Sylvia's Journal

We left our lovely Delhi ‘boutique’ hotel early in the morning. We learned from one of the managers that the hotel is actually owned by an Indian OB/GYN and his Indonesian wife. All the exquisite art work, fabrics, paintings and photographs turned out to be from Bali. They also own a series of shops that sell beautiful home decoration fabrics. It will be our favorite place in Delhi whenever we come back again.

Moving through Delhi Airport was a breeze this time. Our entire brief experience of Incredible !ndia was nothing like those first few hours in helly Delhi on January 4. We will come back when the next leave comes up.

We flew back with 20 Afghan young men who are employed in the civil aviation sector. They returned from a two-week training in Singapore on aviation management. We sat next to one of them, a young traffic controller who, in my view, made a much better career choice than all those people who want to become a doctor. He had received an FAA scholarship to finetune his training in Oklahoma City and then got to go to Singapore.

He is another one of those Afghans who grew up in a refugee camp, learned Urdu, Hindi and English in the process and opted for a technical training rather than the highly overrated medical education.

As one of only two Afghan traffic controllers, more are being trained right now, he is employed by both the Afghan government and ISAF (Kabul airspace is being controlled by ISAF at this time). His future looks very bright, a lot brighter than many of the newly graduated docs.

We flew over the magnificent snow covered Hindukush mountains. So far Kabul has remained without snow; an unusual situation this deep into winter.

Back at our house we found the dining room and bathroom of our house pleasantly warmed by the two bucharis we still trust (the other three are now permanently off after the two misfirings that covered the house in black soot).
The rest of the house was exactly what you would expect of cement in zero 5 degrees.

We unpacked, distributed the goodies we brought back across the house and to the guards and then enjoyed the meal left by our cook. I had given him a German cooking show DVD dubbed in Persian. Tonight’s meal showed that this had been a good move.

And then we caught up on the news which we had ignored during our trip to both Holland and India. We noticed that things had shifted: Ivory Coast had made way for Tunisia as the news star. I was once again reminded of the saying, “everything will work out in the end. If it hasn’t worked out it is because you haven’t come to the end yet.” That was certainly true for our trip which started so poorly. It will work out that way for Tunisia too.

We are not celebrating MLK day here in Afghanistan (in spite of his message being very appropriate for this place) and so tomorrow I will be back at work. First order of business is getting our new visa for Afghanistan; the old one expires tomorrow. The immigration officer noticed that we got in just in time.