Almost TIme

On my next to last day in Herat, I worked like a crazy person editing a very long newsletter. It was interesting to read, but I couldn’t take my time as I would have liked to, because I had a deadline. Esman and Hasat will not be back until Monday, so I can get used to the idea of their not being around. I am still sad, but I think I am over the worst of it. Until I leave!

The hardest thing to do about packing a life is to put the life in a suitcase after using it – for instance, what am I going to do with my wet towel on Monday morning? It’s time to wash my sheets, so I think I will have to get the sheets to the laundry first thing on Monday morning so they will be clean and ready to go when I am. Then I can just shove them in my suitcase, and my bed in my new room will feel comforting.

I am leaving some Hershey’s Kisses here. Esman and Hasat had never seen them, and so I will give some to each of our staff to remember me – it will be their first kiss!!!

I didn’t go to sleep easily last night, so I am going to hit the hay early and try to make up for lost time. Worse, when I turned on my alarm, I didn’t turn it on all the way, and so it didn’t go off. How I woke up at 7, I will never know.

The moon is almost full and the camp looks almost peaceful in the evenings. Because all our Afghan staff is on holy day holiday, the camp sounds quiet, almost peaceful, during the day. The quiet is broken, however, by the sound of a ping-pong ball hitting the table again and again, back and forth, back and forth, because some soldiers don’t have much to do at that particular time. The cat, meowing softly and looking for a luckless bird, wanders back and forth on its little cat feet (Thank you, Carl Sandburg) across the “piazza” where the pizza oven stands, now unused. A lone soldier sits on a bench outside and murmurs on his cell phone, probably to someone back home. A Gurkha guards the rose garden, aided by a down jacket hanging from a tree and flapping in the wind, like some weird-looking scarecrow. On Monday, though, things will be back to normal and bustling – at least until some date between now and the end of 2014, when this camp will probably be silent. And maybe peaceful.