Sylvia's Journal

We are now getting the English language Afghanistan Times delivered at our workplace, one for each guesthouse. The masthead promises ‘eye on the news’ that is ‘truthful, factual and unbiased.’ It is also a source for positive stories about Afghanistan, one of the few in print. That is why we requested a subscription.

Today I started coalition building in our own organization by calling all the female staff (all 14 of the 225 staff in total – a sorry state I hope to change). We are in the process of creating child care on the premises and we brainstormed today, in Dari and English, on how to celebrate International Women’s Day – a day not celebrated at MSH/Afghanistan since 2004.

Apparently it required the presence of a ‘Gender Specialist.’ With the gender specialist (my former colleague Miho from Japan) gone, the celebrations stopped. This is a problem with specialization and making the gender awareness a job of a specialist.

Last summer I sat in on a meeting with a bunch of male Anglos (US, Australia and Britain), some of them consultants, some colleagues, as well as some male Afghan colleagues. I was the only woman. No sooner had someone uttered the word gender or all eyes were on me, the assumption that the token woman must therefore be the gender specialist. Don’t get me going on this.

Our ‘MSH/Afghanistan Women Unite!’ meeting, chaired by one of my more promising young female staff, confirmed how badly coalitions are needed. I noticed how powerless the women felt and how unacknowledged and unrecognized. This is the problem with being a victim: you give all your power away.

Although it is generally true that Afghan women got dealt a lousy hand, I do believe that some of the victimization is self imposed: no one took their scarf off in our all-female meeting; no one is stepping out from behind the curtains of the musty light-less women’s dining closet. I don’t hear anyone say: we won’t take this any longer. I am the one saying it, maybe because I can and they feel they cannot.

So today was a first step – I learned some things and they learned some things too. Everyone got a job: looking for images and stories of inspiring Afghan women we can parade in front of our men, a quiz to test our staff’s knowledge about women’s status here in Afghanistan, some poetry from famous female poets, a short video and maybe individual testimonials. We will meet again next week – that’s a least a small victory.

Today we had lunch in local Afghan restaurant while we killed time in between a ministry meeting and our weekly meeting in the US government compound. Between the four of us we ate 2 kilos of the most delicious fried fish, a real treat in this landlocked country. The hot fish was sprinkled with a tasty spice mixture consisting of salt, dried chili pepper, cumin, coriander seeds and the powder made from green (unripe) grapes.

The name of the restaurant is Colbah Arman which our Afghan colleagues translated loosely as ‘the hut where you fulfill your greatest desires.’ Steve and I thought of something else than what our colleagues explained the words meant: a place where you meet with friends and enjoy good conversation and a good meal.

Talking about desire, while removing the pasta making machine from its box, yesterday, the cook and housekeeper must have discovered the instruction booklet that came with it. Its front page features a good looking young women with as her only piece of clothing, if you could call it that, a shawl made out of pasta (presumably created with the past machine) that is fringed at the bottom (something the pasta machine can also do), entirely covering the nakedness of her upper body.

They had stuck the picture up on the wall, as if a pin-up girl, above the knife block and the espresso machine, wedged between the wall and one of the cabinets. Right below it they stuck the two pictures Axel had made of them making the past (fully clothed). When I came home at the end of the day, the picture was still wedged between the wall and the cabinet, but pushed in enough that you couldn’t anymore see her pasta outfit or a hint of what the pasta covered.

Today 21 years ago the Russians left and the day is still celebrated. In fact, it is considered disrespectful I am told if you don’t take the day off. So we closed the office and used up the floating holiday that’s now nailed down to the Russians.

I finally got to do my various projects that have been winking at me for some time now: a new night shirt for Axel and the start of a ‘kameez’ from the beautiful handwoven cotton cloth from Mazar that I found in the furniture store. It’s actually upholstery fabric but I think it can be worn too.

Somehow the ‘day off’ message never reached our household staff and so Amin and Ali showed up as usual. I never see the cook because he arrives after I leave and leaves before I get home.

I took advantage of us being in the same place by teaching him how to use the pasta maker. Ali, our housekeeper also got in on the act and while I gave instructions in Dari, with occasional translation from Ali who is studying English, Axel memorialized our cooking class on his little Flip camera.

When all was done and the pasta drying as little birds nest on a dish towel, we sat together around the TV and watched the video Axel had made: our own authentic Afghan/Italian cooking show. Axel also printed a few action shots on photo paper pasta. It was all very jolly and well documented. But they didn’t take the pictures home or some of the pasta they produced. It’s a split life I guess: there’s home and then those weird foreigners.

