Frida's Notebook

Escaping Manistan: it's all about the girls

Living in Ghor is true immersion in Manistan (which is a nickname for Afghanistan devised by Debbie Rodriguez - my one-time hairdresser, big-hearted woman and co-author of "Kabul Beauty School" with blogger Kristin Ohlson - get it, read it and remember that we can all make a difference). I live alone and work with an office entirely staffed by Afghan men.

This trip has been all about women - wonderful, wise, funny, kind, beautiful women.

I started this holiday with a truely magical long weekend of messy, thrilling, womanly goodness with three women who I have met through the extraordinary world of the blog. Together we four are drawn from the four points of the compass, together we bring the four elements, together we complement and balance each other perfectly. Susannah, Denise and Christine, my sisters from around the world.

Then, with their love tucked in my heart and their wind beneath my wings I headed up to Portland to see another soul sister, Mel. She also has a blog but I met her through my ex, and this trip was more than a little bit intense as I finally faced up to the tidal wave of emotion that was waiting just below the surface for me to deal with when I saw him. But she was there for me, a kindred spirit and a woman of immense kindess and quiet wisdom.

With Mel, I bounced about Portland and met up with blogger friends Laini, Alexandra and Jen. They are all just as I would have expected - funny, intelligent, warm and gorgeous.

In between lots of crying and lots of laughing Mel and I had a brilliant weekend. I - as has become my custom - brought the sun to the north west. We walked in the park, we strolled and window shopped, and we went to see a movie which caught me by total surprise and left me thinking long and hard about what it would mean for the treatment of 'mental illness' in my own country if we could tap into the power of a caring community more often. We had dinner with a woman who I know from Herat, whose emotional honesty helped me settle into my own convictions about our work and our lifestyle, and who made me laugh with the joy of life and friendship.

Now I am in New York. A city that I have always loved and this visit is no exception, I'm staying with a dear friend who although originally from Toronto was my first friend in Kabul. You may remember her as the extraordinary lawyer who came up to Ghor and Badghis with me to teach workshops for police and prosecutors on gender and criminal justice. She's now at Columbia and from her apartment window I'm looking out over Central Park. Today I had an emotional hangover so I went for a lovely long walk in the park, listening (again) to my Boho playlist and indulging romantic fantasie.

In this city live three other women with whom I worked in Afghanistan (a human rights lawyer, a refugee officer and an academic who was researching child protection and education), one amazing woman with whom I worked in Gaza (a child psychologist working for UNICEF whom I have not seen for six years) and - you guessed it - more bloggers!

Tomorrow I get to hang out with Susanna, whose blog has given me good reason to expect that she'll have a great eye for the quirky and the beautiful in this grand city. On Friday the extra-ordinary Jen Lemen is coming up from Maryland with her daughter to play for the day.

And there are more - there are those who I wanted so much to meet and couldn't (like Andrea, Emma and Kirsten) and more people to contact here in New York (like Mandi).

I'm on emotional, visual, gastronomical overload and as much as part of me wants to take time out to process it all, the rest of me is screaming "do it all, try it all, live it all, drink it all in". There will be plenty of time back in the mountains of Ghor to quietly reflect on it all. Time for my physical and psychological digestion to recover.

Colour and light in SoCal

This has been a big week in Southern California. Terrible fires have ravaged vast areas of forest and residences from Los Angeles to San Diego. In the midst of the flames I found safe havens, at the beautiful homes of two beautiful SoCal residents - Christine (in LA) and Denise (in San Diego). Joined by my all-time favorite English-woman, Susannah, we made our own kind of magic and I marvelled at how lucky I am to call these women my friends.

All sorts of amazing threads came together and exciting new beginnings emerged from this get together. Little bits and pieces of these may emerge here in days and weeks to come. I could certainly rave about these three women for days on end. Wise, beauty-full, funny, sexy Susannah. Brave, strong, sensuous, playful Denise. Intelligent, generous, inspiring, courageous Christine. Women of light and colour, women of soul. Truely, madly, deeply good women whom I am proud and privileged to call my friends.

