Are you buying cat food!?!?

The commute was much better today, both ways. We gotta keep that Karzai guy outta town--I'm sure he's eager to do the same (I've not heard many encouraging words from the locals about him). We stopped at a grocery store on the way home to buy some things--Mary missed cereal and some other snacks, and we bought chocolate bars for the guards and driver. She was wearing a long, black coat and had a black scarf wrapped around her neck and head. We had been there for a while when I saw her crouched down and picking out cans of Fancy Feast and putting them in our basket. "She's lost it," I thought, "Either she thinks she's at home right now or she things cat food is some kind of good survival meal in an emergency." So I bend down nearby and say "...are you buying CAT FOOD!?!" "Yes, I am," says a young blonde American woman as she turns to look at this asshole invading her personal space. After a minute of being apologetic, I laughed for about ten.

Everyone seems to be selling something here--besides the street kids selling packs of gum or hard candies, there are shops lining the streets all over. It's so dirty though. The streets here have deep ruts on either side that I'm assuming are the sewer/drainage system. And the kids are just so dirty.

I've been in places with this kind of poverty--South Africa, Venezuela, Guatemala--but what is different right now is the cold. I mean, if push comes to shove you can sleep on the ground anywhere in those other places, but you'd freeze here. And you're very uncomfortable during the day. I was feeling sorry for myself having cold hands in the classroom today and there are kids with little more than fall jackets out in the street. The cold is like a final indignity the world is dealing out to these kids. "Not only are you going to be poor and dirty, but you will also be really uncomfortable 5 months of the year."

I saw a very little boy on the roof of some building, which was kind of the front of his dwelling (there are shanties built into the mountainsides here like in Caracas or other large, poor cities). And he was just standing there, looking around, and my knee-jerk thought, like when you see someone standing near a big drop-off, was "Don't do it, life's worth living." He wasn't looking to jump, or considering it or anything like that, but that thought ran through my head. But then I thought about the future he has to look forward to and I have doubts about this knee-jerk thought. Maybe it's relative--that I know living standards are so much better elsewhere. There are "happiness" surveys out there that seem to indicate wealth and happiness, on a national scale, may not be strictly related.

This is Kabul 1978. It could just as easily be yesterday.

Class went well again today. Tomorrow is the official opening ceremony for the project. So we don't have class in the morning. A classic event--precious class time is disposed of in favor of maintaining the cleanliness of the classroom so important visitors will be as impressed as possible and so that the university can trumpet about a program they seem to have done their best to stand in the way of.

In Dari, "-jahn" is a suffix you would put on someone's name if they are your buddy. Such as "Jeff-jahn" or "Ramin-jahn." My name being Jon, it nearly sounds like this suffix, so a couple of the students were laughing about the idea of "Jon-jahn."