Today, while we were petting the camp kitten at lunch and after work, a young boy blew himself up in Kabul, killing at least five other people, some of them children, and injuring four more.

We were playing with a little kitten, and some young teenager took his own life and those of some children who were hanging around Embassy Row waiting to sell trinkets to passing soldiers or tourists. The absolute absurdity of the situation flabbergasts me. In the midst of the desert, we, the spandex soldiers, the Afghan soldiers and police, the workers, all of us, watch out for this little kitten’s very life. When the other feral camp cats come after her, Julie hollers at them to leave her alone. The cooks let us take food to her, when really, the rules say that we can’t take food or anything else out of the (you remember?) DFAC. She cavorts in all our offices, which, by the way, are really lovely rooms in connexes (connexi?), which are simply little trailers that don’t look like trailers because they sit on top of each other. She plays with computer cords and “Oriental” carpet fringe, and jumps on the desks, sniffing out all the nooks and crannies and possible play places. When she is tired, she jumps on Julie’s lap and snuggles up to her and takes a nap. This little kitten, whose markings are part tiger, part jaguar, is a diversion from the arid brown dust and the latent danger that surround us. She is loving and kind, odd for a cat, and we respond because that is what we want from our lives – a connection with feelings, warm and responsive and affectionate.

And a young boy blew himself up while we played.

I try to understand the mentality that goes along with such fanaticism, but I cannot. I cannot figure out at what point the hatred of something intangible becomes so powerful that it convinces people to give up their lives for it. I have a hard time believing that the impetus for all this hatred, this violence, is religious faith, but I know that must be a large part of it. And because I don’t hate those who believe differently from the way I believe, I don’t understand why they hate me because of my belief system.

In Washington, one of our classmates was Muslim. He made it clear that he is not one of the people who believes that we with different faiths cannot co-exist in our world. In fact, he accepts that all of us with faith believe in God, though we have different names for that being, and that we are all supposed to obey the Golden Rule – you remember: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Some of his beliefs are outside my understanding, but so is speaking in tongues – and I know plenty of people who believe in and practice that. After all, I grew up pretty close to Arkansas.

So at the end of the day, and I mean that to be literal and not vernacular, I am safe in a connex room, waiting to play again tomorrow with the kitten, and five or six people are dead in Kabul, far from where I used to be, because someone was able to convince an impressionable teenager that he should give his life for hatred. I wish that he had had a kitten to play with.

I wonder if this kind of thing will ever end.