qatra qatra darya mesha*

my days in kabul slip through my fingers, and while i realize i should cup my hands to catch at least a few memories, it sometimes feels like i am standing under a waterfall, and there is no way to control or capture the flood of experience and emotion.

but here is a small attempt, a few glimpses:

walking outside on a fine day during our lunch hour, V. exclaims, "aftau mazadar as!" (the sun is delicious) but then tells me the not so sweet story of her life. of her father who was murdered by his business partner when she was 4. of her mother, a school teacher, refusing to give up her children to her dead husband's uneducated family. of her two aunts who died in childbirth, inspiring her by age 9 to become a midwife...

thursday evening sauna with the finnish women, their blond children sitting in tubs of warm water on the floor by the bukhari. we sweat out the week. pipes in the shower room so full of steam we're afraid they'll burst. "we didn't have electricity for most of the afternoon, and maybe the chaokidar didn't pump the water so there's none in the tank," someone suggests. the water eventually comes streaming, steaming out. E. asks me to scrub her back, and then she scrubs mine in return, so hard i think i must have all new skin showing by the end. i feel gloriously tingly and clean...

a bit macabre: driving to work we pass a sheep being butchered by the side of the road. while a sheep tied up at the next shop over looks on...

quite sisyphean: city workers sweep the dirt off of the streets. but in a city of rubble and dust, the streets themselves are mostly dirt...

in the F.s' compound after friday fellowship this morning, the kids are waiting outside to pelt me with snowballs. again. "what are you going to do when all the snow melts?" i ask. "next week we're going to throw mud at you," the little one replies. good thing i'll be barcelona.

*many drops make a river