Who’s Behind those Salad Plates?

This is the lunar month of Ramadan, a time of spiritual renewal marked by fasting and other forms of self-control for Muslims around the world. This year it coincides with a female Afghan friend’s last minute preparations for higher education outside of Afghanistan. She has worked toward and waited for this for years. She’ll be studying close to the equator in a city hotter than Kabul, but also one where she will be freer.

A bit of her new freedom of expression takes the form of celebrity style sunglasses. How glamorous she looks, I think. But in Kabul walking with a female friend, she’s gets stares, car honks, and then a man following them. Afghan men wear these things, but they tease the women who do so. “She’s wearing plates of salad on her face’, is one taunt.

More seriously, she is accused of canceling their fasting. Because the woman has aroused inappropriate feelings in the man, she is in the wrong. And the man says this looking directly at her rather than with gaze down as is dictated by custom.

My friend’s companion said, “The glasses are great, but I don’t want to lose you. Please take them off.” So they are packed up with all her belongings for her new life as a full-time student taking her place in the university’s program for leadership training. Watch out world.

Chubby is good

Imagine living in a beautiful place where it’s good to be chubby. People admire the very chubbiness  you’d love to loose. In fact, maybe you joined the Peace Corps to slim down.

I arrived at this real place in the late 60’s as a young single woman, where  extra pounds on cheeks, hips, thighs were a sign of good health. Such a woman likely would bear her husband lots of children, have the strength to raise them properly, maintain house and compound, make her own clothes, do laundry at the stream, cook at open fires, and tend the elderly and the sick in the extended family without dying early leaving her poor husband to fend for himself until he could afford to re-marry.

Also the female dress code prescribed loose pants to the ankle secured at the waist with elastic. A billowy dress that came below the knees completed the outfit. Why worry about extra weight in a world without spandex?

So, I ate a lot. My job took me out for a few days to a few weeks at a time to rural Afghanistan to vaccinate against smallpox. With a team of one to four Afghan vaccinators, I’d stay with village leaders or landowners who had a guest “house.” Their wives prepared meals for us.

These home-cooked meals – pilaus and soups, fresh cucumbers and yogurt, whole wheat flat bread, spinach and onions –  were the best to be had in that part of the world. Also, after working outside and walking a good deal of the day, I had a fine appetite by nightfall. Since the arrival of our team, sent by the Ministry of Health in Kabul, often took the host by surprise, a long wait, further whetted my appetite.. It took hours to slaughter and dress chickens, to prepare rice and vegetable, if such could be located, to bake the extra bread, etc. over small dung fires.

When the steaming platters of food did arrive in the hands of the boy servers, I was encouraged by the men around me, locals and teammates, to eat a lot. The rice was oily from the fat-tailed sheep, the chicken free-range and fresh, the bread still warm from the clay oven. Without a worry in my head about taking bread from the mouths of babes or, more likely, from the women who’d prepared this elaborate meal, I’d stuff myself.

It wasn’t until late in my time in Afghanistan, when Ramadan came around a second time, that a little window opened up for me. For me, Ramadan was a time of fasting from dawn to dusk and feasting on the single meal of the day at night. I was visiting the family of a counterpart in a village outside of Jalalabad. A Peace Corps friend and I had been pampered all day by his mother and sisters. They had painstakingly hennaed our hands and presented us each with a huge woolen shawl embroidered by them. At the meal we sat with our male counterpart friend and dug into a lovely Qabali pilau. By this time in our experience, we didn’t need the urging of host and counterparts to partake of the fine meal heartily. Mouthful after mouthful of the succulent meat and rice disappeared  and between them we’d rave to our host friend of the fine taste.

He was a tall Afghan without an extra ounce of weight, the kind of person who could easily be rendered undernourished from a few days of high fever or an infection. He sat back after a few minutes and watched us eat. We were high on good food and a rare sense of belonging. He perhaps couldn’t resist a chance to clarify something for us about Afghan hospitality. When the two of us finally sat back on our healthy backsides sated, he said in a serious voice, “I’m so glad you two are not horses in my stable.”

There was silence as we took that in, and then he smiled. All that urging of the guest to eat and eat and eat. The Afghan hospitality we’d bathed in those evenings in the villages had a price tag we were asked to overlook. Appreciating their culture and homeland, answering their questions about my life in their tongue, and doing some vaccinating might have made it worth it to the Afghans. But still, I didn’t appreciate the sacrifice until that night.

I didn’t gain weight in Afghanistan, but I didn’t lose any either. The sharing of humor, tradition, and all those delicious home-cooked meals, that was my great gain.