Sylvia's Journal

This morning I am taking two pills that match my clothes: a yellow one with multiple vitamins for general maintenance. It matches the color of my Afghan shalwar kameez. The other one is exactly the same color blue as the tiny embroidery stitches on my dress. That one is to fight the inflammation in my recovering arm and shoulder. I am so very fashionable!

I was woken up in the middle of the night by a sound I did not recognize. It turned out to be my 2nd cellphone that very few people call. I had our New York based pension fund institution on the line with a chipper lady who had not made the calculation of the time difference, despite multiple emails. Something has gone awry in the transfer of my 403(b) fund into our new 401(k) company sponsored pension fund and the monies, a significant amount saved up over years, had gone missing. Setting this right from Afghanistan is hard. I spent the hours from midnight to 1:30 AM trying to do this. Because of a different kind of security concerns than the ones I have here, both institutions refuse to deal with anyone else but me. It is infuriating, especially since the stock market has been climbing, which otherwise would have been a good thing. I am not sure the issue has been resolved and there may be more midnight interruptions I fear.

I am now being quoted on an eco-tourism website that talks about Afghanistan. Imagine that! Reading it filled my heart with longing, the kind of longing I am sure many people here have. Looking at the pictures of Bandi Amir and Bamiyan, I remember those spots and wished I could invite people to come and visit us and go see these places. Actually, people here do, but I wouldn’t invite anyone to come from afar. Axel and I certainly hope to go there ourselves when spring comes around.

I am official now, with an updated ID card. My last card was from 2002. I am a little greyer now. Slowly all the settling in pieces are falling into place. The only things missing are my multiple entry Indian ‘escape’ visas (not easy to get, and particularly hard after the bomb damage), my work permit and my multiple entry visa to Afghanistan.

It is starting to get really cold in the morning, time for warm socks. My office is heated by the sun but the sun doesn’t get to me until sometime after lunch.It’s very hard to dress for these temperature extremes, from 30s to 70s and back to 30s. Winterization is starting and consists of the placement of small diesel stoves in our offices and bedrooms. I am told the diesl stoves are actually a little bit too large for my small office and so soon I will be sweating again. I have also been warned of the diesel fumes. It’s good that there are cracks between the floor and the door.

I am experiencing the novelty of being senior management on a daily basis. My opinion is very highly valued because it is no longer simply an opinion but an opinion that can quickly turn into a decision. People line up outside my office for this or that and they are waiting patiently outside until I wave them in. At least I can see them; Steve has an office without glass, so he sometimes doesn’t know people are waiting outside his door. I don’t know what is better.

We received the news tonight that the (re)elections are scheduled in 2 weeks. I can’t imagine that the election apparatus can pull this off but I guess people must have been prepared. The elections will be happen just about when Axel was planning to arrive, a decision we thus may need to revisit. I am getting a bit lonely without him.

For dinner tonight we had dishes prepared by one of the cooks who has applied for the new guesthouse position. It was our way of ‘interviewing’ him. We had him prepare a meal for our current guesthouse under the supervision of our cook. The meal was excellent. We will have another guest cook in the next few days. And on Thursday I will interview the housekeeper. I don’t quite know how to conduct such an interview, which will have to be with an interpreter. What should I ask him? I may be as much intimidated as he will be.

We shared our meal with a gentleman who is in town doing similar stuff that I do for another large organization like MSH that has a strong and large presence in Afghanistan. He is investigating how to turn an expat-managed and led project into an Afghan-managed and led project. MSH has much hard-earned experience about how to do this.

I enjoyed meeting with him as we turned out to be kindred spirits. He also comes from a family therapy background and has turned into an OD consultant and leadership developer. He has been very active working on peace and reconciliations as well as trauma response in conflict areas around the world.

Seeing the traffic on the main street leading to the other side of Kabul, our destination, the driver turned around and took the long but unclogged way across the mountain to the other side of town this morning. This included a steep drive over unpaved roads that hardly deserve the name, past small but clean informal settlements stuck to the side of the mountain. Little bright-eyed raggamuffins stared at me and our fancy car. It is an entirely different world up there. I felt like I had gone on a field trip and enjoyed it despite the bumps in the road. Unfortunately I had not brought my camera, so no pictures.