Except for reading my emails (but not acting on them) only twice all day, it was more of a holiday than I have had since Christmas. I never left the house and did all the things I have no time for during the work week, and barely during the weekend.

Axel did go out as his SOLA class was not cancelled. He talked about mission and vision using the materials we produced at MSH. Back home he showed me the mindmap he had created of the dreams of the five young men he is teaching on Mondays. It’s all very hopeful – one day these kids will be in charge and that’s a good prospect.

And now, at the closing of this holiday we are eating the homemade pasta with a homemade pasta sauce while watching Miss Marple solving a complex murder mystery.

Valentine’s Day is something else here. At Axel’s school the girls celebrate Valentine’s Day together, no boys. Somehow the notion of romantic love and red hearts doesn’t fit with the kind of boy-girl relationships this culture favors.

Still, one of the girls got two chocolates from a boy (giggle, giggle). ‘Chocolate’ here refers to any kind of chewy and non chewy candy. Thus the love-chocolate (real chocolate) relationship is a bit arbitrary and brown (or pink, white) and red don’t necessarly go together on this day. But if he had wanted to, Axel could have bought me a box of fancy chocolates. But instead he made me a card with a tulip motif, taken directly from the rug weaving business. It’s better than chocolates. The day does exist in shops that sell sweets to the foreign and Afghan elite.

During my visit at the ministry on Saturday I spotted Valentine cookies: oreo-type cookies with pink stuff in between and heart-shaped red cut outs in the top cookie. A love cookie so to speak. It felt out of place but my host explained that such habits as Christmas and Valentine’s Day come along with the returning diaspora. And shop keepers like any such new habit that has the potential to augment sales.

Tonight we are celebrating Valentine’s Day with Hameed and Mary at the romantic restaurant called Bella Italia which is situated, not very romantically, behind enormous blast walls on the other side of town. We don’t know either of our Valentine’s Day dates but have heard much (good) about Mary. We know nothing about Hameed other than that we suppose he is Afghan. Mary is bringing him along.

Last night we also went out, to a Korean restaurant, right down the street. We met up with Michael, a British nurse who grew up in a Salvation Army household in Sierra Leone. In the 60s Michael was a nurse to the Saudi king who got shot by his (the king’s) nephew. Michael was an eye witness to this family feud which landed him in a plush Saudi jail. He was treated well and received a daily allowance of Jimmy Walker Red. This was his second stint in jail. When he first arrived he was also put in jail, not quite as nice, because of holding a profession (nursing) associated with women. This created enough cognitive dissonance to overpower his six page royal visa and a royal invitation to nurse the king.

But somehow everything worked out for him and we are lucky to have found him on our path. He has an enormous reservoir of stories which will take many more dinners. Unfortunately for us, Michael is off to another adventure next month that will take him to Saigon. For some people life is never dull. For us it will be a little duller without him.

Saturdays aren’t always days of rest for me because I am here to support the central ministry of health. They work and sometimes call me. This morning I combined a meeting at the ministry of health with a visit to my physical therapist, across the street, and the husband of one of my staff.

Fahima treated me in a room that was not heated. The small ‘country stove’ was lit when we came in but the room never got warm. She reviewed my exercises and established weekly goals. I am working on range of motion and a little bit of strength. She prepared me a schedule for the week – some exercises I have to do every two hours. That is going to require some discipline.

I came in late to an organizing committee for one of the many large ministry-wide conferences that are supposed to happen every year but have slipped a bit since last fall. The committee has been meeting for awhile and so it was hard not to come in and spoil the party with criticism. But I do have lots of questions. I tried to ‘read’ the group, even when they speak in their own language, as not to upset the apple cart, determining where to draw the line between breaking down and building up.

I noticed, whenever the group reverted to Dari, that I can understand significantly more than 3 months ago. Dari is no longer an entirely secret language although I still have a long way to go before I can fully participate in local language discussions.

After our meeting I had an appointment with another senior ministry official who happens to be married to one of my team members. I had requested a meeting so that we could discuss his wife’s professional development and share what opportunities are available. Such topics are private and individual in the US but here they are family affairs. We discussed family and women’s professional development over a wonderful lunch that was cooked in the office on a little petroleum stove behind a screen. How people can cook the most wonderful meals like that remains a mystery to me. I need a fully equipped kitchen to produce a similar meal.

