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.