Sylvia's Journal

The cheap Chinese light bulbs flicker in their sockets – they have a very short lamp life. The worst quality Chinese products end up here, not in the US where customers are more discerning and have deeper pockets. The alternative is the bright spiral long life (supposedly green) bulbs that make our rooms feel like public bathrooms (light-wise that is).

I feel a bit like these flickering lights especially those that are getting dimmer and dimmer. It is Thursday night and the week is over and I am ready to tumble into bed. It wasn’t a particularly trying week in spite of, or maybe because our two bosses are out but it was yet again a collection of at least five 10 hour days which doesn’t count the hours and hours of Dari homework.

I came home late because I was checking out hundreds of pictures taken during a field visit by one of our staff who monitors the NGOs that implement the services. You can tell from the pictures that he took his work seriously: all equipment in the clinics, all drugs, all wall charts, all graphs, binders and registration books were painstakingly photographed.

On many pictures he is busy putting marks on a checklist. That must be the famous NMC, or national monitoring checklist I have heard so much about. I wonder whether this could not be better done using handhelds as I saw demonstrated last summer at the Global Health Council’s annual meeting that featured technology. It seemed like a great idea there and then; but here I realize that you would need a high level champion, otherwise people will see it like another extra thing to add to their work load.

Rumors continue to whilr around town about our candidate for health minister. Apparently she did a good job presenting her vision to the parliament but the rumors come from people who are biased: they helped to prepare her speech and prep her for giving good answers. Some of the rumors have moved on to the next level down: were she to be voted in, who would she pick as deputies? Some of the rumors include one of our own.

I watched local TV and the imagines shifted between the catastrophe of Haiti and improvised explosive devices being detonated here. The Haitian scenes are more depressing.

Axel went to a goodbye party across town in Wazir Akhbar Khan at one of the fortified places. Someone is leaving the fortified place to set out on his own and start a new business. He’s Dutch of course; they are congenitally entrepreneurs and business men or women. I am an exception.

I wonder what it is like to go from living in a bubble to stepping out like that. Axel went with Pia who introduced him to the Dutchman. They didn’t leave until close to my bedtime. I told them to be careful and hoped they had fun. They left saying ‘bye mom!’