Snapshots
1) The Masjid-e Jami is often referred to in English language guides
as the "Friday Mosque." "Masjid" means mosque and, yes, the word for
"Friday" is "Jami" -- but Jami does not mean Friday, per se. It means
a group of people gathered together, most typically for prayer
("salat" in Arabic or "namaz" in Dari). In Dari, the days of the week
are numbered. "Yak, du, se" are the numbers 1, 2, 3 and Sunday is
"yakshanbe," Monday is "dushanbe," Tuesday is "seshanbe," etc. Friday
is the only day that breaks this "shanbe" (day) sequence and it is
because Friday is the Muslim holy day. The day of Jami -- people
gathering together in prayer. The Masjid-e Jami, then, is not the
"Friday Mosque" but the "Mosque of people gathering together." Take
note.
2) Everyone here spits. Correction, all males here spit. They spit on
the sidewalk when outside and out the car window when seated next to
the window. When they're inside, they still spit -- onto the floor of
the restaurant or the carpet of the hotel. When they're in a car and
not near the window, they spit on the floor of the car. Nobody bats an
eye.
3) The Mustafa is an incestuous little community. The twelve or so
people here keep active a large enough rumor mill to make you think
our numbers were tenfold. The macrocosmic Afghanistan problem of a
skewed sense of value plays out here in the hotel on a microcosmic
scale. Here, it's with women. Or should I say, "woman." There's only a
single Western woman here and since that makes her (ostensibly,
possibly) the only "available" woman around, her value has
artificially skyrocketed. A face in the crowd in her home country, the
focal point of a swirling maelstrom of attention and attempts to win
affection -- or just sex -- at the Mustafa. The topic -- "she!" --
dominates coffee table conversation here and that fact aggravates me
to no end. Where she'd previously tried to downplay all of this
nonsense, and recognized how artificial it was, she's now, two weeks
later, talking about making lists of her "top five" of the men around
here that she'd screw. The whole think reeks of 8th grade and is so
pitifully juvenile that when I look around at who is sitting at the
table buying into this -- a doctor, a satellite communications
engineer, a psychiatrist -- I want to cry or scream or collapse in on
myself and fall straight through the floor.
4) There're three places to get military rations -- MREs, or Meals
Ready to Eat -- here. The first two places are the bazaar near Bagram
Airbase and the bazaar near the Kabul Compound. Soldiers trade MREs
for cigarettes, I think, or give them to locals as gifts, and then the
locals sell them. The third place is a shop on Chicken Street. I'm not
sure where those MREs come from as they're not individual. You buy
them by the case (12 units) or by the pallette (a number of cases). It
seems there's a black market for MREs here, perhaps fed by
unscrupulous Westerners or locals doing transport and a few cases,
every few days, just "falling off the truck."
I've been eating them for a few days and while not "good," on an
objective scale, in terms of Kabul food they're fantastic, even
gourmet. At $5 to $10 for a case of 12, they're something of a bargain
as well. In the states, an individual meal at a military surplus store
runs you $10. Here, it's about 80 cents per meal. Each includes an
entree, a desert, crackers, peanut butter or cheese, a small (glass!)
bottle of Tobasco sauce, etc, as well as matches, chewing gum, toilet
paper, and instant coffee.
5) A few weeks prior to this trip, while walking alone at night in
Virginia, an ten-second image flashed into my mind. It was me,
kidnapped. The view is of a small, dimly lit room. Cracking plaster,
peeling paint. A blank wall partially covered with a haphazardly
strung homemade banner proclaiming the name of some jihadi group in
Arabic script. Hizb-e-Islami or Islmaic Jihad or al-Saraya Mujaheddin,
maybe. I'm kneeling on the floor in front of the wall. Clothes torn
and dirtied, head hanging limply, chin resting against my chest, eyes
fixed on the floor, perhaps, or closed. My body is broken and beaten,
my wrists tied together behind my back and my shoulders slumped
forward in a mixture of exhaustion and resignation.
In the moment that this image appears in my head, my dried, cracked
lips are scarcely moving, mumbling at barely above a whisper: "Every
finger in the room is pointing at me... I want to spit in their faces
but I'm afraid of what that might bring me. Got a bowling ball in my
stomach, got a desert in my mouth... figures that my courage would
choose to sell-out now..."
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