Sylvia's Journal

Okcana from Uzbekistan cut our hair this afternoon, in the kitchen; first Axel, then me. She has the pale look of a Caucasian. Her parents left Moscow and Belorus to settle in Samarkand. She doesn’t speak Uzbek nor Dari because everyone spoke Russian under the USSR regime.

She came to Afghanistan with her teenage son and worked in a beauty salon. Her son is about to graduate; after that she doesn’t know what will happen. She lives just down the street. We are both pleased with the result. Axel no longer looks like a conductor with wisps of hair flying loose around his face and I have a new look.

For dinner we met the very young and pregnant Bureau Chief for Afghanistan and Pakistan of Time magazine. She and her Afghan American husband are flying to Massachusetts in two months to settle in Rockport and, when the time comes, deliver their first born at the Beverly Birth Center, how wonderfully strange is that? They were pleased to have a firsthand account of what it is like to deliver there. Our memories are still very vivid even though it was 24 years ago.

We met in the Korean restaurant, which was one of the few open on this second day of Eid. It is unmarked from the street and so you have to know; even if you pass the first barricade and heavy outdoor fence you couldn’t tell you were about to get into a restaurant/guesthouse. For a brief and unsettling moment I felt like we were in a trap of the kind that James Bond always gets into, a kind of airlocked sluice with nothing but high and unscalable walls. And then one of the walls opened and we walked into the smells of Korea.

Over a delicious dinner we discussed child bearing, working in male environments, working moms, and life in Kabul that is not dictated by security rules. Our new found friends have a car each, drive around, and mix with the local population in ways we can only dream of.

It’s part of the schizophrenia of living in this place: one the one hand life is very ordinary, with shopping, cooking, working, getting pregnant, antenatal visits, driving around town to get from A to B, while on the other hand we are constantly reminded of the ugliness of war and fighting, by blast walls, men in uniform with guns and armored cars/humvees in camouflage, tons of them.

As if to illustrate this juxtaposition of the ordinary and the dangerous, just this morning a family feud got out of hand near our house as we later found out. Our colleagues reported small arms fire. That’s the problem here – Thanksgiving dinners in the US may also bring out family feuds but at least people usually don’t pull out their guns. The fight here ended badly for one person at least who lost his life (I assume his), and possibly more if the police gets the perpetrators.

We ended the day with a video call to our friends in Charlottesville in Virginia who showed us a chocolate Charlotte, leaving us wishing for a more advanced kind of technology that allows virtual licking of mixing bowls. We showed off our Chinese-Pakistani furniture and the fancy and hideous lamps as well as our new haircuts while peaking into our friends kitchen for other things to drool over. One day I am sure we can beam stuff up and partake in faraway Thanksgiving meals and beverages. For now this remains in the realm of fantasy.

We can no longer see clearly through our windows because winter plastic has been nailed to all of them, except the windows that we want to open – to let fresh air in and diesel fumes out. We can see whether it is nice or not but shapes are a little blurred.

We think it was Eid today but we are still not sure. Many shops were closed but then again, it is Friday, and they would have been anyways. We did go for our customary walk around the school tracks and then stopped for French pastries, for with the coffee, with lunch and after dinner. I spent about half of a low ranking government employee’s monthly salary on pastries. The only redeeming factor about this luxury purchase is that the money goes to educating Hazara kids, aside from tasting really good.

We had Douglas and Paul over for dinner. Paul just returned from France and brought a bottle of wine along, something we think normal back in Manchester, but here such a gesture is an indescribable treat.

Paul has been for ever in Afghanistan and knows about the various tribes, rulers, allegiances and what not; information that is hard to absorb for us newcomers. Everyone is embedded in these old tribal relationships which define one’s alliances, enemies, trustworthiness, etc. I listen to all this while trying to understand opinions I have heard about this one and that one in this new perspective. It is not entirely new because I have been reading about all this, but it is a tangle of names and geographies that are hard to retain.

