Memories of Afghanistan

 Written August 7, 2002

>
> I lived in Afghanistan as a young child.  My father worked at the US Embassy
> in Kabul.  My mother loved it there.  Most of her Afghan friends escaped
> years ago.   Before her stroke, my mom and step dad used to go to fund
> raising events for Afghan refugees.  What a terribly dirt poor country
> Afghanistan has always been.   We were in Kabul when they put in the first
> traffic light.  The Afghans would stand watching, and wave at the cars to
> stop or go when the light changed.    When our servant's wife had twin
> babies, my mother found a doctor and took him into the mountain village to
> help only to find that the babies had died.  My father bought bikes for our
> servants and taught them how to ride them.   I started school in there and
> was a Brownie there.   My mom was a Cub Scout Leader for my brother's troop
> there.   My sister was a teenager and I remember the dances at our house
> with her friends.   We went skiing in the winter.  We swam in the summer at
> the International Club.  My mom played tennis and went horse back riding
> there.    My dad took pictures of the turbaned barber who used to come to
> the embassy and cut the men's'  hair right there.   My dad took so many
> pictures.  I recall the scent of the beautiful bearded irises in our yard
> and the rose bushes.   We had a big weeping willow tree in our yard.   One
> Christmas a friend (who was an Afghan prince) brought us a big, freshly cut
> fir tree to use as our Christmas tree.  He had strapped it to the roof of
> his car and drove in the night with his headlights off so he wouldn't get in
> trouble.   I am not sure what the laws were then, or what trouble he risked.
>  He wa
> s a friend.
>
> When I hear the names Kabul, Quandahar, Peshawar (Pakistan), I cannot
> believe that I have been on that soil.  I remember going to the open air
> market with my dad and buying pomegranates and naan –the flat bread that is
> baked in dirt ovens, and I remember my first taste of honeydew melon.  For a
> long time after we returned from Kabul all of my drawings had the high
> Himalayan mountains in the background.   The country was stark, but the
> mountains, I can remember, large, and beautiful and they were everywhere
> around us.

My brother Dale in Afghan clothes

Me in an Afghan dress

My sister, Carol, was in the Girl Scouts in Kabul