Thursday, July 31, 2008

Memorial services

I have just come back from my second memorial prayer meeting this week. The first was for the father of an Afghan colleague who died young - bad enough. This morning's was for the 21-year-old uncle of another Afghan colleague who was shot dead by his debtors in Pakistan. It can be tough in this society.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Monitoring the monitoring

"After discussing the challenges and obstacles of sector monitoring it was agreed that the monitoring team should be re-established and instructed to monitor the development projects of the sector and prepare the monitoring report as soon as possible." - anonymous Community Development Specialist in Province X, Afghanistan

Monday, July 7, 2008

We're OK

There was an explostion at the Ministry of Interior in Kabul today that shook our house and broke some eggs but Ms S. and I are OK.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Over the top cuteness

Ms S. gave the Kids a bath the other day. I thought cats hated baths - in fact I think I remember once a long time ago after Bentley went up the chimney it took Mom, Dad and me a lot of struggle and I think some actual bleeding to get him presentable again. But our darlings seem to like it.



Fernando dries off



Angelica dries off



We are starting to question their initial gender assignments. No, it's not obvious with kittens. I read something about it at the Wikipedia 'kitten' page) but it was too technical and personal for me. I'm reassured that I used to live and work with an obstetrician-gynaecologist in Liberia who incorrectly identified the gender of our adult cat, 'Bravo Zero'.) Ms S. and I both claim we can identify cats' genders by their faces but I don't think we've done a scientific test. I understand that ginger cats are normally male but we call our ginger cat 'Angelica'. The tabby is 'Fernando'. (This site says three out of four ginger cats are male and tortoiseshell cats are 200:1 female.) Our tortoiseshell is going to remain 'Fernando', even if he his own kittens. And Angelica will remain Angelica even if she turns into a radical Talib.