We sat around the table for hours, making a good dent into the food-for-five-days that was prepared by our cook, as well as the French pastries and of course finishing the wine. For once we did not all sit in our respective rooms watching our computer screens, or the 300 channels of bad TV.

We celebrated Thanksgiving a little different than we usually do.There was no turkey on our Afghan (Chinese/Pakistani) table this year. The Dari word for turkey is fil (elephant) murkh (chicken). We didn’t even have chicken. Axel stayed home all day while I had lunch with a British-born Australian woman who works in the general directorate for human resources, the poor step child general directorate in the ministry of health.

Her Afghan colleagues have no heat and work under dismal circumstances. After the salaries are paid there is no more money for heat, stationary, and other basic supplies. She goes to work with coat and gloves and never takes them off during the entire winter work days. She’s used to it now but visitors are not and shiver in their suits. She agrees with the concept that there is no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate clothing.

With two of my colleagues we picked her up in a part of town that is called Parwan and drove to the place where most of the restaurants are. We selected a heavily barricaded Lebanese restaurant for lunch. I ordered too much food: a large selection of warm and cold dishes that are called ‘mezze’ in Lebanon. Only the arak was missing. I had wine instead, my first glass of wine since the we opened the bottle that Axel brought from Dubai, a few weeks ago.

The restaurant rewards its customers with extra dishes, ‘on the house’ as the waiter kept saying each time he put another dish on the table that I did not recollect ordering. At the end of the meal a large chunk of chocolate cake is also offered, once again on the house. The result was that 6 hours later I was still not hungry and since there was no turkey anyways, I skipped dinner.

The best part of Thanksgiving was talking with Tessa first, and then later Sita and Jim via Skype to wish them happy Thanksgiving and look into their living room. Even though it slows down the transmission rate, it is still wonderful to be able to see each other through our computer screens.

We have cable TV now and can access the BBC, Al Jazeera English, Bloomberg, EuroNews, Deutsche Welle and a Flemish Channel in addition to about 200 other channels of junk from all over Europe, the Arab world, Central Asian, Korea, Iran and Russia. We can also access a few hallelujah church channels from the Bible belt in the US and talk shows in any language you can imagine.

Not having a remote we have to sit in front of the box and click our way up or down to get to the desired news channels. Along the way we pass by endless Italian quizzes and movies, Islamic sites that have the camera focused on Mecca and, a few numbers higher or lower, titillating still and moving images of thinly clad ladies enticing the viewer to call a number (for a fee of course). We get all this junk for free, imagine that, suffering through it just to get the news. Until now we only got the local channels which are a bit limited aside from being in a language we can not yet follow.

Today felt festive, much like the last workday before Christmas. There is excitement as well as dread in the air, again, just like Christmas. For some Eid is too full of family obligations to be enjoyed. Several people are taking the days after Eid off on personal leave, to recover. What is the purpose of such holidays, really? To exhaust us and empty our pockets?

I picked Axel up for a shopping expedition while I went to see my PT at the military hospital, aka the 400-bed hospital. I no longer have to show my patient card, the guards know me. After the busy and well guarded gated entrance to the military hospital you enter an oasis of peace, a funny combination: peacefulness and the army/wounded soldiers. The grounds are well kept and you can tell that the water/pond arrangement was a nice idea, except there is no water and it looks more like an empty swimming pool now.

There is much marble used on the outside of the hospital. It looks expensive and reasonably well maintained, at least from the outside. The Kabul Orthopedic Organization is tucked away in a far corner, not quite as nice from the outside, but functional and simple inside.

The female treatment room was full today. One lady who had had a stroke on her left side, sat in a chair parked in front of a walker. She was assisted by her daughter who kept putting her paralyzed left hand on the walker but it kept falling down. The patient had had a stroke. She looked like she was in her 80s and her daughter about my age. As it turned out she was 66 and her daughter in her forties. The stroke came from hypertension, a common condition that is often not detected until it is too late and the cause of many deaths and disabilities. It is sad that the illness is so easily detected and can be treated for pennies a day.

