Sylvia's Journal

We have become creatures of habit here. After our usual Friday chili omelet the driver and guard came to pick me up for my Friday massage. ‘Message’ they call it (while many Afghans spell message as ‘massage’). Lisa cut my hair, very short, more or less according to something she had seen in a magazine. The haircut should last me for a good while.

After the haircut came the massage, by Lisa’s trainee, 20 year old A. who is starting to get the hang of it. She is the same girl who peeled some skin of Janneke’s middle toe some months ago that saw us rushing to the clinic with unstoppable bleeding. Janneke got a professional bandage and a tetanus shot. I trust A. with the massage but not with a pedicure.

Andreas came by on the way to the airport to go over the various forms, checklists and reports that should help us make sure the hospital continues with the triage in the outpatient department and start the one in the emergency ward. The challenge is to keep the staff from dropping the effort now that the consultant has left.

We fear that if they stop now and lose the momentum we will never get to the vision they drew a week ago. But maybe that wasn’t their vision, just what they thought was the vision we wanted, politely pleasing of the foreigners.

Although the refrigerator was full of food we cooked a Thai/Indonesian meal, a slightly modified Pad Thai and Tahu Goreng with the tofu we picked up at the Korean restaurant last week and the bean sprouts that have been sprouting for the last 5 days and were about to turn brown.

We called our tax lawyer in DC to get some advice on filing taxes and what to do and where to hang out after we leave Afghanistan. We will owe a considerable amount of money to the IRS if we go straight home and so the idea of hanging out in Holland for awhile may not be a bad idea.