Blood Test, Birthday, Easter, Taloqan Again, Budapest
Dear Everyone:
I was so tired when I left Faizabad. I had just recovered from a body-aching fever that lasted for an entire week. My temperature never soared to the place where your eyeballs feel like they are squishing around in your head, but it was enough to make me stay in bed. Haleem was concerned that it was malaria, so I eventually agreed to go to an afghan clinic and have a blood test.
I thought it was a bit dicey after all the stories I've heard of people in end-of-the-world spots having injections and operations and etc. with needles and stuff being used for the third time that day without antiseptic. We walked down to the clinic, and the good doctor was indulgent: he removed the wrapper of the poker and the slide right in front of me so I would feel safe. He was quite competent and professional, and he kind of had this twinkle in his eye that some doctors have which is specially designed to put patients at ease. He sent his son around later to tell us that it wasn't malaria. Haleem looked away from the sight of me getting stabbed in the finger. Everyday he would ask how I was; all of the staff asked. They would raise their hands to heaven and tell me that they prayed everyday that I would be healthy. When I arrived in Taloqan, they had heard that I was sick, and Sayed Marouf who has just enough English to be cute asked me: "How is your situation? We are hearing you are sick... we pray that your situation is good." Altogether, I felt pretty taken care of when I was sick.
For my birthday the fever finally broke. Happy Birthday to Me. Quite a few people sent me emails, and Joyce gave me a little card with a keychain in it. Other people from NGOs sent cards as well. I was SO happy about the fever being gone, and these little gifts that it was a great birthday despite the fact that I felt worn out and spent the whole day in bed. Gulagha came in and said: "may you live another hundred years!" as long as the fever stays away I agree with him.
For Easter morning we went over to Jason and Cindy's house and celebrated. What that means is that we tried to remember Easter songs, belted out the first verse, stumbled through the second and petered out. Jason and Cindy took turns being good sports trying to accompany us on the guitar. It wasn't a very grand celebration, and I caught myself being annoyed with the goofiness of it. Then I thought about becoming a child to enter the kingdom of God and noticed that we were being quite a lot like children, belting out the one or two lines we remembered to join in with an event that had changed the world forever. I had somehow grown too old, sitting weak from the fever in the corner, sneering at the unsophisticated joy. I imagine that God doesn't care a fig about sophistication, and he took our praise like a mother takes a child's macaroni and sparkle art, and proudly hung it on his fridge.
I flew from Faizabad to Taloqan. The plan was to meet up with Patty-Leigh and her parents there and drive down to Kabul. This was the plan because it was the cheapest plan, and also because I wanted to see everyone in Taloqan again. The Faizabad airport is a couple of bombed out buildings, a whole bunch of guys with green wool guard uniforms, a couple guys with guns, and a corrugated metal airstrip. It's also a drive-in: you drive up to the runway, sit in your car, and wait for your plane. Planes don't fly when it's dark, or rainy, or cloudy, or if the people flying them don't feel like it. The day I flew it was beautiful and they felt like it. So did I. Ariana, the afghan airline, had just started to fly to Faizabad. I was flying with Pactec, an NGO outfit, and I happened to be standing with the pilots as the Ariana flight took off. They taxied back to the beginning of the runway and took a good run at it. About six feet from the last possible moment they pulled in the landing gear, as if they thought, well, there's the end of the runway, and we're still on the ground, so if we pull up the wheels we won' be any more and that's like taking off, right? The Pactec pilots were cringing like squeamish people at the sight of blood: "Come on guys, lift off would be good..." But the afghans made it off the runway and over the mountain and all the way to Kunduz. They're good at making it, these people. Two decades of total war and they're still getting their planes off the ground. I think I'll give them a few weeks practice with the Faizabad runway before I fly with them, though.
I was in Taloqan for five days and there was a feast everyday. This was very good because I think I'd lost weight and I can't spare much of that. The reason for the gorgeous spreads every night was that Patty-Leigh was leaving Taloqan for a new position in Kabul and they were kicking it up a notch for her and her parents (visiting from Kenya) while she was still with them. I spent the time in between meals lying down, still wasted from being sick. After about two days of this, I was back on again. Engineer Kaiwan kept asking for help with his new computer. In a month, from knowing jack diddly about computers he had gone to making his own excel spreadsheets. I hooked his computer up to a wireless network with the other office computers and showed him how to share files. I showed him how to go to another computer and open a file. He got a look in his eye like a child who's been given a puppy by a fairy godmother: It's like... it's like magical! He is what the Education zealots drool all over, the Lifelong Learner, and it really is worth all the drool. If only we all could have such childlike delight at 55... unless you become like one of these, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. After Taloqan, I spent a couple of days in Kabul. Chris took us around on a bit of a sight-seeing tour of the city. We saw the bombed out royal palace, and walked around in the rubble. We drove up to the top of the hill that sits like an island in the middle of the city and looked around. It's a huge sprawling jumble of mud houses, colonial style palaces, and the ugly block apartments the Soviets left behind. The houses spread out and spill up the sides of the mountains around them, like milk poured into a cereal bowl. Up the hill we were on, two Kuchi women were tending their goats. Like true tourists we snapped some photos of everything and headed back down.