In the meantime word reached me from Holland that the lung condition maybe treatable and may not be as fatal as we thought yesterday. All prayers are much appreciated and we are feeling a little less depressed. It was hard to concentrate on work when you are worried about someone near and dear like that.

In the late afternoon (‘digar’) Axel and I went to our Dari class together. Our classes are separate – we learn in different ways and at different speeds and so we have different teachers.

I added a whole new series of complex constructions to my bag of Dari tricks, all of them requiring a shift in mindset in addition to learning the words. I learned that ‘I forget’ in Dari is ‘something slipped from my memory,’ and ‘I am late’ is ‘lateness came to me.’ The general belief that life happens to you is reflected in such constructions.

I enjoy my classes tremendously and wish I could spend more time on them. But for now 4 hours a week in class is all I can handle, given that homework takes another couple of hours.

We followed our usual Friday ritual of walking in Bagh-e-bala, then going for lunch, some shopping and then back home. We did not join the Chicken Street contingent because one visit every few weeks is enough for us.

We had green tea, sitting in the sun and practiced our Dari, while looking out over the white mountains around Kabul and enjoying the mild temperature. On days like this Kabul is very pleasant.

We had lunch at the Flower Street café which isn’t on Flower Street anymore. It is one of those places where foreigners hang out. The place is owned by Afghan Americans and serves American breakfast fare. We sat at a table in the snow covered backyard while the sun was heating up my back. It was lovely.

Everything remained lovely until I checked my email. For once I had not checked my email all day with the intent of not thinking about work at all. Since the head office hasn’t completed its work week, opening emails on Friday is risky. But then I did at the end of the day and found a dark message from my brother – the doctors found something really wrong in the lungs of his wife. That sort of stopped everything. She’s my age. Life’s fragile.

Nazima sold socks on the streets of Iran which her mother bought for pennies less in the bazaar, while her father was hunkering down at home, fearing arrest because his papers were not in order. Nazima’s story is one of thousands but I got to hear her tell me directly with a big grin, the memories she had from that time, such as the gentleman who already wore 6 socks, one over the other, each with a hole in the big toe.

One of the references on Nazima’s CV is her former fiancé. Since she is only 20 I wondered what had happened and, with my western lenses on I thought ‘how sad, he ditched her.’ But after some probing it turned out that she ditched him when, five month after the engagement, she had enough of his checking on her and telling her what she could and could not do and what she could and could not wear. The final drop in the bucket was that after marriage she would not be allowed to see her mother anymore. That did it and now she is no longer engaged and free as a bird (with mom’s encouragement, dad’s no longer of this world).

Talking about a narrow escape! She told me that there is a saying in Persian (and Dari) that if you cross over the rainbow you will turn from boy into girl or girl into boy. I suppose it is used as a threat to boys and a dream to girls in this part of the world. Nazima had figured out early in life that being a girl was not a good thing and one day she set out to chase after the rainbow. She was gone for a good part of the day but never caught up with the elusive rainbow and finally gave up. When she came home her mother asked her where she had been. She told her. I would have like to know her mother’s thoughts.

I asked her whether she would still want to cross that rainbow. If you live in Afghanistan being a girl is still not a good thing, but she has decided to educate herself and get a good job, earn a good salary and marry a handsome man. That way being a girl is not bad.

Nazima is an acquaintance of a friend who had asked me for help in finding her a new job as the old one is running out. I promised to meet her and check out her English (excellent) and help her with her CV. Once again I encountered a part of Afghan society that will transform it, with or without permission of the old powers, the white-beards (riis-safed) some of whom would like to keep things as they are and women in their place. But as far as I can tell the cat is out of the bag and unlikely to ever return.

Once big change from my previous work is that I am now a director. I direct others to do the work I used to be myself. There are now many Afghan facilitators implementing the Leadership Program here and in the provinces. It has been a while since I was directly involved in one or even observed one. And since it is all done in local language I have no idea how much it has drifted.

And so today I decided to accompany my Afghan colleagues for an alignment meeting with hospital directors as part of an effort to improve hospital performance in the capital city. This sector has been neglected too long and people realize that a significant proportion of the politically active or literate population lives in Kabul and other urban areas. For them hospitals represent the face of the ministry of health, or the government. And this is a face that’s not good looking at the moment.

