That Much for Casual Friday

Yesterday I thought I could go for some more casual clothes for work, as I did not have any planned meetings and Fridays we only work until 13 o’clock. So I choose a light summer’s skirt and blouse and even a pair of flip-flops. However, at last moment I though maybe the flip-flops were a little too casual. Even though I didn’t have meetings booked, my colleagues might have and there might be external visitors at the office do I choose to bring a pair of other shoes for safety’s reason.

What a good idea! It did not take long before I was asked to join for a meeting at the senate, with very short notice. And little later I was asked to stand in for the boss at a meeting in the afternoon at one of the ministries. That much for casual Friday!

Iceland

Last Saturday I was on a somewhat different businesstrip. I went as an observer on an exercise with the Swedish Natonal Air Medevac (SNAM) to Iceland. That meant we had to gather already at 05.15 at the airport and then flew to Iceland, where according to the exercise; a tourist bus, with a lot of Swedish skiers, had gone off the road and down a hill side and now there were a lot of badly injured people that needed transport back to Sweden as the local hospital was badly strained. The SNAM is a normal Boing 737 from SAS that in six hours can be rebuilt to an ambulance aircraft able to transport 6 intensive care patience and six less but still badly injured persons, about 30 relatives or lightly injured persons and a staff of nine doctors and about 15 nurses. Very impressive I must say!



As Akureyri is on the northern coast of Iceland we had a nice flight right across the island. Looking down reminded me of flying over Afghanistan. So empty. Just the barren mountains with snow covered tops and some streams between them. But apart from that I guess there are not many similarities between the two countries. I still remember how an Icelandic journalist told me about the amazment of president Karzai when he met his Icelandic counterpart. Learning that Iceland had no neighbouring coutries and had never been to war he concluded that it must be a happy country.



It is almost hard to believe that Akureyri is the second largest town on Iceland, outside the Reyjkavik area. With only 17 200 inhabtants!



Getting out of the plan was quite amazing, the airport was very beautifully situated at the end of a bay of the sea, between the green hills.



The SNAM team.



Even though it was only from a distance I am glad that I saw some Iceland-ponies.





While the "patients" were made ready, the rest of us got a short bustrip through the town.



So; the "patients" are all onboard and ready for the transport back home to Sweden.

The Internationals

It is quite funny, but no matter how different Afghanistan and Dubai are, they have one thing in common; they would not cope without their expats. However there are very different types of international. In Afghanistan you find the “humanitarians” and the “cowboys” travelling from one disaster or war zone to the other and like to talk about and comparing the misery in different places, the one place being worse than the other. In Afghanistan noting is really simple or clean. In Dubai everything is shiny and beautiful and they seem to believe it is possible to build away all problems and act as if there are no worries in this world; it is all a big party. Instead of moving from disaster to disaster people move from one financial centre to the other. In Afghanistan there are few parties and little investment and finance is more a question of funding. So what makes those people do what they do? What is their motivation? Money? Kicks? On the average maybe these two groups of people are not so different after all. The other day someone commented my trip to Afghanistan with: “That must be interesting, it is great that there are people who work with things that is not just about making money.” That made a huge gap very visible. I never thought of it like that. Not that I would mind making a lot of money, but I could not imagine spending my time on a job that I don’t find interesting.