Sylvia's Journal

We had another nice dinner with Razia Jan and her always interesting circle of friends and relatives. This included an American who spoke perfectly Dutch. Although both his parents are Americans he grew up in Holland and went to school there. He is providing technical assistance to the Baghlan Cheese factory. As it turned out Axel had met him half a year ago at the (near) monthly Dutch embassy ‘borrel’ (cocktail hour/party).

Axel’s wedding outfit was ready. He did one other showing of the suit and looks quite smart. The shirt is dazzling white and therefore needs to be kept far away from catsup, tomato sauce and red wine. My wedding dress was done a week ago, only the dress for the day after the wedding still needs some tweaking and so we will see Razia jan once more before we leave.

On my last day at work we met, our nascent female leadership development team, Ali and myself, with two members of the Executive Board of the Afghan Midwives Association. We discussed the who, what, how, when and where of a leadership program that we will do with them for their provincial chapters and teams of midwives who work in several Kabul hospitals. It’s going to be one of those rare activities where women will predominate.

I used the rest of the day to complete all the tasks that remained on my to-do list, handed over my work to one of my staff who will be acting on my behalf and sent my handover notes to all the program managers. As a last step I activated the out-of-office assistant feature of MS Outlook that will alert every email sender that I am now officially on vacation. The first one and a half days of this vacation will be spent in Kabul over brunch, under the skillful masseuse’s hands and then we will start to pack.

The weather change (cool evenings) is for real we are told. We have crossed the mid-summer/early fall divide, much like in Massachusetts except maybe a few weeks earlier. It means we can turn the airco off at night and open the windows. This is a good thing except that we have to put up again with the incessant barking of dogs and other noises that are not very pleasant. It’s quite a racket outside our garden walls. We wonder why no one has pulled out their gun yet. Strychnine-laced chunks of meat are the preferred way I was told.