Sylvia's Journal

I am back in Dubai waiting for the Safi plane to take me home. With my emergency room experience under my belt I had been able to negotiate a stay in the Dubai airport hotel. It is expensive (it charges by the hour) but it would allow me to stay in the hotel and have a few hours of sleep rather than having to negotiate several waiting lines, get into a taxi to another expensive hotel, sleep an hour and get back into a taxi to join more waiting lines.

A young man with my name, misspelled, on a handheld sign whisked me straight off the plane to a luxurious hotel room just above the hustle and bustle of the tax-free shopping area; a room with a view on one of the jetways.

I dreamt about women’s liberation and courage, quite a good combination of themes that came from watching first Temple Grandin deal with the stockyard cowboys in Arizona (Thinking in pictures) and then Alice Paul and her team fighting for women’s voting rights in the 1917s in the US (Iron jawed angels).

Both films were about the power of vision and the ugliness of human behavior, in the case of these particular films, man’s nature, when the vision clashes with a deeply entrenched status quo. I don’t quite understand the perceived threat (is is more perceived than real it seems). It is one I also see in Afghanistan, when people stand up for their rights and speak truth to power.

And now on to Kabul.