Sylvia's Journal

Two weeks after I landed I have back my house, mostly, minus things that I have outgrown and things that have outgrown me. We had given Tessa and Steve our couch, partially because it had suffered from bunnies, dogs and other living things over the last 17 years and partially because we had this fantasy of getting a nice new clean couch.

But after shopping around for a new couch we realized that, without a guaranteed income, and certainly without post differential and danger pay, and a costly trip to Holland in the near future, we better not spend our money on a new couch. And so we bought the one we had looked at in the second hand store near our house. With the cushions coming in from Afghanistan it will look great – in fact it already looks so natural that our best friends didn’t even noticed the new old couch.

We spent the evening with our friends who were baysitting their grandchild, something they highly recommended. While baby Otto was asleep we plotted our trip through Holland later this fall. We put before them many difficult choices that require at least a two week vacation which they can’t afford – we probably cannot either but we will sort that out later. Planning a vacation is half the fun of having it.

I have decided I need an office outside our home simply to park all my African and other collections of stuff collected over the last 25 years. I don’t want all of it in my home anymore because it collects dust and Ali Ghulam is no longer there to keep things dust free. Visiting colleagues at MSH this week I realized how many knick-knacks that people buy, or that are gifted, are parked in their offices. I even recognized knick-knacks I had given away when I left two years ago.

They fill 100s of yards of shelves and every horizontal surface. I was wondering whether I could slip some things in, like my collection of African toy planes that I have outgrown, without anyone noticing.

I went into the big city for the second time this week, to catch up on two years with my longtime (but no longer) squash partner Annie, then have a wonderful Thai lunch (much better than the kind of Thai we would get in Kabul – so much better that I practically licked the plates clean) with people from Boston University’s School of Public Health, and then back, through excruciating slow traffic to MSH for a discussion about a chunk of work that needs to be done and for which I was considered a good candidate.

Since I will be running out of vacation time in the next couple of weeks – and was starting to get a little nervous – this was good news. I went home with some papers to study and accept or decline early next week.

I talked with M in Kabul, who was at home because the traffic is all tied up in condolence events for the recently slain leader of the peace process. I think that since the start of Ramazan in early August there has not been an entire work week, what with attacks, holidays, and traffic chaos. The phone call was to let her know that I may be far away but there is still that piece of my heart that is over there. M. says she will be hiding it so that I have to keep on coming back, over and over, to find it.

I do miss my team. Here I am not on any team at the moment and I realize that I need to work with a team to feel complete. If I accept the job given to me today I will be on a team with people I can learn much from. I have also made contact with my co-teacher for the Japan assignment in early November. In the meantime I am on my husband’s team as we move back into our home.

The moving back in, which went so fast when I just got home, is running into some snags, mostly mildew-related snags, exacerbated by the recent water main break – but not entirely. And so my neatly arranged office is in disarray again with stuff and books piled up on every horizontal surface, the smell of bleach and piles of books I am discarding but don’t know where to discard to.

Only a month ago I in my Kabul home with piles everywhere. Now I am back amidst different piles and the removal of these piles is so much more complicated because most people don’t want my stuff but I can’t throw it out. What a luxury problem to have – abundance!

All the dog hair has been removed from the car – nearly all. I found a few stray ones to the great consternation of Andrew the car detailing man who had promised I would be totally satisfied.

While Andrew was detailing our car I visited a friend who hired me 25 years ago as a family planning counselor at Planned Parenthood. Our contact has been spotty but we never entirely lost sight of each other. Now her son is a Peace Corps Volunteer in Lesotho. It was fun looking over the map of Lesotho and hearing the stories about his new life there.

I spent the remaining hours enjoying the freedom of walking around on my own in Gloucester on this warm fall day, had a nice lunch and some wicked good espresso. And while I was doing this Axel and Joe drove to western Massachusetts to take care of some Joe business and have the company of each other during the five hour round trip.

Our shipments have cleared customs, 250 pounds in Minneapolis and the remaining 2500 pounds in Boston. There is now more urgency to rid our house of unnecessary pounds to make room for the new stuff. All of the new pounds are expected to arrive at our door step any time now.
 

I went to MSH today and felt much like when I am in Holland: I am from there but have become an alien simply by being absent for a while. I did see some people who I have known for over 20 years and it was nice to see them but everyone is busy (‘very busy’) with stuff I know nothing about. I felt strangely out of place.

The big project that is supposed to give people like me work has still not been awarded and I wonder whether it ever will. I saw some writing on the wall and decided I better re-activate my looking for secure employment elsewhere – it is not an easy decision and somewhat out of my comfort zone, but one has to be practical about such matters and there is a whiff of excitement that comes with the idea.

