Sylvia's Journal

From the fairytale wedding with all its love and beauty we are back to ordinary life in Kabul which is about to enter its habitual ‘fighting season’ with all its threats of attacks. It’s a bit of a downer. We will adjust our movements and stay under the radar as much as we can.

All morning I worked on various assignments, including my first half page translation from English into (written) Dari – a convoluted story about broken mobile phones, having misplaced money, gifts that cannot be bought, reading glasses ‘that were put under someone’s foot’ (meaning ‘were broken’).

I learned that reading glasses are called ‘number glasses.’ The number refers to the little plastic sticker that indicates the strength of the glasses. The business of saying ‘glasses were put under my foot’ tells a lot about this culture where stuff happens to people and things rather than people doing stuff themselves.

When I showed up for my Saturday afternoon Dari class I was the only one. As a result I had a private lesson, providing me with a chance to review my translation, not half bad, for the first hour. The second hour we practiced the verb form called the progressive past as well as four words that I keep confusing with each other, such as ‘coming and going’ and ‘bringing and taking.’

For dinner we had a friend of a friend over who is here for only one week and needed some time off from camping out. We fed him tacos and ice cream, preceded by a GT.
Although his business is that of providing loans to small businesses, we discovered that we had many experiences in common, some related to organizational development and others to our experience of watching the royal wedding.

We had all watched the wedding yesterday and agreed that it was a magnificent symbolic event that stressed, for a change, all that is good, beautiful and inspiring, something that is a bit of a luxury out here. I know there is much pooh-poohing in the US about the hype but it lifted our spirits and gave us some respite from the Middle East nastiness and the promise of some more of that over here.

We had plumb forgotten about the royal wedding – it is not front page news here – until we turned on the BBC in the middle of the afternoon but by then the vows had already been exchanged. We watched the Duchess of Cambridge at the arm of her husband leave the Abbey. After that we stayed glued to the TV. It’s nice to for a change to see people gushing with love and other warm fuzzy feelings rather than looking grim and holding guns.

It was a beautiful day in Kabul and time for Axel to finally get out. He commutes between SOLA and our house, both in the same neighborhood, and needed a change of scenery.

After he dropped me off for my weekly massage indulgence in the middle of the vast US diplomatic and military complex – which required a nice long walk (even if it was between blast walls, tanks and people with guns) – he returned to the car and finally made it to the Shah bookstore of ‘The Bookseller of Kabul’ fame. He said he restrained himself and only bought stuff for SOLA: a large map of the world, an atlas and a book with Afghan legends. He is starting to turn SOLA into a real school rather than a regular home with a bunch of students inside. All this was inspired by our visit to Taktse International School in Sikkim.

I joined Axel later at the Bistro restaurant, a small piece of France off Chicken Street. Sitting there in the lovely garden with the most beautiful carpets draped along all the walls, inside and out, we enjoyed a nice and rather pricey lunch – the only thing missing was a cool glass of white wine – and could pretend for an hour or so that we were living someplace else.
Afterwards we walked over to our favorite carpet seller, who we had not visited for some time, to say hello and learn something more about carpets – he is a great and patient teacher. We could easily have dropped large amounts of money but restrained ourselves. We took pictures of those we liked a lot to add to our illustrated wish list.

For the first time since the supermarket bombing we ventured out into its sister store which is now barricaded behind thick steel plates with controlled entrance and exit sluices. Although the chances are very slim that a repeat will happen I was not quite at ease and was relieved when we were back in the car. I think it was just about that time that the vows were exchanged, a major world news event, with us oblivious to it all.

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Nothing untoward happened, at least not in Kabul during the Mujahideen Day parade. Instead bad things happened where people least expected them, Alabama and environs and Morocco. I watched the pictures on our very pixilated TV screen and thought that life, wherever you live, is risky – not just here in Kabul.

Although it was a holiday I spent most of it in front of my computer screen doing various tasks I can’t seem to find time for at work. It left me feeling fried and dissatisfied.

Axel left early for his SOLA classes and I followed him towards the end of the afternoon. We read another 3 pages of Three Cups of Tea. The story remains compelling to my students in spite of the negative publicity around Mr. Mortenson.