It was a good little reunion in Kabul. Mathias was there, on his way home from Herat. I hadn't seen him for three months, and it was good to catch up and hear about his time, and tell him about mine, and have him reassure me that I wasn't nuts, and it was really like that for everybody. We flew the same flight out of Kabul, and I got off in Istanbul.Istanbul looks like a dream. There are mosques and minarets everywhere. I walked down to the ocean (oh Lord! Thank you for the OCEAN!) and looked across the Golden Horn to the cupolas and towers rising out of the mist on the other side. It is like a vista from Star Wars, an alien city. While I was sitting there a guy named Imam, a traveller from Egypt came along with a plastic bag full of good Danish beer, offered me one, and then told me all about how the US of A meddles in everyone else's affairs. He was very friendly, and when he found I was from Canada, he told me about his aunt who lives in Toronto. I asked him what he thought about Istanbul. "This?" he asked disdainfully, waving his hand over the whole scene. "This is nothing to me... you must go to Egypt!"Still, when the little old lady came along with three pairs of binoculars hanging around her neck, a sweet smile and an upraised palm, he gave her some money so we could look across at the city. I left imam, and Istanbul that afternoon, bound for Hungary.
There is too much to tell about Budapest. JM and Abby are outstanding hosts, and wonderful cooks, and despite the fact that they have been working hard for YWAM here and were in the middle of wrapping and packing everything up to go back to Canada, they took the time to show Kate and I the city. We spent fantastic hours, sipping drinks in the city's million sidewalk cafes, debriefing everything we'd been doing, telling stories, pushing each other to better, and more wonderful, and more truthful and delightful things. Being with Kate made my soul leap and it hasn't come down yet. And the city is like everything you'd want out of an old European town: huge ornate churches and palaces and monuments, tree-lined streets, and cafes on every sidewalk. Wonderful.
rjs
I was so tired when I left Faizabad. I had just recovered from a body-aching fever that lasted for an entire week. My temperature never soared to the place where your eyeballs feel like they are squishing around in your head, but it was enough to make me stay in bed. Haleem was concerned that it was malaria, so I eventually agreed to go to an afghan clinic and have a blood test.
I thought it was a bit dicey after all the stories I've heard of people in end-of-the-world spots having injections and operations and etc. with needles and stuff being used for the third time that day without antiseptic. We walked down to the clinic, and the good doctor was indulgent: he removed the wrapper of the poker and the slide right in front of me so I would feel safe. He was quite competent and professional, and he kind of had this twinkle in his eye that some doctors have which is specially designed to put patients at ease. He sent his son around later to tell us that it wasn't malaria. Haleem looked away from the sight of me getting stabbed in the finger. Everyday he would ask how I was; all of the staff asked. They would raise their hands to heaven and tell me that they prayed everyday that I would be healthy. When I arrived in Taloqan, they had heard that I was sick, and Sayed Marouf who has just enough English to be cute asked me: "How is your situation? We are hearing you are sick... we pray that your situation is good." Altogether, I felt pretty taken care of when I was sick.
For my birthday the fever finally broke. Happy Birthday to Me. Quite a few people sent me emails, and Joyce gave me a little card with a keychain in it. Other people from NGOs sent cards as well. I was SO happy about the fever being gone, and these little gifts that it was a great birthday despite the fact that I felt worn out and spent the whole day in bed. Gulagha came in and said: "may you live another hundred years!" as long as the fever stays away I agree with him.
For Easter morning we went over to Jason and Cindy's house and celebrated. What that means is that we tried to remember Easter songs, belted out the first verse, stumbled through the second and petered out. Jason and Cindy took turns being good sports trying to accompany us on the guitar. It wasn't a very grand celebration, and I caught myself being annoyed with the goofiness of it. Then I thought about becoming a child to enter the kingdom of God and noticed that we were being quite a lot like children, belting out the one or two lines we remembered to join in with an event that had changed the world forever. I had somehow grown too old, sitting weak from the fever in the corner, sneering at the unsophisticated joy. I imagine that God doesn't care a fig about sophistication, and he took our praise like a mother takes a child's macaroni and sparkle art, and proudly hung it on his fridge.