Another woman, of unknown age (I stopped guessing) and rather obese, was being strapped into a contraption to immobilize her spine because of compression fractures that had happened some months ago. It was a more primitive arrangement of straps and hard plastic than Axel’s plastic corset but, if worn all the time, should work. The problem was that the woman was not wearing it because she couldn’t do housework with it. The PTs had asked her to come to the center and wear the brace while performing typical household tasks like folding blankets, cooking while squatting, etc. It was a clever move from the PT staff as she was cleaning the treatment room while they watched her.

A third woman, accompanied by her 21 year old daughter was working on strengthening her back muscles while rolling up and down a large yellow exercise ball. I could tell it was hard work and not something she’d be easily doing at home. While she was resting from her exercise with a frayed hotpad on her back she asked me how many children I had, the kind of basic chit-chat conversation I can now hold in Dari. She laughed when I said 2 daughters. ‘That’s all?’ she asked in disbelief. I understood her disbelief, as she had 14 and was only 44. That basically means she has been pregnant or nursing all of her adult life and, after her first menses, never menstruated again.

Everywhere I go now I look how people avoid the fumes from their stoves. The PTs had a good solution, they used plaster-casting tape to make the pipes tight and keep them immobilized. Another form of appropriate technology was the wheelchair, constructed from a plastic chair and a metal frame, two things that are easy to come by here, very clever.

I was once again greeted with three kisses by my physical therapist. She told me the swelling in my shoulder had gone down. She massaged the sore shoulder and then administered the gentle electric current to shock the muscles back into service.

After my session was over I visited the on-site nursery for the children of the female staffers where my PT was nursing her 2-month old. It was a brightly decorated room with baby crib bunk beds and a potbelly stove in the middle of the room. Two- and three-year olds toddled around the stove as if it was an innocent piece of furniture. It is hard to imagine such a setup in a workplace nursery back home.

Axel picked me up after an hour of shopping and we did some more. We stocked up for five days without a cook and being at home a lot. We can pretty much get anything we want here, including maple syrup and Girl Scout cookies (Thin Mints) from a very adventurous Girl Scout or Troop. I wonder how they got here. It certainly deserves a special badge.

Steve and I went to the Indian embassy for our multiple entry visas. Being able to escape to India on short notice is part of our security package. Since the last bombing the Indian officials are requiring foreigners who want a visa to show up in person. We used to send Khalid, the airport gopher for such things. It was people like him who had bad luck at the days that the bombs exploded.

We had to walk passed the barricaded entrance to the Indian embassy, along tall blast walls. Everyone around the entrance to the Indian embassy was very jittery, there was much gesturing and yelling. I don’t blame people for that. It remains a hot piece of property in this part of the world.

Although foreigner visa time is from 10:15 till 12:30 we still weren’t let in by 11:30, strung along by policemen who barked at us to stay away from the entrance. Steve discovered a handicraft store nearby and disappeared while Khalid and I waited in the cold drizzle until we gave up. We returned empty handed, that is, without the visa. We did fill our hands with freshly grilled kebabs from a street vendor and steaming naan straight from the tandoor. It was lunchtime and we wouldn’t be back in time for lunch at the office canteen. It is one of the many treats that makes up for the discomfort of living here (which isn’t all that uncomfortable).

The traffic is intense these days, much like the traffic around shopping malls in the US around Christmas time. Eid is in the air. You see people carrying boxes with cookies and sweets everywhere and the women are cooking up a storm, according to their husbands who are my colleagues. It is like a five day Thanksgiving holiday filled with visits and good food.

The beggars look more desperate than ever, especially now with the cold rain drizzle and the mud everywhere. The worst to watch are the shivering little girls with their outstretched hands. They look exactly like the poor matchstick girl in one of Grimm’s stories. I don’t think I will ever know how to deal with beggar women and children, especially in bad weather.