Eventually we emerged on the other side of the mountain in the part of town where the European Commission has its heavily fortified compound. It is located right next to the Indian embassy which has now become nearly impenetrable from the main road. The enormous concrete blast walls that had been removed sometimes after the previous blast were put back into place and only special-plate cars were allowed in. That included ours.

The compound looked pristine, grass cut, lovely flowers, fresh paint, no broken windows. Yet I learned later that many of the windows had been blasted to pieces and the ceiling of the EC’s conference room collapsed. Everything has been cleaned, fixed and replaced and life went on as if nothing had happened. The families back home never knew how close their loved ones were to the Indian embassy and may never know.

The European Commission is revamping its development assistance strategies and is sending consultants around the world to explain it. The process by which this was done was an interesting contradiction to the central message of dialogue: we were lectured at for the entire morning. When the consultant told us that he’d go back to Brussels to tell people what he had learned I raised my hand and asked him, ‘learned what? You have been talking at us for more than 3 hours.’ I just couldn’t help myself.

I do not have any tolerance to sit for hours looking at an expert standing in front of an slide projector, no matter how good the content (the ideas were excellent, it’s just that they did not seem to apply to him). He was a good sport and challengeable and told me what he should have done (buzz groups); pressured even further why he had ignored his own best judgment, and be congruent with his message, he mentioned time pressures, which is something all of us understand. This is the difference between theoretical concepts and the realities on the ground.

I got a few whiffs of the competition between the Europeans and the Americans and the strong resentment that the US approach seems to engender among its European counterparts. Even though, as a Dutch-American, both sides in this drama are ‘my people’ I found myself surprisingly detached from the strong feelings on both sides. Holbrooke’s name triggered some very strong reactions, never mind that he works for the Great Inspirator Obama. Maybe it is time to read The Ugly American again.

In the afternoon a smaller working group on health convened and it was indeed a listening session. It was fun being facilitated rather than facilitating myself and I watched the Danish consultant-facilitator with great interest, seeing what he was trying to do. It was a useful exchange for me as I learned much about donor issues and people’s perspectives on what’s working and what is not.

I had my second Dari lesson today. Actually the first was at the beginning of the day when I was asked to say a few words at the opening of the second workshop in a serious of four to help provincial staff for the province of Kabul act more like managers and leaders. When you are asked to give a speech it is called ‘hitting words’ if you were to translate the Dari literally. So I hit some words, mostly in English, but I can now say in Dari that I am very happy to see a significant number of women in the room. It was significant indeed, more than one third. People from countries where the sexes mingle freely have no idea how exciting that is (and how unusual).

My Dari teacher came to my office and we practiced verbs. I get to pick the verbs I want to learn. Since I am moving in a few weeks I asked how to say that I will be moving from guesthouse zero to guesthouse 33. This how I learned that moving from one house to another is, literally, ‘doing nomad.’ So now I can say that in a few weeks I will do nomad. The word for nomad as koch, as in Kochis, the nomads who crisscross Afghanistan in their brightly colored clothes.

I also learned that getting cold in Dari is expressed by saying that I eat (ingest) cold. It is so interesting to learn these expressions that reveal something about the way people think about natural or physical phenomena.

I made a few mispronunciations that are awkward in public because the bad words and good words closely resemble each other. My teacher started to giggle when I said something that, as he later explained, was like a four-letter English word (he couldn’t get himself to tell me which one, but I guessed) if I pronounced it with an ‘ah’ rather than an ‘oh’ or vice versa. Now of course I never dare to use the intended and innocent word again out of fear that I say the unintended and offensive word.

I sacrificed half of my day off to attend a meeting in the EC container. When I first heard the venue of the meeting I laughed, the EC container? What’s that? But here plenty of people live and work in containers, practically all US government employees, if not all.

