Sylvia's Journal

For days now the Ibis Hotel in Tana has been telling us that Incredible India! is coming to the hotel for a week long of Indian culinary delights for lunch and dinner. Cooks are being flown in with the complements of the Indian Embassy. In addition, huge curved screens (compliments of Samsung)  are set up all over the already very noisy restaurant to get the full benefit of Incredible India! coming to our doorstep.

The restaurant already has the acoustics of an indoor swimming pool. Add to that some mindless guests who put their mobile phones on speaker so everyone can hear their phone partner(s) on the other side of the line. On the days I was really sick I couldn’t stand it, being already in a highly irritable state.  But there’s more: I hate restaurants with large in-your-face TV screens flickering with sports and news, inescapable, no matter where you sit.  The new Samsung screens are curved and also large so that we can all enjoy Incredible India! to the hilt this week. Now, in addition to French sports and news there are Indian skits playing in the east, Bollywood dancing in the west and some other loud thumping Indian (what? why are these thinly-clad and anorexic ladies so European looking?) art style going on in the south of the restaurant, which is, by the way, not very large. It is a cacophony of impressions – something they also claim our palates will get once the food appears. One could get an epileptic fit from this.

Tonight, because of my massage, I arrived later than usual to an already crowded dining room. I had decided that I was going to have palak paneer, something that is on the usual menu but never available. I thought they couldn’t possibly tell me they didn’t have palak paneer on this first night of the India week. I expected a new menu with all my favorite Indian dishes. But no, I was told the start of the India week has been postponed.

I wondered whether that was because the cooks were booked on Air Malagasy (a company notorious for arbitrarily changing not only its departure time but also date, sometimes by days, and not just for domestic flights). Our Board Chairman and his wife had booked themselves, unbeknownst to people who would have counseled them otherwise, on an Air Malagasy wide body from Paris. They should have arrived on Friday or Saturday but are still not here. Maybe they are twiddling their thumbs with the Indian cooks at CDG airport.

I have been taking my medicines faithfully but the progress is slow. I skyped with Axel the other night, that is, he talked and I wrote since I was not able to talk yet. It was better than no contact at all, but awkward as our words and questions where always out of alignment.

On Saturday I decided to join our (MSH) Board that is on a visit to Madagascar and South Africa – it is a coincidence that their itinerary overlaps for a good deal with mine, both here and in South Africa — in fact we are travelling there together on Wednesday. Since I am (at least structurally) a-midlevel-on-the-periphery-MSH-employee, I never have unfettered access to the Board, so this was interesting. I accepted the invitation to join a couple of Board members and one old time colleague for dinner even though I was still in whisper mode. The fact that it was a small group (only four of us in total) was compelling, as whispering is easier that way.

We went to a small Alsatian restaurant that served raclette, imagine that, in the hard of Tana: cornichons, small potatoes, thinly sliced zebu and other charcuterie and raclette cheese melting on a stand in the middle of the table, and all this accompanied by a nice Chilean wine. One of our Board members is from Chile and we complemented her on her country’s great wines. Other than some rum in my daily grog, I haven’t had any alcohol, so the glass of wine was a real treat; in fact the whole evening was a nice treat, and we didn’t talk all that much about MSH.

I was invited to join another party of Board members (they split into smaller groups for activities and meals when going out) on Sunday, today, to see the Lemurs in a nearby park and then the Kings Palace, a UNESCO heritage site. Although I wasn’t quite fully recovered I decided I needed a break from being in my small hotel room and working all the time. So I went.

As it turned out I was the only French speaker in the group and could make myself useful to serve as an interpreter as well; I was able to talk, still croaking, but beyond the whisper stage. Still I have these occasional throat tickles that turn into major coughing spasms that take about 10 minutes to pass – leaving everyone worried and concerned. The attention makes it worse of course, there is nothing one can do other than letting the spasms recede. This was my third major coughing fit, the first in the middle of my in-briefing at USAID, the second in the office and now this one in the car. I am so done with this coughing.

On the way home I had myself dropped off at my hotel and was able to secure a massage slot right away. That was a nice ending of the day – although it is not quite over. That’s the next post.