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.