One realisation that emerged for me this week was the importance of colour and light in my ongoing healing process. I felt this when I was playing in Swirly's studio, paint on my fingers, Deb Talan singing in the background and three wise and light-filled women by my side.

Here is how one messenger worded it for me this week:

"The sun is rising for you now, illuminating all the dark corners of your life and your consciousness. This is a time of rebirth, renewed life and renewed clarity and inspiration. Within the light of the sun every colour exists, ready to bring forth that colour into the world."

Long haul travel: the good, the bad and the ugly

About 30 hours ago I left the house in Kabul where I'd been staying since arriving in from Ghor last week. I was on my way to the airport, but I still didn't have my passport. I did however have an excellent plan. My passport had arrived the day before on a UN flight from Herat and was supposedly out at the UN terminal. So I was driving to the UN terminal, picking up my passport (maybe grabbing a cappuccino at the cafe there since there is no such thing at the main terminal in Kabul) and then heading over to Kabul International Airport to catch my Air India flight to Delhi.

I found my passport, and a few friends, at the UN terminal so I enjoyed not only an early morning coffee but also a hug and a chat with a good friend from Herat who was waiting to fly out to Dubai. Then I pulled on my hijab and headed over to the main airport. Outside the terminal were a couple of tables manned by Afghan soldiers who were manually searching all the bags.

I have a confession to make. For all my fearless adventuring all over the world I have a serious and longstanding problem with having my bags searched. It dates back to my years in the Gaza Strip and the incredibly politically and emotionally charged experience of crossing from the Palestinian Occupied Territories into Israel on a regular basis. During those years I had some particularly unpleasant experiences and to this day, when someone tells me that they are going to have to manually search my luggage I feel my whole body begin to tense.

In Kabul I made a great performance out of insisting that these men should not be inspecting my bags, and although the secuirty chief assured me that it was not haram (apparently police are considered maharam) I still made the men all look away when I removed my bras and underwear from the bag and would let them touch them. On one level I made light of it all - but just beneath the surface I know very well that panic is lurking.

The first major hurdle of my journey over I checked in and went upstairs to find that many of my Indian, Nepalese and Bhutanese colleagues from across the country were waiting to catch the same flight. Hindus are about to celebrate two of the major festivals of their calendar - culminating in Diwali. I love Diwali and enjoyed the festive atmosphere of travelling to Delhi with colleagues who were making their way home for the equivalent of the Christian Christmas.

In Delhi my journey went from good to truely amazing. I had booked myself in for a half-day treatment at an Ayuvedic spa and after a colleague dropped me off at the spa I found myself enveloped in an underground world of goodness. The design of the spa is exceptional. Water flows along the floor and you make your way from treatment room to treatment room by stepping from stone to stone scattered along this magical waterway. My treat started in teh meditation room where I sat in meditation for the first time in weeks. I was immediately reminded of why I had made meditation a part of my daily life for so long and committed myself to returning to this particular habit.

I continued on with a series of traditional ayuvedic treatments for balancing including "Shirodhara". This is a very special treatment in ayuvedic medicine and many more traditional ayuvedic centres will not allow clients to undertake the treatment unless as part of a longer retreat. The treatment involves having warm oil dripped onto your forehead for between 20-60 minutes, in my case for almost an hour and is supposed to pacify vata, calm and nourish the nervous system and open the vital energy channels in the head.

The experience I had later in the evening made me wonder whether the more traditional ayuvedic centres are right to insist that his treatment not be given to short-term clients and not without careful consultation. Perhaps the treatment had nothing to do with the emotional outpouring I was to experience at Delhi airport a few hours later, but I can't help at least wondering about the association.

