Sylvia's Journal

Today was calamity day. It started at midnight, we think, but we didn’t know until the phonecall came in that the water main, where it enters our house, was squirting out enormous quantities of water into our basement. If the water came in at 50 gallons a minute (as someone said), a quick calculation puts our next water bill at 21000 gallons, as the break was after the water meter. Ouch!

The union between the outside line and the indoor plumbing was broken and there was no way of stopping the flow. We didn’t know where the shut off valve was (it had been moved when our water main was re-positioned some months ago). Now we know of course but a little too late.

At 5:15 we found ourselves wading in 4 inches of water in our basement, frantically trying to save whatever was positioned below the water line. It was a good thing we had been moving things upstairs as part of our moving back into our house but we hadn’t moved everything.
While Axel dealt with the firefighters (who also pump flooded basements) and the plumber (responsible for not tightening the connection enough, we assume) and then bringing all the wet stuff up to the yard, I took each of our pictures, removed them from their wet or mildewed frame and cleaned frames and glass. And so we found ourselves a little differently occupied than we would have liked.

All the while Joe, veteran calamity manager, was a beacon of calm, lightened things up with his sense of humor-in-calamity, and provided sustenance all through the day.

Later in the afternoon, when all the wet stuff had either dried or been thrown out, Tessa and Steve came over to prepare pesto sauce from the basil, harvest cabbage and beets and hang out – which was nice after the intense physical labor of the day.

For dinner we were invited to friends across town who are gourmet cooks and the perfect distraction for the remainder of the day, not in the last because of the morels in cream sauce over a juicy steak, cumin corn, a cheese platter (so sorely missed in Kabul) and burnt sugar ice cream.

Our basement, a cleanup project waiting to be tackled, is now very clean and empty.

On Fridays I would have visited Lisa for my massage. Lisa’s place was right in the crossfire between ISAF and the US embassy. I wrote her to find out if she was OK. There is no basement in her salon; no place to hide. I always felt it was a safe place because it being right in the middle of endless fortifications. But it is also right in the middle of lots of people with guns. Safety amidst so many guns is, of course, an illusion.

Joe, her husband replied to my email. She is OK but her access to modern communication technology appears to have been disrupted.

Now that I am out of the Kabul dustbowl I decided to try wearing my unilens again, one (lensed) eye for reading and the other for distance. But my eyes got all watery and irritated. The optometrist checked my cornea and told me it has bulged a little more since he last measured it, which may explain the irritation and the difficulty of putting the lens in and getting it out. Nothing serious and something that appears to be age-related he assured me – just part of the general falling apart of older people’s bodies. Hmmm, I am not even 60.

Our shipment appears to be in transit. Whether that means out of Afghanistan is not clear. We hoped it had not gotten caught in the cross fire – and the email from the moving company confirmed it had not. We are still far from creating the necessary space in our house – an enormous task that left Axel irritable as it seems without end.

Our friends Anne and Chuck came over for a fall dinner – applesauce from our neighbor’s appletrees, home fries from Down East, pork roasts and green beans – the only missing ingredient was a fire in the fireplace. Although the temperatures are tumbling, it is not quite fireplace weather, not yet.

Over dinner Joe recited once more how he and his wife brought a community of staunch individualists together to create a shared vision, after a forest fire ravaged a good part of the town, and killed some people. The vision allowed them to take advantage of opportunities that came knocking, disguised as calamities. It made me think how we, as a nation, could have done so much better after 9/11 if we had followed a similar path.

Z. sent me a sad poem, inspired no doubt about the latest round of violence, about her home country. I have promised her to review her other pieces she sent me. They are wonderful and full of spelling and grammar mistakes. Giving good feedback requires some serious thinking and so I have postponed giving it to her.

I am procrastinating on many fronts. I wonder if this is part of my adjustment of being out of a stress zone. I feel a bit paralyzed at time – keeping busy with cleaning out closets keeps me from focusing on the things I said I wanted to do but can’t.

It has been exactly one week since I returned home; one week that feels like a lifetime. I have settled into my old rooms and can find things again. I have rediscovered dresses I forgot about and all sorts of knick-knacks that I would never have missed but now that I found them again I don’t know what to do with them: too much of an attachment (too many memories) to throw them out but also very peripheral to my resumed old life.

A storm is raging around the house, making the old wood creak – fall has arrived very suddenly. I am wearing coats and sweaters after days of hot and humid weather. I am not sure what I like better.

