Thursday October 13
Today is Leeza's sixth birthday. I was here for last year's celebration so now I feel almost like one of the family. Almost. Just when I start to feel this - and it's a remarkable family that can do it, since I'm the kind of person who cringes at words like "settle down" - something brings me up short.
It can be as simple as exercise. It's only here that I realize how deeply involved we Americans are with sports and physical activity. Admittedly even at home I'm an outlier, since I exercise and take a 4-8 mile bike ride every day and pursue tennis and golf fanatically. But I was still brought up short Tuesday when after recruiting Leeza and Fayaz for a late afternoon walk around the neighborhood, Marya suggested taking the car. Even though the streets were full of debris, I badly needed the exercise. Then yesterday Tawfiq promised that we would all go to a park to walk, and the park turned out to be the garden of a wedding salon. Nice, and big, but about as close to nature as the modish Afghan bride's polyester dress. At night we watched a program on MBC called "Joe Somebody" (new to me, since I don't watch TV) and the plot hinged on the middle-aged cubicle drone's re-awakening to his sense of pride and manhood through working out and training to fight a bullying co-worker. I could tell that the family found the concept incomprehensible.
Despite the press about Afghan fierceness, Afghans seem to consider sports a specialized activity. Maybe one of the First World -Third World differences is this: We in the developed countries have a much broader repertoire of what we consider common knowledge. An American is generally able to change a tire, swim, ride a bike, do simple home repairs, defend himself in a fight, often shoot, sail, ride a horse. Most Afghans can do few of the above. No one in this family knows how to swim, and when I asked the men if they had fought the Taliban in '97 they said, bewildered, "But our profession is not soldier!" It never occurred to them that every able-bodied man might be expected to defend his country.
The lack of physical activity is ultimately what makes me unable to live here. I can deal with the horrible heat and the damned headscarf and bulky clothing better than with the fact that the Afghan ideal is lolling around. When we went to the wedding park, I insisted on walking around the perimeter a few times, and Leeza and Fayaz came along, but everyone else sat at a picnic table, which was exactly what they'd be doing at home.
I try to turn this sitting to useful account with the kids, doing English lessons or simple Farsi writing lessons (I read and write better than I speak, unfortunately). Leeza and Fayaz don't seem to play in the way of American kids, running around or devising games of their own. Left to their own devices, they watch TV or, in the case of Fayaz, work on their school homework. He's the top boy in his class, which is no surprise. All these kids are very bright, speaking at one or earlier. I'd swear that Asila is about to come out with her first words. At a year and 7 months, Parisa babbles in full sentences. In the U.S., Fayaz, who's gifted in math and mechanical things, would probably be designing his own website and science experiments. But there are none of those cultural expectations here.
This makes the kids delightfully relaxed and innocent, so it's a hard one to call. Would Leeza still be as sweet and appealing if she were being shuttled between ballet lessons, French class, soccer practice and who knows what else, like any upper-middle-class New York 6-year-old?
