Sylvia's Journal

I had until yesterday always associated Vertigo with Hitchcock but from now on it will be associated with my four day trip to deliver a presentation at a conference in Washington that nearly didn’t happen and 5 hours in the emergency room of George Washington University Hospital.

The vertigo had started small, brief episodes before I got off the plane on Saturday morning, a few more that day, a few more on Sunday, all short and fleeting. But then, at the end of the morning session of the big conference that celebrated the end of the project I have been working on for all these years, the episode did not stop. I became like a drunk: unable to walk with the room spinning around me and then my stomach started to heave. Two colleagues got me to the bathroom, just in time; after that I had to have a plastic bag/waste basket next to me at all time.

For a while it was touch-and-go: will she present, will she not. My colleagues were ready to whisk me away to the emergency room but I resisted. After all I had travelled 36 hours to make that presentation. In the end the presentation became a team effort: the Afghan representative of the ministry of health and one of my Boston based colleagues prepared themselves for taking over. We ended up each doing a piece. We took longer than planned, there were fewer people than we had expected and there were essentially no questions but we delivered the message that some good stuff is happening in Afghanistan.

And then I was taken to the hospital where I had a cat scan (everything OK), blood tests (everything OK), and EKG (OK) and the final conclusion, luckily, of benign locational vertigo. A little after 10 PM I was sent home with antivertigo medicine and the OK from the doctor to board the plane to Dubai tonight. My colleagues wanted to keep me in DC, in a Holiday Inn near the office but that was not at all in my plans. I am happy to go home; a home that I learned just now had been bombed again and had a plane crash. Vertigo seems like a minor irritation in comparison.

Full with the joy of seeing friends and colleagues who I have worked with for many years, decades in some case; of seeing colleagues from Nepal. We started something there in 2006 and it is still going strong – leaders are popping up everywhere.

Full of pride in seeing Flore from Cote d’Ivoire. She was an administrative assistant, underemployed like Marzila in Kabul. I convinced the rest of her male team that we needed women on the facilitator team. Some protested (I have heard this too often: she is too young, the older men won’t accept her in an authority role). But they did and now she is here in Washington for the first time in her life. We hugged. I could have cried.

I could have cried and was filled with sadness upon hearing about the earthquake from my Haitian colleagues, the sadness of Sandra who lost her husband, her life partner, her best friend. Many are still living in tents, afraid to enter even their undamaged home. It takes courage they say. For now it is too scary, because of the continuing and unexpected aftershocks. The earth, it seems, is not done yet. What a frightening thought.

Full of the stuffiness that comes from being in a windowless hotel basement room for an entire day watching rehearsals of powerpoint presentations and doing my own.

Too full with stories to be able to stick to the 30 minutes allowed (but how does one tell about Afghanistan in 30 minutes?).

A city full of beaming students and their parents as they walk, some in their graduation gowns, others with just the tassled hat on, or simply carrying the thing in a plastic bag) on their way to the enormous GWU graduation set-up in the middle of the Mall.

Meals full of calories but so very yummy.

Full of energy after a good night. Now it is morning here in DC and evening in Kabul. The real reason for why I am here starts today. Rehearsal time is over. Curtain opens in a couple of hours.

Full of pearls; wearing my mother’s and grandmother’s pearls for the occasion. I so rarely dress up these days. This seemed like a good time.

Full of gladness that I am not leaving for Dubai tonight.

For 16 hours I was high up in the sky, oblivious to the worries of the world, ensconced in my business class pod. Things turned out all right and it was my lucky day after all. I fell asleep, which is very easy to do in the pod because the seat flattens entirely, as soon as we were up in the air and woke up as we approached the North American coast. Sixteen hours in that business class pod is easy flying; I could have gone on for another 16 hours. But in coach it is an endless trip, I have done it too.

I entered the US with a simple swipe of my passport in a kiosk. I got my clearance for the Global Entry System just when my continuous travel stopped, last winter. It’s very satisfying to bypass the long lines. The swift entry and not having any checked luggage, made it possible to catch the plane to DC that left 25 minutes after I exited the plane that had taken me from Dubai.

I was taken to a very fancy hotel, Monaco, which is located straight across the National Portrait Gallery. I learned that the hotel used to be the Tariff Building and was the first significant federal building constructed after the US Capitol and the White House. The design is based on an Italian Renaissance Palazzo. I feel kind of royal, first the B-class and now this. I am travelling in style.

I threw myself Washington like a true tourist, starting with a walk down to the Mall. I chose my lunch spot carefully: in the National Gallery’s statue garden. I had it with a glass of white wine in a plastic cup, just like that, in the open, while watching a steady stream of obese tourists waddle by and trying to look at the exposed flesh with the eyes of an Afghan and I marvel about this place where everything is possible that is so frowned upon back home.

I visited the National Gallery and then made a brief pilgrimage to see Amelia’s shiny red Lockheed Vega in the overcrowded Air & Space Museum. I had watched the movie about her on the plane and felt compelled to pay my respect.

On my way back to the hotel I passed by the Canadian embassy, marvelling again at the absence of any visible form of protection, except for some low fences one could jump over in a second. It made me want to scream at all the warmongers in Afghanistan, ‘don’t you see what you could get, how lovely and peaceful Afghanistan could be if you could just stop worrying about your own wellbeing and interest and start looking after the good of the country?’

Back at the hotel I ‘rested my eyes’ as Axel calls it until the phone brought me back from a bottomless sleep. Kathy from the reception rang to tell me the provincial health director of Bamiyan Province had showed up. He has been all over the US on a trip paid for by the State Department and we were able to keep him here three more days to participate in our conference. I am paying his bill, hence the call.

I am happy about his presence at the conference on Monday. It will keep me honest. When people ask me about ‘country-owned’ and ‘government-led’ I can call on him.

It also meant that I had an Afghan dinner date and the food was going to be Afghan. Our Sikh taxi driver took us far outside the city; I was ready to turn back and then there it was, a place along a major road, strip mall style. I don’t think I would have ever gone in by myself as it didn’t look very attractive on the outside. It was Afghan all right, very Afghan. A wedding was going on inside. It is as if I was back in Kabul except the men and women mingled freely and most women were not covering themselves as they would in the home country.

The food and the service was excellent and stood in some contrast to the rather run down surrounding. I could tell that my Afghan friend was enjoying the food he has missed for 3 weeks. I watched him observe with curiosity his Americanized country men and women as he ate his warm Afghan naan, sipped his green tea and dug into his qabuli rice. It was royal treatment of a different kind.