January 20, 2009: 'The Day Barack Obama Takes His Responsibility'

January 20, 2009 It's 6:30 PM on Tuesday, January 20, 2009, and I am sitting in my room at the guest house in Kabul. I am about to get dressed to go to the Inaugural Ball at the US Embassy in Kabul. They will have a big screen TV where we will see the swearing-in of Barack Obama as President of the United States. I have been waiting for this day!I am profoundly moved by this day. I turned CNN on the minute I got home from work. Watching the sea of joyful faces on the Mall, talking to my son Alex as he made his way to the Mall with friends, Skyping with my daughter Louisa later, seeing Barack and Michelle Obama depart Blair House for the church service at St. John's Episcopal Church, I was flooded with tears of joy. I am thinking back to the faith and hard work it took to get to this day. I am filled with gratitude for all that so many did to make this day happen. I am happiest of all for Louisa and Alex. This is their history.This morning, I pinned my last Obama '08 button to my jacket as I headed for work. I told my Afghan driver, Qader, and my bodyguard, Massoud that today is a big day in America. They both smiled. Massoud said, "Obama takes his responsibility today, yes?" "Yes," I said, "today is the day. A big day for America." I took off my Obama button to show to them, and before I knew it, Qader had pinned it on his jacket and said, "Thank you. Now Obama will help Afghanistan." When he picked me up at the end of the work day, he pointed to the button and smiled. “Wear it well, Qader,” I thought. Today is a good day.

I have never been prouder of my country.

The Inaugural Ball at the US Embassy is formal, but the invitation issued a caveat: “Formal – but this is Kabul, do your best,” and so I did. I bought a beautiful lavender silk scarf and a bronze beaded shawl to wear to the party. I hope I pass muster!

It’s now 11:00 PM on Tuesday, January 20, and I am just back from the US Embassy. The party was very nice. Afghans and Americans stood side by side cheering for Obama. Women wore jeans and women wore Prom gowns. I staked out a front row spot in front of the big TV and stayed there through the whole ceremony. I was so happy. When the CNN banner on the bottom of the screen said that Obama was officially president at high noon even though he had not yet been sworn in, the entire crowd hollered. At 10:30, our driver and bodyguard came to pick up the 5 of us who went to the party. The bodyguard jumped out of the car and shook my hand. “Congratulations on President Barack Obama,” he said. I will never forget that moment.

Home Away From Home

January 8, 2009 Day Two of this extended holiday that frames my first week in Kabul! Afghans ordinarily work a six-day week with Friday as the weekend. This week, the powers-that-be declared that Wednesday and Thursday of this week would be work holdiays since Ashura, yesterday's Muslim holiday, fell on a Wednesday and Thursday is a half-day for Afghans anyway (but not for ex-pats!). So this is the second day of a three-day work holiday for me, and I have only been here one week! I am trying to hunker down in hopes of gaining some early mastery of my job, but I am tempted by the beautiful day outside and the views in every direction.

I am living in the elegant foreign workers' Guest House in the photo above while I work with USAID's Afghanistan Rule of Law Project. The house is spacious with three floors and a basement where we eat our meals. The second and third floors of the house are ringed with porches that offer dazzling views of TV Mountain in the near distance and the Hindu Kush in the background. My colleagues and my housemates are one in the same. We live together and work together. It's a nice group.

My office, pictured at right, was formerly a private residence. From what I am told, it is more typical of Afghan homes than our guest house as it (the office) has a spacious courtyard with space for a garden, whereas our Guest House occupies most of the lot it is perched on, with only a very small plot of grass for a yard.

I am the Performance Monitoring and Reporting Specialist for USAID's Afghanistan Rule of Law Project which brings together US lawyers, judges, law professors with their Afghan counterparts to rebuild and restore Afghanistan's Justice Sector. (Details can be found at http://afghanistan.usaid.gov/en/Activity.85.aspx.) I am responsible for preparing scheduled progress reports for USAID on the full scope of work accomplished weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Our office is in another neighborhood of Kabul. We are driven there and back every day. Most of the staff are Afghan locals and kinder, more professional colleagues one could not ask for.

