By Dawn Lloyd
Editor’s Note: Dawn Lloyd is a guest columnist that spends most of the year in Kabul, Afghanistan. Throughout the term, she’ll be sharing her experiences living in Kabul with Ethos. Any opinions she expresses are solely hers and are not necessarily held by the editorial staff.
Her other entries can be found here: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9
Special Editor’s Note: This is not a normal Kabul Dispatch entry. Dawn Lloyd was friends with one of the two Americans killed in the recent Taliban attack on a crowded restaurant in Kabul, covered by CBS here, the Huffington Post here, and CNN here. Both Americans were her colleagues at the American University of Afghanistan.
Because of a series of airline mishaps and delayed flights, I was late returning to Kabul after Christmas vacation, and instead ended up stuck in Delhi for two days. I got off the plane, took the metro in to the city, got a cheap hotel that had WiFi, and checked my email. The attack is all over the news in general.
The news articles aren’t what I saw first, though. I suppose maybe it was better to have heard about the death of my friend from a university email than a cold news report. But ultimately, I don’t think any way of hearing the news can really make it better. Nevertheless, I learned about the attack on the Lebanese restaurant, La Taverna, from email before I saw the news.  The first email in my inbox was from the university president. He’d sent it out shortly after the attack and confirmed that two of our teachers had been killed. No names were released because they were still contacting the families.  The next email in my inbox was sent a bit later identifying who was killed.  Alexandros Petersen was new to AUAF. I didn’t know him, and so I assume he arrived for orientation a week before returning teachers. AUAF is a tight-knit faculty community, and new arrivals are generally met with enthusiasm and excitement as our family (and social network) grows a bit larger. I regret that I will never have the opportunity to know one of our AUAF own who died for coming to a country where he could hopefully improve lives.
The second name I saw was “Alexis Kamerman.” My first thought was “who?” because no one ever called her Alexis. She was Lexie.
Moments later, the horrible realization hit.
Lexie was a friend of mine.  She was part of our board game group, and we spent many weekends together. Two weeks before the end of the semester, we had come to mutual realization that we should hang out more time together outside of the board games, and so we had agreed to do that this semester. When I was visiting my parents over Christmas break, I mentioned her to them and that I was looking forward to spending more time with her.
She was a genuinely good person and I was glad to call a friend. She was opinionated but concerned about not overruling other peoples’ opinions with her own. Above all, she wanted people to care about each other and work together. I respected her on many levels.
In my Delhi hotel room, I finally went to bed and lay there for a long time.  I almost never dream about people, places, or events I know, and can very seldom make any connection to my dreams and actual events of my life.  However, last night I dreamed I was at a house and her 5 yr old brother was standing by the door watching me. (I don’t know if she has any brothers, but if she does, I’m sure they’re not 5 yrs old. Dreams don’t conform to logic.)  He didn’t know about her death, and I was trying to decide if I should tell him or if his family was nearby and they could tell him.  He left to go into another room for a while and when he came back, he was crying.
It was an odd dream, but I think reflects how I feel on a subconscious level.
I’ve spent three and a half years watching students and Afghan staff lose family/friends in attacks. I think the worst way to lose someone is to a random murder with no cause. But this is the first time someone I know, let alone someone I consider a friend, has been killed.  It strikes home a lot more, although I suppose ultimately a senseless death is a senseless death no matter who is killed.
I spent today somberly trying to sort out a plane ticket to Kabul. I’ll be arriving tomorrow and will go about settling in to a campus and faculty in mourning.
So for now, I simply continue on, grateful to be alive and hoping for the day when no one else will have to experience the loss of someone they care about.
About the author: Dawn Lloyd is an American who got bored and set out to find adventure. Four continents later, she’s settled in Kabul where she teaches English at the American University of Afghanistan. She is Editor in Chief for The Colored Lens magazine and writes speculative fiction, a list of which can be found on her personal site.