Sylvia's Journal

We are back in Kabul after a very bumpy ride over India’s northern plains where pre-monsoon disturbances pushed our plane like a little toy across the skies.

As luck would have it, my seat neighbor was an Afghan doctor who used to be a very senior government official two (health) administrations ago. He told me he has just published a book about organizational behavior (in the local language) – I couldn’t quite believe my ears. He is heavily into organizational behavior and emotional intelligence. This may not sound so surprising in the US but here such champions are rare.

I told my neighbor that I have been toying with the idea of doing a series of sessions about emotional intelligence as I have witnessed several occasions recently where this intelligence was clearly missing. He offered to do the sessions with me. This perked me right up.

We found our visiting consultant Ankie at our house. We should have preceded her arrival but our hospital adventure reversed our arrival times. It is her fifth time here and her fourth with us – she classifies as our most regular visitor. She knows what we like and what we miss and brought licorice and cheese; we gave her a packet of Darjeeling tea in return.

After warm Delhi the cold weather in Kabul surprised us. I reinserted the mattress heating pads which I had already put away when we were fooled into thinking that spring was actually summer. It is not, I had forgotten about that.

We are now at a summer schedule in our office which means the car comes to pick me up at 6:45 AM (it also means our workday ends at 3:30).