This is a beginning from the middle. With all good intentions, I had planned this to be a travel diary, or at least a teenager's journal of random notes, fears and aspirations. Instead, I've been in Kabul a full week already without a single word posted. So, let's start from the middle...
From the "hooch" - which everyone except me knew was the basic lodging offered to Embassy staff. When I'm polite, I tell my family it's a trailer - and it is, in a way, with what I imagine to be all the comforts of a modest mobile home: bed, dresser, desk, sink, toilet, shower, microwave plus a big flat screen TV, all provided by the Embassy. And really, it's fairly comfortable if small. The hot water works 24/7, the toilet flushes, there are thirty or more stations of cable television.
The truth is, though, that the hooch is not a trailer. It won't trail anything; it never had wheels; it will never know the joys of the open road. It is not an RV just waiting to set out for the back woods of Afghanistan.
The truth is, the hooch is a container, fixed up and reconstituted for human life. It is utilitarian, without any hope of having an emotional connection with its occupant. It exists in vast organized rows, never to be alone. It is meant to be temporary (and indeed, a couple of dozen of them disappeared from their site the other day). The hooch is the empty shell on the beach, occupied by the hermit crab but eventually abandoned.
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