I noticed that two of Axel’s students in my class are practicing what he is teaching them about sounding out words using the syllable approach. We both have noticed progress.

After class we met with the young woman who is in charge of the school – we are both impressed with her management skills and her intuition about how to manage a small organization with young boys, young girls, a cleaner, a cook, and two guards plus a bunch of foreigners who volunteer their services. The set up is rather counter cultural but it seems to work in its own loose ways: the kids are learning and the place is not falling apart.

Back home I realized I had completely missed our quarterly worldwide staff meeting, held at 9 AM in Boston, which was focused on girls and women this time. Our contribution was mostly missing, not for lack of trying – people just have other things on their plates and it was a holiday after all.

We watched another installment of the Number One Ladies Detective Agency – a series that we have come to love and that we can download via iTunes.

We celebrated the Queen (mother’s) birthday today, three days ahead of the real day because the embassy get-togethers are always on Wednesdays. We had lots of haring, paling (eel), old Dutch cheese, bitterballen and other traditional and fattening Dutch goodies. We had extra stuff because the Eupol and ISAF folks of Dutch descent were in lock down. Probably because of the heightened security alerts of Mujahideen Day (tomorrow) and maybe even because the Taliban commanders who emerged out of the tunnel and who are still at large.

We spent much time talking with Afghan/Dutchmen who are here either temporarily or have reestablished themselves doing business in jewelry, traditional law advice and graphic design. All have stories about moving, fleeing, and endless paperwork nightmares, and all spoke much better Dutch than I speak Dari.

We are back home now for a long weekend. I need it as I am very tired. It was an intense week of aligning a thousand small pieces and putting all this on paper plus some significant staff changes. All in all a rather stressful and difficult though short week.

This morning we had a meeting at the American Embassy of Kabul – across the place where we usually have meetings with our donors because USAID is running out of meeting space – that is what happens when you have civilian surges.

Within the span of 30 minutes we travelled from Afghanistan to America, crossing a few checkpoints and seeing many people with guns who are following their very strict SOPs that know no exceptions. Once we emerged at the embassy proper we felt indeed far from Afghanistan. As we walked up to our meeting room we passed gaggles of men in dark suits with wires coming out of their ears. It is dangerous here.

We met in a container room off the Kabul Community Center, populated by one very tired soldier stretching out on a barkalounger –and trunks with Mexican blankets that revealed it is also a yoga studio. Outside many uniformed men and women were busy taking pictures of each other against the backdrop of the majestic and ochre colored Embassy building. Photos are a no-no for most of us civilians but not for those in uniform.

With too little time to return back to our office in between meetings I had lunch by myself in the courtyard of the ministry. It was a very unhealthy lunch consisting of 35 cents worth of cookies and cakes – it was all the Afghan money I carried with me and I did not want to embarrass myself by ordering a real lunch for 50 cents that I couldn’t pay for.

I had pulled out my Dari homework to kill more time but was interrupted every few minutes. Afghans cannot simply pass by someone they know without greeting and talking – and by now I know a lot of people here. And so I socialized more than I studied.

After my meeting I returned to the office for our biweekly phone call with Boston before dressing up in orange for the Dutch party. It made for one very long day, made more difficult by a series of dust storms that, except for the lack of snow and cold air, would qualify as blizzards and are really bad for our lungs. They left a layer of fine dust on every surface in our home and offices.

Apparently there is a serial on Afghan TV about a prison break and so there were many jokes about the Taliban having picked up the idea for their tunneling into the Kandahar prison from watching TV (secretly of course). Allegedly, the earth they dug out of the tunnel was put in trucks and sold on the market as fill. I sensed there was some awe about the brazen and clever act that, once again, embarrassed the Afghan leadership – right under their noses.

As we drove across town to the US compound I wondered how many of the liberated commanders had already made their way to Kabul. How would you recognize a Taliban commander from an ordinary Afghan? At the US compound security was enhanced. Four beefy American soldiers in full battle gear stood guard where usually Afghans stand. They frisked my two Afghan colleagues but let me through. I do wonder whether the freeing of prisoners, after 8 months of digging, was intended to happen two days before the big parade of Mujahideen Day – the same day on which Karzai escaped an attempt three years ago. Is there another brazen plan?

