Sylvia's Journal

It is freezing cold in the early morning and evening hours now. When I walked into my diesel-heated office at 7 AM I was instantly nauseous and opened the door to the outside to get rid of the fumes. Unfortunately this also lets in the cold air.

I walked around with a headache and sore throat for most of the day and kept my window and door open. I was told to give it a couple more days for the newness to burn off but I don’t know if I can hang in that long. I am longing to have the stove removed and go back to using a tiny electric heater.

It is sobering to realize that my suffering is minor compared to people who have no heat at all. This includes colleagues who work in the ministry of health and are requesting the purchase of gas stoves because the electrical circuit cannot manage the many electrical heaters people have been bringing in from their homes. I asked what happens if I don’t sign these request forms (one of my new responsibilities is signing such slips of paper). The answer was that I am leaving people out in the cold. So I sign.

We are entering another period of intense speculation and rumors that surround the inauguration. I have never been in a place where there so many rumors and so few ways to check on the veracity of them. There are few newspapers and most I cannot read (yet); our TV provides only news in Dari or Pashto and so we can only guess. But apparently even to those who can understand the language the rumors cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed.

Our security people have decided to close the office on Thursday for all staff. This means working at home. The senior staff have laptops and modems and so they should be able to work from home just fine. Those below them have not.

I am giving our two administrative coordinators homework: they have to study two chapters of the Managers Who Lead book. There was much giggling about such an assignment. To make sure it is taken serious I have put Dr. Ali in charge of checking on the homework, more giggling.

At 5 PM my teacher showed up. By then it was dark and cold and there was no way I was going to have a two hour lesson in my fume-filled office. I was nauseous and tired. We went upstairs in the main building to sit in one of the many offices that have air conditioners mounted on the walls (‘koolers’). These can both heat and cool a room, very efficiently, quietly and without any fumes. Unfortunatelt I cannot have one of these in my office because the electrical circuit cannot carry such a load.

In today’s lesson we covered verbs that start with the letter ‘A,’ about 30 of them. If there was more than one Farsi word for an English word, as was often the case, my teacher would write the additional meanings not between brackets but, as he calls them, between barricades. The many years of conflict run deep here. I don’t think he knows his own country without barricades.