Sylvia's Journal

It was a slow and tedious day – the kind of day when you look constantly at your watch and find little movement “What, only 5 minutes have passed since I last looked at the clock?” This is hospital time – as I remember from four years ago – crawling through the night watching every minute taking its sweet time to complete the circle, then dozing off and, when awake again, noticing that only 2 minutes have passed and wondering whether it will ever get morning.

In Dutch we have a saying that the last pieces of lead are the heaviest (the laatste loodjes wegen het zwaarst). These last weeks are hard because in my mind I am already home. The discrepancy between where I want to be and where I am makes me irritable, testy and impatient. I was so with my boss in our senior staff meeting this morning. I apologized afterwards to him and felt embarrassed – I had for a moment lost my mind.

In the leadership workshop we have one facilitator who is losing his voice and another who stayed home with a migraine headache. I didn’t feel so great myself – very sleepy and with a headache. Maybe this is normal for people who are fasting. I broke off small pieces from a Cliff bar, rolling them between my fingers into small pea-size chunks that I can pop into my mouth unobtrusively, much like I used to do with small pieces of licorice in class when the teacher wasn’t watching. But I can’t do that with water and the thirst is the worst.

Day three of the four-day event has passed. We really should be taking more time with these half days but every attempt I have made suggesting that we finish next week are met with a stream of arguments that we can finish the workshop tomorrow. We appear to be zigzagging a bit through the curriculum and I am suspecting it has something to do with wanting to finish tomorrow.

The ride back to the office these day is a killer, between the heat, the traffic jams, the fumes, and irritable and impatient people wanting to get to their homes for a nap. We were stuck for a longtime in gridlock at a cross roads where everyone goes in every direction. The powerless policeman in the middle tried his best to be effective and preserve his dignity but he could do nothing to stop the train of large armored SUVs with tinted windows and no number plates of plowing ahead through the gridlock. Honking loudly, and with grim looking big men with as large a gun as one could put inside a car, they managed to open the road by sheer force.

They came from the direction of the presidential palace and a number of government offices that let out right after noon – a little before the official end of the day for government workers during Ramadan. If you have a mighty car and armed men you don’t have to follow the rules. I was waiting for an accident to happen (it didn’t) as pedestrians ducked and dove through the traffic as if there was no tomorrow – there might not have been one. It is the burqa’ed women, the crippled and old men and the small children I worry about. It was pure luck that no one got hurt this time.