I have been having lunch with some of my female colleagues for a few weeks now. With the prohibition that office cleaners can no longer be used to deliver lunch to people’s offices more of the women now come to the cafeteria where there is a separate lunchroom for ladies. When I just arrived I thumped my nose at it, mostly because it was tawdry and uninviting – very few women ever ate there. I had some misguided idea then that these separate lunches were silly and asked both men and women why they couldn’t eat together. Now I know better. Lunching separately makes perfect sense.

We are trying to make the ladies’ lunchroom more welcoming so we can socialize rather than simply fulfilling a physiological need. We have ordered tushaks (the low cushions common in Afghan rooms), a small table, and pillows. I am told that as soon as it is cozy and comfy the men will invade it. We’ll see about that.

Having lunch together is nice – the women talk much more than the men who concentrate on eating, mostly in silence. The women sit around a small round table where we do the opposite: I think we talk more than we eat. Most of the talk is in local langauge so I get some serious language immersion. I also learn a lot about life for Afghan women. Today I learned that in some areas of Afghanistan men traditionally refer to their wife and children as ‘the kids’ a collective noun that doesn’t distinguish between female adults and kids. It takes an assertive woman to change this. Some of my female colleagues have successfully done so.

I disclosed that I had had a lesson in Pashto yesterday and indicated which letters I found hard to pronounce. There is one letter that looks like a N but sounds, at least in Nangahar Province (East of Kabul), like an ‘l’ ‘r’ and ‘n’ all rolled into one. It requires some serious tongue gymnastics.

My innocent inquiry led to a serious discussion about where the most proper Pashto is spoken – none had any standing in this debate as two were native Dari speakers, and three had a Dari speaking mom and a Pashto speaking dad; only one was all Pashto but still a mixture of Kandahari and Kabuli Pashto with the latter having no chance of being considered pure.

My Pashto teacher doesn’t speak much English so I am being taught in Dari., effectively getting two languages for the price of one. There are many words that are the same but also many that are completely different. Unlike in Dari there are male and female words. I am already discovering that plural and singular word forms are quite different from each other. There are new letters that look a bit like Dari letters but with a completely different pronunciation. They have dots and circles at unexpected places – some letters are real tong twisters – and then, I am told, there is a grammar that is much more complex.

I have a Rosetta Stone Pashto program which I tried on for fun over a year ago. At the time I was completely lost and gave up halfway Unit one – Lesson One. Now, with my improved Dari I am no longer lost, progress through many lessons quickly and on some exercises did quite well at least in word/sound recognition.

I finally did it: I spilled my afternoon tea (black, no sugar) over my laptop keyboard. For awhile my keyboard would work like the T9 feature on my mobile: you type one letter and it adds others, supposedly into commonly used words. For me it always comes out like gibberish and on my laptop it did too. Not only that, caps lock or num lock would go on and off by themselves and commands produced random actions.

I am afraid it is a permanent condition. My small portable laptop now needs an extra large bag full of supports: a multi USB port, a mouse (the touchpad/nipple no longer work) and a separate keyboard. It makes for very cumbersome computering and travel between office, ministry and home.

I was told that new computers are on their way from Boston and that I was on the list to get one; but getting them here and through customs may take awhile so I have resigned myself to this new reality. A small thing that was easy, now no longer is easy. But, I remind myself, there are more serious things happening here, like the Taliban tunneling over 400 commanders into freedom, out of their Kandahar prison cells. How did they do that? It is the stuff of movies and the prospect of more violence.

Back home I gave Axel a traditional Afghan hair wash. The attendant at the Delhi hospital had washed his hair with hand soap. After that it looked flat and brittle. So tonight I applied ‘gil,’ small pieces of hardened clay, dug from some riverbed, known for its special hair conditioning properties. The big chunks dissolve into smaller chunks and eventual into mud when immersed in hot water. It is as messy as doing a henna wash but it doesn’t leave your hair red or orange (good thing said Axel). Whether it is better or worse than olive oil remains to be seen. We can try the oil treatment tomorrow if the ‘gil’ doesn’t produce the desired results.

