Sylvia's Journal

The day started with a summons from the minister to help her with her thank you letters to the various people who welcomed her, worked with her during her visit to the US. They were the leaders of various UN agencies, the World Bank, the US congress, the UN in New York, the Lancet and No Woman, No Cry, whose director, Christy Turlington Burns film, Every mother counts, greatly moved her.

I am working with one of her staff to transfer the skill of writing good thank you letters. When I was 12 my mother taught me that skill and for years I had a sample of a thank you letter, in her handwriting, hidden under my desk blotter. I kept pulling it out whenever there was a thank you letter to compose. As a result I am pretty darn good at it now and it is time to pass the skill on.

In the evening we were invited at the Dutch embassy for a celebration of ‘Leiden’s Ontzet,’ which is one of the oldest victory celebrations in Holland. On October 3, 1574 the rebels pierced the dikes and flooded the countryside around Leiden to flush away the enemy Spaniards. It was sink or run. They ran.

The Dutch rebels rowed across the water with food for the besieged and starving inhabitants of the city: haring and white bread. Legend has it they also brought the contents of the cooking pots the Spaniards left behind, a stew now considered very Dutch, ‘hutspot,’ consisting of potatoes, carrots, onions, mashed together into a thick orange mass and served with sausage.

The Dutch embassy had invited General Petraeus to partake in this very Dutch event. We did not know this but we could have figured it out from the tank-like SUVs (weighing 9000 pounds and costing more than a small house each) that were parked between the various embassy perimeters.

The celebration was a small and intimate affair that allowed us to chat with the man who is so much in the news. We asked about Woodward’s book and his now famous quote that I remember mostly because of its [expletive] part. He smiled and said he tries not to use those words but they sometimes slip in.

We discovered his father was a Dutch captain and so there is some affinity with the Dutch, although he did politely decline both the raw herring and the Dutch gin (apple juice in a gin glass looked exactly like it).

We met some old acquaintances and made new friends. One of the old acquaintances, a Dutch/Afghan, who ate herring like a Dutchman, had run for a seat in parliament. He thinks he got 1000 votes; whether that is enough or not we don’t know.

A member of the October 3 Committee had flown in from Leiden with several hundred pounds of haring, sausage for the hutspot and corenwijn, a special variety of Dutch gin. Small bowls of hutspot with the sausage were served in addition to the herring. After the speeches we could also have a glass of gin, except the military (Dutch and American) because McChrystal banned alcohol for uniformed men (except the Belgians who threatened to leave if not allowed their 2 beers a day).

The Afghan staff knew quickly who the herring lovers were; as a result I ate more than I ever have at one sitting. The committee member turned out to be a Scott, married to Leiden’s principal city archivist and a citizen of Leiden. His Dutch was so impeccable that we did not realize he was not a native Dutch speaker. But then someone reminded us that old Scottish was very close to old Dutch.