Sylvia's Journal

The whole day was inside work, that is, the work of managing and leading applied to myself and my team. Some days and weeks are all outside work, when I spent most of my working hours at the ministry. The good thing about inside work is that I don’t need to drive across town and be stuck in traffic; the bad thing is that it doesn’t feel all that productive.

I woke up with a sharp pain in my arm yesterday morning and discovered what looked like a 1 inch cut or narrow blister. I did not remember hurting myself and was puzzled. It may have been a small cut or puncture that I never noticed and got infected. And so I asked one of the myriad of doctors who surround me all day what to do.

I was proud to show that I had put lots of anti biotic cream on the wound and bandaged it. But doctor Steve told me to use the ancient wisdom of what to do with infections: hot compresses. The heat mobilizes the white blood cells to attack the enemy. It is the equivalent of the Afghan National Army squelching internal disturbances; the international military forces would be more like the expensive and not always effective (and addictive) antibiotics.

To my great surprise the wound immediately started to get better, no more itching or tenderness (although it is coming back as Ii write this – hot compresses are needed for a while, the doctor told me).

Our hapless travellers in Dubai have still not come to the end of their agony. We had booked them on the afternoon flight back to Kabul but now their suitcases are lots in the mayhem in Dubai. And so their troubles are not over. I am collecting Dari proverbs with which to soothe them when they come back. A nice meal may also be required. I wonder if they ever want to go to an international conference again.

Our cook is using the bilingual cookbook and the meals are getting more interesting. The act of cooking is also more interesting as the electrician installed new lights that have turned our poorly lit kitchen (we needed a flashlight to check what was cooking in the oven) into something akin to a surgical ward.

We also now have fans to move the air around because we cannot open the (unscreened) doors because of the multitude of flies. We are beginning to wonder whether having a house near a rather polluted trickle of a stream may have been a bad decision. Flies like heat, like the bacteria and the white blood cells that will kill them, hopefully soon.