Sylvia's Journal

Today is Friday which means weekend. There is a routine that I know well but Axel doesn’t. The only difference from the weekend routine I last experienced is that the contract with the German school, hidden behind major fortifications, has run out. A new contract (of the use for one and a half hours of the athletic track and fields) is now with the Habibia high school a little further up the road. It is the place where the Afghan intelligentsia has been trained for generations. For a while it was out of commission, entirely destroyed in crossfire and then fixed up again.

I had my ‘expectations’ conversation with my new boss. I had given him my vision for next year when the project (and thus my contract) ends as well as the actions that I plan to undertake to take me there. We had a wonderful and very frank conversation.

My new boss lives on the edge of many dividing lines: as an Afghan he is head of an American project and thus has to please the American people (or at least those who represent this constituency). The project is designed to help the Afghan government, so he has to please that client too, which includes a steep hierarchy crowned by the most senior officials in the ministry of health, some he knows very well personally but, as a non government official, he has to show deference to all of them. He supervises three expats and also has to keep MSH headquarters in Boston happy. And then there is the staff, some are from the same ethnic background and others are from places that have traditionally been warring with his.

On top of this he is held responsible for the judicious spending of enormous amounts of money, for staff scattered over the country, some in very insecure areas like Kandahar and Khost, and held to performance standards that are high under the best of circumstances. He is a little stressed.

The new ‘surge’ in Afghanistan is piling more complexity on this already stressful state. We submitted a plan to help the US government wean the population away from a hodgepodge of Taliban and Al Qaeda groups by paying attention to things ordinary people badly need, like a place to take their sick wives and children, something the these various fighting groups can’t or won’t provide.

My Dari is improving slowly. We eat lunch, whenever we can, in the staff-run cafeteria where a simple and delicous meal costs 1 dollar. I sit in the men’s section because I am like a third gender, the advantage of being a female foreigner. That is where I practice my Dari and learn a few new words each day. It is easy to learn Dari here (as opposed to learning in the US) because everyone loves to teach me and I am encouraged by all. I am hopelessly in love with this place.

Last night we went to another guesthouse where our colleagues served cocktails and beer. It was a busy place because Maria Pia’s Afghan family had arrived from the north. Wafa’s hair was cut and Said wore a preppy tea shirt. They are ready for this new adventure in their lives, just as Axel and I are, going in the opposite direction. The only thing is that I knew what to expect before heading out here. They have no idea where they are going (or if they have an idea it is probably heavily influenced by the American rambo-type movies that Said loves to watch).

Said had brought his bird, a fighting partridge, which they try to get us to take care of after they are gone. I found the creature a little too nervous for my liking. It did have a nice plastic cage with a carpet on the bottom, we are in Afghanistan after all, but I think we will decline.

They are supposed to leave in less than a week’s time but only if their brandnew Afghan passports are stamped in time at the US embassy here. Everyone is sitting on pins and needles. Maria Pia has been able to secure donated business class seats for all and the experts at Massachusetts General Hospital are on standby to sort out Said’s twisted limbs. I wish I could ride along and watch their faces as they travel away from old and ancient Afghanistan into the New World of America.

We returned to our guesthouse and sat on the porch on our plastic peacock chairs eating yet another delicious meal prepared by our cook. We have a great bunch of people here and are getting to know them better. This is the attraction of living in this guesthouse. If you want to be alone or hang out with interesting people, you can.

We tried to watch our bootlegged copy of the movie The Proposal that I had bought for 2 dollars in Addis. It includes laughing. This is not a track, but real people laughing in a real cinema someplace in the world where the film was video-taped straight from the screen. Our watching experience was a good deterrent (punishment?) to secure anymore of such movies. The copy was OK until halfway through the movie.

Between the recurrent power outages and the defective copy it became too much of a hassle and the audience trickled away until only the two of us were left. Although we have a suspicion of how the movie ends, we don’t know how the storyline will take us there. We did see the scenes filmed in Manchester and Rockport, with mountains inserted in the background. I like that look.