Sylvia's Journal

With the temperature hovering around zero Celsius the rain sometimes turned into snow and sometimes the snow turned into rain. The result of all this was muck, especially in the places where the culverts and drainage arrangements have not quite been finished by the various road building contractors who have been remodeling our main drag, Darulaman, since I arrived here in September 2009.

It seems a fitting metaphor for the continuation of Obama’s Wars as reported by the latest issue of Rolling Stones. [King David’s War by Michael Hastings, February 2, 2011] Combined with Dexter Filkin’s recent story on the Great Kabul Bank Heist in the New Yorker it makes it hard to keep my usual optimism about the direction in which things are going here.

We watched, now a nightly ritual, how Egypt has fared after another day of rage/revolution. To our great surprise, we saw my Egyptian colleague in the crowd, speaking into a BBC microphone. He is the one who should have been guiding us around Egypt now during the study visit that was canceled last week. Our tickets were changed to February 12 but I don’t think Egypt is quite ready to receive us.