Sylvia's Journal

The second day of Ramazan was a workday but only a few people showed up. The streets and offices were empty and stores closed. Walking to my office I pass many fruit trees, two of them fig trees. I plucked a few dark purple figs from the tree for when I would get hungry. I had brought a hardboiled egg just in case. My colleague AB is fasting along with everyone else but for this I have no drive nor desire.

I took furtive sips from my water bottle that was hiding in back of my computer, ate the figs and the egg and made it through a long day dedicated mostly to emptying my overflowing mailbox. In the morning we had our last incomplete directors’ meeting. Our Finance and Operations Director is back and his predecessor is arriving early in the morning. We will finally be able to do a proper handover from one to the other, about 6 weeks overdue. This should be a week of many resolutions and decisions.

In our meeting we talked about how and when to consult with whom and where the boundaries are between our jobs. It is not obvious and will probably remain rather grey. Despite the clamor for clarity, and the countless job descriptions and manuals that experts produce for this purpose in my line of work there is little that is crystal clear. I am finding that the higher you rise the more of your time is spent on relationship building and maintenance, something that is rarely mentioned in job descriptions. The emphasis is on ‘technical’ but I do very little technical work.

After sitting the whole day in a hot and sticky room with a fan blowing papers hither and thither I arrived home hungry and exhausted. I was thinking of all the people who actually fasted and did hard labor without even a fan, and who don’t have an air conditioned bedroom in which to retreat, then multiplied by 30 days. I can’t really complain.

The guards were busy in the back of the house preparing for the breaking of the fast. It starts with fruits and dates. Our pear tree had lost a loaded branch which they relieved of at least 20 pears. We lent them our juicer and they produced the most delicious pear juice, enough for all of us.

We ate our dinner in front of the TV, switching back and forth between EuroNews and the BBC whenever the screen got too pixilated, with heads and bodies no longer matching. The TV makes clicking sounds when the picture breaks apart, as if the San people from South Africa have taken over, click, click. Our TV does that when it gets tired, too hot or the antenna dish got kicked. We were too lazy to try to fix it.

I watched a fierce (and pixilated) debate between women who favor wearing the veil and those who don’t, somewhere in a suburb of Brussels. The topic is so complex that every argument sounds reasonable. Why can’t we let women wear whatever they are comfortable with as long as it doesn’t jeopardize others (as in driving a car or piloting a plane in a burqa).

When I look at pictures from the 50s in Western Europe or even the US you see lots of women wearing scarves and when you go to southern Europe you find most of the older women with a veil or black scarf. When I was a teenager I often wore a scarf. My father had brought me one from Italy that I still have, with horse imagery on it. It had nothing to do with oppression. And here I am learning from some women that they like the anonymity of having most of their bodies hidden even if it is very hot.