Rough Day

Yesterday was a pretty rough day for me.

One of the hardest parts about being deployed to places like this is having to manage the expectations and desires of the people in your life. In some cases people are understanding about the fact that you are so far away from home, but with instant communication and email its easy for people to lose sight of the fact that you are in a place like Afghanistan and that there may actually be some things going on that transcend your relationship with them. What may be a reasonable expectation of discourse and engagement for a personal relationship can very easily cross the line of unreasonableness when someone is in Afghanistan. This came to a head yesterday with an individual who I was particularly close to and lets just say it didn't end well.




This is an endemic problem with the type of profession I have and its definitely a hard balance. As much as I love my job and I believe in what I do it's hard to accept that it comes to the detriment of the personal relationships I value to say nothing about the potential of trying to enter into a stable relationship with someone. The vast majority of people here, aside from the military officers, are single or divorced. It's so bad that,  I made a joke to a friend the other day that when I want to do something different I'm just going to open up an "egg farming" operation outside of USAID. That's messed up but not so outlandish. It's hard frankly. You meet someone out on the town, things are going well and then it's...hey....some shit is going down in Sudan..see you in 6 months? no? alright then..

Maybe another day I'll get into the disproportionate impact this has on women as opposed to men.

Anyway, one of the most important things you have to do in places like these is to keep the proper perspective. It can always be worse.