Sylvia's Journal

Although part of my weekend, I was summoned to the Ministry of Health to attend the weekly staff meeting of one of the director generals. Two people representing projects from the European Commission also attended but they work at the ministry anyways and don’t have to come from afar.

We were given a brief presentation about the government’s efforts to support the provinces and why it doesn’t work. There are valiant efforts to make it work but they bump up against something that is ill-defined: departments that do not respond but we don’t know why. Is it intentional? Resource-related? No consequences? Still, the analysis of a year worth of meeting minutes that raised issues that are still unresolved, was interesting.

Although none of us represented donors, we were all asked to take back requests about funding a provincial conference to celebrate the things that did get resolved and the good men and women (very few) that are actually serious about improving the health of their provincial populations. A little over a year ago I attended a similar conference that was hijacked by a UN agency that will remain nameless.

In between meetings I did the rounds of our staff seconded to the ministry to make sure they were warm; I had after all approved the purchase of gas heaters. One was not used because it didn’t work. This should not be surprising (I have never seen so many new items malfunction or not function), but the inaction from one of our staff who is supposed to be a management coach was disappointing. I couldn’t help myself and gave a short lecture about taking action when a result is not the one that was intended.

The 2nd meeting was canceled when I showed up, also not uncommon. There is a lot of nervous movement in the ministry because the cabinet announcements will be made tomorrow. The big question is, will the Minister of Health remain, and if so, will his top team? I just learned that most of the ministers will be replaced and many investigated, so the nervousness is understandable. So things are a little on hold for now until we know our (new or old) counterparts.

I walked over to the physical therapy place at the 400-bed hospital across the street and found the staff eating their lunch. I was promptly invited to a tasty lunch of rice and spinach, accompanied by green tea. Few of the staff spoke English, except the project manager for the demining project who lived in England for some time. We talked about the courage it takes to become a de-miner (the opposite of a suicide bomber) and the terrible tragedies created by mines. It is what keeps everyone in the orthopedic and PT practice busy.

I ended up spending a few hours at the hospital, sitting by the woodstove and speaking in broken Dari and English with the other PTs and the one patient. At some point there was excitement in the air because the first snow was falling. The Dari word for snow is ‘barf’ and this was then the ‘awal barf.’ They tried to explain to me the local ritual surrounding first snow but I didn’t understand enough words to make sense out of it. It included a plastic bag, an envelope, pretending that the melting snow in the plastic bag in the envelope was a letter from France or Britain and then running away laughing. Everyone had a good laugh about either the joke or me not understanding, and I laughed along with everyone else.

I was given a new exercise that requires a small children’s ball which necessitated a significant detour through a choked Shari-nao. I chose the 2 dollar ball over the 30 cent ball because it was not as dirty, the cheap one had been hanging in a net through several seasons.