Sylvia's Journal

Operation ‘steel belt’ was in place today which meant that cars coming in and out of Kabul are being searched thoroughly, all through the day. The resulting traffic jam kept both good and bad people who were in the know at home or at their offices. Those who did not know had bad luck and spent hours in their cars. My planned visit to the ministry was wisely cancelled.

This worked out OK since we had to finish the workplan down to the nitty gritty detail, neither my, nor Steve’s forte. We soldiered on, as had Alain in Boston, pulling an allnighter to get us his feedback in time. The product was delivered on time to our funder, in spite of the traffic jam. It was accepted and immediately followed by a request for 16 separate provincial work plans. Somehow the database did not capture that distinction and so we are back to another round of workplanning.

I had excused myself from the meeting across town (and thus avoiding hours in the car) to meet with our donor, a weekly event that is attended by our senior leadership, a category I now belong to. Instead I met with one of my teams, an event I could not miss since no one else would have been there to ask the difficult questions and provide feedback, starting the long and painful process of changing the rules of engagement. As the new boss of the team’s boss I suddenly have the kind of formal power and authority I have never had before. I kind of like it. Is this the initial seductive taste of power?

After a first polite but edgy exchange around the quality of the work product that will be showcased on Sunday to all the program managers, we engaged in a sort of dance, with both parties trying to be elegant and not step on toes while getting strong messages across. I had expected some defensive routines and they were there, but slowly, as the minutes passed, I noticed a subtle change from defensiveness to surrender, all of it packaged in light joking remarks. At the end the work product was slightly better, not as good as I would have wanted, but better and more focused, and the mood collegial.

I am getting my own office, with a door and a table, and hopefully some bookshelves to house the books that were sent ahead of me. Our office compound is lovely with the green grass, the roses and grapes, thousands of them.

We had hoped to go out for dinner to the restaurant with the nicely clipped marihuana hedge to celebrate the delivery of the work plan but the steel belt around Kabul was still there, evidenced by big blue flashing lights. We postponed our dinner till tomorrow.

I spent the entire day at the ministry of health, located in the center of Kabul. It’s an old building that has been painted in blue and purple, an odd combination of colors. It used to be of a non descript color when I first saw it years ago but slowly more and more walls got painted. We used to be able to get in through the official entrance into the cavernous lobby.

Over the years the place has gotten increasingly barricaded and now we enter through a heavily fortified side entrance and walk through a container with both ends removed and from there we have to turn a few corners before we get to the courtyard full of benches and roses. It is a lovely place to behold out after the ugliness of the entry experience. Then, after turning a few more corners we enter through the side of the building and up the side staircase. It’s ugly inside and dirty. I can’t help but think that is what you get when you forget about the women (there are women of course who work there, but few in senior positions).

One of the teams in my portfolio is the grants and contracts management unit; not that I have anything to do with the management of this team, not even my colleague Doug who is assigned as their advisor. Their placement and supervision is handled by ministry staff. My role is to support Doug who is supporting them. They had organized an orientation for me that left me inspired and a little worried about how this level of professionalism and intense coaching that they do (of their grantees) can be maintained after our project ends. They laid out for me the process of contracting and grant monitoring of the NGOs that are implementing the government’s Basic Package of Health Services.

When people outside Afghanistan talk about the country as a basket case they are dismissing the extraordinary accomplishments of people like this, thanks to whom capacity is built across the country while health services are delivered to people in far flung places who used to have no services at all. That this is also supported by US tax dollars is hardly known by Joe the plumber.

In between the presentations I made the rounds of the various director-generals with whom I have worked in the past and whose attention I always sought in order to fulfill my scope of work as a consultant in the past. Now I no longer have this need to get all their attention crammed into two short weeks. It is a liberating feeling to be able to take my time. I was warmly greeted by all, and offered a fresh cup of green tea at each stop.

The contracts team eats in their offices, their lunch served by people hired to prepare their noontime meals. This is, for example, how one of the downstairs bathrooms for women has gotten to be a kitchen. At lunch time the courtyard is full of people squatting over small kerosene stoves, cooking. I try to imagine such a practice at the State Department.

Lunch consisted of Kabuli rice (raisins and strips of carrots mixed in with the rice) with a small piece of meat sitting defiantly on top, served with the ubiquitous flat Afghan bread and tea. We ate while sitting around the large conference table and continued our meeting without missing a beat. It was a working lunch, a rather counter-cultural habit that may have slipped in along with the US tax dollars.

I am jumping right into the fray: imagined emergencies that mobilize the energies of many of our most senior staff, here in Kabul and in Cambridge. There are assumptions embedded in the urgent calls for action that are not, and probably cannot be, questioned, because of the high levels of powers involved. This is common practice in most countries of the world, including the US; we too obey when power tells us to jump through this or that hoop. And so we are busy jumping to make sure that, what some of us believe are imagined, and unquestionable consequences, don’t happen.