I flew from Faizabad to Taloqan. The plan was to meet up with Patty-Leigh and her parents there and drive down to Kabul. This was the plan because it was the cheapest plan, and also because I wanted to see everyone in Taloqan again. The Faizabad airport is a couple of bombed out buildings, a whole bunch of guys with green wool guard uniforms, a couple guys with guns, and a corrugated metal airstrip. It's also a drive-in: you drive up to the runway, sit in your car, and wait for your plane. Planes don't fly when it's dark, or rainy, or cloudy, or if the people flying them don't feel like it. The day I flew it was beautiful and they felt like it. So did I. Ariana, the afghan airline, had just started to fly to Faizabad. I was flying with Pactec, an NGO outfit, and I happened to be standing with the pilots as the Ariana flight took off. They taxied back to the beginning of the runway and took a good run at it. About six feet from the last possible moment they pulled in the landing gear, as if they thought, well, there's the end of the runway, and we're still on the ground, so if we pull up the wheels we won' be any more and that's like taking off, right? The Pactec pilots were cringing like squeamish people at the sight of blood: "Come on guys, lift off would be good..." But the afghans made it off the runway and over the mountain and all the way to Kunduz. They're good at making it, these people. Two decades of total war and they're still getting their planes off the ground. I think I'll give them a few weeks practice with the Faizabad runway before I fly with them, though.
I was in Taloqan for five days and there was a feast everyday. This was very good because I think I'd lost weight and I can't spare much of that. The reason for the gorgeous spreads every night was that Patty-Leigh was leaving Taloqan for a new position in Kabul and they were kicking it up a notch for her and her parents (visiting from Kenya) while she was still with them. I spent the time in between meals lying down, still wasted from being sick. After about two days of this, I was back on again. Engineer Kaiwan kept asking for help with his new computer. In a month, from knowing jack diddly about computers he had gone to making his own excel spreadsheets. I hooked his computer up to a wireless network with the other office computers and showed him how to share files. I showed him how to go to another computer and open a file. He got a look in his eye like a child who's been given a puppy by a fairy godmother: It's like... it's like magical! He is what the Education zealots drool all over, the Lifelong Learner, and it really is worth all the drool. If only we all could have such childlike delight at 55... unless you become like one of these, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. After Taloqan, I spent a couple of days in Kabul. Chris took us around on a bit of a sight-seeing tour of the city. We saw the bombed out royal palace, and walked around in the rubble. We drove up to the top of the hill that sits like an island in the middle of the city and looked around. It's a huge sprawling jumble of mud houses, colonial style palaces, and the ugly block apartments the Soviets left behind. The houses spread out and spill up the sides of the mountains around them, like milk poured into a cereal bowl. Up the hill we were on, two Kuchi women were tending their goats. Like true tourists we snapped some photos of everything and headed back down.
It was a good little reunion in Kabul. Mathias was there, on his way home from Herat. I hadn't seen him for three months, and it was good to catch up and hear about his time, and tell him about mine, and have him reassure me that I wasn't nuts, and it was really like that for everybody. We flew the same flight out of Kabul, and I got off in Istanbul.Istanbul looks like a dream. There are mosques and minarets everywhere. I walked down to the ocean (oh Lord! Thank you for the OCEAN!) and looked across the Golden Horn to the cupolas and towers rising out of the mist on the other side. It is like a vista from Star Wars, an alien city. While I was sitting there a guy named Imam, a traveller from Egypt came along with a plastic bag full of good Danish beer, offered me one, and then told me all about how the US of A meddles in everyone else's affairs. He was very friendly, and when he found I was from Canada, he told me about his aunt who lives in Toronto. I asked him what he thought about Istanbul. "This?" he asked disdainfully, waving his hand over the whole scene. "This is nothing to me... you must go to Egypt!"Still, when the little old lady came along with three pairs of binoculars hanging around her neck, a sweet smile and an upraised palm, he gave her some money so we could look across at the city. I left imam, and Istanbul that afternoon, bound for Hungary.
There is too much to tell about Budapest. JM and Abby are outstanding hosts, and wonderful cooks, and despite the fact that they have been working hard for YWAM here and were in the middle of wrapping and packing everything up to go back to Canada, they took the time to show Kate and I the city. We spent fantastic hours, sipping drinks in the city's million sidewalk cafes, debriefing everything we'd been doing, telling stories, pushing each other to better, and more wonderful, and more truthful and delightful things. Being with Kate made my soul leap and it hasn't come down yet. And the city is like everything you'd want out of an old European town: huge ornate churches and palaces and monuments, tree-lined streets, and cafes on every sidewalk. Wonderful.
rjs
posted by rjs | 4:11 PM
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