After finishing up the treatments with a full body salt scrub and vichy shower to wash away to filth of Kabul, I headed back to Delhi International Airport. At this point my journey was about to go a bit haywire. As soon as the American Airline security staff saw my Afghan visa they took me aside and told me they would have to put me through a full manual search. Initially I thought I was going to be fine. But as the search continued I felt a kind of rising panic. This was incredibly unsettling, not least because the last time I had really felt this kind of "out-of-control" was last winter during the dark and chaotic days of the PTSD.

Before I could stop myself I was in tears, apologising to the woman searching my bag and acting like someone with an obsessive compulsive disorder, insisting on refolding each garment after she folded it and removing everything she packed into my case to repack it. I even unrolled the yoga mat she had just finished carefully rolling and re-rolled it. She was incredibly understanding but I felt like a total mess. As soon as the whole ordeal was over I bought two large bottles of water, gulped them down, took one of the "sleep aid" pills I had been given by the local phamasist in Ghor and found a quiet place to sit and listen to my Boho-girl playlist.

By the time the flight was boarding I was feeling quite calm. We all had to stop on the way onto the plane and have our handbags manually searched as well. Initially I thought this was no big deal at all, and then I suddely found myself saying to the security officer as she repacked my bag - "just let me touch that as you put it in". What? Just let me touch that? What the hell is happening here? I suddenly found my self on the verge of tears again and asked if I could be allowed to just sit in a quiet spot and breath quietly for a while. Five minutes of yoga breathing and I was ready again to board - but thinking to myself - "girl, you need to see a shrink about this!".

So it seems the fearless world traveller has developed a strange phobia about security searches. It has nothing to do with being caught out with illicit goods, and everything to do with control. So much for learning to let go.

Well - my flight to Los Angeles is boarding (I'm writing this from Chicago Airport) and in just over three hours I'll be meeting Christine for the beginning of an amazing weekend with Christine, Denise and Susannah - three women who i am fairly confident can handle (and cuddle) me whether I'm turning out to be crazier than I thought or not. All will be well. Much, much better than well. All will be amazing girly goodness for the next few weeks. Security search phobias can wait...

A time for talking

I've been in Kabul for almost a week and I have talked so much I think that a little part of me (the little part that had grown quite accustomed to my hermit's life in Ghor) is in shock. But other parts of me feel vibrantly alive in a way I haven't for weeks.

That seems to me to be part of the beautiful paradox and the delicate balance of life. A life of solitude brings parts of us to life. In me, solitude generates a particular creativity and thoughfulness which is essential to rich inner life. On the other hand the company of fascinating, loving, funny people also feeds my inner as well as my outer life.

This week I have shared a beer with a 59 year old geologist from New Zealand and his wife, a gorgeous woman whose warm enthusiasm for life (even life in Kabul) made me feel as though she was an old and treasured friend within an hour of meeting her.

This week I have eaten dinner with my dearest Afghan friend, a fearless feminist and human rights activist who was the reason I came to Afghanistan in the first place. Despite my absence from their home of more than four months, her 18 month old daughter seemed to recognise me and as well as playing tickle with me for most of the night she repeated my name over and over again in a delighted giggle of recognition.

This week I have sat in the sun with a soul friend who has seen me through some of the darkest day of my dark winter, and with whom I practiced yoga in a tiny room in Herat as the sun came out both literally and figuratively last summer. We turned over the material of our lives right now, the parallels and the convergances, we acknowledged how much we miss each other and we allowed each other to talk through each current question to its limits.

This week I laughed through a dinner with an Australian hardcase who grew up on a coffee plantation in Papua New Guinea and although as tough as nuts on the outside was the first person to offer me a fluffy soft towel and an extra blanket in the spare room when I arrived in Kabul dirty and looking for a room.

This week I caught up, over a glass of wine, with a woman born to American parents in Afghanistan 30 years ago. The daughter of an eye-doctor who grew up through the horrors of the civil war here and whose house was my home my first summer in Kabul. As happens every time I meet her, she revealed to me again another layer of her rich character, this time her genuine compassion for an injured cat.

