Last night 10 suicide bombers, inthehari, were arrested somewhere in Kabul and had their mission aborted. Today another two were similarly arrested. It made me both happy and worried. Happy to know that somehow the intelligence processes worked; worried because the thought of these 12 roaming around made me wonder how many more were not caught?
As a result of this I decided not to join old and new friends in a Lebanese restaurant across town in an area that tends to be, despite guards, sandbags and blastwalls, more often targeted than the southwestern part of Kabul where I work and live. The drivers agreed with my decision to stay at home.
Today was Pashto class – a one hour struggle with new grammatical structures such as the ‘the oblique tense’ that I haven’t quite mastered. I have no expectation that I will ever get to the level I have reached in Dari now but the reaction of my Pashtoon speaking colleagues encourage me.
One of Axel’s SOLA students, who has recently returned from the US, called me to reconnect and ask for advice. He took up tennis in Maine at the high school where he studied for half a year and is busy now building a tennis court at one of Kabul’s girls high school – he needs connections and networks so that, if and when he leaves to go back to the US for college, the court he is building will be used.
Unlike his brother, F. came back to the US and hopes to be able to get a visa to return to college in New Mexico in August. Whether he will is now in question and the reason why many of the young men and women skip to Canada rather than going back. It is a self-sealing process with visas being denied to more and more youngsters because their peers did not come back.
Sylvia's Journal 
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