Sylvia's Journal

We started the day with the blast in Wazir Akbar Khan, more or less where we were driving the other day and where we felt rather creepy; so we were right. Luck here is to some degree being somewhere else. We feel quite safe in Karte Seh, far from the Wazir area.

The day ended with shots that were fired on our street while we were having dinner. The guards rushed out with their walkie-talkies and we waited inside for what would happen next. Ten minutes later the guards knocked on our door with big grins on their faces saying something that we understood as ‘firing in the air for joy,’ their movements confirmed our interpretation. Such joy!

In between those two fiery events Axel learned more Dari and I prepared for all sorts of meetings: one with our colleagues here to create a viewpoint about MSH in Afghanistan, something that is needed because of the many requests on the US East Coast for such an opinion. This meeting will happen tomorrow and is somewhat of a challenge: trying to get highly opiniated older (white) male experts to produce one voice together is going to be tricky but we’d better as otherwise the Head office will produce the voice.

We are also getting ready for our quarterly review meetings (called During Action Reviews, DARs here) and the resubmission of our technical proposal for a project extension that will bring us to September 2011. And finally there is the weekly meeting with our donor located not that far from where the blast was.

On the way to our meeting my boss told stories about the Taliban days which include all sorts of variations on highway robberies, always by men with guns and always with the thought that this is the last minute of his life, and then the story takes a turn for the better. He tells the stories with a grin; they are funny in hindsight but not then and I am reminded of the resilience of people here. I think about my work experience at MSH headquarters with a punctured tire as the worst experience.

Our USAID meeting was long, making today another 11 hour day, but interesting. I could see our counterparts in USAID listen intently to what implementation of great ideas looks like on the ground: messy and not according to plan. While we are talking stories emerge about petty attempts at corruption (like: I will give you a travel advance if you promise to hire my cousin’s car or stay in my aunt’s guesthouse; or, I will hold up this bureaucratic transaction in the hope that I can get a small piece of the pie.)

Our own passports are in a holding pattern for similar reasons, at the passport office. We have a few more days before we will really need them. Our security man laughs about it as it is an old ritual until someone says they will tell USAID or bring in our own warriors. That always breaks the hold, we are told. This is another one of those trust falls.

We talked with Pia over the phone to check out the rumor that the DAI offices are targeted (close to the Kabul blast and another in Paktya where local DAI staff got killed). She feels safe in Jalalabad’s DAI compound but people are on alert. It was a very bad day, she confirms. We are relieved she is OK. People text each other in such circumstances.