I had my hair cut by my old hairdresser of 16 years. She is reading Kabul Beauty School and so can relate just a tiny bit to my stories about Kabul. “Oh, you mean the stuff she describes is real?” she asked incredulously.

In the afternoon we visited Katie, temporarily out of Afghanistan to take care of some health issues. We visited her in her home in Waltham that is full of her five years in Afghanistan. We compared notes about decompressing after returning from years of living with permanent stress, even though we don’t realize it.

My way of decompressing is cleaning cabinets, I think. I have many more to go and I don’t mind. I clean while I listen to a book on my iPod, moving it along as I go from cabinet to cabinet.
We picked up Joe at South Station who trained in from a job in New Jersey and an interview in the big Apple. We had not seen each other in years. He took us out to his namesake’s restaurant (Not your ordinary Joe) and asked me to start somewhere, describing our experience of living in Afghanistan.

I started on Sunday and then worked through the week, our routines. The one thing that I have to get used to is the complexity of living in the US: the endless choices. This stands in sharp contrast to the routines of our life in Kabul, on Sundays, on Mondays (language classes), on Tuesdays (PM meetings at USAID), on Wednesdays and on Thursdays (SOLA).

What did I miss most? My friends and colleagues, the Afghan families we befriended and the students at SOLA. And then some things I don’t miss at all. I wore a sleeveless calf length dress, we had roast pork and a glass of Blue Moon.

Eyewitness accounts of what happened in Kabul did not take my mind of the deteriorating situation there. The fighting started about 15 minutes before we usually showed up – on Tuesdays – at the entrance to the US compound. I remember how I never liked to have to wait there while security went through its processes to clear us. Yet never did I feel directly threatened – just the idea that it could happen. And then it did.

The last few days have all been about finding things, getting things, returning things, throwing things away and trying to figure out where to put all the stuff, knowing that another 2000 plus pounds is coming my way, hopefully, in the not too distant future.

All my good intentions of continuing my language lessons, reading my students’ papers, looking for jobs, have fallen by the way side in favor of the activities mentioned above.

All day my head and heart have been in Kabul. All the familiar spots were under siege. I was both relieved to not be there and sorry for having abandoned Kabul and my colleagues and friends there, including those in the embassy compound.

Today, Tuesday, was always the day we would go to the embassy for our weekly meeting with our USAID colleagues. It must have been cancelled as everyone must have hunkered down in the safe rooms.

And so I continued to live the free life I so badly wanted while my heart was all but free. Out just in time, I thought, and Axel thought, yet one cannot be totally out within a week of return.

I had planned to write just when the news came through and found myself paralyzed. Now, 10 hours later, with calm having returned to Kabul, I can still not write. The Kabul attacks droned out everything wonderful I did today – the breakfast in Gloucester, the visit from Ruth and Don, the kayaking and filling of the traps with lobster bait, the discovery of another lobster hiding in the seaweed (pre-dinner snack) and a lovely dinner – all obscured by this terrible assault and leaving me with a sense of dread about the future.

After a lead up of weeks the 10th anniversary of 9/11 arrived. I had difficulty with the endless radio programs featuring call-ins or special guests talking about where they were, what they were thinking and feeling, on 9/11.

I got tired listening to simplistic statements about the fallout of that day and what we should or should not be doing in Afghanistan. As with anything else, the more you immerse yourself into something the more complex it becomes. I can’t give people my opinion about Afghanistan in one sentence. It would take me days, maybe even weeks, to do that.

Axel and I bicycled to Quaker Meeting. The bicycling is for me part of the meditative experience and something I have missed so much in Afghanistan. Feeling the wind on my arms and legs and marveling at the most wonderful vistas that lie between our house and the school where we hold our meeting for worship. It was the same beautiful fall day as 10 years ago.

Axel bicycled along with some difficulty; his lungs are still not in great shape, neither were his bicycle muscles. We had to take a few breaks along the way.

The hour of silence was difficult for me – my thoughts going everywhere. During my two years in Afghanistan the image of God as a bearded men sitting up in the sky on a throne had come back – a childhood image that took me years to shed. Before I left I was a great believer in the Great Spirit, the Life Force, that which the Chinese call Chi. But Afghanistan religiosity has brought back the man image. “What am I doing here?” I wondered. At times like this atheism beckons.

Someone in meeting mentioned an article in The Onion, re-issued 10 years later. It does have a picture of the man with the beard in it and the message did resonate.

