Sylvia's Journal

Another day spent in meetings. The early morning one to make sure the project’s senior leadership team is re-aligned now that the boss is back. Then over to the ministry to make sure the high level health retreat planned for early February will be more productive than the one last year and finally a conversation with our European Commission counterpart about centralized and decentralized support to the government for contracting out health care services to NGOs. Add to this another three and a half hours of sitting in traffic and it all adds up to a full day.

The meeting at the ministry took place in the office of someone else because the reserved conference room was in use. While we were discussing our agenda, the room’s official resident was doing his business with people coming and going as if we weren’t there. I was trying to imagine a similar scenario back home and could not. But here, stranger things happen.

We were not allowed to take the car into the street with the huge concrete blast walls that were taken down just before the Indian embassy bombing and put up right after. The EC compound is in that neighborhood, away from the bustling traffic. We left our computer bags in the car and walked, armed with cell phones and note pads, along lonely store fronts, now cut off from customers, and bombed-out buildings until we arrived at the heavily fortified EC entrance staffed with Nepali gurkas who give me a big smile when I put my hands together and said ‘namaste.’

Opposite an army of people from USAID involved with the NGO contracting stands a lonely but feisty Italian woman who is, more or less by herself, the EC health unit. We went to see here to find out what her view is about host country contracting, which means transferring money directly from the American (or European) taxpayer to the Afghan government. The EC has decided not to, after three audits that showed only minor improvement towards compliance with EU standards. There are many other philosophical and practical differences with the EC, one of them being that USAID represent a single country and the EC a whole bunch.

Steve came back from his R&R in Myanmar and arrived at an empty guesthouse zero. We invited him to have dinner with us in our house 33 that he had not seen yet. He brought a big copper platter from his guesthouse that he is willing to part with until he leaves Afghanistan next year. Now I can put my coffee cup down on the kelim (also Steve’s) without risk of tipping it over.