Sylvia's Journal

To Afghanize or not was the verb-of-the-day, and will probably continue to be the verb-of-the-week and even verb-of-the-month after Obama reveals his Afghanistan strategy while we are asleep. Our funder asked us to indicate how we will transfer everything we do to Afghan entities, public or private, describe it in one or two pages, and have it submitted by yesterday.

It is one thing to build capacity, our mandate, so that civil servants can run the public health system on their own; it is an entirely different thing for them to receive and manage US government funds with all the myriad of strings attached.

All our local staff and consultants have to undergo a ‘terrorist check’ to certify that they are not terrorists before they can be paid with US government dollars. I am trying to imagine how this will be handled after we are gone and a local entity is in charge.

The push to Afghanize sounds nice on paper and fits nicely with the 8-years-from-now exit strategy that Obama will promise; but it doesn’t match the equally strong push to bring transparency to this country by imposing countless controls that are hard enough for us to put into effect.

This complex and sudden demand from our donor kept us at work long after our Afghan colleagues went home. For over an hour we discussed options and scenarios over cellphone speaker phones with Alain in the DRC, our Chief of Party who is sick in Peshawar and colleagues at HQ in the US. It is good that we couldn’t see each other and no one saw how much I yawned. It was another 12-hour day.

Earlier in the day I received a call from a gentleman who spoke loud in halting English and mentioned the word Holland a few times. I couldn’t for the life of me understand who he was and what he wanted from me until he showed up a few hours later at my office and I discovered he was the brother-in-law of my brother’s assistant at the University of Tilburg’s school of law.

He invited Axel and me to come over for lunch and meet his wife, Zeebah, next Friday. He lives in one of the apartment complexes across town put down by the Russians and called Mikroyan (short for MicroRayon). Seeing the buildings you would not have to be told that the Russians built the place; it requires no imagination.

We visited of one of my colleagues in asimilar block a few weeks ago. I imagine that it is similar: poorly heated, bullet holes on the outside, small apartments with dumpy stairwells.

Axel was involved in another kind of capacity building of the cook. It looks like pizza is still a bit out of reach (blank stare) but the Irish stew Axel pulled from the internet came out quite nice. It was our first lamb for dinner in our new home after indicating that we had had enough after one month of chicken.

I had left an illustrated list for the housekeeper and cook with, among others, a picture of a chicken with an X drawn through it. It worked. Axel signed his email telling me about his capacity building in the kitchen with the Dari words for ‘teacher (muallem), student (shogerd) and cook (ashpaz).’ I was very proud of him.