In the afternoon we went out in boat and kayak to check Axel’s lobster traps. They were full of sea weed, wrought loose from the ocean floor by the storms that have come by in the last 2 weeks. In one of the traps a large lobster was hiding in the sea weed; in another one adolescent and a toddler, which we threw back to grow up a little more. The big one became our lunch.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

A Brazilian wedding, a church service in Our Lady of the Victories, strapless gowns in all sorts of shapes and sizes, men and women, dancing together and the bride and the groom kissing long and hard whenever we tapped our forks and knives on our wineglasses. I am very far from Afghanistan and especially its weddings.

The Brazilian wedding was of our son in law’s brother who married a Brazilian lady. We are now part of that extended family though we never met most of the Brazilian cousins, aunts and uncles because they didn’t get a visa – a familiar story.

Today was my last day on the project. As of tomorrow I switch to another boss and another status, billable it is called which means I have to find assignments to keep myself gainfully employed. For this reason I will go for a visit next week to show my face and nose around for something to do but not too much as I am still in vacation mode.

My feet are killing me. I think they are in shock about the amount of walking. They haven’t been used all that much in Afghanistan – just from the house to the car (about 20 feet), from the dispatch office to my office, about 100 feet, from my office to the bathroom upstairs (a western style bathroom), maybe 50 feet and occasional trips to the finance office and south side of the compound, another 100 feet at most.

I spent most of the day re-installing myself, re-emerging clothes, stuff and cleaning the dog hair from the places the cleaning ladies couldn’t get to. I required many trips upstairs, downstairs, into the basement and to the attic of the barn – always carrying things hither and thither.

I received a very enthusiastic account of F. during her first few days in the UK and now at her new school. Farid also sent me a very enthusiastic account of his first few weeks down in New Mexico. It is unfortunate that these are the only two accounts I can expect.

Axel asked me to go to the high school football game tonight. During halftime he and the team mates with whom he won the 1961 championships will wave at everyone and everyone will clap to commemorate this victory half a century ago. The team met up at a local bar to warm up, everyone wearing their team jerseys, newly minted – it was a joyful reunion. I watched from the sidelines sitting on a stool to relieve my aching feet. I declined the invitation to watch the game and drove myself home. Imagine that, didn’t even have to call dispatch for a car.

The view out of the window is no longer the dust-filled sky, the dusty mountains, the barbed wire with the kites caught in them, the galvanized roof of the guard’s quarters. The view is, once again the beach, the point, Lobster Cove. I have to change the header of my blog.

Daily musings on living and working in Kabul will be of the hindsight kind – made up of memories, slow insights, new perspectives – or made during short trips there in the future, but no longer the object of my daily writings. Will there be enough to write, I wonder, in quiet Manchester?

The daily things I took for granted when I left Manchester two years ago will be taken for granted soon enough while the daily sights of Kabul will become more special: the stray cats, finally grown up enough that they can jump up the high wall and fight with each other. The cooing pigeons just outside my window, building nests on the silliest places; the sparrows that ate the entire grape harvest of our grape arbor that revived in one year, after years of neglect. I think it was thanks to the ‘dawa’ (lit. medicine) that Hadji Kazem, MSH’s gardener, periodically gave to the two enormous and ancient grape vine trunks, one on each side of the veranda.

It was an odd sensation, during the final stretch across the Atlantic, that I was in-bound this time, rather than out-bound – the terms have switched; there won’t be an outbound until my next trip. It is both exhilarating and a little scary as I don’t have yet a job to go home to.

I finished listening to Howie Carr’s book about how the Bulger brothers and their cronies enriched themselves and corrupted everything they touched. The parallels with Afghanistan are so obvious – politics just another name for self-enrichment, patronage, so many people are for sale, so many situations used to settle accounts, repay debts, revenge for slights and insults in the past. The abuse is, no doubt, still happening in Massachusetts right under our noses but it is a little more refined and subtle than in Afghanistan – but the Afghans are learning fast.

And then I was home. Tessa and Axel were waiting for me at the airport with a bouquet of flowers from our garden. I didn’t mind that it was overcast, humid and there were huge mosquitoes that right away bit me. I dodged the mosquitoes to see Tessa’s vegetable garden with cabbage, broccoli, purple, red and yellow peppers, beets, and more. And there was the wonderful smell of the ocean.

Tessa and Steve joined us for the kind of dinner that cannot be had in Afghanistan: fresh swordfish, fresh corn, homegrown tomato salad and a glass of cool white wine. I am in seventh heaven again.