Sylvia's Journal

Our grand-dog Chicha became very nervous when she saw me haul two large suitcases out of the basement. She is still traumatized about her parents taking off for Tennessee without telling her. She kept looking at me with those sad eyes that only dogs have. But how could I explain that the big green suitcase was for taking winter clothes to Afghanistan via Addis Ababa?

Since the project in Afghanistan officially ends in June 2010, I will not be employed for a year, even though I am hired for a year. Verbally the project has been extended to September, hence the 12 months, but this is not yet formalized with signatures and such. This makes me an employee on TDY (temporary duty) and therefore not eligible for a shipping allowance. Whatever I plan to use in Afghanistan, clothes, hobbies, books, Scrabble, needs to be stuffed in suitcases that we carry along.

I am packing stuff that, if for one reason or another, the place becomes uninhabitable after the elections in August, I would not be too upset about losing yet, paradoxically, is important enough to bring. Still, it’s hard to anticipate what I would want to have with me through the fall.

Yesterday’s fall weather continued throughout the day and the walk with the dog never materialized during the short dry spells between down pours. Nevertheless I made it mostly a vacation day, my last opportunity to use up vacation days that cannot be carried over into the next fiscal year (this is for our own good!).

I spent a few hours sitting on the couch with my back turned to the wet and windy outside, knitting and reading. The book is about the concubine-turned-empress dowager Yeho-Nala in China who ruled from the mid-1800s into 1900. I learned that the famous Boxer Uprising was not rebellion, as portrayed in my school history books, but an attempt to clear the foreigners out of the Middle Kingdom by followers of a martial arts sect (the Righteous Harmonious Fists, nicknamed the Shadow Boxers or Boxers), with the encouragement of the empress dowager. I finally understand this nervousness of the Chinese authorities about the Falun Gong followers. By comparison, Afghanistan’s current troubles seem relatively mild.

I surveyed the garden and noticed that my clever scheme of planting peas next to asparagus did not work. I had reasoned that the asparagus would serve as a trellis but the wind blew them over and the foliage keeps the sun out. Axel will have to do some emergency repair in the next few days, in between his thousand and one things that need to be initiated, finished, handed over, and articulated.