Rant

I'm heat exhausted and the hell in.
Cultural sensitivity is so much easier when 'just visiting' or when feeling less put upon.
I think the reason for this not so sudden desire to burn everything and everyone I see to the ground is that freedom in the form of leave is a mere 2 weeks (!) away. So close and yet so far.

My protege M has arrived from Faizabad (wrote about her previously in Protege Power, July5th). She has never in her 22 years left her hometown. I've arranged for her to come to this office in Taloqan, meet the staff and practice the new skills I've passed on to her. Then she's off to Kabul for a week long course. I'm almost more excited than she is.
That's well and good.
But the bloody culture (GRRRRRRR) insists that she 'see' her country, for the first time I might add, through the most diabolical contraption ever devised by man. Man being the operative word. I bought one of these charming blue burqa to see just how bad it could be. It's bad. Really bad. The tiny mesh window allows for zero peripheral vision which means I've witnessed several women almost run over by cars, as well as stumbling across the diabolical roads into the endless array of potholes and their disgusting contents. If you move your head from side to side everything fragments and the dizziness is awful. If you hold your head very still its fly vision, only not cool.
Oh and they're made of nylon, so no good in winter or summer.
Of course the women here have had a lot of practice getting used to their prisons.
Still, it makes me SICK every day to see them like this.

M will be staying with one of the women who works for us. I escorted her there, because I wanted to see this woman's new baby. Everyone here thinks I'm totally bizarre for being so interested in children and yet being childless.
Children are sort of like ants. An unavoidable nuisance. Everyone wants them, especially the boys of course, but no one really wants to pay them any attention. As a result kids run wild in the open sewers and many many many die before they reach 5. I have not once seen adult supervision of any kind.
So the newborn was laid out in the concrete passageway howling at the fly net. I made a bee-line for the little soul. While the 3 women who are obviously taking care of him, as I saw them wash his bottom later (pictured above), watched me with great perplexion as I cooed and held his little hand.
A good friend of mine here is a Dutch midwife who has the most wonderful training program for local midwives. She says that of every country she's ever worked in (and that's a lot) she has never seen such a lack of emotion in the birthing room. She says the new mothers scarcely look at their offspring let alone express any desire to hold them. They also labour without making so much as a peep! She says every birth here, and there have been many, has left her depressed.
What is up with that?
Is it unclean perhaps, because it's related to the sex act? Or what?
Is it something their husbands have 'forced' on them like so much other suffering?
Men have spoken quite openly about how their wives tried to rid themselves of unwanted pregnancies by jumping off of high walls, drinking weird potions and other horror stories.
Anyway, I'm sad and frustrated.