Sylvia's Journal

Today was more varied than yesterday and did not give me a headache. We now have every morning a touch base as the senior leadership team. It is helpful and short. After that I make the rounds of my staff to let them know what they have to do. This is an interesting new reality to me – making sure others do their job rather than me doing it. I kinda like it.

After I informed every one of urgent tasks I tried to sort out what my work was. In the frenzy of last minute requests from higher ups (from our funder and our government client) this is not obvious. Any message to be communicated to these higher ups needs to be very carefully thought through: what’s the medium (phone, in person, email) and I always have to image the possibility of the receiver receiving my message in a bad mood. It’s a good discipline for communicating. To be on the safe side, since I don’t know the personalities yet, I ask my boss for advice. So far I haven’t made any faux pas I believe.

From the high and complex to the banal and simple, Akram took me to select carpeting and carpets for the new house. For carpeting I picked beige rather than purple or dark green; for the carpets I asked if they can give me the money and I go to Chicken street and select my own but that is not according to the rules. I will get machine-manufactured carpets. We went to see what they look like in Guesthouse 32. They are not bad for industrial carpets (forgot to take a picture).

I did decline the monstrous furniture and asked if I could have the traditional Afghan ‘furniture’ that consists of mattress-like cushions on the floor with cushions in the back. That is how we had arranged our house in Lebanon 30 years ago. I can already picture myself lounging on those.

Back in the office I made my acquaintance with the office cat. When people keep a dog here they give it a name but not to cats; they are simply called peshak, the Dari word for cat. That is just like my first cat which was called Poes, the Dutch word for cat. I have baptized the cat, daftari-peshak , or office cat in Dari.

In between work related crises I have to make sure I have all my paper work in order. One such thing is my foreigner registration card that requires a visit to the ministry of interior. Everyone is searched upon entry to the ministry compound. My male colleagues are searched at the entrance. I am let in to a tiny shack where female employees do a cursory search or none at all. They are mostly curious about foreigners like me, sometimes asking for make up (I have to disappoint them).

This morning, when I asked them in Dari how well they were and answered their return question with a praise-the-lord, one of the ladies got up and planted a big kiss on my cheek. I think this is why people fall in love with this place. You simply can’t help it.

The office where the registration cards are manufactured (handwritten, a passport picture first cut to size and then stapled and then a stamp) is occupied by a person that I thought a woman but Steve told me was a man, since a woman would have worn a scarf, and he didn’t. He is a dwarf who is also dwarfed (anyone would be) by the gigantic registers that are piled up on his table.

Baskets full of cancelled registration cards are placed willy-nilly on the floor. The purpose of the registration process is not entirely clear but it keeps at least one Afghan busy and on salary. Signs are posted to say that it is a free service of the Afghan government; so no salary supplements for the little man. But the upstairs official who adds one other stamp did ask for donations to replace his old furniture and office equipment. A thinly veiled request for bribes, I asked Khalid? No, not at all; it’s a very poor ministry and they need help. That is obvious.

I asked what happened to all the registers and cancelled cards when the book or basket is full. Khalid, our logistics man told me that from time to time these places catch fire and that takes care of the archiving.

We had our weekly phone call with Boston which is tedious, partially because it is after work hours, because at least one of us is called on another cellphone and the quality of the connection is often bad and requires several re-calls.

I can now be disturbed twice as often since I am now in the possession, like many of my colleagues, of 2 cellphones and 2 numbers. One is pre-paid (using scratch cards) and one is post-paid. The latter is for calls to Boston that would exhaust multiple scratch cards. For that phone we get a bill monthly. I am now a two-fisted cellphoner.