Sylvia's Journal

I had a good and calm first day at work; unfortunately my boss had not been able to return yet from Peshawar and so I concentrated on being a good boss myself. I met with one of the three people I supervise to understand what’s going on in his unit and agree on how we will work together. I will meet with the others tomorrow.

We are still in the throes of work planning which keeps many people extremely busy and some on edge. When the workday starts in Boston, tomorrow night for us, all has to be as final as we can make it. In the past some not so perfect plans had been passed on to Boston triggering reactions that people still talk about; they don’t want a repeat and we are striving for better this time.

The large offices are being re-arranged to accommodate new/more staff which means that I am temporarily parked at a visitor’s table in the space where the technical advisors are sitting when not with their counterparts in the ministry. Eventually I will get a space all to myself with a door than can be closed, a luxury I haven’t had in 16 years. I am looking forward to such a space, mostly so that I can unpack the five boxes of books that were shipped from Boston.

I learned that a couple of new guesthouses are being rented and I get to have first dibs if I like one of them. This makes my living quarters also temporary – and I will keep camping out in the office and at home until final decisions are made. I hope this is done before Axel shows up; I promised him that our nest would be ready to receive him when he arrives in a few weeks. I prefer a more permanent over a temporary nest.

Back at the guest house I noticed that the housekeeper had contributed to my settling in by hammering a 5 inch nail in one of the kitchen cabinets to hold a towel that I had put on the counter; a degree of overkill that practically pulled the cabinet apart. It seems that hammering huge nails in the wall is what you do here when you want to hang things. All the beautiful Central Asian textiles in my room are also nailed into the walls with similar large stakes.

Soon after my return an office car pulled up tat the guesthouse and deposited our new housemate, a Dutch woman named Ankie, who had just flown in from Amsterdam. As it turned out I had met her husband in Ghana in March, small world. Her first name is the same as my sister’s and her last name the same as the last name of my best friend in Holland (no relation). With this Steve is once more outnumbered by Dutch people. This seems to happen a lot in guesthouse zero.

The physical therapist I had found on the internet came to our guesthouse after dinner for an initial consultation. He is a wandering PT and only does house calls, mostly consulting to foreigners. He was astonished by my range of motion and flexibility 8 weeks post-op and did not feel he had much to contribute as this point, since my recovery will be dictated by how serious I take my exercises (very!). The protocol I follow is apparently quite standard and with all the exercises for the next couple of months already printed out by my US PT, he had little to add. Instead he gave me some exercises to strengthen my upperback and offset the strains of sitting in front of a computer that are compounded by two-year old whiplash. We agreed to check in again in a few weeks.