Sylvia's Journal

The attack on the restaurant where we had dinner only three days ago shook me up and produced a night full of disturbing dreams. This included me sitting in a wheelchair and not being able to navigate myself to a destination I can’t remember.

I Skyped last night with Axel, Sita and Faro, sitting in the early morning sunlight in Manchester, Sita on the eve of her departure for Davos. I already knew about the attack but didn’t want to disturb the call; seeing the little family in our sunny home made me homesick and wanting to beam myself over, out of Kabul for a moment and forget about our vulnerabilities here.

When I woke up and saw that the attack was front page news in the NYT and all over the twitter sphere I figured I better tell Axel. We skyped some more and I was able to calm down and start to think about what next. The Bollywood fashion show we were going to go to next Friday will have to do without us; our security office has placed all restaurants and hotels that are frequented by foreigners out of bounds.

We are allowed to visit families at their homes, which we did today. We spent several hours at the house of a former colleague who was visiting from her new home in Holland. We speak Dutch together, with her Dutch being much better than my Dari.

After a delicious dinner of kofta, qabuli pilao and various salads, the table cloth on the floor was cleared away and we played with the baby, drinking tea, and eating the cookies we brought. We admired the grandsons, theirs in the flesh and mine on an iPAD, bonding us two grandmothers together, whether khala jan (Pashtu), bibi jan (Dari), or Oma (Dutch).

We looked at wedding albums and witnessed the baby’s development, documented in great detail, from zero to his current 7 months as we feasted on grapes from the garden that had been kept alive from the fall. They were sweet and firm, I don’t know how they do it.

And now I am back at the guesthouse and preparing for the busy next week. I am also looking forward to our new housemate who is flying in from Dubai just about now. I had hoped to show her Kabul and all its great eating and other places but I guess her first visit will be less exciting now that these places are off limits. We’d like her to get the right, not the wrong kind of excitement. We simply have to plan more visits to people’s homes, which is actually a much nicer way to learn about Afghanistan.