Sleeping Beauty

Oh my god - so the most exciting story happened on Saturday in all of my adventures in the past six months in Afghanistan.

At around 6.30am in the morning one of our staff was going to drive to Taloqan so people were up but this Chinese prostitute had climbed up our gate (which has big metal spikes on top) and into our compound...Sorry at this point I should give you a bit of a background.

There are or were lots of chinese prostitutes in Kabul who were kept in big warehouses or houses or restaurant - a chinese restaurant was most likely to be a brothel! All was going well and they were 'servicing' various expat and god knows who else communities until a couple of months ago when the Kabul police raided all of the brothels and either put them in prison or under house arrest (apparently a couple were killed too). And, not to our knowledge of course (!), some of the women were being kept in a house near our guesthouse.

So back to the story..

So this women jumps our gate, running away from the police because she has escaped the hell hole she was forced to stay in , covered in blood, her hand was bleeding and she spoke no dari and minimal english. She asked for shelter so various options were discussed such as taking her to Afghan women's shelter etc etc but then she said her 'brother' worked in the chinese embassy (something went really wrong in the family ties if one brother became a diplomat and the sister a prostitute!). So it was decided that we would put her in a taxi and pay for her to get to the chinese embassy, otherwise it would look like we were transporting international prossies all over the place.

But the girl didn't have a scarf so she had to take one of mine and then they were going to put her in the back of the truck (true to trafficking form) but then it would look suspicious so she got in the car, then the police were there asking questoins and the guards were so excited that they called their friends to say they had a chinese prostitute in the compound...retards is the only word that springs to mind.

So the girl got away and never heard of again but the worst part of the story is...

I SLEPT THROUGH THE ENTIRE THING!

The most exciting event and lazibones here slept through the whole thing!

Mind you the guys said it was probably best that I didn't wake up because if the police had seen an escaped chinese prostitute, 3 afghan men and 2 pakistani men (both speak fluent dari so could be mistaken for afhgans) and one brit chick just stumbled out of bed, not knowiing it was an NGO house, I would be in prison no questions asked!!

So I consoled myself from missing the excitement by going to not one but two internatioanl restaurants yesterday (no actually 3 but only ate at 2) - french and lebanese - both gorgeous, esp. french. French was western prices so it was nice to learn how to spend money again.

The white randomness has not yet evacuated my tonsil but i'm knocking back the penicillin like there's no tomorrow.