After a brief interlude at the office it was time to get back in the car and once again across town for our weekly meeting with USAID. I learned about millions of contraceptive pill cycles languishing in our store rooms that we cannot give away because of US government regulations that were created to prevent contraceptives to be forced upon hapless women. Yet many women and agencies here want them, the government is asking for them. The pills are expiring soon and so we are shipping them to Pakistan and Jordan where they want them; this is costly, cumbersome and slow; some pills may expire along the way while unwanted babies get born right here, one after another. Our US colleagues would be held personally liable if any hapless woman forced to contracept would initiate a lawsuit. Maybe I don’t get this, but it makes no sense.

On our way out of the US containers back into the cold I watched with pity the Afghan and Nepali soldiers hired to protect the US compound. My hour wait at the Indian embassy in the drizzle suddenly didn’t seem so bad anymore compared what these guys have to put up with, in full combat gear, for hours on end. The boredom would kill me before the cold.

After another hour and a half ride back to the office a few of us remained to interview an African candidate for a position on our team, by video conference, in Cambridge. It was an interesting conversation – I like these group interviews but with the nine and a half hours difference, it makes for a very long day, fourteen hours nonstop. This was going to be just a quick post before I tumble into bed.

Today I saw a 3 year old holding hands with a 4 year old crossing an immensely busy intersection, something like Central Square in Cambridge. I held my breath as I watched them duck traffic and run then this way then that. They made it across, as they probably do most of the time but I am sure some don’t. Knowing the state of the hospitals, I hate to think the drama that would follow such a mishap. If we were to witness something like that in the US the parents would be put in jail probably for negligence. Unfortunately, such a sight is not uncommon. It breaks my heart each time.

I have shiny new pipes connecting my old stove to the hole in the wall and the fumes have now become manageable. This will be it for the winter. Today was a dreary day, wet and with snow at higher altitudes. It will come down here soon as well, people predict. It will be nice at first as it will cover all the ugliness on the streets.

It took us over an hour to make it to the ministry to participate in the planning meeting for the important top level health retreat in February. Many donor reps were added to the group, which included now several expat women. It’s nice for a change to be in a meeting where I am not the only woman. The meeting was led by an Afghan woman and one other participated. It gives a sense of progress, although there is much work to do before women will have real power.

Rumors are still flying around about the new cabinet, and thus new minister of health. But the current one has a good track record and even returned from an international vaccination meeting in Hanoi with four awards for Afghanistan (out of five) – an impressive record about cold chain maintenance and vaccination progress. A photo op was organized this afternoon where awards are passed on to those who made it all possible, both donor and UN agencies and ministry staff. I am sure such things lift spirits amidst all the accusations of corruption.

I started the day once again with my door and window wide open to let the fumes out of my small office but now it is really a bit too cold for this. The housekeeper put another rag soaked in salt water around the vent and the boss suggested packing mud around the edges. We are involved in a scientific experiment, changing one variable at a time. Now the rusty pipe is replaced by a brand new pipe and if that doesn’t change things we are going to exchange the whole thing with another stove, from someone who doesn’t mind.

In the middle of my weekly team meeting we heard a loud bang that rattled the windows. We stopped for a moment and wondered when the sms would come through telling us not to go across town and then we resumed our meeting as if nothing had happened. It was much like last night’s rocket attack on the Serena hotel that most people seem to shrug off as yet another example of a poor shot.

As it turned out it was the diesel stove in the office next to mine that had exploded, presumably because the secretary had turned it up too high and this flooded the chamber with fuel. Between the fumes and the chance of explosion, I hardly dared to go into my office again.

I joined my colleague Ali for a visit with the highest ranking female in the ministry, a deputy minister, to talk about a study visit to Egypt next February and who should come along from her staff. We were a little early and used the time to shake some hands (allowed again after the early panic about H1N1) and check in on our colleagues.

