Sylvia's Journal

Kabul by night is very different from Kabul by daytime. The streets are mostly empty except for the police trucks and the countless lumbering trucks going to or coming from points further east. They remind me of elephants.

Many of them are the old ‘bedfords’ – the Dari word for trucks – the ones I remember from 30 years ago. They are round and tall, beautifully decorated. The cabins are lit by red lights and full of dangling things. They are much nicer than the square and flatter Japanese trucks with their more minimalistic decorations. Some do have fantastic metal work but not necessarily colored in the vibrant primary colors of the old bedfords.

We drove back across town from where the road forks off to Jalalabad and Pakistan. We had visited new friends who we met at SOLA as fellow teachers. They work for the European Police Force, training the Afghan police. The police trainers are not surprised about what happened in Mazar a few weeks ago, or now in east Kabul where a factory was invaded by an angry mob because the factory made pulp out of recycled Qu’rans and, allegedly, made toiler paper out of the pulp.

Originally the Germans did the training, on their own – you can tell from the many Mercedez Benz SUVs lining the inner parking place. Our friends are German and treated us to a very German dinner, sausage with senf (mustard), warm rye bread straight out of the bread machine, cheese and herring. As if it was not enough they also ordered us three pizzas.

The compound, hardly visible from the road, under the neon lights of one gigantic wedding hall, looked like a college, an outside space lined by three-story galleried dorm rooms and inside rec rooms. It’s a weird kind of existence – the foreigners (now also Dutch and other Europeans) connected only to Afghanistan via the police trainees – and the nearly impossible task of transforming the police force from nothing into something. They teach leadership so we had that in common. But teaching lofty values and risky behavior (leadership is risky in this country and policing even more so) is not very easy. My job seemed pretty easy in comparison.