Sylvia's Journal

We hear from far that in the West a grim picture is presented in the media of the place we live in. One of my colleagues is on home leave in Washington and called me to ask whether it was safe to return – his wife is frantic about him returning. Friends of us are writing what the hell we are doing in this dangerous place. From all this I can only conclude that the Taliban’s PR campaign of creating fear and trembling in the West has worked perfectly.

On the ground here things are fine. We vacuum the dust from the carpets, wash socks, buy milk and yogurt, knit and embroider, text and skype, read, fill in time sheets and sit in traffic jams. We do all this peacefully here in Kabul.

For our Afghan colleagues who travel outside Kabul (we westerners are not allowed) the instructions are simple: wear local clothing (no suits and ties), do not travel after 2:00 PM, use transport that matches the most common kind of vehicles you see on the roads as you move from one place to another (no large SUVs with special plates), keep a very low profile, do not use a cell phone with international names or numbers, and do not carry a laptop. That is the way of blending in. Most of my colleagues are used to this anyways.

I made two visits into town, one to the ministry and a couple of hours later another to the US compound, one the neighbor of the other. There was a sign on the entrance to the security area of the US compound that said that all outdoor activities were suspended. For the denizens of the US compound ‘outdoors’ just means not being indoors in the work and living containers but still being inside the wired fences. Outdoor doesn’t even mean fresh air because of the pollution from dust winds that come from incessant construction and road work, overbuilding and the disappearance of green fields that hold the soil. The air pollution also comes from the ever running generators and vehicles that belch out toxic fumes. Here ‘outdoors’ is stripped of all the usual joys of outdoors: trees, clean air, water, rocks or sand, grass.

I picked Axel up at SOLA and we returned home where we found the tiles already in place in our new (hopefully) allergenic-free bedroom. On the walls, painted yellow one and a half years ago we could see the outlines, in black soot, of furniture and pictures – it is the soot that pervades everything, even when there was only a modern airco in our room; the diesel stoves were in other rooms, not this one. The blackened outlines were everywhere and frightening. No wonder our lungs are protesting.

Tonight we are sleeping in the consultants’ room which we have named the Solter Suite after one of my favorite colleagues who left nearly a year ago. We have to make do sleeping in a twin bed with, what we now realize, not a very good mattress. The room is full of allergenic stuff that we cannot take out so we have the new air purifier working at full tilt and hope for the best. It will be for a few days, if God wills it, as they say here.