Sylvia's Journal

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.