Elementary Dari

Salaam aleikum!

My friend, Belquis, kindly provided me with a beginner's list of essential phrases in Dari so I can communicate with staff and new friends while I am in Kabul. I share it here, hoping this finds you all khoob!

Salaam aleikum Hi!
Lotfan Please
Tashakor Thank you
Chetor Asti? How are you?
Khoob Well/Good
Khoob Astum I am well
Motar Car/vehicle
Daftar Office
Naan Bread
Chai Tea
Chai-e-Sabz Green tea
Chai-e-Siah Black tea

Ashura

January 7, 2009 I am working from the guest house where I live in Kabul because our security advisor advised against going out on the streets.

Today is Ashura, a day of celebration and mourning marked by both Sunni and Shia Muslims. For Shia Muslims, Ashura is a major religious festival which commemorates the martyrdom at Karbala of Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Mohammad.

Ashura falls on the 10th of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar. It is marked by Shia and Sunni Muslims with a voluntary day of fasting which commemorates the day Noah left the Ark and the day that Moses was saved from the Egyptians by God. For Shia Muslims, Ashura is a solemn day spent mourning the martyrdom of Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, in 680 AD at Karbala in modern-day Iraq.

During Ashura, mourning rituals are observed and passion plays re-enact the martyrdom. Shia men and women dressed in black parade through the streets of Kabul slapping their chests and chanting. Some Shia men seek to emulate the suffering of Hussein by flagellating themselves with chains or cutting their foreheads until blood streams from their bodies.

Kabul, Afghanistan

January 6, 2009 In the four days since I arrived in Kabul, we've had snow and two earthquakes which woke me in the night. As my room swayed, I racked my brain to remember my Southern California childhood training. Duck and cover? No. That's in case of a nuclear bomb. Stand in a doorjamb? I think so. It didn't come to that, but it was a moment.

I feel safe. It is a new experience being accompanied everywhere by a bodyguard, but I don't go many places outside of home and work. I spent yesterday, my first day at work, at a conference of law students, law professors, lawyers, judges, government officials. All of the women wear their heads covered. Men wore Armani suits and shalwar kamiz, capes, and turbans.

Although I receive “danger pay” (term of art!) for this job, this is far from a hardship post in many respects. My meals are prepared and served to me by skilled cooks. Last night's menu: fried chicken, roast potatoes, corn, bread pudding. Hamburgers and french fries the night before. My laundry is done for me; yesterday, my old frayed flannel nightgown was returned to me IRONED! I

I cover my head when I go out. At first, it seemed novel, but after a few hours of fidgeting again and again to make my scarf stay on my head, it became a great nuisance. At the legal conference I attended at the Safi Landmark Hotel in Kabul on Saturday, January 3, I watched the few women – law students, lawyers, judges – all of them in scarves. Not one of them fussed with her scarf, and it seemed to me that every scarf stayed in place except mine.

The contrasts are enormous. Palatial homes surrounded by high walls, next door to mud homes, both on unpaved dirt streets. After yesterday’s snow, Kabul’s rutted streets were mired in mud. Our skilled drivers traverse those streets like bumper cars, twisting and turning, brushing past daring pedestrians, darting into oncoming traffic which seems to part on cue. At night, Kabul traffic is a game of Chicken, writ large.

Street sights clipping through Kabul in an armored car: butcher stalls with slabs of meat hanging in the air. Bakeries with huge loaves of Naan in the window. Produce stands with stunningly beautiful arrangements of fruits and vegetables, placed with the hand of an artist. Eggplants, okra, oranges, apples, cauliflower, pomegranates, tiny lemons, enormous Clementines, cabbage, lettuce, leeks, onions. Purple, green, red, yellow, orange. Gorgeous. Children sorting through curbside garbage in search of soda cans. Goats nibbling on what is left of the garbage. A local bus with fringed windows and “Elephant of the Road” painted in scrolling letters across the front and side.

