Sylvia's Journal

I dreamed of a simple dress that contained vaccine. Somehow, it was able to slowly pass from the fabric into your body and deliver sufficient protection to save you from one or another vaccine-preventable illness. I heard enough the last few days about unnecessary deaths that could be prevented through vaccinations that my mind set to work during the night and came up with this idea. If I had an iota of entrepreneurial gutsiness in me I would further explore this farfetched idea. But I don’t. I am in a different business which is the one of thinking and talking together in productive ways. That will be our challenge this morning. It was originally on yesterday’s program but various forces conspired against it.

Yesterday had some activities inserted that were not on the program. A high powered UN team from outside the country arrived just in time for lunch – funny how so many people show up just before lunch. The delegation shamelessly hijacked the morning program under the guise of ‘a nice opportunity to exchange views with you.’ I could see the organizers biting their tongue. But the interference is sanctioned by the highest levels, so what can you do?

Although I agree that it was an opportunity, the ‘exchange’ part did not work. The exchanges were nothing more than a series of requests for help from the audience, reducing participants to the role of victims, or worse, beggars for this or that, rather than agents of change. It is a role many are familiar with when in the presence of higher authority and, like a well worn coat, they wear that role with ease. While some of us try to strengthen leadership and management, much of the design of public discourse produces behavior and attitudes that are antithetical to leadership and instead reinforce helplessness and dependency.

I have entirely transferred responsibility for our interactive session to my counterpart, and he has successfully delegated subtasks to his peers. He organized a just-in-time orientation of facilitators from our project’s team, the EU team and some from the ministry of health. Organizing this was a challenge and a half. I admired how he pulled it off over lunch. This required not only rounding everyone up but also chasing higher level officials away from our reserved table, something no one felt comfortable to do. I offered myself as the naive foreigner and politely explained why we needed the space. I hope my outsider status made this act forgivable. All in all it was a nerve wrecking enterprise and I tightly crossed my fingers behind my back.

The hijack of the morning created such a ripple that the entire program was hours behind schedule. By the time our session was supposed to start it was too late. We scrambled to re-budget the time for the next morning, knowing that there was a hard stop at the very end of that last day and that this change, in turn, would create further ripples. Everything was off balance.

More annoying than the hijack itself was the fact that the high level delegation left after lunch and therefore never found out about the consequences of its act. I am trying to figure out how to get that feedback to them since I know it is unlikely that any Afghan would even consider doing something like that. It is safer to whisper and complain about it in private conversations (and I heard a lot of those).

It was past 5 when the day was officially closed, and it took another half hour before we had a car. The sun was setting by the time we got on the road. And although rush hour should have been over, the traffic was so thick that it looked like a slow drive home. The driver decided that was not a good idea and took us over Television Mountain to the part of Kabul where we live. I am not sure it was actually cutting anything short but there was at least a sense of movement, albeit it very bumpy, over unpaved mountain roads. It wasn’t only better than standing still in traffic; it was also exotic and different. For awhile we were high up seeing the lights of Kabul below us while around us we appeared to be in a remote mountain village – mud brick houses and hardly any lights.

Steve was delivered at the office to catch up on work and messages from Boston but I had had enough and was dropped off at ‘hotel sifr.’ I realized that I had not yet gotten the irritations of the day out of my system and unloaded on Maureen and then wrote an impulsive angry email which I later regretted, before it got far into cyberspace ( I hope). An early evening phone call with our team in Cambridge was the final work activity of the day. Altogether it was enough and made for a very long day.

In Dari the place I am staying at is called hotel sifr (zero) or hotel yak (one), That is what the drivers call on their radio when they approach the house because the guards have to open the gate so there is no idling in front of the house; a security measure. I am still not sure which of the two houses in our compound is Guesthouse Zero and which is Guesthouse One. If I stayed in hotel zero last time I must now be staying in hotel one; or it is the other way around.

My evening and morning routines in the guesthouse are now well established – it took a while to do so as I was learning how to make best use of all that was available to me. After dinner I fill the rubber bladder that I brought from home with hot water and put it inside my bed. That way it has a few hours to warm the bottom of my bed where my toes will be.

I bring a thermos from the kitchen and some bags of green tea. The Thermos bottle is made in Japan; unlike the large and often garishly decorated and colored Chinese thermos flacons that are ubiquitous in developing countries, this one is reserved and subdued in its colors and decoration. According to the label at the bottom of the thermos, the color is ‘cacao herb,’ an undefined tan color. Three messages, written in very small print and thus easily overlooked bring the user some good advice. Nobody in the house had noticed them. Two of the messages, marked by a large letter G and F say that we should enjoy working in the garden and put fresh flowers in our house. The third has a stylized picture of a flower and sums up the other two: Live beautifully together with herbs. The two kinds of thermos flacons entirely capture the national character of these two different nations, as least as I have experienced them. The adjectives I have heard the Chinese use to describe the Japanese and vice versa could also describe these insulated bottles that keep our water warm.

I drink many cups of jasmine green tea at night. According to the package, this tea ‘reduces stress, depression and headaches and stimulates metabolism and the calorie burning process.’ I am also assured that the tea has no side effects. All this is good since I am eating here more and differently from what I am I used to. I leave enough hot water in the cacao herb bottle for the morning to warm my hands while blogging and checking mail. It helps with the increasingly unpleasant task of getting up in the morning. The cold invades my room during the night when there is nothing to hold it at bay other than my 25 pounds of Chinese blankets.

After writing and checking my mail I wrap myself in a warm blanket, put my slippers on and cross the yard to take a shower in the downstairs bathroom of the other house where the water is hotter, the pressure stronger and the tank bigger.

For breakfast, unless it is his day off, our housekeeper puts everything on the table that could possible be consumed during breakfast. Every day he puts things out that nobody touches. It is all about routines. We have a choice of jams and jellies that come from Greece, Turkey and Pakistan, peanut butter from America, honey from Australia and various Kellogg’s products, Familia Muesli, leftovers from last night’s desert, cookies, yoghurt, a bowl of fruit, a bowl of hard boiled eggs, brown European bread and naan (local bread), milk and a variety of juices from Europe. The Special K box reminds us that ‘Every woman wants to be admired in that special way’ and then gives us advice on how to get the shape that would have us admired. Of course this includes eating lots of Special K. Steve has been eating the stuff for months but it doesn’t work for him. You have to be a woman.