Sylvia's Journal

Today our senior management team became a little more complete with three of the four positions in place. Steve’s phone number was given to our new (German) Finance and Operations Director who has arrived with his Kenyan wife. It felt a little disloyal to delete Steve from my phone list.

If Holland makes it through the semi-finals we will have a divided office with some people rooting for Holland, on my side, and other rooting for Germany, on Peter’s side. Right now there are a lot of Holland fans. Unfortunately, the games are much too late for me to watch.

We had our weekly meeting with our donor, requiring a drive across time that now is taking quite a bit longer because Kabul municipality is frantically upgrading roads before the Kabul Conference in less than three weeks. This means everything is dug up and under construction. Today’s newspaper explained that the process of repair and reconstruction is delayed because of ‘forceful men, irrigation and canalization system (read ‘open sewers under construction’), trafficking, property possessing, power pillars, junctions and telecommunications main wholes (sic).’ Road construction management is not easy here.

Actually, nothing is really easy here. The incident report for July that tracks attacks on health facilities and people who provide health services amounted to about 190, several of which were deadly, all of which interfered with the delivery of health services to the people of Afghanistan.

That’s what we’re all up against. We try not to get too discouraged because, as one of Axel’s students wrote, “Hope is like open wings for flying in the height to reach the prosperities, because hope can cause get all the humans in the highest positions. Hope gives us confidence to have effort in our life and not to end our improvements until we have our life with pride and proud (Sabera, 2010).”