I am happy to be here.

To the Hindu Kush

January 1, 2009 Sal-I-naw Mubarak! Happy new year! I arrived in Kabul yesterday and have barely begun to sort through impressions from the last three days traveling from DC to Dubai to Kabul. One could hardly find a greater contrast than one night in Dubai and the next day in Kabul.

Women in Dubai were chic and glamorous, even in their black chiffon hijabs which cover them from head to toe, but do not cover their faces. In Kabul, many women seen on the street are covered in heavy blue burkas with a narrow slit at the eyes; that slit is covered with a net grilling. Young women cover their heads with scarves, but often wear jeans, high heels, and nail polish.

I traveled here with my friend Belquis who was born in Kabul, moved to the US in 2001 with her parents and siblings, and now works in Kabul. We had great plans of celebrating New Year's Eve in Dubai but were told by our hotel that the Government of Dubai had canceled New Year's Eve celebrations because of the strife in Gaza. Our hotel offered several dinner packages in the various restaurants -- all too pricey, even the package that offered a meal and all the soft drinks you could consume in the restaurant and later in the bar until 3:00 AM for $300 US. We settled for room service Mezzeh and a bottle of Chilean wine.

I have only glimpsed Kabul so far on the ride to my guest house from the airport. Early images: military police with Ak-47s; roadside vendors everywhere; huge glitzy Las Vegasy buildings that serve as wedding halls (a big industry in Kabul); donkey carts vying with newish cars for one of three lanes on the highway from the airport.

The guest house I live in is 3 floors plus a basement where we eat meals. The view outside my window is of private residences, one of them enormous and pink. Our meals are prepared to American tastes by Afghan cooks. Last night's dinner was roast beef, mashed potatoes, and green beans. The house is built in an ornate Asian style with many flourishes and curlicues. A terrace on the third floor offers a beautiful view of the snow-capped mountains that surround Kabul and make it the dust bowl it is. I have a big TV in my room with cable and satellite access (yesterday, I watched Indian Idol!).We are driven everywhere in armored cars with armed bodyguards. The guest house is guarded 24/7. But I am not worried. I feel very safe. The Afghanistan Rule of Law Project where I am working has a finely-tuned security operation.

The work week in Kabul is 6 days, Saturday through Thursday. Today, Friday, is the weekend. I am eager to get out and see more of Kabul.

The Snake on the Porch and the Wind-Up Monkey

My grandfather was a self-taught naturalist. The family home where he and my grandmother lived and where my father and his brother were born and raised was the staging ground for his forays into the mountains. The den, Grandpa’s domain, was filled floor to ceiling with his hunting trophies: stuffed birds, ducks, snakes, bobcats, and civet cats, ranging from infancy to full-grown. There were nests with desiccated eggs, horseshoes, and snake skins. Coiled rattlesnakes frozen, ready to strike. Peacock feathers, fossils, bird’s eggs. A magnificent horned owl reigned over the den.

On the floor in front of the fireplace was a small rug made from a snarling bobcat. A coat rack fashioned out of the stuffed and mounted head of a deer with the deer’s four legs and hooves pointing upward hung on the wall. (This was the only item stolen in a home burglary years later.) In front of the fireplace stood a chiseled stone mortar and pestle, an Indian relic retrieved on an outing to the mountains.

Grandpa had time to attend to detail. Life had been kind to him in the form of his marriage to my grandmother. There was family money and the family home on 20 acres of land in Southern California. Every morning, Grandpa dressed in gabardine trousers, a tweed jacket, starched white shirt and necktie stuck through with a pin sporting a Boy Scouts of America insignia. He used a talc after-shave whose scent still fills the room he died in in 1962. He eased his hand-tooled leather boots onto his feet, tucked his cigarette holder and a fresh package of Herbert Tareyton cigarettes in the inside pocket of his jacket, arranged his Stetson hat on his sparse but freshly groomed hair, and drove downtown to make his daily rounds. He visited the Citrus Exchange, the local Boy Scouts chapter, and the Mupu Grill. At each stop, he lingered to chat and smoke. When my father’s 3rd grade teacher asked the children in her class to write a paragraph about what their fathers did, my father wrote simply: “My father walks around town in his boots.”

