Sylvia's Journal

Too many bad things happened in July, all the way up to the very last day, in spite of Axel’s birthday and his reaching the ripe old age of 64 in good health and our 3 year survival anniversary.

The accident victims are still in a bad way and explorations of transfer out of the country are continuing. I wasn’t able to mobilize any more, having come to the end of the road and so I placed this duty in the hands of others, opening, I hope, a whole new network of possibilities. Bad news kept coming in until the very last minute of July: one of my American colleagues lost his brother in a motorcycle accident.

As if to confirm that things were going to turn around, we watched a lovely movie last night about the rising from the ashes of the Afghan cricket team. A kind of home movie with lovely scenes as the cameraman follows the cricket team first to Jersey island, of all places, and then all over the world. Slowly they are working their way from the refugee camps in Pakistan into the international cricket circuit. I would be the last to watch a cricket movie, but I am glad I went – I needed some distraction.

Today August started, a new beginning. The first day of this month is my mother’s birthday, a joyous occasion, always celebrated during our summer vacation. I have wonderful memories of her birthday celebrations in Switzerland where her day was amplified by it also being the country’s national holiday.

This morning I found an email in my gmail account, one I don’t check as frequently as I should, from Nuha who I had imagined married off to a conservative man forbidding all contact with the outside world. How wonderful to learn that I was completely wrong about this and that she is thriving professionally and is surrounded by family and good mentors, bosses and friends. The good news made my day.

There were riots in town this morning, allegedly instigated by religious fanatics who wanted video stores to remove anything that could corrupt Afghans. It got nasty when store windows were smashed. So we took the long way around the city to get to the ministry, along with everyone else. This claimed what remained of the morning.

I attended a few meetings after which I was called to represent our project at the ceremony inaugurating Breastfeeding week. Everything was in Dari and Pashto, spoken much too fast for me. I used my time of attendance (sitting far in the back where no one noticed) catching up on my reading, those long pdf articles about interesting topics related to Afghanistan that people send me all the time; some worth it, some not; some well written, some not.

The ceremony was long and people started to leave the large auditorium as soon as the snack bags had been distributed and the official work day had ened. It was very noisy while the bags were distributed and everyone tried to get a hold of these bags before they were gone. Scarcity (there should have been enough for everyone) does bring this out in people. The dean of the medical school made a joke about the few stalwarts staying to the end only to find out that they were the red carpet and sound installation people. Except for us foreigners, one of the remaining people did indeed roll up the red carpet.