Focusing the Blur

We started up the International School of Kabul on an impossible to fulfill timeline. In June, 2005 USAID awarded a grant to rent land for a top-notch International School in Kabul. Classes started that September. I was the first of the new “ISK” people to arrive in town – having come to work on language. Back then, the school building that has housed my classroom for the last four and a half years was a freshly dug pit into which the foundations were being laid. Back then, the street between our properties was a dump where what was not grazed by the passing sheep was burned.

So it started with a blur of activity. “Supervising” workers when I knew neither their language nor their job. Receiving new staff members. Unloading shipments. Language tutoring. Meeting Afghan friends. Finding a place to run and running there. Languange tutoring. Unloading shipments. Sipping chai. At the time, the opening of the school seemed like it would be the end of the blur; today it is remembered as the beginning.

Today, it seems as though Hamroz and I have been together forever. We have an uncanny way of knowing each other’s thoughts and emotions. What a blessing it is to know and be known in such a way. There was a time, back then in the blur, when we would not even be seen together.

Today, it is hard to imagine doing anything other than teaching 6th grade at the International School. The kids, as always, are not just learning to perform academically, but to think, to question, to reason. Younger siblings get confused with their brothers and sisters who passed through my classroom in years past. We are school family; there is that energy, that bond, that affection. Not truly Afghan, not truly American, we are a third culture familiar unto ourselves. Yet, there was a time when we were strangers feeling each other out.

Today, Hamroz and I have friends who visit. Our house is full of the clanking of dinner plates and coffee/tea mugs. People watching TV, talking and laughing around that little Persian table (it’s just big enough to get a knee under it), different groups in the guestroom and the living room. Back then, there were two groups of friends, “his and hers”, today our friends are “ours”.