The big house had several porches, some enclosed and some open to the outdoors. The North Porch veranda faced Ojai and Topa Topa Mountain in the distance. It swung around to the right of the original front door which fell out of use with the demise of the horse and carriage. During the lifetimes of my grandparents, guests arrived by the kitchen door and exited around a circular gravel drive approaching the entrance to Ojai Road in front of the North Porch and out the front gate.

For all of my childhood, a caged rattlesnake stood sentry on the old North Porch, watching over what had been the front entrance where guests were received and oil company executives ushered into what was then the Stewart-Hardison Oil Company, later to become Union Oil Company.

Long before I was born, company began to be diverted to the side entrance on the south side of the house. This shift signals the decline in family fortunes when my great-grandfather left his wife and family for an actress in Los Angeles. One could chart a steady decline in the life of the old house from that point forward. So really by the time my grandfather found the fledgling snake on the edge of the orange orchard in 1923, the house was well into its downward spiral.

Grandpa spotted the newly hatched rattlesnake by chance one morning when he left the house to begin his daily rounds. At first, he thought it was a piece of wood come to rest on a big rock. Upon closer examination, he saw it stir. He returned to the house for a tin bucket and came back outside. The snake had not moved. He snapped a dry branch from a nearby lemon tree and used it to ease the snake off of the rock into the bucket. He secured the bucket with heavy screen and rope, leaving it in the care of Albert Osuna, the ranch manager, while he drove to town to purchase a large glass case with a latched lid to house the snake. When he returned, he asked Albert to construct a divider with a hinged door to place inside the glass case to section off about a quarter of the space. Albert was also to build a platform for the glass case to elevate it some three feet from the floor. Thus, in 1923, the rattlesnake came to be housed in the glass case on the North Porch of my grandparents’ home. It lived in that glass case for 30 years.

Every few months, Albert caught a mouse in the barn and put it in the smaller space. I can hear my brother Jim speeding around the gravel driveway from the barn, heading for the North Porch, breathless with the news my brother John and I had been waiting for. “Albert caught a mouse. Albert caught a mouse!” Dancing a little jig up the three steps to the North Porch, Jim delivered the promise of a Sunday evening’s entertainment.

Lined up in stairstep order, we watched as the snake caught the scent of the mouse and wriggled into the smaller space to fetch his meal. We stood spellbound as the snake worked its deadly constrictions on the helpless mouse. This was our Sunday entertainment in the 1950s.

Curious as to the longevity of rattlesnakes, my grandfather wrote to National Geographic in 1950 to inquire. National Geographic informed him that they knew of one rattlesnake that had lived 17 years. Ours was the longest living rattlesnake in captivity!

Not a Sunday supper passed that we did not beg for permission to visit the rattlesnake. “If you clean your plates,” was the predictable response. On a good Sunday, we got to visit the rattlesnake and watch the wind-up monkey.

The wind-up monkey was a cherished Victorian-era toy from my grandmother’s childhood, both macabre and mesmerizing. It sat on top of an armoire in the breakfast porch where we had Sunday supper. The wind-up monkey was a mother monkey the size of a smallish real-life monkey. Its skin was fashioned of real monkey skin. It sat on a chair holding a baby monkey in its arms. One of the mother monkey’s arms was uplifted, poised to feed her baby a bottle of milk which she held aloft in her paw.

If we behaved during dinner, Grandpa brought the monkey down off the armoire onto the table and wound it up. What came next can only be described as bizarre. The mother monkey’s head nodded back and forth as her teeth chattered. The baby monkey in her arms remained passive. The chop-chop, chop-chop sound of the teeth chattering echoed throughout the window-lined breakfast room. We were enchanted. Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, the snake and the monkey. It never got old.