Sylvia's Journal

Today I was in the Afghanistan that I came to love 33 years ago. The Afghanistan that is for many foreigners obscured from view because of the blast walls and barbed wire, the red/white striped booms that bar entrance to or exit from roads that used to be public roads and other no-no zones full of guns and stern looking uniformed men. I am referring to the traditional, normal Afghanistan that made me want to live and work here back in 1978. The Afghanistan that explains why people never leave Afghanistan for ever – those who knew that Afghanistan always come back.

Everyone who works for the US embassy or USAID was grounded for reasons I don’t understand. The consular office sent out a notice that between 6 PM on June 23 until 6 AM on June 26 embassy personnel was prohibited from travel within Kabul City. I feel sorry for them. How can you possibly love this place if you cannot enter into daily life? If you don’t get out all you experience of Afghanistan is the corruption, the greed, the politicking – the things that make me depressed. I was reminded today that my mood swings about Afghanistan are very much influenced by the degree to which I get to see that Afghanistan from way back.

Today I did, and, not surprisingly, I feel wonderful. First I went to Murad Khane to Fazel’s jewelry workshop to see if I could find some presents to bring to the monsoon wedding now that I have decided that the lapis stoneware is a little heavy. Although neither Fazel not the things I was looking for were there it was a wonderful escapade.

With guard Habibullah by my side we worked our way up through the textile and fruit bazaar spread out along the nearly empty and trash-filled Kabul River. Unlike the river the bazaar is a delight to the eye – so colorful and such interesting things for sale. I could have walked around there for hours, in spite of the dust and heat. I was filled with flashbacks to our month long trip through Afghanistan in the fall of 1978.

To get to the entrance of the restored caravanserai where the workshop is located we passed by a market where old car, truck and tractor tires were repaired with pieces from other tires or recycled in an enormous variety of household goods. Right next to it was the blacksmith bazaar where construction and agricultural implements were hammered into shape they way they have been for generations. I was the only foreigner around and people greeted me friendly and then left me alone. No hassling, no staring.

In the afternoon I had my Dari class and completed the grammar course that I started back in March with four other ladies and ended alone. Before we will tackle my third-grade school book my teacher helped me translate a poem by Hafez that a colleague had given me. Although the literal text was very much about drinking wine my teacher assured me it was a very deep mystic Sufi poem and it wasn’t about what I thought it was about (forgetting love troubles in wine, drinking until you felt you were in paradise).

To complete the hour we talked about current events. One such current event, the legalization of same sex marriages in New York triggered an exasperated comment from my teacher that is akin to ‘where is the world coming to?’ followed by a very deep sigh and then, “we are fighting Allah.”

My teacher believes that in the olden days people were nicer and that we as a species are getting increasingly depraved (New York’s new law is ample proof to him). I showed him the book about the Sunni-Shia split, a page turner written by eminent Arabic scholar and storyteller Lesly Hazelton, and told him that in the 630s the behavior of people in and around Mecca and Medina was not all that different from what we see now in Kabul. I will ask Axel to buy the book for him and then we will have another conversation that should be either very interesting or very annoying.

In the evening I went to a concert in the French Lycee. On center stage sat, cross-legged, Ustad Haji Abdul Qadr, a 70 year old player of a stringed instrument that has a haunting, mournful sound, played like a tiny cello (but that’s where the comparison ends). Around him, seated in a semi-circle, on beautiful carpet-covered pillows, against a backdrop of traditional embroidered textiles, were eight other musicians: one flutist, three (different) drummers, and four people playing or picking stringed instruments, each instrument a piece of art all by itself in shape, decoration and sound (and for some of the men this was true too).

At the end of the concert the Alliance Francaise offered us a fresh apple-mango fruit salad to celebrate the summer. A soul-lifting evening and a desert, all that for 10 bucks.

This is the Afghanistan that I hoped to move back to, now two years ago – and this is the Afghanistan that will keep pulling me back.