Sylvia's Journal

I sacrificed half of my day off to attend a meeting in the EC container. When I first heard the venue of the meeting I laughed, the EC container? What’s that? But here plenty of people live and work in containers, practically all US government employees, if not all.

The European Commission solved the problem of space for its advisors to the ministry of health by placing two containers, one on top of the other, in the inner courtyard of the ministry. There is a small conference room, a bunch of cubicles and a kitchen. That’s where we met.

It was my first participation in a working group meeting. For once I was not the only woman. We sat next to each other to make it look as if there were more of us. The meeting was a little fluid with no clearly identified outcome other than a ‘meeting of the minds,’ and no hard time boundaries. As a result we drifted past the official ending time of the ministry’s workday. I could tell because the government employees were checking their watches. Steve and I never need to check our watches as there are no time boundaries for us. And for lunch and dinner we simply listen to our bellies.

On our way home today we inched our way through the dense traffic, made denser by multiple roadblocks put up in case of irregularities that were predicted after the election results announcement. But it never came, postponed once more, for the fifth time. I gather Karzai and Abdullah are not ready to shake hands despite the pressure from all the heavyweights in the world.

One of our consultants made the mistake of taking a picture of the red-bereted elite troops in the center of town. This angered one of the soldiers so much that he started pounding the car window where the consultant was sitting and shouting at the top of his lungs, attracting more shouting from other men with guns. It was a little frightening. We were pulled over and our driver and guard jumped out to calm the soldier with the frayed nerves and the gun. The drama lasted only a few minutes and ended with the promise that the picture would be deleted. That was actually funny because no one checked if the picture got deleted. This is different from the olden days when they would have demanded the camera and ripped out the film.

Back home we indulged in another one of the wonderful meals that our cook prepares for us. It was followed by the sweetest and juiciest pomegranates and melons I have ever had, complemented by Peet’s coffee, Iranian dates and the Indian sweets dripping with honey that we bought yesterday on Flower street.

The evening temperatures are dropping fast and the daytime – night time difference is nearly 40 degrees Fahrenheit: 75 degrees at midday and just above freezing at night. The down puff I brought along in September is coming in handy now. Leaving my warm nest in the morning is a little bit more challenging each day.

The weekend is now over. It wasn’t much of a weekend as I took care of the last assignments of my previous job which I cannot possibly handle during my workweek here. On the side I am writing a chapter for a book about third-culture-kids (TCKs) authored by the wife of our organization’s president. It’s not much of a sacrifice because I love this kind of writing.