20 July 2011

A Day in the Life

I spent a majority of the day walking to Julia (my interpreter) about what life is like for her in Afghanistan. It was a relatively quiet day at work, and we were inspired by the sunshine. It was the perfect coffee shop conversation, but without coffee (caffeine and Islam are not compatible) and while on the move. So basically it was nothing like sitting in a coffee shop, but I digress...(wishful thinking...)

Let's start here:  Julia will soon turn 22 years old. She has a five year old daughter, and a husband who left her when her daughter was one year old. The marriage was arranged (it was not, as she she refers to my own marriage, a "love marriage") and would probably qualify in the minds of most Americans as at least unhappy (if not more). Since her husband left her, she has lived together with her two parents, her daughter, her sister and her sister's family in a four bedroom "house" in Kabul City.

As an interpreter for the American Forces, I have to believe Julia is paid substantially more than she could make elsewhere, and rightfully so considering how much we value her skills and the potential dangers of her job. She earns $565 a month (paid in American dollars, when the bank processes the payment correctly, which they often do not) and is paid one time per month. That's about 22,000 Afghani (the local currency). Julia, at age 21 and as an Afghan woman, is solely responsible for paying the rent for the family of about eight who live in the house. The monthly rent is $300 (13,000 Afghani), or more than half of her monthly income.

I am having a terrible time figuring out the worth of the Afghani. Downtown I can buy two loaves of bread for 20 Afghani and a quart of yogurt for 55 Afghani (about $1.40)...and though I was with an interpreter, those may be American prices. So sadly, Afghani is "play money" for me - I give them money, they give me change, and I find assessing value to be impossible thus far...but if you saw the condition of the living arrangements here, I'm fairly certain you'd agree that $300 a month is a complete swindle.

Whether Julia is appropriately compensated (or being ripped off by a corrupt landlord) is almost irrelevant to her, which I find astonishing. In the face of all of the monumental challenges she has faced in her 21 years in Afghanistan, she is inspired to create what she thinks will be a better life for her daughter. She works for me from about 9am until around 2pm, goes home to see her daughter, then goes to cosmetology school in the evenings. She glows. Literally. The weight of her entire family sits on her shoulders all day, and she doesn't once complain. Instead she tells me how thankful she is to have a good job (and that she gets to work for a woman!)

And I think that's the best lesson Afghanistan has taught me thus far...sometimes less is more. Julia is very well grounded - her faith and her family absolutely come before anything else. Her life, in comparison to mine, seems much more simple and certainly not as defined by material things. Though the American in me will probably never mirror her values, listening to her stories (and spending six months in a strange land with a lot of spare time on my hands) does encourage me to reconsider what is really important.

And the lesson is best taught by Robert Frost, in the last few lines of "The Road Less Taken:"

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

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