Sylvia's Journal

This time I took off for real. Axel and I said our goodbyes once more, grateful for the extension of our time together. It chipped one day off the length of our separation that is stretching forbiddingly in front of us.

I listened to John Denver’s most famous goodbye song (Leaving on a Jet plane) as soon as I was allowed to, while the plane took me further and further away from Boston. The song came with a whole host of memories about parting from people I love(d) and, by association, about other departures to places in turmoil, resurfacing 34-year old sentiments about starting a new chapter in Lebanon. Some of these sentiments are the same as what I am experiencing now: the excitement of adventure, discovering a new place, the anticipation of learning a new language, making new friends; some are very different and make this an entirely different new chapter: insecurities about my professional identity and an unequal marital relationship that did not survive (a good thing in hindsight).

I am reading the ‘sensitive but unclassified’ United States Government Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan for Support to Afghanistan that lists the 11 ‘Transformative Effects’ that are to help Afghanistan become a place that people want to live and invest in. MSH, as a US government contractor will play a small part in this drama and therefore, so will I. It is through this lens that I am reading the document. The word leadership is used quite a lot and I see where I might contribute a small stone (steentje bijdragen in Dutch), even though mine maybe no more than a Lego block, moving things a quarter of an inch off the ground.

Maybe I am naïve, but something tugs at me inside when I read the words that describe a different Afghanistan, a yes-we-can-against-all-odds kind of tug and I am more than thrilled that I will be there to put my small Lego blocks on top of others. The backdrop of violence, so much in the foreground for everyone in the US, does not faze me; it’s the backdrop that I see and that makes working in and for Afghanistan at this time the right thing to do.

I gave Delta thousands of my hard earned miles in exchange for an upgrade to business class and have no regrets. The 777 that took me to Dubai has business class seats that look like small pods, self contained living spaces that turn a comfortable seat into a flat bed. It will be hard to downgrade to economy class when the miles are gone. I am not going to earn as many and will mostly be drawing down in the coming year with all the travel of family members on the horizon.

I watched John Adams part 1 while eating dinner. It starts with a scene in Holland which explains much about the special relationship between our two countries. It had something to do with faith and supporting the little guy, a mindset coupled with actions that have paid back handsomely over the years. We Dutch (in general, not me) are business people after all and used to take risks in new ventures.

Watching Jefferson, Adams and Franklin strategize how to lead their new country makes me think of Afghanistan – driven by a 30.000 feet vision of these new United States, they too had to bind together diverse rough-and-tumble characters that were used to do their own thing and convince them to join together for some abstract greater good that was not at all obvious at ground level. These men were also believers in a God they presumed to be entirely on their side, even though they were not all as pious as their culture expected of them.