Sylvia's Journal

Yesterday I bought a bouquet of fresh daffodils (from Jalalabad) and a video with cooking lessons in Persian, for our cook. The fresh flowers needed a vase and are now nicely settled into a Herat blue glass vase, drooping a bit, but still nice. The cooking video was pirated from a German show and dubbed in Farsi.

Sara and I watched lesson one of the cooking class: rosemary and garlic roasted lamb, braised carrots with carrot greens and thyme, and tiny leek-and-apple tarts. I noticed that all the ingredients and utensils needed for the meal are available. It was a good exercise from a language perspective and will be a good lesson for our cook from a quality-of-life perspective.

I started the day with a meeting with Douglas who works in the ministry and who I won’t get to see for a week to make sure everything is moving along well as we prepare for the potential impact of the new US Government AFPAK strategy that landed in our mailboxes yesterday. It feels like a tsunami coming our way.

Douglas left with Sara for a meeting with the military to educate them about how health services are delivered (through a grant project that is managed by the government with our assistance). While they were educating the ISAF folks I was educating myself further about the AFPAK strategy: ambitious and clean, sometimes a bit too clean knowing the messy reality of daily Afghan government life.

It was a beautiful day, spring like again, still no snow in sight, which made it possible to sit on the terrace without a coat (but otherwise well covered), preparing for my Dari class.

We had dinner with Razia Jan which I am now discovering is like a refueling visit. When I see too many men make dumb decisions or get embroiled in sandbox fights or think narrowly about their work, all I have to do is go to Razia’s house and meet the extraordinary women she collects around her.

I talked with one young woman who got an MBA in the US some years ago. She told me that in her life at work here in Kabul she thinks about the lessons from her leadership and OB classes more than any other of her MBA classes. I asked her why. She told me the consequences of not understanding OB and poor leadership are visible all around her.

Few people see the gender dynamics at work when the (few) women who hold professional positions try hard to avoid making mistakes, creating a whole series of non events, while the men (98% of all decision makers both in civil and military life) get away with making one bad judgment after another, poorly thought through decisions, cover their behinds and take silly risks; the damage of this is then either cleaned up by women or good men (this goes mostly unnoticed) or the day is saved by other men who then become heroes.