Sylvia's Journal

Axel surprised me by getting up before me and setting the birthday table with croissants from the French bakery and a fake flower arrangement selected with great care in our local shopping street with the help of a driver. Getting real flowers would have required a trip across town that would have taken half a day.

Hajji Rahim, the driver who took me to the office stopped along the way to pick one of the last roses alive on our route and offered it to me as a birthday present. That made for lots of flowers, one real and many fake on this 58th birthday.

The rest of the day was entirely in the service of the US counter-insurgency strategy (COIN), producing documents that indicate how what we do relates to Obama’s speech (I could find one line, on page 5) and indicating our approach to regionalization and Afghanization, two important new words in our vocabulary although the actions behind them are not new to us at all. The internet went down at critical moments of the collaborative writing exercises and we rushed hither and thither with pen-drive to make up for the disconnectivity.

In the meantime Axel went on an outing into the old city to look for a remote and an all purpose DVD player so that we can watch Seinfeld when we are really tired and incapable of doing anything else.

For dinner we went to Razia who had cooked one of the most elaborate Thanksgiving dinners I have had in a long time, including two elephant chickens, stuffing and all the usual and unusual Thanksgiving trimmings. For desert there was everything, from a birthday Schwarzwalder Torte, including candles, for me, 2 apple pies, pomegranates, a fruit mousse and ice cream.

Joining in the fun was an eclectic company of people, a Syrian from Duxbury, a NARC, a young and an old engineer, a young woman from the US army, our film maker friend , a young Kenyan health policy specialist who works for Agha Khan and anIndian American peacenik who runs two NGOs in addition to having a job and, just like me, is getting calls for peace and against extra troops from her Quaker friends in the US.