Today is an important day for us, as a couple, and yet it was such a non-event. No Easter egg hunt, no peeps, no baskets, no chocolate Easter eggs. The ones Ankie had brought were long gone and, since many of the agencies like MSH were in lock down because of Pastor Jones, we couldn’t invite friends from across town.

It was a work-at-home day for me, a welcome chance to get some serious reading and reviewing done. I also planned tomorrow’s session about our annual performance review process and dug deeper down in my mailbox, giving some people belated replies to questions they had posed weeks ago.

Axel spent the morning boning up on the science of reading, syllables, vowels and consonants and the afternoon at SOLA explaining all this to students.

At the end of the afternoon Axel prepared us our traditional Happy Easter Bloody Mary, at about the same time we would have had one in Manchester. We had to improvise a bit because we don’t have all the ingredients for making the Ritz Carlton/Naples/FL Bloody Maries – a staple of our Easter Party. We toasted to all our friends near and far. We missed very much today.

We had some intent to play Scrabble but got hooked into the Doha debates on BBC about whether the Arab countries should lead actions against wayward presidents in their neck of the wood. While watching I did a final quality check of the Quaker (cross-stitch) sampler that I started in Holland in January, added a few stitches here and there and considered it done and ready for washing, drying, and framing.

Axel retired early to bed, coughing and sputtering, with too much fine dust in his lungs. It is visible on all surfaces in our house. It’s even visible on Axel’s chest X-ray.

I worked all day on getting my dress finished for the shab-e-henna, the night before the wedding party, of one off my colleagues’ sons. It was an invitation for women only so Axel stayed home.

The shab-e-henna is basically like a wedding party and I gather at the end the couple is officially married after the traditional and formal negotiations about money have taken place in a separate room someplace in the enormous wedding hall. I assume it is a formality as the decision to wed has already been made.

I had been listening all day to stories from Persia and Arabia and had my head full of images of people dressed in splendid clothes, beautiful walled gardens with songbirds and fountains in the middle of the desert by the time I arrived at the wedding hall. Although there were pictures of walled gardens and songbirds and fountains on the wall, the hall was a far cry from these romantic settings but the clothes people wore could have been from that ancient world.

The bride glittered and sparkled in her heavily embroidered dresses and veils (there were two outfits tonight and tomorrow there will be another set of dresses). And it was not only the bride. One by one, as the women entered they took their chadoors or black cloaks off, and emerged in their finery; more glitter, gold, mirrors, and stunning embroidery than I have ever seen in one place. I felt a little drab in my home-sewn print ensemble which looked liked a moo-moo next to all that fancy needlework.

The place was awash with small kids; half of them were dressed in very cute mini traditional Indian, Pakistani or Afghan outfits, including the embroidered and mirrored hats, the others wore western clothes. They tore through the room as if they had been given uppers; up and down the stairs they flew, the boys little terrors, the girls prancing in their ill fitting party dresses.

One little boy who had his left arm in a cast and sling kept hovering around the stairs as if he wanted to break his other arm. Two others discovered that you could shake a coke can really hard and then pull the tab off and then, best of all, could keep the can upside down above the stairwell. There were more games invented with the soda cans; full cans, shaken and opened a little bit made awesome grenades. What fun!

As more Coca Cola was consumed the frenzy increased while the bride and groom sat quietly and patiently on their thrones, facing us. After the meal the female siblings of the bride and groom danced around the couple in their traditional clothes, carrying decorated clay pots and an arrangement with peacock feathers, candles and other things I could not make out.

The henna ceremony remained a bit hazy for me. It started with the bride holding her hand against her forehead. The hand was supposed to be closed and then to be pried open with money and rings but the bride didn’t even try and willingly opened her hand for her relatives to dab with the red stuff. When all was done the hand was closed and protected with a silver/lacy piece of cloth. And then the party was over. I have never quite stayed till the end (usually the food arrives so late that I can hardly keep my eyes open).

While waiting for the car a young man approached me on behalf of his seven giggly sisters and asked if they could have their picture taken with me. They arranged themselves next and behind me which made for many permutations; each new combination required another picture. No one asked my name. I try to imagine these girls showing their friends this picture of them with the no name gray-haired and foreign lady with her reading glasses and dress entirely devoid of glitter. More giggles no doubt.