The European Commission solved the problem of space for its advisors to the ministry of health by placing two containers, one on top of the other, in the inner courtyard of the ministry. There is a small conference room, a bunch of cubicles and a kitchen. That’s where we met.

It was my first participation in a working group meeting. For once I was not the only woman. We sat next to each other to make it look as if there were more of us. The meeting was a little fluid with no clearly identified outcome other than a ‘meeting of the minds,’ and no hard time boundaries. As a result we drifted past the official ending time of the ministry’s workday. I could tell because the government employees were checking their watches. Steve and I never need to check our watches as there are no time boundaries for us. And for lunch and dinner we simply listen to our bellies.

On our way home today we inched our way through the dense traffic, made denser by multiple roadblocks put up in case of irregularities that were predicted after the election results announcement. But it never came, postponed once more, for the fifth time. I gather Karzai and Abdullah are not ready to shake hands despite the pressure from all the heavyweights in the world.

One of our consultants made the mistake of taking a picture of the red-bereted elite troops in the center of town. This angered one of the soldiers so much that he started pounding the car window where the consultant was sitting and shouting at the top of his lungs, attracting more shouting from other men with guns. It was a little frightening. We were pulled over and our driver and guard jumped out to calm the soldier with the frayed nerves and the gun. The drama lasted only a few minutes and ended with the promise that the picture would be deleted. That was actually funny because no one checked if the picture got deleted. This is different from the olden days when they would have demanded the camera and ripped out the film.

Back home we indulged in another one of the wonderful meals that our cook prepares for us. It was followed by the sweetest and juiciest pomegranates and melons I have ever had, complemented by Peet’s coffee, Iranian dates and the Indian sweets dripping with honey that we bought yesterday on Flower street.

The evening temperatures are dropping fast and the daytime – night time difference is nearly 40 degrees Fahrenheit: 75 degrees at midday and just above freezing at night. The down puff I brought along in September is coming in handy now. Leaving my warm nest in the morning is a little bit more challenging each day.

The weekend is now over. It wasn’t much of a weekend as I took care of the last assignments of my previous job which I cannot possibly handle during my workweek here. On the side I am writing a chapter for a book about third-culture-kids (TCKs) authored by the wife of our organization’s president. It’s not much of a sacrifice because I love this kind of writing.

No alarm this morning. I slept in until 7 AM. It was another one of those glorious Kabul mornings, the kind that make you want to sit outside and have breakfast in the sun. I have to wait a few more weeks for that but the rehabilitation of our house (khana si-o-seh or guesthouse 33) is progressing according to schedule.

The hiring of staff is in process. I have asked that each of the cooks who have applied for the job prepare a sample meal next week in our guesthouse for its five current occupants, one vegetarian, one carnivore and three omnivores, so I think it will be a good test. It would be nice if he can prepare sushi but Afghan food would be fine too.

In the meantime I have bought some local art to put on my bare office walls. I spotted some lovely pencil and watercolor drawings in a rack in the back of a small dusty bookstore on Flower street during our weekly outing into town where I also found Dupree’s famous book on Afghanistan, a well used and somewhat dirty copy that will do the trick as a reference.

While Greg and Steve went on their weekly carpet hunt on and off Chicken Street, I went with Naranjan, an Indian colleague who is staying with us, for a stroll beyond the carpet and knick-knack stores to a more ordinary street with small grocery stores and shops that sell ordinary household goods.

In between the shops we spotted a window filled with pakoras, small deep-fried beignets with potato and spinach filling. Naranjan is a vegetarian while the other housemates of us are carnivores and so this was his chance. Together with Abdul Ahab who is there to guard is, we filled our plates with all the pakoras and something like potato latkes. I generously offered to pay for everyone; combined with 3 cokes the bill came to 3 dollars and 60 cents.

My Dari teacher showed up late for our first lesson because he works with an organization that had one of their cars taken into custody by the policy somewhere in the north and his services were required to ‘solve the situation’ as it was referred to. Eventually he arrived and we had an hour and a half lesson working on verbs, pronunciation and numbers. I learned, among other things, that here people ‘eat’ tea rather than drink it. Maybe it is because of the chewy candies that are such an integral part of the tea consumption.

