Sunday March 11

Slept fitfully until 3:30 then finally got up, showered, and took my laptop and books to a patio behind our apartment. Its cold, I can see my breath, and it is raining a little. I am beginning to think that cold tolerance is one of my thyroid symptoms (this turned out to be true). It just doesn’t bother me.

I have been thinking a lot about Nepal. It has been exactly 10 years as evidenced by having to get my passport renewed. I left Nepal feeling that I needed to get something that poor Asians could use. And here I am, invited to a country I have cared about for a while to share the things I have spent 10 years learning. But it is too short a stay to offer the holistic package I’ve wanted to bring. I think Afghanistan would be a great place for us if it wasn’t for all the fighting. It makes me think Pakistan might work out well for us.

Its 5 am and I can hear the call to prayer through the renewed light rain. Actually, that doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all.
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We watched NCAA basketball during breakfast. The time zone has advantages. Our main contact, Dan, here is a Wisconsin fan so I doubt I will be missing any big games.

Security seems to be really good in Kabul. Apparently there are some streets people keep off, but otherwise it’s really pretty safe. Most of the USAID folks don’t even wear their body armor or helmet when in transit (not me though…I’m all about my body armor when advised).

Today is a work day but the class doesn’t start until tomorrow. We had a meeting about the
Kajakai project and spent much of the morning talking about it and chasing data. It is a pretty cool project that was supposed to be built in ’79 before the Soviets invaded. Then we spent some time working on our lectures as we waited for several hours for our contact who supposedly printed out the student notes…nope. We spent the afternoon preparing the binders of notes for the students rather than prepping the lectures themselves. It was pretty stressful. At one point I had broken all three copiers owned by the Corps and USAID.

We worked a solid 12 hour day today. It seems fairly common around here, but it was rough given the jet lag and three nights of rocky sleep. It has been a rough time to give up soda for lent. It is free and I could use it. But I face my jet lag unmedicated and feel oddly heroic for it. Once in a while I use the cravings to meditate on the darkness of my unregenerate life and the longing for Jesus to make things right in the world and in my heart.

I think that this kind of work attracts odd people. Three separate discussions over meals today were about a friend made in Afghanistan who got divorced. I find some of them a little abrasive.

It’s been raining today in Kabul. It’s nice, but as Bilbo would say ‘I want to see the mountains again.”

My body armor makes it difficult to get in and out of vehicles. I kind of have to awkwardly roll out of my seat. It made me admire my pregnant wife.

The USAID house is empty. Part of me is sad. It would have been interesting to hang out with the notoriously bohemian crew. Part of me is relived to just lay here in my bed without social pressure to interact with high energy do gooders (and I do mean do gooders in the most bureaucratic sense possible).

I found out today that the embassy stocks a hard liquor store. I thought it was illegal to consume alcohol here but apparently it only is if you get your paycheck from the Department of Defense. I expressed my surprise to Dan who replied “USAID folks couldn’t do what they do without several drinks every night.”

The embassy café was selling candy bars made in Iran. This was strangely hysterical to those of us at dinner.

I seem to be listing random 1-3 sentence thoughts rather than journaling. I’ll blame the 12 hour jet lag

It has started to ever so slightly snow.

Tuesday March 21

We got up at 6:50 and were waiting at our gate at 7:55 for our ride to AID. It wasn’t exactly where I wanted to spend my day, but I did want to get out of the compound and they were paying me, so I thought I’d spend the morning working there. At 8:10 we called the motor pool. After a series of calls the conclusion was that no cars were rolling today, even the one mile between AID and our compound. Nothing new had happened. It seemed like just an arbitrary decision. John said they might have gotten new intelligence. So today I have been counting sand (nearly a whole layer by lunch time), working on my paper and reading journal articles. I even took an hour to read about the History of the Middle East in the sun. It’s like 70. I just got to gunpowder in the book. The Ottomans adopted it but the Persians and Egyptians saw the use of guns as undignified and cowardly…so they got their butts kicked. The Ottomans took over Egypt, but the Persians hired a bunch of Europeans and developed better handguns and ballistics strategy than the Ottomans. Also, the Ottomans were mainly Turkey and Iraq and the Persians were Iran and Parts of the Stans. I guess I am beginning to see where some of the modern rivalries are coming from. I also found the Mongols really interesting.

