Sylvia's Journal

My first day of work is a half day. Saturday is a work day for the government but not for my colleagues. Since their counterparts are in the government they often do end up working 6 days a week.

My colleague picks me at my guesthouse and we drive across town to pick up his boss before heading to the Ministry of Health. Security is enhanced and people can no longer walk into the place unhampered. Sandwiched in between my male Afghan colleagues I walk right past the guards who stop us to check my bag. They let me pass through when one of my colleagues said that I was not with Al Quaida. I must have looked like a low risk between the countless turbaned Afghans who would all have been frisked had this been an American public building.

We meet with our counterparts of the Institute of Public Health who had signed up for several virtual courses which I am asked to explain. I do not know the particular course they signed up for and that starts next week but tell them about our virtual courses in general, with the message to over-communicate rather than under-communicate with the facilitators, having been a facilitator with a few too many under-communicating teams in the past.

Next stop is the institute for health sciences where paramedical, nurses and midwives learn their trade. I did not expect to see so few women in an institute that trains students for what I consider female professions. But I could have known. We see a few young female students at the end of our visit. I am told that now it is 100% better than at the Taliban time when of course there were no women at all in the building. There are jokes made about that time but I cannot understand them and no one translates.

We meet with senior faculty to talk about introducing or strengthening management and leadership as topics in the curriculum. It is entirely neglected in the midwifery curriculum because of the haste to churn out large numbers of midwives and to cut the program from 3 to 2 years. Whatever little there was of management preparation (and they do have to manage once on the job) was considered a luxury that could be discarded. Yet when I query them about their own clinical experience they all have stories about costly mistakes that were made because they weren’t prepared for the management and leadership tasks on the job.

The meeting is entirely in Dari and reminds me of the need to learn that language, even though it is kind of a long shot, given how infrequently and briefly I am here. Yet, every new word I learn contributes to my understanding which is now entirely dependent on translations from my colleagues. Their short translations don’t match the discussions in length and I have no idea whether I am given a summary or a commentary.

Ali buys me a small notebook to put down the words I am learning from listening and asking him when I hear a word repeatedly (shagerd = student, nars = nurse; qabela = midwife). It is a little plastic covered booklet with a large feather on top and part of a poem by Thomas Gent (1828): “The beauteous yesterday is fading away light a blushed twilight. Though nothing can bring back the hours of sweet treasured past. I will grieve not but rather find splendor in the memories.” I wonder who decided to print that poem on this booklet in this place. There are no spelling errors in the text and so I conclude it cannot possibly come from China. A local product from a designer with literary aspirations perhaps?

On our way home I am invited to lunch at the boss’ house but when he checks with his womenfolk no one is prepared for such a spontaneous visit by a foreigner. He tells the driver to turn around and takse us to a fast food restaurant, despite my protestations. He orders me a fried chicken leg with fries, to take home for lunch. The rest of the afternoon I catch up on mail, chat with my housemates and start to think through possible designs for tomorrow when one of the director generals with his direct reports (we think) awaits us to deliver on expectations that are far from clear (on all sides).

Towards dinner time Maria Pia opens a bottle of wine; an alcohol-containing present for Steve that goes the way all his other alcoholic presents went (this is the problem when you share a home with transients like us). It is an untold luxury in a place I associate with sobriety. While we sip our wine she treats Hans and me to many stories about the time she was working at Logan airport as Massachusetts first defense against viruses that come in on planes in dead or feverish people, and/or in live or dead animals. She talks about her colleagues from immigration, agriculture and customs and border patrol. They are from very different professional tribes, thrown together in an uneasy alliance with the creation of Homeland Security. I see a book on the horizon.