Sylvia's Journal

Today was another hot and dust-stormy day. My energy level is close to zero. I am beginning to wonder whether it is the dusty and dry winds or the depleted soils that produce good looking and tasty but mineral-deficient veggies and fruits that are sapping my energy. I took a multi-vitamin and drank another half liter of water.

We had our usual Sunday meetings: top team, my teams, all team managers. It makes for a lot of meeting on Sunday morning, and some of it is a bit repetitive but as a result everyone knows what everyone else is doing. I think it pays off in the end.

I was supposed to have gone to the ministry after lunch but by then word of the suicide attack, near the road to the airport and beyond the ministry, had reached our security office and all rides into town were cancelled. Because tomorrow and after tomorrow we are supposed to stay home, and next week I am supposed to go to Badakhshan, scheduling or rescheduling meetings is becoming rather difficult. I am looking weeks into the future.

Back home the three of us were too pooped to do much of anything. Sallie Craig fell asleep reading her book and I would have done the same had I been sitting on a more comfortable seat.

Before we all conked out we micro-waved our plates with samples of various dishes the cook had prepared. The highlight was the desert: an apricot appletart, with appletart being the word for pie in our cook’s limited English. Since he had learned to make apple tarts from another cook, it is the gestalt that gets the name, not the particular fruit.

We had received half a bushel of apricots from one of my staff who has a summer place outside Kabul, with lots of fruit trees. And so we asked Amin to make an apricot tart, which he did. It was just like the apple tart, a little more soggy and difficult to eat but very tasty. He prepared it exactly like the apple tart, including the apricot glaze made from Pakistani or Iranian apricot jam. Axel and I ate it with vanilla ice cream from Herat. And then I felt a great urge to go to bed.