It is hard to write a journal on days that I am stuck in the compound. I ate, I worked, I took a 20 minute nap after lunch. I thought about my wife and missed her.
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I made it all the way through the paper I am updating for sedimentology. It seems there is a fine line between accepted requiring changes and rejected but highly recommended to resubmit…but it is an emotionally charged distinction. I am still rejected until I resubmit (editorial note…this paper was eventually accepted). I have rewritten like 70% of the text, and I think it is a lot better. Plus, a lot of the bed form literature they wanted me to read, I needed to write my next proposal. So it was a double benefit.

We went to the gym at today. It was packed. I couldn’t even get a treadmill. I settled for 10 minutes elliptical and 10 minutes stair climber. It was a pretty good workout. I also was able to do the incline press without incident on a low weight. I was feeling bold and wondering just how ‘better’ my shoulder might be. That used to be the worst exercise for it. Well it appears that I am quite a bit better, which is surprising b/c I thought it was degenerative. I’m pretty thankful. Between my meds and my shoulder, I’m feeling like a 25 year old.

I’ve had another take on Lent and the ubiquitous forbidden soda. I think lent is like fasting in that Protestants are confused about why to do it. I know I am. So my latest reflection when I choose not to have a soda is the simple admission that I can’t have everything I want. I think this might be a pretty powerful application of the season. I have heard people talk about fasting this way and about how fasting leads to lower rates of affair. Particularly in our culture, where I can have pretty much anything I want, it is good to practice mild depravation and train yourself to say no…so when the thing you want leads to moral failure you’ve had a little practice. So today, when I reach for my juice box, I tell myself, “You are not the master of your soul. You can’t have everything you want.”

I worked pretty hard until around 8:00 then I started writing. I started the other story, the one about the guy who wakes up each day to a life formed by different choices. I had trouble sleeping, so I wrote like 6 pages. I feel like its kind of waste of time, but I’m really enjoying it. I find that I will pump out a couple of good paragraphs that are separated in time, and then string them together with some pretty mundane and mechanical text. I kind of wonder if they are any good.

I felt like watching a movie, so I went to see what the PX had for sale. They had nothing I was interested in, but I did find the new Switchfoot CD for $12. So I got it. It’s pretty good. I think they are about my age and it seems like they are going through about the same thing. In fact, earlier in the day I had written one of those ‘poems’ I write where the sentences are too long for it to actually be a poem but to short and disconnected to be an essay. I felt like one of the songs on the CD echoed some of the same themes and even used a similar phrase.

This morning the cars were going to AID so I decided to go in for half the day. When I got here they were able to give me my own cubicle, I put Cam’s cool earphones on and disappeared into a world of productivity. I started by going through the comments on my paper and marking the ones I hadn’t dealt with yet. One of the comments directed me to do some additional computations, so I spent much of the rest of the day doing those. It was really frustrating for a while since my hand calcs didn’t agree with RAS, but I think I’m getting close.

I was invited to go out to a Croatian restaurant tonight. It was tempting, but it against the rules to go off compound, so I declined. This compound business is a little restrictive. I’d like to come some time not with the government.

I am planning on trying to run here on the AID compound. It is a beautiful day, They have a road all the way around that might be a fifth of a mile and the mountains are visible in all directions. I’m a little light on the other things to say. My day is really summarized in the table.

Tomorrow is the Bazar and the official day off. I think we are eating steaks.

I finished one of my stories tonight. It is about a guy who feels trapped in his life and marriage who begins waking up each new day in a life that was the result of different choices made. He sees that his discontent and emotional barriers submarine every permutation of his existence and he starts to shed them. Along the way he ends up reading part of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot ends up to be a symbol of his unconscious quest for innocence and righteousness and, in the end, a symbol of the difficulty of both. I expected it to be a much longer story, but after the 4th day I couldn’t seem to write anything that wasn’t anti-climactic. I may go in and add intermediate days, but my current final day has to be the end of the story.