Sylvia's Journal

Our guard Rabbani took off the plastic from our windows. We can see outside again; the daylight can come in clear now. In Dari the word for light or clear is roshan, which is also the name of one of the cell phone providers. The plastic was covered with a thin layer of soot, on the outside, which tells me something about what gets in our lungs.

We had breakfast outside in our little garden plot, amidst the rose bushes, the apple trees, the pear tree and the grape vines that are just starting to sprout: tiny light green leaves coming out of what looks like dead wood, but isn’t.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have the same hopes about the deadwood that floats around the ministry.

I spent most of the day rebuilding the folders on my old computer, uploading all the non standard software that got lost in the computer hospital. All at a snail’s pace with frequent interruptions. One of the things that got lost is my Dari program with its memory of the 500 words I had learned, including fresh and stale ones.

My computer and the various external hard disks are a little bit like a linen closet: a mess. It takes much perseverance and patience to sort things out. It turned out to be an all day task.

We had decided not to go out today but stay in our enclosure – partially because it was lovely outside and partially because we want to keep our heads low in case Karzai’s antics produce a reaction against Americans.

Later in the day the weather turned bad (for us) or good (rain is always good here) and Axel went shopping while I packed for my trip to Mazar tomorrow.

Karzai claims that it was not the Afghan people but the UN and Europeans under the leadership of Peter Gailbraith that stole the elections. The comment affected me more than I thought it would. We were saying to each other it must be a joke but we knew it was not. I was very discouraged. How can anything get better in the place if the top makes delusional statements like that? And when the highest authority in the country says it is the foreigners who are bad, in a place like this where a largely uneducated population easily swallows nonsense like this and then takes to the street, one does get a little worried.

Another long day ended this frantic week that started with a working Saturday, then three days of the annual health retreat and then the shadowing. But the shadowing is over now after Steve and I told the minister what we had observed and asked if these observations were on the mark (they were). We then proposed some ways to help her preserve her energy for her four public roles (symbolic, managerial, political and advocacy) and her private role as member of a family. She embraced some of our suggestions with great enthusiasm, judged by her conversation with her Afghan advisers who had joined us. Other ideas just sat on the table. After that we were dismissed. It was time for the weekend for all of us.

With that our brief opportunity of shadowing was over, which was exactly what Steve wanted but I would have prefered some more days. Still, not having to go to the ministry every morning and then coming back at 1 for another full day of work is welcome and more sustainable for my own sanity and my family life.

Axel had a guys-night out in a sportsbar-and-beer-and-meat kind of place (the Sizzler) on the other side of town. Places with TVs on the walls that serve large chunks of meat are not my cup of tea and so I stayed home and watched karzai say silly things while migrating my files from my loaner computer back to my resurrected new computer with its new hard drive that can hold 220 gigs.If Karzai was indeed serious then I passed this April Fool’s Day without any jokes.