Sylvia's Journal

We were all woken up at 4:15 AM; it was as if our bed was gently rocked back and forth; a soft clanking of metal against metal outside added to the eerie experience of feeling the earth moving underneath us. It was my first earthquake and it was a frightening experience. The epicenter was about 175 km northeast of Kabul and deep under the Hindukush mountains, which made us all grateful for tall mountains.

Sickness, attacks, earthquakes, it really feels as if we are receiving multiple messages from the universe that it is time for our R&R. In that respect we are lucky, Afghans don’t get R&R, and so we can’t complain.

Today seven provincial teams from the South and the East of Afghanistan, many of them considered dangerous places, came together in our large meeting room for a refresher training as facilitators of our successful leadership development program.

I did a similar program over 14 months ago in the same place with the same teams. Then I took the lead. Now the process is expertly managed by one colleague from our Kabul team, one from Kandahar and one energetic young lady from the ministry. It was immeasurably satisfying to see them apply adult teaching methods with great ease, as if they’d done it all their life and being utterly confident.

They used the morning session to find out where people were in their learning process and crafted a very responsive program around it, firming up a rough idea of a program I had shared with them earlier.

Although I am supposed to be part of the facilitator team, they are really running the show; it is better that way because all can be done in Pashto and Dari.

I was please to be able to follow much of the Dari instructions (but none of the instructions in Pashto) and realize that there too has been much progress in my language acquisition.

And, right in line with all these experiences of movement (most in the right direction, some disturbing) and being moved, Axel applied for a job with a company called Harakat, which means, yes indeed, movement.

All in all a moving day!