We found one shivering in front of an electric heater while the cold came streaming in through the thin single-glazed windows loosely set in their wood frames. A bunch of thin wood strapping, with a lovely geometric design burned onto each piece, were waiting in a corner for the plastic sheets that might not come in time for this winter. I am learning quickly that going to the ministry means putting on layers of warm clothes, scarves and jackets, and, soon enough, gloves. My stove troubles are in a way a luxury: I have a diesel stove with fuel supplied automatically.

Our meeting with the deputy minister was short and sweet. I took advantage of her undivided attention to query her about her experience of being in a leadership position amidst all those men and what advice she would give to women wanting to follow in her footsteps. To my surprise she mentioned: learn to speak English fluently, as you need it at this high a level, and learn to use a computer effectively; transparency and commitment came next.

The transparency theme continued into the afternoon when we visited a team of consultants from the European Commission who are trying to sanitize and rationalize the governments’ approach to grading and paying civil servants, a yeoman’s job full of landmines and traps. At the end I understood why the senior consultant’s hair was white. He has been here for five years helping to reform something that is currently incompatible with the kind of government that Barack and Hillary are insisting on. At the end I ask one of the consultants what she was doing for fun. One more year, was her response. Hats off to these brave souls.

This morning I went for my first physical therapy session after a month of essential stagnation. Here appointments aren’t made in 30 minute slots. You can come anytime you want as long as it is between 8 and 3 and from Saturday to Wednesday. There is only one room for female patients and we are all treated in the one open space with 6 therapy tables and a few hospital beds.

The place is otherwise minimally equipped. There is one large dirty yellow exercise ball, a slanted plank for exercises, an apparatus with a pulley to exercise arm muscles, a skeleton that hangs together with tape here and there, an old exercise bicycle and one old narrow hospital gurney , the white paint chipped of, with an enormous crank to lower or raise it.

The electrical equipment is the most frightening. An infra-red lamp has half of its plastic shade melted and burned; an electric heater is plugged into a power strip, one wire in one hole, the other in the other hole without the help of a plug. There is a small handheld E-stim gadget to stimulate the nerves to get the muscles to contract. The pads are worn from over-use but it did the trick.

I was first greeted with three kisses by my PT who then diagnosed my condition as impingement syndrome. One of my shoulder muscles had weakened to the point that it can no longer produce the shoulder rotation that is needed when I lift my arm, hence the impingement. She demonstrated on the skeleton what had gone wrong.

I am glad I had not given up on her. It seems now that Fahima may have gotten me to do an exercise that was too advanced for my condition but I probably also did it wrong. Luckily it is a muscle condition and not, as I had feared at first, a rip someplace in the reconstructed shoulder.

The female PT room was ice cold when I entered because someone had forgotten to put wood in the small woodstove. I come from a place where heat is usually an automatic thing; it’s there when you need it unless your furnace is broken or you forgot to pay a bill. Here I see what happens when it is not automatic. All over Afghanistan people have been taking small stoves out of their summer storage places for the last month or so. Winterizing is a huge job: plastic on the widows, if you can, cleaning the stoves, putting them on a tray in the room to be heated, reconnect the pipes to the vent hole and fill it with fuel (wood or diesel) – and then keep filling them.

A burqa-ed women came in with an armful of wood and relit the stove. We all crouched around it while Fahima worked my shoulder. A fellow patient had her upper back and shoulder treated under the scary infrared lamp, followed by a heat pack treatment under a heavy wool blanket and then a massage.

She had brought a Chinese gadget that looked like a computer game console which the therapists were trying to understand. It was an electronic acu-pressure point thing that claimed to treat anything from overweight to insomnia. My PT decided, after trying it on herself, that it was exactly what we thought it was, a Chinese gadget. We had a long conversation about acupuncture which she finds scary and mysterious (mostly because there the needles don’t make you bleed). An animated conversation about a popular Chinese soap opera ensued in which, supposedly, acupuncture was done with embroidery needles. It was clear that the PTs had no confidence in acupuncture.