I had carefully prepared my lunch, a salad from Axel’s lobster (his fifth caught since I got home) plus the beets and a salad made from the red cabbage from our garden but I forgot to put it in the car. So I had to go to Trader Joe and buy myself lunch. In the meantime Axel and Joe ate mine.

While at TJ I bought a sea salt-caramel-dark chocolate bar and ate it on the spot. A colleague at MSH, a no-nonsense public health physician, told me he read of a longitudinal study that concluded that people who ate chocolate everyday were healthier than those who did not. He and I didn’t even ask for the credentials of the researchers and used the study’s conclusion as sufficient justification to go out and buy (then eat) chocolate.

In the afternoon I visited MP and her Afghan son who decided that my farewell speech was appropriately poetic and he concluded I had learned Dari well. This was the second Afghan I impressed with my (written) finals, my farewell speech at work. But when he asked me how to say something in Dari I stumbled – I am quickly getting out of practice in spite of my good intentions.

Pia lives nearby and was my next visit. We talked about futures while sipping tea and watching the still wet but clean kitchen and living room floor dry in the late afternoon sun, very slowly. Some ideas are hatching, slowly, about what comes next. I realize that some things need an incubation period.

In the evening Axel and I, still cleaning out cabinets, re-discovered a portfolio with letters and newspaper cuttings from 1772, 1806 and 1845 from various and sundry people about matters of estate and other serious things – parts of the estate of the Cabots that were left in the house when Axel’s parents bought it in the early 50s after Cabot had left with his Mexican bride for warmer climes.

The 1772 newspaper (the Essex`Gazette) advertised the sale of a ‘29 year old negro’ by a widow in Newbury-port [sic] and the arrival of goods from India. It also had a series of ‘anecdotes’ written by someone who knew King George (the one who went crazy) and his consort, princess Charlotte whom he adored – a difficult piece to read as all the s’es are written as ‘f’s and images from a time very long ago. Amazing to be reading all this now, sitting in a place lit up and connected in ways they couldn’t have dreamed about then.

People ask me if I have re-adjusted to life in the US and I think I have but then I feel sleepy at odd hours and am overwhelmed by choices and chores. Although I am supposed to be on vacation it doesn’t feel like it. There is so much to do again, a demanding house, especially during season changes, promises of keeping up with people in Kabul, reading writings from the SOLA girls.

We visited Sita in western Mass and sat with the mosquitoes amidst the results of over-enthusiastic tomato planting some months ago – shriveled up tomatoes everywhere on vines – next to an abundance of 6 feet zinnias.

If I’d still be flying we would have been there in 45 minutes but by road it is nearly 3 hours. I have been looking at the sky a lot lately – partially because it is so perfect blue but also because I would love to fly again. Still, with the job situation, and thus income, a bit unclear, flying will have to wait until I can buy a share and take some lessons again.

On the way home we stopped in Auburn to dine with Tessa’s mother-in-law who is babysitting for the honeymooned couple, her brother in law and his not so new wife. I finally got to taste the fancy wedding cake that I missed because of our early exit from the wedding – now nearly 10 days ago. It was still pretty good but a little old. Axel drove back while I slept. A back-and-forth to western mass requires over 5 hours of driving. We are both exhausted.

It is getting a bit nippy. Fall is in the air. I had to bring out sweaters and warm shawls. We passed the dividing line between summer and fall. Still, it was a beautiful day. Today was less work and more social: a brunch with friends from DC – the same friends, in a Salem restaurant across the street from where we brunched two years ago on the eve of my departure to Kabul. It was the closing bookend brunch of that two year period.

We had left Joe to his own devices which he likes as he is (a) overcoming a cold and needs quiet rest and (b) is trying to come up with an integrated model combining permaculture, the timeless way of building and some other important thought frames about a better future world.

After a walk in the woods, amidst thousands of mushrooms past their prime, we sat on the beach to burn those frames that were no longer of use to us. Each of us would take an old frame, declare it no longer valid or useless and then ceremoniously tossed it into the fire. We also burned baskets, and with them, expectations contained in them about how and what we should be. After that it was freedom for a while.

Just when I was relishing my new freedoms a little boy, 10 years or so, ran onto the beach with a plastic AK-47 replica. I was so astonished, seeing this kid with the so familiar weapon, that I was speechless for a while. He ran up and down the beach looking for bad people or good people, we weren’t sure on which side he was – armed opposition groups (AOGs) or Taliban or the national army, blissfully pulling the trigger which made a real tat-tat-tat sound. If only he knew.

After our outdoor fire Axel started an indoor fire in our fireplace that was just installed when I left 2 years ago. It got me warm and sleepy. Bedtime it was.

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.