Sylvia's Journal

All the to-dos and meetings are now being compressed in the few remaining work hours; right now, one full work day to be exact. There was one last hurried trip to the ministry for a meeting about the various top-level health strategy events, and then the whittling down of what must be done by me and no one else in the next 24 hours.

Our office email system has been severely crippled by an inordinate amount of spam and malicious emails. It is a mystery to me how IT folks can solve this problem without blocking out the good mails along with the bad stuff. As we can see from our ‘undeliverable’ notices, they don’t always succeed. Everyone expects, even here, that emails arrive instantly; so when they don’t we are in big trouble. I am starting to use my gmail and educating people to send emails to both addresses but it may be a little too late.

For reasons I never understand the traffic has been jammed all day and everywhere. The driver took a very roundabout way to the ministry. I passed through neighborhoods that I am not familiar way and watched the hustle and bustle of commerce and trade.

If this was all you got to see of Afghanistan you’d see an industriousness that most people could not imagine. Carts with bags of cement, cans of tomato paste, stacked too high and sacks filled with flour and rice where heaped on rickety ‘karachis’ (the wooden planked two wheeler cards usually pulled by donkeys and sometimes by men) or in wheelbarrows. Spindly little boys or sinewy men pushed carts we wouldn’t even entrust to a donkey or horse. Small and big change is earned there every day.

Axel went to see his four students who are off to various US High Schools, beneficiaries of the US government-sponsored YES program. One is going to be living with a family in Alabama that owns the Polka Dot Café, another will be in the far western part of Massachusetts, near North Adams, the third in Maine and the fourth is still waiting for his host family to turn up, someplace in the US.

I missed the send off party because it was too early in the day. Axel received a chappan (the green/blue Karzai coat with the very long skinny sleeves) and then there was much speechifying, regrets from the YES program alumns, things they should have done but didn’t, plenty of good advice and a SOLA cake, as there always is, the good cake from the Iranian bakery near our house.

I was told this morning by our expeditor that it was time to hand in our passports to get a new visa. This is a process that I initiated about 6 weeks ago but it was too late now. We can’t risk having our passports on someone’s desk waiting to be stamped when our departure is less than 48 hours away. We are supposed to arrive back here the day before our visas expire and keep our fingers crossed that the renewal will be a matter of days.