Sylvia's Journal

Because of all the schedule changes and Liz’ departure tonight we treated yesterday like a Saturday, a half day of work and the rest playtime. Early in the morning, before the office car arrived, we took a rickety taxi to the other side of town where the leather factory is and bought the leather good we had fancied and put aside last week. Even though I felt a little guilty about the amount of money we dropped there, Liz convinced me that we had actually supported the local economy. I can only hope it was not a Chinese owned factory, a real possibility. The Ethiopians here say that the Chinese are taking over by consuming their women and their chickens.

Even if it was a locally-owned factory, I was still wondering about the social impact of my purchase. I watched the Story of Stuff the other night on YouTube and am trying to be a little more conscious about buying stuff. For one, I was wondering where the runoff went of the chemical processes used for converting the hides into soft colorful leathers. I can only hope that it is somewhat regulated (am I kidding myself?). The factory is located in a neighborhood with other factories surrounded by small houses behind walls and narrow unpaved roads. Would anyone know the cancer rates in this part of town?

The rest of the morning Liz oriented all of us about the various management tools that MSH headquarters makes available to our field projects. I listened with my new hat on, as a director for management and leadership and thus a potential user of such tools. I imagined getting Liz to come to Kabul and do the same there. She’s very good at it and knows the management tools better than I do.

We had lunch at one of our favorite café/restaurants that is conveniently located above the Boston Spa. We had changed our Saturday appointments and spent the entire afternoon being scrubbed, buffed, polished and massaged. Now Liz is ready (and pretty) for the long plane ride home and I got some of my stiffness massaged out of my tangled and knotted tendons and muscles. My feet were sanded down to soft baby skin and my toenails painted a deep dark red.

In the middle of our beauty treatment the electricity went out, a fairly common occurrence here, rain or shine. It is hard to imagine a spa in the US functioning without electricity but here no one seemed very perturbed by it. I am glad I had selected the color of my nail polish before the lights went out because doing that by candlelight in a windowless room might have produced some surprises. So we ended up having our nails painted in the dark. The nail technicians had done this before; our nails came out perfect.

Pierre-Marie had no part in this very feminine entertainment and only joined us at night for dinner. He was actually working, interviewing candidates in Kinshasa for his other project launch in the DRC.