He gave me much homework that includes declinations of at least 15 verbs, the numbers I was tripping over and, if I get all that done before Tuesday, also a writing assignment. We are tackling talking, reading and writing all at the same time.

This morning at 6 AM or so the tens of thousands of doses of seasonal flu vaccine arrived at Kabul airport. Only very few people know what an enormous accomplishment that is. People have given up their private lives and sleep for the last few weeks to make sure that Afghan hajjis are not turned back upon their arrival in Saudi Arabia, a scenario that has given some people here nightmares.

Kabul, and probably all of Afghanistan, is spinning with rumors about the election results that were supposed to be announced today but apparently delayed till Saturday. It is strange to live in a place where rumors take the place of the traditional media. I have yet to see an Afghan read a newspaper or hold a transistor close to his ear. This stands in such sharp contrast to Africa where everyone has at least 2 if not more newspapers under his arm in the morning and even in the most remote areas you will see men listening to tiny transistor radios held together with elastic bands.

We get our news from the BBC. There is a TV in the house across the yard but I rarely watch and most of the time I cannot figure out how to use the three remotes. Instead of finding a news channel I may chance upon some slightly naughty programs that show a little bit more of the female body than is usually accepted. I do have a TV, given to me in custody by Brad who has left the country for North Dakota or some other faraway place. It is sitting in his old room at guesthouse number 26 and waiting till we move into the new guesthouse 33 – a few weeks from now. In the meantime the only remaining source of news is the internet. But I spend enough time sitting at my computer as it is.

I finally figured out why there are saucers with small wrapped chewy candies everywhere. Now I understand why tea is never served with sugar, unlike elsewhere in this part of the world. The tea is supposed to be consumed at the same time as the candy which then sweetens the drink. Oblivious to this, I have been eating the candy without the tea. Related to tea, I learned today that the Dari word for tea is, literally translated, ‘the answer to tea.’

In what others thought was a moment of impaired judgment I volunteered to coordinate the annual report production process together with a colleague in Boston who was supposed to be with us here but cancelled after the Indian Embassy bombing. These processes have been a little traumatic in the past which I think has something to do with a very imperfect understanding of Word’s formatting potential as well as English. During those periods everyone is underemployed: countless doctors doctoring documents, ad nauseam. One of the pieces of my vision for this job is to help make the planning and reporting processes if not joyous then at least occasions for reflection and learning. This is my chance.

On the way back from our weekly meeting at the US gated community I noticed several SUVs with ski racks. That struck me as odd. But when I asked my Afghan colleagues it turned out that people used to ski in Afghanistan, at the Salang Pass. In fact, when my housemate Steve got married here in 1977, MSH gave the couple skis as a wedding present. Skiing now would be a bit risky because of all the mines. So, no skiing this winter, unless of course we choose to go to Dubai and ski on the ski slope in the shopping center.

The consultant floodgates have opened and I now watch the stream from the other side of the table. Consultants want to meet, and should meet of course. Between counterparts, funders and consultants, most of my office hours seem now to be spent in meetings, some short and sweet, others long, at times arduous and occasionally difficult. There is much more ‘grappling’ at this level with complex issues that have no simple solutions and have consequences for many more people. This is the reality of being in a senior leadership position. Although I always knew this intellectually, living it is something else. The flipside is that I have staff who can do things for me, a luxury I enjoy.

The entire day we ran our meetings past their ending time. Time boundaries here are very elastic, more than the rigid time keeper that I am is used too. But everyone is very accommodating, partially because there is always the excuse of the traffic jam. Here traffic jams are the same as everywhere else in the world and then a little worse because of shifting military or police presences. Whenever high level people with their enormous security contingents move around town everyone stands still. Sometimes whole roads are blocked off because of a conference or meetings. On some streets our green car plates give us special privileges that ordinary white number-plated cars don’t have. Still, I sometimes wished that I could take taxis and explore the city streets on my own, stopping whenever and wherever I wanted.

