Life as I know it

I’m in Kabul for at least the next five months. The job for which I was hired, either as a trainer or manager with an adult education program, is in a region that does not now have foreign staff. So my actual work and ultimate location are TBD.

In the meantime, I’m learning Dari in a five-month course. Dari is related to Farsi (Persian/Iranian). The method mimics child learning at an accelerated pace. Classes are four hours a day, five days a week. The first 30 hours are listening only. In the first 100 hours, I’ll acquire 750 vocabulary words. Native speakers teach everything.

My accommodations are very comfortable if dusty. My grandparents had it tougher in the early years of their marriage. It’s a large house divided into a top and bottom flats. I live on the ground floor with a British girl in the same language course. There are two other ladies upstairs. I blew their battery inverter on accident, so they’ve been doing candles the last two nights.

We have “city power” for a few hours every third evening. Other than that, there’s solar for fluorescent lights the rest of the time. I have a mobile phone. Internet is slow and spotty and there’s none in this house. We have a regular toilet with decent plumbing. Something’s gone wrong along my digestive tract, but it’s livable. We graduated from bucket baths today after learning how to light the kerosene water heater yesterday. It’s as dry as Wyoming.

All houses are set behind high walls. We have doormen, one for the day and one for the night. We are near the neighborhood mosque. It has a very good speaker system. I wear a headscarf whenever I go out, but don’t cover my face. Boys and young men fly kites every afternoon. They soar hundreds of feet in the air all over the sky.

I’ve been invited over by many team members for meals. They’re always from scratch, sometimes with meat and sometimes without. Tonight it was cauliflower and carrot dal with apple strudel for dessert. Tea is ubiquitous, though coffee is also available. Flat bread called naan is also ubiquitous. I bought Pantene hair conditioner. There is peanut butter and feta cheese. My favorite cereal, Just Right, which has not been sold in the US for the last five years, is readily available. Seasonal fresh fruits from the region are delicious.