Sylvia's Journal

I came home late, 11 hours after arriving at work, tired and hungry. I found a plastic bag with melting ice cream, two half frozen steaks and a roll of thawing minced meat outside our door. Our refrigerator went to the repair shop – it would only cool correctly if you pushed the door up with your foot before closing it. This I forgot to do 9 out of 10 times. And so they took the refrigerator away after taking everything out.

The temperature in our unheated kitchen is about the same as inside the refrigerator, and so keeping the food out is not a problem at the moment. But it is no longer freezing outside and this did pose a problem for the contents of the freezer. It was my Dutch mentality of never wasting anything, plus being cold, hungry and tired and in great need of comfort that led me to eat the remaining pint or so of mango vanilla ice cream before I had even taken my coat off. There was no time to lose.

Only after that, and some not so nice remarks back and forth about who was to blame for the thawing goods, that we had our pre-dinner drinks with the last of the (also thawing) ice cubes. Every end of day is one day closer to our departure date on March 25 to Sikkim.

At work some of us put the final touches on various Women’s Day Celebrations. M. will do a powerpoint presentation about her stay in Egypt, there will be presents given by the men to the women (though the women bought the gifts), some speeches and I will read my poem in Dari while S. will read the English part. We rehearsed our parts in each other’s language. It will be far from perfect but good enough we hope.

Many people tinkered with the Dari that my teacher and I so carefully crafted yesterday. There were typos and the few men I let in on my secret made corrections that were then corrected again by the next one. I can see why we are having so much trouble with getting agreement on translations of some of our leadership materials.

In the afternoon several of us (health) implementing partners went to hear about the US civilian assistance to Afghanistan version 2.0 and the implications for our work. It is all about migration and transfer, those are the critical words that will have to figure prominently in the paperwork we will need to submit by next month to make the extension of several of our projects official.