In between all of this we are chasing deadlines for the work plan review process that got Steve and me sitting in front of a database entry screen fixing errors of thought, grammar and spelling. We labored our way through 35 pages of activities typed in tiny letters, that spell out what everyone plans to be doing starting next week.

Steve and I, being the most senior technical staff, were responsible for getting the best possible draft to Boston by 5 PM our time, when Boston starts its workday. But when you are thirsty, hungry and tired, and mosquitoes are pestering you under the desk, the clearheadedness we were supposed to bring to the task left something to be desired. It’s good we were in this boat together. This reminded me of the title of a quotation book I got from the Hubers a few weeks ago: don’t forget to sing when you are in the life boat. As it so happens, Steve and I love to sing, and so we kept each others’ spirits up.

By the time we got home, itchy from mosquito bites, bleary-eyed and hungry, we had been in the office for 12 hours, non stop, except for a short break for lunch. “Is it always like this?” I asked Steve. “Sometimes,: he responded. He often works 11 hours because the Boston work day starts when our day is over. But without spouses waiting for us at our guesthouses, there are no natural breaks on the work. This is not the case for our Afghan colleagues who are driven home to their families in company buses at 3:30 PM on the dot.

After lunch I met a potential Dari teacher. Although he is currently an English teacher I had to bring in a translator to get him to articulate his teaching philosophy and process; he did not understand the question, even when translated in Dari. The book he uses is the one I am studying from when not using my computerized flash cards. Other than that I did not get a good idea of his approach. I asked him to send me a proposal for lessons and cost attached for various scenarios of intensity (2 days a week, 3 days, 4 days). He kept asking me to name a price, which I refused since I have no sense of the cost of such lessons. He may not be my man.

In the meantime I have asked everyone in the office to be my teacher. Lunch time is like a linguistic field trip and today I learned the word for rice, among others. I tend to eat with the men (foreign women are like a third gender). I am the only female. My female Afghan colleagues eat in a separate room that is hidden behind a curtain. If I want to socialize with them I’d have to go behind the curtain too.

So far, my fantasy of knitting at night or playing the ukulele has not been realized; but then again, I’ve only been here for less than a week.

I had a good and calm first day at work; unfortunately my boss had not been able to return yet from Peshawar and so I concentrated on being a good boss myself. I met with one of the three people I supervise to understand what’s going on in his unit and agree on how we will work together. I will meet with the others tomorrow.

We are still in the throes of work planning which keeps many people extremely busy and some on edge. When the workday starts in Boston, tomorrow night for us, all has to be as final as we can make it. In the past some not so perfect plans had been passed on to Boston triggering reactions that people still talk about; they don’t want a repeat and we are striving for better this time.

The large offices are being re-arranged to accommodate new/more staff which means that I am temporarily parked at a visitor’s table in the space where the technical advisors are sitting when not with their counterparts in the ministry. Eventually I will get a space all to myself with a door than can be closed, a luxury I haven’t had in 16 years. I am looking forward to such a space, mostly so that I can unpack the five boxes of books that were shipped from Boston.

I learned that a couple of new guesthouses are being rented and I get to have first dibs if I like one of them. This makes my living quarters also temporary – and I will keep camping out in the office and at home until final decisions are made. I hope this is done before Axel shows up; I promised him that our nest would be ready to receive him when he arrives in a few weeks. I prefer a more permanent over a temporary nest.

Back at the guest house I noticed that the housekeeper had contributed to my settling in by hammering a 5 inch nail in one of the kitchen cabinets to hold a towel that I had put on the counter; a degree of overkill that practically pulled the cabinet apart. It seems that hammering huge nails in the wall is what you do here when you want to hang things. All the beautiful Central Asian textiles in my room are also nailed into the walls with similar large stakes.

Soon after my return an office car pulled up tat the guesthouse and deposited our new housemate, a Dutch woman named Ankie, who had just flown in from Amsterdam. As it turned out I had met her husband in Ghana in March, small world. Her first name is the same as my sister’s and her last name the same as the last name of my best friend in Holland (no relation). With this Steve is once more outnumbered by Dutch people. This seems to happen a lot in guesthouse zero.

The physical therapist I had found on the internet came to our guesthouse after dinner for an initial consultation. He is a wandering PT and only does house calls, mostly consulting to foreigners. He was astonished by my range of motion and flexibility 8 weeks post-op and did not feel he had much to contribute as this point, since my recovery will be dictated by how serious I take my exercises (very!). The protocol I follow is apparently quite standard and with all the exercises for the next couple of months already printed out by my US PT, he had little to add. Instead he gave me some exercises to strengthen my upperback and offset the strains of sitting in front of a computer that are compounded by two-year old whiplash. We agreed to check in again in a few weeks.

