Sylvia's Journal

Senior official are very busy here. Yet they will spend hours each week sitting around conference tables waiting for their peers or bosses to arrive. They use the time for small talk, maybe some coordinating and communicating, and I am sure some complaining but I would have to speak a lot better Dari to confirm that. No one checks their watches as we westerners would have done.

I use the waiting time to learn a few more words and try out my Dari on one of the non-English speaking office staff. When I ask for tea and it doesn’t come, I know I need to work on my pronunciation. When it finally comes it is like I passed the orals (with a tangible reward for it).

One of the department heads indicates that he is too busy to attend this meeting and should have sent his deputy. I tell him that I would like him to stay at least for the visioning part. He says that he already has a vision. We spend the next three hours in conversation about the challenges and dilemmas for people at the top. We have a long discussion about power and then they draw their vision, a few under protest. The vision drawings, when put next to each other, produce a fairly complete picture of what the directorate is striving to accomplish. People smile. It is more compelling that the very abstract and boring language that they started with.

The morning serves as a diagnostic for me and as a mirror for the the chief and his department heads. The people who said they would leave because they were too busy for this meeting stayed. I consider this a victory. We don’t get the entire agenda finished and I am not clear how and when to continue our conversation since my departure is in sight. It is now abundantly clear that I cannot do this work if I zip in and out for two weeks every six months.

I ask if I can sit in on the team’s next staff meeting on Sunday. This would provide me with another opportunity to see how they work together and possibly continue our conversation of today. Now that the group has a vision, the next step will be to find out what blocks them from this vision or keeps them stuck in a place they want to leave.

In the afternoon I facilitate another conversation with the technical advisors from the project who will soon leave their comfortable offices at the MSH office and move in with their counterparts in the ministry. It’s a complex undertaking with many unresolved issues, dilemmas, worries and fears. None of their bosses are around, intentionally. The discussions are earnest and frank. It is clear that much needs to be ironed out before the move can actually take place.

When most people have left, Steve and MP congregate in my temporary office. We talk about what we did today in between yawns. It is time to go home, the weekend has started. Only Dr. Ali stays behind to participate in the  worldwide staff meeting in Cambridge where it is 9 in the morning. I had hoped to follow it from the guesthouse but never get the audio right and while messing around with it miss the entire presentation from my colleagues back home I had looked forward to.

Dinner is another slow and wonderful affair with many stories and Janneke’s home cooked nasi goring to complement all the other dishes made by the cook today and yesterday’s leftovers. We have food aplenty.

It’s now the equivalent of Saturday night and so we plan to watch a movie but can’t figure out the video, so we watch the news about Pakistan and Western Afghanistan. As the crow flies these two places that are near but I look at the news as if I am in the US.