Fell asleep at 10 or so last night, feeling pretty good about how well I'd made it through the day. Took my usual early-trip dose of benadryl to help me sleep through the night, but I woke up probably around 3 AM anyway. Tossed and turned, took some more benadryl, but now it's 4 AM and I am wide the fuck awake. I slept for a significant chunk of the IAD-IST flight, which is a good thing. Maybe I'll just have to accept improved plane sleeping ability as a trade-off for being able to rely on benadryl to ease me through jet lag. So now I'm cranky and pissed off at this computer for sucking -- the brightness controls don't work and this brand-new piece of crap constantly makes the lovely grinding noise of worn-out computers everywhere. It tells me every 10 minutes that I have low disk space on the D (recovery) drive, which is not even the main hard drive so shouldn't matter. I can't change the trackpad settings. Periodically, when I'm typing in a document or a window like this, the cursor just decides to jump up a few rows. I just downloaded f.lux, which is a piece of software that dims and warms your computer monitor at night and it did nothing. Great.
Deep breaths. I'm going to lie back down in a little bit and hopefully get back to sleep. But while I'm up: Yesterday was good, like I said I managed to stay awake pretty well. Did some work in the morning on PE stuff and then in the afternoon I got invited to sit in on a strategy meeting for the Mtn Societies Dev Support Program. It was helpful to listen and observe the dynamics between the management of the Program and of AKF -- MSDSP is a lot less independent than its equivalents in Pakistan or India. I knew that coming in but it's interesting how clear the difference is in practice. The meeting appeared to go well -- the leadership in the room are comfortable with each other and so while there were some serious points of contention and some pretty tough criticism from up top, no one seemed resentful or angry at the end, in fact there was some good-natured joking as everyone filed out of the conference room. Maybe I'm just bad at reading Tajiks.
UPDATE: I uninstalled and updated the graphics adapter and now the brightness adjuster and f.lux work. Mash'allah.
After the meeting was over I met briefly with Yodgor, who's the Foundation CEO over here. He's very nice and clearly on top of his game. Then it was back to the hotel. We got stuck in some traffic so I bailed on the car and walked the last quarter mile or so. It's nice to be in a place where that doesn't feel uncomfortable, although I am definitely conspicuous here with my fair complexion and tweedy jacket. Traffic or not, in Kabul you just have to wait until you're smack-dab next to the gate.
Guess that's enough for now, might try to grab a few more winks but I don't have my hopes up.
Deep breaths. I'm going to lie back down in a little bit and hopefully get back to sleep. But while I'm up: Yesterday was good, like I said I managed to stay awake pretty well. Did some work in the morning on PE stuff and then in the afternoon I got invited to sit in on a strategy meeting for the Mtn Societies Dev Support Program. It was helpful to listen and observe the dynamics between the management of the Program and of AKF -- MSDSP is a lot less independent than its equivalents in Pakistan or India. I knew that coming in but it's interesting how clear the difference is in practice. The meeting appeared to go well -- the leadership in the room are comfortable with each other and so while there were some serious points of contention and some pretty tough criticism from up top, no one seemed resentful or angry at the end, in fact there was some good-natured joking as everyone filed out of the conference room. Maybe I'm just bad at reading Tajiks.
UPDATE: I uninstalled and updated the graphics adapter and now the brightness adjuster and f.lux work. Mash'allah.
After the meeting was over I met briefly with Yodgor, who's the Foundation CEO over here. He's very nice and clearly on top of his game. Then it was back to the hotel. We got stuck in some traffic so I bailed on the car and walked the last quarter mile or so. It's nice to be in a place where that doesn't feel uncomfortable, although I am definitely conspicuous here with my fair complexion and tweedy jacket. Traffic or not, in Kabul you just have to wait until you're smack-dab next to the gate.
Guess that's enough for now, might try to grab a few more winks but I don't have my hopes up.
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