Moving on

After an exhausting week complete with run-ins with unprofessional funeral planners and family I have never met, I am in Dubai on my way back to Kabul in a few hours. The funeral was really nice, as far as funerals go. We kept it very personal, family members spoke and my sister and I sang my grandfather's favorite song Kinders van die Wind (Children of the Wind) by legendary Afrikaans songwriter Koos du Plessis (pretty much the Afrikaans version of Bob Dylan).

On top of the funeral Thursday, I spent all day Friday moving my grandmother into the Alzheimer's unit at her nursing home. A devastating thing to see. It took me about two hours of reading to her from ma Bible study guide to calm her down enough for me to try and leave to pack.

Saturday saw me relaxing for the first time this week when I joined my father at the rugby match between the South African Sprinboks and the island nation of Samoa at Ellispark Stadium in Johannesburg. Not the best piece of rugby ever played, but spending those few hours not worrying about anything and relaxing with my father was really worth it. We sat in a private box of one of his contractors and spent the first twenty minutes trying to locate my mother and my aunt's family in the stands on the opposite side of the field via text messages. South Africa won the game comfortably 35-8.

Of Dubai, I am still not a fan. After touch-down at 0530 yesterday morning, I grabbed a taxi around 0600 and headed straight to the UN Humanitarian City to pick up my visa letter that was hand carried from Kabul, and then went looking for the Afghan Consulate, which took us an hour and a half. On the drive over there I was once again appalled at the conditions that south Asians work in here in Dubai. They are bussed to the hundreds of construction sites around the city in old dilapidated buses, leaning their heads against the bars for a few minutes of shut-eye. I saw dozens of these buses with hundreds of passport-less workers who form part of modern slavery, powerlessly building this surreal playground of the middle East.

One last espresso and off to Terminal 2, the Terminal of Doom at Dubai International where aid workers and PSDs linger to board flights to places like Kabul, Baghdad and Khartoum. Back to reality.