A new week

I got very frustrated in class today (Saturday). We were trying to work in Excel and different people kept having problems with their keyboards. Turns out, the copies of MS Office need to be registered, which can be done online or over the telephone. Otherwise, the keyboard gets locked out. So we have a dozen computers (of 30) with that problem. Then there are others that can’t connect to the network printer. So I was kind of scrambling to get people squared away (with very limited success) while also trying to walk everyone through printing from Excel. It’s very easy to print a table that spills over to another page or waste several pages when printing, so I wanted to make sure we did each step together. As I’m explaining, I can here the printer start to fire up as people sent their work, improperly formatted and printing one little corner of a sheet of paper. Paper is kind of at a premium here so I really wanted them to stick with me. Anyway, I was getting pretty hot under the collar today. I wonder if I’ve been too playful and that’s why I’m now having trouble… We’ll see how things go in the future…















I was complaining about the state of the bathrooms at the university to Haroun before he left. "It's not that hard to clean the bathroom once a week--I'll buy the bleach and a mop, for heaven's sake. There's a maintenance guy, even if he's not well paid, why wouldn't he do the job passably well--what's the option, sit around and not do it?" Then Haroun told me a story that I thought was pretty insightful. His last time here he'd stayed somewhere else and every day he came home he would see the guy across the street go to have tea next door at the teahouse. And everyday he fought with the broken door leading out of the property to the sidewalk--one or both of the hinges were broken. "He uses that door at least four times a day--why doesn't he fix it?" Haroun said he thought to himself. Well, after a few weeks the man spoke with Haroun asking if he was the nephew of such-and-such (Haroun's family were high up in the government when the Soviets invaded--many were killed or imprisoned). So the man invited Haroun to tea and they had a long talk. Haroun asked, "I'm sorry, but I notice everyday you struggle with that broken door--why don't you have it fixed?" The man told Haroun he'd fixed it many times, but it was continually damaged by the fighting taking place in the city. He also told Haroun about how his wife and daughter had been killed during the course of all the fighting in Afghanistan and how another daughter had lost her legs. Then Haroun (and I) realized how unimportant the door must be in the context of all that heartbreak.

I first learned working as a camp counsellor at YMCA Camp Pepin, but seem to have to learn over and over you've got to appreciate people on their terms, not on yours.

One day when he came to the library, Haroun was looking through the library's English-language card catalogue. "Look at all these books they used to have..." "Used to have, what happened to them?" "They had to burn them..." and I'm thinking because of the Taliban when he concluded, "...for heat." The catalogues on the left of the pillar are/were for the English-language books.