And the Countdown Rolls On...

I’m going to see my friends Faruq and Samina tonight, which should be fun – they’re the furniture designers, and they’re lovely people. Tomorrow night, Lois and I will be hanging out one last time, and then I’m debating whether or not it’s worth it for me to try to sleep for a few hours before heading to the airport at 3 am. It probably is, but that will also depend on how close I am to having everything 100% packed up. I’m actually not doing too badly at the moment, it’s just a few last things that need doing – like finding another luggage lock. I’ve also been making a point of taking more pictures. I went to my dad’s hospital the other day – that place is huge. I hope I took pictures of the right part, because I know he told me something about it being built in phases. Well, we shall find out, I suppose. But really – well done, Dad!

I was all set to be snippy with the house staff for the whole gossiping thing, but I found that when I got here, I just couldn’t. Whether or not it was ill-intended is kind of beside the point. It’s just the culture here, so while I thought it was unkind and invasive, my perspective on this is completely colored by my upbringing, my experiences, and my culture – and it’s the same for them. It’s also one of the main reasons why I don’t know if I could continue to work in a country like this, certainly not without substantially more in-person support than I’ve had here. I have met some wonderful, kind men in Pakistan, but I have also met guys like G-man, and I just don’t know that I want to voluntarily return to a culture where a lot of men feel entitled to women – to their space, their bodies, their lives. And where being a foreign woman makes them all the more likely to do it, contrary to the popularly-held opinion that foreign women are treated with kid gloves. Although most local women, particularly in poor communities, absolutely have it worse, I can’t say that I have the most positive impression about how women are treated here in general. Again, not every man here is like that – but I’ve run across enough who are to make me feel as though coming back here would be making it harder on me than it needed to be. And as much as men here have told me that the type of behavior exhibited by G-man is very un-Islamic, which it absolutely is, that doesn’t mean that some men here don’t indulge in it without a second thought. Don’t get me wrong – plenty of guys in the US behave that way as well, but it feels more accepted here – or at least that people are more willing to turn a blind eye.

I don’t know why they’re doing it, but some guy is walking through the office with an aerosol can, spraying some wretched, sweet-smelling substance that’s making me sneeze. Kind of like if they made Right Guard a candy and put it in spray form. It’s also making me not want to inhale too deeply, because the pollution here is bad enough outside, I want to give my lungs a break at some point!

My shoulder is starting to feel a lot better, so that’s good – just in time for me to hurt it wrestling with my baggage again! I’m actually not sore from my marathon swimming session yesterday, which is exciting. I realize that for people who actually swim on a regular basis, 20 laps can hardly be considered a marathon, so it’s a relative term. For me, the best I had done at one time was 15 laps, which was six weeks ago, and I’ve been swimming all of two times in the interim! I’m still harboring the dream of doing a triathlon one day, and I figure that my training should involve me being able to comfortably do at least double the racing distance in each event, that way the race itself might not kill me – or make me wish that it would. I suspect running is still going to be the hardest part for me, as I’ve quite taken to swimming, and I know that I ride far longer than a sprint-distance triathlon bike distance in spinning class. I’ll start with a sprint distance and see how I do – although I still maintain that people who do an Iron Man are crackheads. But we’ll see what happens – I’ve got to be able to really train in order to think about really doing it.

Here’s something I didn’t miss about Pakistan – the daily power outage. As long as it’s less than two hours, it’s okay. After that point, the battery on my computer dies, and I’ve got a nice paperweight to play with for a while. And…we’re back with the power. These things rarely last for very long, and the office probably has a generator, but I think I could count the number of full days I’ve spent here where we didn’t have a power outage on my hands, without using all the fingers. (End of day tally: four power outages)

I have one major priority item that I need to get done today for Vietnam, I’ve called my local counterpart here to try to talk to her, and I think that will make up the majority of my day. It’s okay, because I think my brain has already left the country – or is, at least, busy packing up. So if I had a hugely full schedule for today and tomorrow, I think it would be a bit of a disaster. As it is, I think I’m pushing it, much as I hate to admit that. The sleeping thing still isn’t going too well for me, so that’s not helping, but the bed I have here is so much more comfortable than the one I had in Vietnam, which is a huge step up.

I just asked one of the guys in the office to help me make sure that the driver is at the house at 3 am on Wednesday to take me to the airport. Unfortunately, Hamid won’t be here, as he’s going up to Peshawar for the wedding of his younger brother, or as he refers to him “small brother”. I’m sad about that, as he’s such a nice guy, and has been an ever-cheerful presence here, even when I’ve had crappy days. The other drivers, however, don’t all speak very good English. Fair enough, they’re in Pakistan, but I want to make sure that whoever is stuck driving me to the airport knows that he has to be at the house at that horrifyingly early/late hour.

My lists of things to do are getting smaller, which is good, because my available time is getting smaller as well. Unfortunately, one of the things on my list, “get money” was not in the cards for today. Hamid drove me to *six* different ATMs, three were out of service, one didn’t take my card, one was closed, and one was out of money. The entire way there we were wedged into this access road that runs parallel to Sharae Faisal, and ends up serving as a de facto parking lot, because people have nowhere else to park their cars. Needless to say, this impairs the flow of traffic quite significantly. This is actually one of the main reasons that everyone in Vietnam drives a motorcycle – they can park them on the sidewalks, in buildings, wherever. This is because, in Ho Chi Minh City, as here in Karachi, there is absolutely no parking. It’s not planned for, it’s not part of a building design requirement – nothing. So these side streets get more and more clogged every day. But when we’re stuck in traffic, with no way of dislodging the car without 20 other people getting their act together as well, I start to think about how much I stand out, how we’ve been given no security on this project because it’s not in the budget (everyone who works at the American School and the US Consulate has a car full of armed guards that follows their main car as a mandatory security requirement), and how, if someone wanted to do something to me, it would be really, really easy. People staring into the car and beggars coming up and banging aggressively on the windows doesn’t help me to feel any more comfortable. These thoughts also make me glad that I’m leaving, because I don’t like to have to ponder such things. Although, it's funny - because driving around with Faruq and Samina, I feel perfectly safe.

I just finished my document for Vietnam, so I’m glad that’s out of the way – it has been sent out into the void, and I hope they like it. Since my local counterpart here in Pakistan has yet to return my phone call, which she said she would do when I called her at 8:45 this morning, I have to admit to being at a bit of a loss as to what to do tomorrow. I have some errands I can run, but that’s hardly beneficial to the project, since they’re my personal errands that I was planning to do at my lunch time. Very frustrating. Particularly since I really am trying to do the right thing here. Well, I can’t force people to call me back if they’re not so inclined, and I can’t make documents materialize out of thin air, unfortunately. I just really don’t want this to end up being my fault somehow.