Sylvia's Journal

Our yard is full of little trees, seeds sprouted from the ubiquitous ‘darakht-e-rusi’ or Russian tree. It’s an ugly kind of tree that you see in the US in abandoned city lots. The guard and driver this morning described to me the tree: it is an invasive species and the Afghans love to cut it down; hence the name.

I spent most of the day with Lonna from HQ who is on a whirlwind trip of Central and South Asia looking for business opportunities for our organization. It was fun going with her to meetings and seeing her do her sales pitch – I don’t think I can do something like that and so I was paying close attention while marveling at the ease and grace with which she made the pitch.

We are supposed to do this kind of pitching all the time but we are not very good at it and have little time. So having such a ball of energy breeze in from the head office is quite an experience.

In the afternoon we managed to squeeze in a little shopping. As I am writing this she is trying to stuff a small carpet and a lovely Afghan jacket into her suitcase that needs to go to Bangladesh and then Nepal before going home to DC.

In the evening we were invited to a dinner (thank you American taxpayer) to celebrate the successful (people say) completion of an annual event that brings all key actors on the Afghan health scene together. It was an outdoor event with tables set around the pool of the Intercontinental Hotel. It is a lovely spot and one could easily forget to be in a country that is associated with war.

We were seated at the VIP table with the current acting minister and her predecessor who got the ministry jump started after the Taliban. She and her team made a series of extraordinary decisions then that remain solid now, nine years later, and on which much of the extraordinary progress in health has been built. We ate our meals under a light spring rain, the kind that coastal West Africans call ‘mango rains,’ something that is highly unusual in Kabul in the middle of its hot and dry summer.