One Day Under Our Belts

Kabul is a sad place—the views on our drives to and from the university are filled with filthy street kids seemingly old far, far beyond their years. More than once, we’ve seen a group of them talking and someone says, “business meeting,” with a chuckle. They really do look like worn old men, harshly battered by life. And they're just kids. It's just so sad to see.

On the positive side, the first day of class went pretty well. There were lots of loose ends that seemed to fall into place at the last minute. We did some introductions and the students were very graceful and thanking us for coming. I tried to break the ice a bit by telling them about how Iowa has 3 million people and 15 million pigs...I think maybe something got lost in translation because that one usually gets a good laugh. Then we were asking them to say what their favorite color was ("I like all colors") or what animal they'd be if they could ("I'd like to be an accountant"). Speaking of translation, our translator is a doctor. He's a diminutive, polite guy with these amazing green eyes one sees here now and again, made famous by the National Geographic photo of the Afghan girl some years ago.

Mary did some talking about basic accounting concepts and then I did an Excel tutorial for a bit. The levels of knowledge appear to vary greatly. Some people had things done before I started talking about them, others had to have some help from others, and one guy pulled out a fancy (well, big) USB stick and asked if he could save his work on it! I really wished I had a computer projector like my professors have used for this kind of class. We have a dry erase board.

The classroom is cold--the heat in the building doesn't work, like the house where we live (we have big propane gas heaters for each room at our house). The university closes for three months in the winter because of the issues with heat. So we have a couple big electric heaters, but, though the room is kind of small, the ceilings are high so the heat dissipates easily. The students keep their jackets and scarves on... They call me Mr. Jon or "Sir."

The bathroom is really nasty. There's no way I could use the toilet--it seriouly looks like that grody toilet from Trainspotting. And as I was using the urinal, I looked right to notice the huge windows--I guess privacy is not a big concern around here!

We actually arrived a full hour late today--the traffic was awful. The drive got caught in traffic coming back from the university to pick us up in the morning and it took us an hour to get home in the evening. The reason given was that the national assembly met today and Karzai spoke...the commute so far is the worst part about this thing. You kind of feel like a sitting duck when traffic is frozen for such long stretches.