Sylvia's Journal

Khoda Hafez means goodbye in Dari. The day has arrived. This morning I woke up long before the alarm was scheduled to wake me up, as I usually do; probably because of the light that filters into my room through the white cloth stapled to the windows. Or maybe it is because the generator kicks in, a light hum in the background or the switching on of the wall-mounted electric heater.

For the last time I follow the Guest House Zero routine: I take a shower, dress and walk over to the other Guest House where the server is (Guest House 1, facing the street). For this I have to cross the garden courtyard where the roses are growing like crazy and the buds are beginning to show. These are the famous roses of Kabul that flower uninterrupted till fall. I then reboot the server. Every morning the server asks me the same question: Why did the server shut down unexpectedly? And every morning I click on the same answer: power failure environment. There is nothing unexpected about this by the way but the computer needs to be told every morning.

Then I call the dispatcher for a car to pick me up in an hour, check my mail and have breakfast with Mirwais who has, by then, come back from his morning run. Even if I wanted to, a morning run is not in the stars for us foreigners as we would make beautiful targets for the growing kidnapping industry, which appears to be driven primarily by economic rather than political motives.

I was too busy to dream this week, but now that everyting is over the dreams are coming back. My dream last night was about MSH and several colleagues, past and present, all mingled together. I was in a retreat of sorts in a mansion that looked like Brandegee where MSH used to have its headquarters, Versailles, as my old office mate Carol used to call it. I was in one part of the building but somehow excluded from preparatory work with a small group of senior staff because I was a facilitator. The exclusion included not being asked to sign a birthday card for our deputy director. I wandered over to another part of the building where I found many of my current and past colleagues (from MSH as well as other places of employ) happily eating cakes and other yummy things with whipped cream. It was a more congenial place and I wanted to stay with them rather than go back. There was also something about looking at action plans from Pakistan but the context of that has evaporated because I wasn’t fast enough with my pen and paper.

For me the dream is rather transparent and related to my anxieties about going back to the Boston office. In a way it is good that the trip takes as long as it does. As much as I dread the physical experience, the slow adjustment to being back psychologically is a good thing.

We had a good team debriefing, applying the same feedback process to ourselves that we used in the workshops. I am happy with the results and leave with the feeling that I have contributed a tiny little brick to the rebuilding of the Afghanistan edifice. And now, off to Kabul airport.