We had breakfast at the Pelican restaurant around the corner. I skipped the eggs and ordered a platter of French pastries.

We could still sit in the warm winter sun outside, and I munched on my pastries while watching the construction crew next door slap wet cement on the side of the house. Axel and I did not think it looked like a very trustworthy building technique, but Hans from Holland who is an architect told us that it is pretty common and not something to worry about. Still, we are glad it is not our house.

We walked around the Habibia athletic field until a police chief with a big gun in his hand chased us away. We don’t quite know what was going on but we understood the gesture. Everyone is still a bit jittery from the events of the last few weeks and our security people decided that we should not go to Chicken Street since it was too much of a routine.

We piled into the car, three Dutch and three Americans, and headed into Shari Nao. We visited two lovely places that sold exquisite Afghan handicraft: textiles, clothes, rugs, pillows, calligraphy, woodwork, blankets, scarves, etc. It was easy to drop a lot of money in no time. We came in with dollars and left with four large pillows that made piling back into the car a bit of a challenge.

Axel bought a signed copy of Nancy Dupree’s book ‘Afghanistan over a cup of tea,’ and then discovered that she was actually on the premises. I soon found her chatting with Axel in the store’s office about idealism, misguided actions and the marketing Afghan handicraft. Nancy, referred to as Afghanistan’s grandmother, and her husband Louis met in Afghanistan in 1960s. The book chronicles their lives against the backdrop of the wild history of Afghanistan’s last 50 years.

Lunch was Japanese Bento style with barley tea which made me think of Chris back in Cambridge and the barley tea she brought us after the accident. I am sure it was medicinal.

By the time lunch was finished the sun was setting and the cold returned. There are two climates here, a day time one that is pleasant and warm and a night time one that is cold and harsh. I am told that soon the two will merge and it will be cold all the time.

And now two-thirds of our long weekend is over and I am running out of time to do my Dari homework. I have to learn all the verbs that start with the letter A, about 30 of them. This include typing them out in a Dari word file which I am to send to my teacher as proof that I am studying.

The new pillows are a nice addition to our living room, inviting us to lounge around and not doing my homework.

Why did Hillary not wear a scarf, we wondered, at Karzai’s inauguration? When you move around in such high circles everything you do is symbolic. My gut feeling was that not conforming to this ubiquitous local tradition was a signal of one upwomanship: you are adapting to us, not us to you…maybe? And what about the Kashmiri embroidered coat – Kashmir is a flammable thing in these parts of the world. Was there a subtle purpose, like attracting attention to the beauty of the place to remind everyone that we should not destroy it?

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when the scarf issue was raised (I can’t imagine it was not). In Pakistan she wore a scarf and when she visited the Pope some time ago she wore something on her head (but that was as a spouse I believe). What were the pros and cons raised about the scarf wearing? I am always curious about such matters because I cannot imagine that not wearing a scarf was because she was in a hurry and simply forgot.

When Axel and I were at the opening of the 4th International Film Festival in Kabul in July, the female reps from the Goethe Institute did not wear scarves. I was jealous of them as I sat wrapped up in a vent-less and hot auditorium on that day. The scarf-less lady was important because she sat on the front row and was invited to address us. Next to her, also on the front row was another woman, a little younger, who wore a tank top and a short skirt (and no scarf). Remembering how naked I felt all wrapped up in my mid-calf dress, cardigan and headscarf, I wondered whether she felt the glances from people but endured them because of the statement she was making or whether she was simply oblivious.

A young woman who takes pictures for our donor at special events here in Kabul also never wears a scarf. I don’t know her enough to ask her about her reasoning. I did ask my Dutch friend Janneke who is rather casual with her head cover. For her it’s a principled issue. But most of us foreign women do comply with the local culture and cover our head, rain, sun, shine or snow.