I use the time I spent in traffic to learn Dari or practice the names of drivers when I am the only passenger. When I travel with a bunch of Afghan colleagues I learn about the jokes that Afghans from one province make about another province, like Wardakis about Konaris. These are very much like the jokes that the Dutch make about the Belgians or vice versa. That alone would be a good reason to learn the local language. There is much joy in those moments.

Last night I was invited by Sabina from Germany who is a radio reporter based in Delhi. She travels all over Afghanistan, essentially alone, unfazed but veiled whenever in public (like most of us Western women).

She stays in a guesthouse in Shari Nao that is not recognizable from the street. Rooms surround a lovely garden and are luxurious and costly, at 124 dollars a night. Dinner is not as luxurious but costly as well. The menu includes much British comfort food such as steak and kidney pie, sheppard pie in addition to pizza, pasta and a few Afghan dishes. There is wine and beer which makes it a favorite foreigner hangout. A very English looking pub is in the basement including darts and a big screen for cricket games.

When I ate the grapes last week that were washed under the garden hose I probably ingested something else with the grapes that nestled inside my intestines. Today I asked for a consultation with my boss and watched local prescribing practices. He checked my pulse and asked if I had a fever. When I said no he wrote a prescription on a Post-It note: 1+1+1 Flagyl – 20, gave it to me and sent me to the deputy director for provincial capacity building. I don’t know why, but the man was prepared, asked me for 50 Afs (1 dollar), made a phone call and about 10 minutes later one of the office housekeepers showed up with a small plastic bag with 2 strips of 10 pills each. The provincial doctor checked the strips for tinkering and approved them as authentic Flagyls. That’s how these things work. Easy.

For lunch the boss had invited us all to the Intercontinental hotel that is built on a hill overlooking part of Kabul. It was in this hotel that I participated in my first post-Taliban activity in Afghanistan in 2002. That was a time of relative freedom and so much optimism. We thought everything was possible then and that the Taliban would never come back, the veils and burkas thrown to the wind.

One of our Boston-based colleagues, Saeed, is here for a few days more. He is Afghan himself and left this country 16 years ago. He has relatives at high places and hears much of what is cooking behind closed doors. He was hopeful which made me hopeful. The idea of Afghanistan returning to something akin the normalcy of the 70s makes for the sweetest fantasies.

After lunch we drove off in two cars, one back to the office and the other back to the ministry. I was in the latter heading for a meeting with one of the Director-Generals to explore expectations about our staff (some are on my team) who are placed in the ministry. This has taken years to be realized and now it is nearly done. We only need to get everyone to agree what they would be doing there. As it turned out, many will find they are asked to do something they are not quite equipped for (and may be didn’t sign on for), namely being a management and leadership coach rather than a technical (public health) advisor. Surprise!

I am patient nr 7015 of the Kabul Orthopedic Organization, located at the very back of the military hospital that was opened by the Russians in 1990. The hospital is also referred to as the 400 bed hospital, a phrase I need to learn in Dari so I don’t end up at the wrong hospital for my next visit.

Fahima came recommended to me by a Swedish physical therapist who lived for several years in Kabul and knows the PT scene here well.

The first home-visiting therapist turned out rather useless in addition to being extraordinarily expensive for Kabul (35 dollars) now that I know that the hospital charges 20 dollars for a session that consists of 6 half hour visits. I was led into the ladies side of the building and into a room with several beds, a big exercise ball, an infrared lamp, some flex bands and very basic and well used exercise equipment.

I was impressed by the professional approach of Fahima. She first studied the surgery notes and then the protocol for rotator cuff surgery. She had me do my exercises and checked those I had been doing wrong, substituting the wrong muscles.

The whole place was impressive; very basic but well organized and employing many handicapped people. That was actually in their mission statement and goals, prominently displayed above a large bookcase full of records.

The rest of the day was a blur as I am trying to bring my email box down to near zero and set priorities for the countless tasks that were hiding in there –some rather urgent. Sometimes I feel like I am handed a ball of wool that is entirely tangled. I am trying to find the ends so I can start unraveling the knots.