Sylvia's Journal

It is easy to forget how different we are, those of us coming from far West of Afghanistan from those whose entire lives have been lived here. Although the US and European press seem to indicate that everyone here despises us and our ways, I am daily surrounded by people who want to be like us and sometimes pretend to be like us.

But ‘us’ is a fast moving bunch: all fluent or nearly fluent English speakers and writers, very adept with the computer, at ease with abstract concepts and able to say ‘I don’t know’ even if we are very senior. We are also able to confront or challenge our superiors in ways people here cannot even begin to fathom no matter how white their hair is.

Many of us are also speed readers and check our email every 30 seconds and then respond in less than that with impressive intellectual opinions, analyses and critiques. We have been trained like that. We have also been trained to be pro-active, look for knowledge and data and think about connections that may not be obvious to people living close to the ground.

The people we work with, whether our own colleagues or counterparts in the ministry, even those high up the hierarchy have been trained differently: rote learning well into their academic training; total deference to the professor and anyone else in an authority role; always polite no matter how much one is insulted. English remains their third or even fourth language and reading and writing in English takes a lot of energy and time.

Socially we are also very differently. You can see that easily by the hours that the bachelor expats put in, with no family to stop the work. For them time is very elastic and things can be and are done long after the work day is over. As the only expat with a family here I am finally realizing that I need to set my work/family boundaries more sharply.

There are always absences because the mother in law of a cousin of a brother in law has died or something like that. For us these would be too remote to count as reasons for family bereavement leave, but here all that is much closer. I learned that our young dispatcher just married a woman who is both the daughter of his mother’s brother and the daughter of his father’s sister. Go figure that out.

And yet, we work side by side with an American clock ticking on the wall. Sharp deadlines, long documents, high English standards, fast computers and a relentless stream of emails, day and night (night is day at Headquarters and Washington).

I found out that I needed to reset my computer clock everyday because it was 10 minutes late. I was puzzled by that since I assumed computer clocks are always right. As it turned out, the local server was responsible for the delay, but now I realize it was also a signal from the universe that time here is different and a reminder that many of our deadlines are entirely self-imposed and much more elastic than American workers think (except when you have to report results to Congress of course).

I spent a good two hours with one of my staff establishing and explaining performance standards; although he is familiar with the ways of the west, having worked with the UN for many years, I still realized that we were trying to meet across an ocean of differences. Good enough for now has to be the motto as we are all trying to get the work done and earn our pay.