Almost done for now

It’s been an interesting and frustrating day, I have to say. I had a meeting with a local NGO here, and found out that G-man has completely botched part of this project, so now we need to figure out ways to address it. Some of you probably already know this about me, but while I’m certainly happy to offer help when it’s needed and all of that stuff, I hate it when it suddenly becomes my job to clean up someone else’s mistakes. Particularly when the person in question will never, ever, in a million years, admit to a mistake. It will be anyone’s fault, including mine, my supervisor’s, and probably even my mother’s (sorry, Mom), before it will be his fault. I’m not a big fan of having to suck up to someone just because they feel entitled to it, so all this bowing and scraping is a little tough for me. I am, however, doing my best to suck it up and get over it. It’s all part of the job, blah, blah, blah. Besides, he’s officially gone from the position, so my dealings with him beyond tomorrow are likely to be about nil. I just hope that his replacement is more worried about actually doing his job than just trying to make it seem as though he’s doing his job.

After running around and scrambling to get things in order, I finally heard from the guy in Bangladesh today. It looks like my trip is definitely on, so that’s very good news. Now I just have to figure out the logistics of it. If you want to get your visa on arrival in Bangladesh, apparently you have to have tons and tons of paperwork, as well as $500. Not five hundred of whatever the currency is in Bangladesh. Five hundred dollars. To say that such a thing seems excessive to me is an understatement. I mean, $500 can probably pay the annual salary of a rural civil servant. So maybe my poor planning is helping to better serve rural areas of Bangladesh.

Let’s not bet on that.

I’m hoping that there’s a Bangladeshi consulate in Ho Chi Minh City, otherwise I don’t know quite what I’m going to do. But hey – all their paperwork says that the rules may change from time to time. Maybe they’ll let me haggle for my visa. Hmm…well, I’m bad at haggling anyway, so let’s hope not.

Hamid and I had a good and productive morning, however. We picked up my ticket to Vietnam and I picked up my coat at the tailor. I have to say, I think they did a really nice job. I also have to say that I was not looking forward to trying on my nice wool coat today. It’s been over 100 degrees for the last few days, and when I get home and turn on the air conditioner, I can’t tell if the noise I hear is the air conditioner laughing at me for expecting it to be able to make a difference, or if it’s the air conditioner crying in pain, because it’s facing an impossible task. If it could just stay on the whole time, that would probably be okay because the apartment feels much cooler on Sundays when I keep the a/c on from the time I get home on Saturday evening. However, the houseboy turns it off on the mornings that I go to work, so it has to start all over when I get home Monday through Saturday. If Sisyphus were an air conditioner...

I leave for Vietnam tomorrow – my visa letter still says “Mr. Amanda Goebel”, but I’ve been told that’s unimportant. I mostly just want to get to Vietnam and get settled into being there. It’s not that I think it’s necessarily going to be any simpler to work there than is has been to work here, but for me it might be easier to live there than here. We’ll see. In any event, the project here has been so frustrating lately that I think a breather will do me good.

I’ve told Hamid that, one day, I would like for him to take me around to take pictures of Karachi. I spend so much of my time being shuttled from one place to another that it’s been difficult to capture any of the images that make up my day. I’m going to have to set out one day with a few rolls of film and photograph some of the parts of the city with which I’ve become familiar. One thing that still strikes me as very odd is the selection of American pop culture establishments that are available here. We have McDonald’s (although, who doesn’t at this point?), Subway, Pizza Hut, Dunkin’ Donuts, KFC, etc. There’s a KFC billboard on Sharae Faisal that shows a woman wandering in the desert, looking lost and in despair, only to be greeted in the next frame by a KFC delivery guy who has just parachuted in to rescue her with a bucket of Extra Crispy. If that was what someone decided to give me if I was wandering in the desert, I don’t think I’d look quite as happy as she does. Even if I weren’t vegetarian. There are many other, and much better things for the US to be exporting around the world, why must we scrape the bottom of the culinary barrel? C’mon now – really…

By far the funniest thing I’ve seen is the Pakistani version of those Dove shampoo commercials that show women giving “real life testimonies” about how fantastic Dove shampoo is for their hair. Well, one of the women talking about the fabulousness of the shampoo is wearing a hejab. A hejab is a traditional Muslim women’s headscarf, meaning that you can’t see a single hair on her head. She could be bald under there, for all we know, and she’s in a shampoo commercial. Love it.