This week I met a fascinating carpet dealer, a carpet guru, a man who appreciates beauty and history and who is helping people like me to understand more of the beauty of Afghanistan's cultural history - and then helping us claim a little bit to take home with us. A gentle, sophisticated, intelligent man who was infinitely patient with my desire to look at and stroke his most expensive carpets (way out of my price range).

This week I have had very little time to write in my journal, or to even sit back quietly and reflect on all these amazing people and the interesting and stimulating conversations I've had with them. But I see that these moments are to be lived to the full, the energy is to be soaked up and stored up.

There will be quiet times of solitude in the future during which the fruits of these encounters will bubble their way back up to teh surface, feeding my creative imagination in the quiets evenings in Ghor.

Surviving life in the "deep field": No thanks to HQ

On Friday night I was in Kabul, enjoying a radical change of scene from Ghor. We had a dinner party to celebrate the upcoming almost-nuptuals of a colleague (she and her partner are travelling to NZ to register their partnership as a civil union - I had a tiny little bit to do with the policy process behind the Civil Union Act, so I felt very happy to see it being put to good use).

At this dinner party I sat next to a new friend, and Australian who grew up in Papua New Guinea, where I also spent a few years as a child. He is a straight-talking guy who I always feel I can take entirely at face value. He decided to tell me that he had heard rumours coming out of my organisation that my employers and colleagues were concerned about my mental health up in Ghor after receiving (and I'm quoting here) "erratic emails" from me.

As he told me this I felt an immediate emotional reaction. A wave of righteously indignant anger rose up from my stomach. Angry Frida was yelling in my head "how dare they!", "you must fight back", "your professional reputation is at stake".

I thought immediately of a friend and colleague who had likewise been posted to one of the very remote provincial offices for the last six months of his time in Afghanistan. Everytime I came into Kabul people in HQ would take me aside and ask me how he was doing. His emails, they would whisper conspiratorially, are a bit odd. I told them then what I think I may have to tell them now -

"If you send someone to live and work alone in a remote office under difficult conditions and then get an 'odd' email from them, get on the fricken phone and call them to see if they are alright. DO NOT simply start gossiping about them."

I am very honest in my emails, even with work colleagues. Last week I had three really bad days. Two days when I literally could not face getting out of bed. Instead of lying to my HQ boss I told him in an email. Listen - I said - the weekly report will not be ready on time because I am having a moment of being completely overwhelmed and I think I may just go back to bed and cry.

I know that this kind of honesty is very rare in this business, and that keeping up the appearance of "toughness" is highly valued. But that is not my style. I'm not tough, I do get knocked over. But I am very resilient and I will get up again.

So - here is what I plan to say to my colleagues/employers when I get into the Kabul office on Tuesday.

"If you get an email from me saying that I'm about to spend a day in bed then do feel free to give me a call and see if I think I'll be in bed for just the one day or whether this is a more serious/long term condition. But do not leave me up there with no communication from you (and no fricken care packages despite your repeated promises to send them) and spend your Friday morning sitting in a cafe in Kabul gossiping about whether or not I'm losing it."

Does that seem fair to you? I think that angry Frida has receeded sufficiently to allow rational Frida to get the better of the drafting here, but now that I know my mental health is under the microscope I'm a little more concerned about not letting my emotional response get the better of me.

Getting out of the "deep field" Part II

On Sunday I got two pieces of news that made me sit up and pay attention. The first news was that the airstrip in Ghor was closing on Wednesday for repairs and the second news was that my Afghan visa had expired and I would not be let out of the country until it was renewed.

So I jumped on the first flight out of Ghor (a week ahead of plan) and spent a day in Herat transfering money from my Afghan to my NZ bank account and trying to charm the consulate staff at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs into overlooking my lapsed visa and renewing it. An Afghan friend with extraordinary diplomatic skills and a great network helped out and they promised to issue it by next Tuesday.

