s lists. Axel is a list person and so is Tessa so it was a fitting present. For me there were lovely green sea-glass earrings which immediately made me homesick – glass from down by the beach that is so very far away from here. A final suprise was the, to us unknown, Australian TV series (mockumentary) about a high school – 16 episodes no less. We will invite our Australian colleagues for a viewing and, I presume, a good laugh.

For dinner we met Razia jan at the local Korean restaurant. She is off to the US soon for a whole slew of fundraisers for her girls school just outside Kabul. The money raised will buy more school books and allow the school to extend its reach into grade seven.

Things nearby are looking better again even though elsewhere in Afghanistan really bad things are happening and many people are killed or maimed by desperate Taliban & cronies – it is as if the summer killing season has an early start.