Sylvia's Journal

The world economic crisis is showing up in the gloomy graphs on the front of the Dutch newspapers and in the empty plane to Amsterdam with room to spare. I have rarely had an empty seat beside me on my twenty years of Atlantic crossings. My first two flights in 2009 allowed me to sleep, fully extended over 4 seats as if in a bed. This is when a good thing is actually a bad thing.

And so I had a good (half) night sleep, full of dreams. The only one I remember is that I was about to receive a visit from some official who was coming to my house to extend a permit for something that was up for renewal and for which I had to show my continued proficiency. I knew I had to bone up on procedures or rules that contained precise numbers that I had forgotten. Somewhere in my (childhood) room there was a booklet that I needed to review before his arrival; but I couldn’t find it and the search became increasingly frantic. And then the beverage cart came through and released me from my anxiety, offering me watery tea in a Styrofoam cup and a tiny cereal bar that is supposed to taste like apple.

Axel drove me in to work yesterday morning. He had an appointment with the brain injury doctor. The visit was a routine check up and things are going in the right direction. But I did notice he forgot his wallet as we got into the car and is easily distracted when he remembers things he should have done/taken and did not – mostly small things, usually with little or no consequence, that show that his executive function is not quite where it needs to be. In spite of this handicap he appears to be handling the complex and complicated job of chair of the town’s community preservation committee remarkably well. But then again, if you work in town you can pretty much leave your wallet at home.

At work there was one more all-morning meeting with our evaluators, this time less powerpoints and more conversation that showed our virtual capacity building portfolio. I have seen it expanding over the years, seen colleagues learn their way into this, including myself in the area of virtual facilitation, and realized as I listened to their presentations that we have come a long way and have much to be proud of.

At lunch time Morsi, Jennifer and I took our intern Nuha out to lunch to celebrate her last day with us, or maybe it is ‘mourn’ her last day. Nuha and I have gotten quite close since we met less than a year ago in the BU course, she a student, and I the professor. We have introduced each other to our respective worlds, hers a world populated by women in a desert kingdom, mine a New England one that includes a lush Lobster Cove, trips in small planes and eating apples straight from the tree.

Nuha showed us pictures of camping out in the Riyadh desert with her female relatives, including a video of singing around a campfire. I have an open invitation to visit her when she is back in Riyadh and participate in such an event. It looks like fun but definitely would require some intense work on my Arabic before I go as it will be a total immersion experience.

The tent is not like what I thought hearing the word; in her world a tent is a like a huge Bedouin tent, permanently set up in the sand on the outskirts of the city, that you can rent if you don’t have your own, and all you do in it is sleep as the days are too hot to be inside and the evenings too cold (close to zero Celsius) and so you sit outside around a fire – it is the desert after all.

I have nearly finished working through my 10 Pimsleur Persian lessons during my commute to work and decided to check with my Afghan colleague Saeed whether I am actually learning something that people in Kabul can understand. He told me that people would notice that I spoke the language of Iran rather than Afghanistan but they would understand me. The problem is that I would not understand much of what they would be saying to me as the words are quite different. I now imagine that the difference is something like between Portuguese and Spanish, where the Portuguese can understand the Spanish speakers but not the other way around. Thus, getting an Afghan tutor is becoming more important now to help me make the adjustments in my newly acquired vocabulary.

And now I am in Amsterdam, waiting for my next departure, just a couple of hours away, first to Khartoum and then Addis.