I read a story to my driver and guard this morning on my way to my weekly massage. I read the story in Dari from a Persian children’s book that contains short animal stories with moral messages. We didn’t get very far because they kept correcting my pronunciation or finishing my sentences. We never got to the moral, told by a wise little bird: the black and raspy old crow is just as important to the world as the sweet colorful little songbird. So there!

The guard and I walked the kilometer or so that it takes when the driver drops me off at the east side of the military complex where large concrete blocks keep us from driving closer. I don’t mind because walking that far is a luxury; besides the weather was wonderful, blue sky and no dust for a change. We chatted in Dari – an advantage of immersion – about developments in the office. Although I have a few holes in my vocabulary about such things we understood each other. Boys, girls and beggars who have learned a few English words from the military personnel that lives behind the barriers tried to strike up a limited conversation (buy, give, baby hungry, hello) but the guard shoos them away.

An hour later, on our way back home, we listened to the local radio to find out if the Dearborne demonstration was on and what the Kabul police had in mind. I was told to be back home around noontime, just in case some overexcited mullahs would be urging their flock to protest against Americans, or westerners in general, when they assume there are not boundaries between us and reckless pastor Jones and his people. But the media were silent on Jones – even the BBC; everyone is too busy with Libya and Syria these days.

Halfway home we were stopped by the police. They were checking our radios to make sure they are legal. Radio licenses are not being renewed by the ministry of telecommunications until a new law takes effect. This make us think that the Afghan government, or at least some part of it, want us foreigners out – first they tackled the private security firms and now this.

After we were waved on the drivers laughed because the police couldn’t read the English papers they were shown. They pretended but the driver didn’t think they could read. No one seems too worried about it, least of all our security chief which I take as a good sign.

One of our drivers tries to speak English with me as I try to speak Dari with others. This leads to some strange exchanges because both of us are lacking vocabulary and sometimes our pronunciation is off. He says something that sounds like ‘Gals with sunglasses not as expensive.’ I quickly look up brideprice in my dictionary. ‘Is that what he means?’ ‘Qimat (expensive),’ he nods but more expensive in the rural areas.’ He switches to English again and cites 20.000 dollars as a price that is not the bride price but some other price. I give up and nod. We have many weird exchanges like that which make for interesting rides across town.

Back home Axel had coffee ready which we drunk on the terrace sitting underneath the grapevine that is just leafing out. It is really too hot to sit in the sun, 26 degrees the BBC told us later. The rest of the day was devoted to a sewing project while I listened to Arabian Nights stories. Axel did teacher homework, printing out colorful posters with which to decorate the SOLA study room and make it look more like an elementary school classroom – vowels, consonants, diphthongs and digraphs; he is learning a whole new vocabulary.

TV dinner and ‘Don’t Eat the Daisies’ was the nightly entertainment during our first day of lock-down.

The Kabul rotary club, in one fell swoop,may have increased its membership by 35% – the orientation evening netted, I think, two foreigners and two Afghans, a father and daughter combo; the percentage of female members would be increasing from 7% to 23%.

For all of us who are bombarded almost daily with stories about greed and carelessness, the stories from current and future members of Rotary Kabul about ‘service over self’ were more than a welcome distraction, truly an inspiration.

We learned a bit about the history of Rotary International and then talked about what we could be doing where, for whom and how. We ended up with some principles: local, continuing relationships and working through existing structures, government and/or traditional.

Through matching grants Rotary Kabul is already contributing to health and education activities of others but we were thinking small; about ways that would combine service with a sense of community of the members, a very small group right now.

Our host, a long time Rotarian in the US and now here, talked about the kinds of fundraising they used to do in her US hometown. One caught my fancy – duck races. I could just see it clearly in my mind: hundreds of numbered rubber duckies floating down the Kabul River, cheered on by people who would not normally hang out together, lined up along the river; lots of laughter in the air.

Some ducks would right away get stuck in the garbage and others on dirty mud flats. It would remind people that their river is not pretty and needs help. After that all things would be possible. Imagine, London has its Henley and Kabul its rubber duck races.