*gasp*

So, who wants to take a guess as to what the most frightening sound I’ve heard since I’ve been here has been? No, no, it’s not gunshots or bombs – although if I’d ever heard either of those things here, they’d top the list. But the closest I’ve come to that was a tire blowout on Sharae Faisal, which made me jump, but isn’t quite the same thing. The scariest sound came last night at about 9:30…the sound of my air conditioner dying. Just…dying. Since I’m not an HVAC expert, I was powerless to resuscitate it, I just turned all the ceiling fans to 11 and tried to go to sleep. I’m going to inform the very nice gentleman who owns the house (and is the Executive Director of the company where I’m working) about this today and hope that he can get someone over to fix it, ins’Allah (I have totally misspelled that, just in case you were wondering – it’s pronounced “in-sha-la”.)

Ins’Allah is, as my mother has said, the great Pakistani escape clause. Whenever someone says that they are going to do something or that something is going to happen, they always say “ins’Allah”, which means “if it is God’s will”. Well, that’s a lovely saying, but the upshot is that, if whatever they said would happen doesn’t happen, or whatever they said they’d do doesn’t get done, then there’s really no one to blame for it, because it obviously wasn’t God’s will. So if your driver doesn’t turn up because he overslept, or if that addition to your house doesn’t get built on time because your crew was working at 50% speed…well, that’s obviously God’s will. What can you do about it?

One other thing that I have clearly noticed here is how accommodating and hospitable Pakistani people are – it’s something ingrained in their culture. The only down side of this is that people will always tell you that something is no problem, no trouble at all, even when it’s quite clear that it actually is problematic or troublesome, if not both. Any attempts I have made to give people a sincerely-offered out in such situations (“if it’s any problem at all, I can easily reschedule – I’m happy to make myself available whenever you’re free, etc.”), have always been met with “oh no, Amanda, it’s really no problem”. I’m starting to get a complex about asking people to do anything. Of course, someone saying that something is “no problem” doesn’t always mean it’s going to happen, but people really will go far out of their way to accommodate you. Ins’Allah…

It looks as though my schedule for Vietnam is going to be as follows. I’ll leave here next week, I may have to stop in Bangkok for a day or two to sort out my visa if I can’t get it on arrival in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon), then it’s going to be a few days in the field, followed by a return to Ho Chi Minh City for the remainder of my time there, as I work out cost estimates for our resettlement and poverty impact assessment baseline surveys. Then I return to Pakistan, and as far as I know, the plan is still for me to leave here on July 20th, as scheduled. I will be stopping in the UK for about a week to spend some time with family and decompress a little, then it’s back to DC! I have a feeling that it’s going to fly by.

I don’t know if they’ll want me to stay in Pakistan longer – it’s not my first choice (understatement), but with G-man gone, it doesn’t seem like as bad a prospect as it did before. Of course, with him gone, and with him having no interest in handing over the project to someone to make sure it doesn’t fall flat, things may grind to a halt for a little bit. I imagine that we’ll take the blame for that, but what can you do? I’m just going to try to document everything, and get ready to go to VIETNAM!!!

Have I mentioned that I’m excited about this yet?

Because I am.