I was walking over to our residence for lunch when all the windows in the building shook, and when I heard the blast I knew instantly what it was—bomb.
The sound was in the distance, but the windows rattled a lot, so I assumed that meant that it was a bad news-good news story. Bad news: big bomb. Good news: Far away.
Most of the folks here came out of the building and went up to the roof to have a look, and I went along. In the distance, we saw a plumb of smoke a couple of miles away, and heard sirens responding. Our Afghan building maintenance guy said it looked to him like it was out by the airport road, which later proved to be right. On several surrounding buildings other foreigners were also climbing up on their roofs to take a look, but after a few minutes everyone had a ‘nothing to see here folks, let’s move along’ moment and disappeared.
The Afghans I work with were mostly curious, but with a sense of routine. No one was upset, and there was no frantic phone calls to loved ones, checking in to see if they were ok. It was business as usual. Same goes for the woman I work with from Texas, who spent a couple of years in Iraq and doesn’t flinch anymore when she hears an explosion. And within 10 minutes the Afghan staff was back at work and the expats were sitting down to our private lunch (we try to get away from the Afghans during Ramadan) of chicken legs and french fries as if nothing had happened.
The explosion left me a bit tingly—literally— for about 30 minutes. Not the kind of almost-had-a-car-wreck when you can’t keep your foot on the accelerator tingly, but kind of a 4-Mountain-Dews-before- work-after-being-out-a-little-late tingly. I just didn’t feel right.
Mentally, I am not so sure what it means for me. It is just weird. I don’t feel scared—hell, my street is so potholed that an explosive would detonate long before it got to me. It still feels like a very random event. Maybe it is like the driving past a bad accident on the highway: You see it, you note it, you think of families that will suffer, but it doesn’t really impact you.
I am just visiting for a few weeks so I think I will soon shake it off. But for many of my expat co-workers, maybe this place just creates a low-grade stress that never leaves, and could boil over at any time—I know it has for some. But I really feel bad for my Afghan friends who live outside my guarded walls, who are trying to live and raise families like regular people, and for whom bombings and killings have become ‘normal’. How sad it is.
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