Then it emerged that I would need a transit visa for India or be forced to sleep overnight in the terminal, but I could only get that visa in Kabul. So I left my UN passport in Herat, jumped on the first plane to Kabul (via Mazar) and took my NZ passport to the Indian embassy on Thursday morning - to be told initially that they require three working days to issue a visa and because of the Eid holidays my passport would not be ready until next Thursday (when I am due to fly). But again something worked in my favour: charm, smiles, the end of Ramadan approaching; I don't know what did it but be 4.30pm I walked away from the Embassy with my passport and new visa in hand.

I think this trip is charmed - every step of the way little unexpected challenges have popped up and against all odds and in direct contradiction to the predictions of seasoned hands - solutions have appeared, in time.

It looks like I won't be needing a donkey this time.

PS: Go visit Laini's blog where she makes me feel like a superstar by posting about my love affair with Magpie, the lead character in Laini's "Faries of Dreamdark" series.

My legs still work

There are two NGOs (non-governmental organisations, or not-for-profits) in town with international staff who, although not based here full-time, make regular and extended visits. This week I arrived back from Lal to find my mates in town until next Tuesday.

When the boys are here I can do all sorts of things that I am not allowed or not able to do alone: go for walks, explore the river, host (small but perfectly formed) social functions at my place. All in all the pace of life changes and I get out and about a lot more.

Last night they came for an after dinner beer and a long talk about Buddhism, suffering, the Boxing day tsunami, meditation, physics (string theory even, I was not altogether coherent on this topic, but nonetheless spoke passionately about the vibrating, dancing strings). Today we sat by the river watching the water go by for an hour or so and then walked out of town up into the hills until we could see the sun was going to set on us.

Can you see Cheghcharan away off in the distance? Today I discovered that after months of being fairly confined to the compound my legs do still work (which is good news for my plans to walk with Swirly!). Breathing in the fresh air, striding out towards the distant mountains, cooking up schemes to walk all the way to the summit one weekend, exclaiming at the hardy little flowers, wondering what the names of the local birds might be - all in all an afternoon very well spent. See how Frida is smiling?

PS: I'm posting all my best photos over at my new photoblog and they are feeling a little lonely over there. I'd love your feedback. I'm building courage to do something more with these images and I'm really interested in which of them you find you respond to most, and maybe even why?

Frida did good!

So - if you've been reading for a while you'll know that I settled into Ghor full-time three months ago, and that one of the first issues I started working on was the camp of Internally Displaced People living on the outskirts of Cheghcharan. At first things moved fast, with indications that these IDP families would be returned to their homes before winter. But that all come to a grinding halt when the Supreme Court decided to refer their case (regarding ownership of the land they were displaced from) back to the provincial level court to be retried.

So this past week I've been encouraging the Government to find the families housing for the winter. It has been getting cold fast in Ghor and the tents were clearly no longer adequate.

Today I visited 19 of the 27 families in the houses they moved into this morning. The baby girl in this photo is three months old, she was born just as I arrived in Ghor and I was so happy to visit her and her mother today and see them settled into a decent house for the winter.

I certainly didn't make this happen by myself, but I have been very persistent in following up the issues affecting these families and they obviously think that it has made a big difference. The smiles I saw on the faces of mothers in every house today made up for my really, truely horrible weekend (we had rockets landing next to our compound through the night on Friday and I was alone, not my idea of a good time at all).

Eid is coming up in just over a week, and this is the time of year for making an extra effort to help those who need a bit more help. I think the spirit of Ramazan helped get the assistance these families needed and all in all it was a day that made me smile.

Now - I'm signing off in order to welcome some Thursday evening visitors! Two of the regular visitors to Ghor are about to arrive for a quiet drink. Lovely.