I never left the guesthouse during the weekend. I sat mostly in front of my computer, digging through the contents of my inbox to make sure that I am as well informed and prepared as I can be for the meetings that are lined up for me tomorrow, my first official workday in Kabul.

I took breaks from time to time to study Dari using a program from Transparent Language (free on the web, Byki 4) that drilled me ad nauseam in both recognition, recall and writing. It was pretty tedious at first but I am getting the hang of it and can now type in Dari using the English keyboard. I feel very accomplished about that. Now I have to keep it up. The program has a feature called ‘stale words’- words that I haven’t ‘touched’ for a certain amount of time, to make sure I don’t lose them.

My Dari teacher has made contact by email and I hope to meet with him soon. I want to take advantage of my evenings alone to study as much as I can. I made a deal with the Director General  for health services that I will be able to have a meaningful conversation with him in Dari before the end of the year. I am putting the Pashto on hold for now.

I am still home alone and that makes the dinners pretty boring; not just the lack of company but also because I am eating the same thing at every meal. The cook had prepared massive quantities of rice and a minced meat/bean/tomato stew and a plate full of dried out slices of eggplant and zucchini that noone had touched so far. It looks pretty bad but tastes OK.

For snacks there are inexhaustible supplies of the sweetest grapes dangling from the long arbor that covers the entry way into our compound. There are many more at the office which has an arbor three time the size. If only I had the wherewithal to make wine…(sigh).

This is what my room looks like now that everything has been neatly stowed. It’s like being a student again, everything in one room.

So far it has been a quiet day in Kabul. My housemate Steve will not return until tomorrow.

I have taken advantage of the quietness to unpack and settle in. This includes retrieving stuff left behind in July and arranging things in empy closets. This is one thing of which there is plenty, especially in the unused small kitchen.

The only thing I cannot find is the bag of coffee from Ethiopia which I had hoped to use in this small stovetop espresso maker that I brought. Afghanistan is a tea drinking country. Houses and stores are therefore not well equipped for coffee.

I alternate attending to emails and doing my homework for my first Program Managers meeting on Sunday with short naps and boning up on my Dari. I have contacted both my Dari teacher and my physical therapist in the hope that I can start using their services soon.

The Internet connection is good; I am listening to NPR as if I am driving around in my car in Massachusetts.

I declined an invitation to accompany another colleague for the ritual Friday visit to Chicken Street. Usually, when on temporary duty, I did not want to miss these visits, there being only one or two chances (Fridays). But now, having plenty of such days ahead of me, I did not feel the need to walk around on a hot day, on a dusty street, and poke my nose into dusty places.

Where we are going to live, and where I am going to sit in the office, is not entirely clear yet. New spaces are being configured to accommodate staff changes and an influx of travelers over the fall. As a result, the settling in is only temporary and rather limited, for now reduced to one room until Axel arrives.

New houses are being rented and I am given first pick, with always the option of staying at my current quarters, expanded to include all three rooms on the second floor of guesthouse zero. And while Axel is busy putting our Manchester in order, I hope to be directing home improvements here as well, after selecting the nicest place to live for our year in Kabul. It’s kind of exciting all this not knowing.

The one suitcase I had some worries about, the one I paid 200 dollars for to ship along to Dubai, failed me indeed. When it did not turn up on the belt a Delta representative told me that it had opened during the journey and the police was checking it to make sure it was OK to return to me. Delta was so kind to wrap the whole thing in a large sturdy plastic bag.

At the hotel I repacked everything and gifted the suitcase to Mr. Sheen, an Indian gentleman who works in the hotel and fetched my luggage. He was quite happy with the suitcase even though I told him the locks did not work all that well (but apparently well enough for him).

I was 40 kg over the weight limit when I checked in with Safi Airways and was charged a hefty 250 dollars to transport everything to Kabul; that brings the total cost of moving my affairs to Kabul to 450 dollars. Axel was probably right that sending a shipment might have been worth it after all.

At Dubai airport I did something I have never done here before: I bought a bottle of bourbon and a bottle of gin. I expect these to last us for awhile. The Afghan customs official did not blink, if he noticed at all. I am sure they are used to foreigners bringing in alcohol.

It’s dinner time now in the guesthouse but everything across the yard in the other house is dark. It is a bit lonely as my housemate Steve is in Pakistan. It is also weekend so it’s ‘help-yourself’ dinner; I haven’t surveyed the refrigerators yet but I am sure there are some interesting leftovers.

The suitcases are unpacked and internet connection established. I am ready to tackle my first assignment: reviewing one more time the work plan for project years 4 and 5 before retiring for the night.