Two hours before the meeting we heard that the general director for hospital services couldn’t come as he was called to the Salang Pass where hundreds were killed and thousands stranded because of an avalanche. The stories emerging from this catastrophe are horrendous and the response from the government came too late for too many. Emergency preparedness mostly exists on paper, as plans developed at the central level with help from consultants, but implementing them is a bit more chaotic, lethally chaotic.

One hour before our meeting the event was back on – it was after all a regular hospital directors’ meeting that happens every week or month, and life goes on, even with hospitals on standby to receive avalanche victims.

Then, as were approaching the venue for the meeting we received a call that the meeting was off again but we continued anyways, pleading with the Director for Hospital & Curative Services to not cancel the meeting even if she couldn’t be there.

Of the 30 expected people some 12 trickled in during the first 45 minutes of the meeting. Without any presence from the government we are always in a bind – should we take over their functions or drop the ball? We decided to step in and play ball. My staff conducted a shortened version of what was supposed to be a 2 hour alignment meeting and an orientation to the leadership program.

What I observed had strayed a bit from the original design. Always, when time is shorter than expected (a normal occurrence) the tendency is to shorten the experiential exercises and revert back to feeding people concepts from handouts or powerpoints. Still, the meeting had its desired effect, creating enough of a pull for the leadership program that we will go ahead with the first or five teams, later this month; one step back, two forward.

I spent the entire afternoon at the US government complex to listen to various officials, military and non-military, in the company of chiefs of party or other representatives of all the USAID projects in Afghanistan. I think there were at least 50 of us if not more, the majority men of a certain age.

I had arrived early and was whisked to ‘the red tent’ on the USAID side of the complex going faster through security than ever before. The driver was even allowed to enter the road that bisects the complex (embassy one side, USAID the other) and which is usually reserved for military and official vehicles.

The inside of the tent was smelly; the thing had come from a military store room and had clearly not been used for a while. I preferred to wait outside on a sunny deck that, with some imagination, could have been in a ski resort in Switzerland if you squinted hard and only looked at the tops of the snow-clad mountains.

But as soon as you lowered your gaze you were back in a place that was all about defense: sand bags, hooches (living containers full of bunk beds and one tiny window), barbed wire, uniformed men with guns and high blast walls.

The deck belongs to the local pub called The Duck & Cover. The pub sign shows a duck with a soldier’s helmet standing on a pile of sand bags with snow covered mountains in the back. The establishment dates back to the year 1387 (=Afghan calendar, last year) it says in old English typeface. On the door is a sticker that says ‘last pub for 240 km.’ I presume you can get beer and watch sport games but I didn’t have any money on me and only helped myself to the free tea and cookies (flown in from the US).

I felt very out of place and experienced an enormous disconnect in this US enclave in the middle of Afghanistan. I did not really want to be there. But then the presentations started and things got better.

I learned about the district development focus for the next couple of years (note ‘couple’ which I take to mean ‘2’) and how the military is planning to play a supporting role (‘you guys are doing the work, we are there to support you!’). The presentation about the district development strategy raised as many questions as it answered, mostly because of the disconnect (another one) between the new decentralized US government approach and the heavily centralized way of operating in the Afghan government.

The most interesting presentation was from a colonel who presented a face of the US army that I have never seen: culturally sensitive, intent on fixing errors made in the last 7 years, creating a core of AF/PAK hands with language skills and frequent immersion in both Afghan society and the world and work of the NGOs.

These military men would not be in uniform or carry personal armor. The colonel answered his own question (wouldn’t that be dangerous?) with the words, ‘not any more dangerous than combat.’

Although I don’t think that we won’t be taking in military anytime soon, other organizations will and that is a good thing. Having military in the various regional commands (and central command) who speak the language and understand something about both the culture and the work that the NGOs are doing can only be good.

We also learned how fraudulent behavior of nationals and internationals alike is aggressively pursued and can be the end of your career, here and anywhere else. When a staff member who handles contracts in a USAID project owns a castle in one of the provinces, the USAID police will surely take a closer look.

Not reporting fraud, by an organization, is also bad for business (debarment). These agressive strategies are clearly in response to concerns raised in the US and the probing eyes of Congress as the total bill of US taxpayer money spent here (excluding the military) runs in the billions.

‘This will past’ was written in colorful letters on the minibus driving in front of us as we made our way around the increasing number of checkpoints that have sprung up over the last few months between our office and the ministry.

We drove in stop and go traffic for nearly an hour through the mud and slush while the snow and sleet kept coming down. It was as if the weather was trying to make up for the many sunny and dry days we have had so far.

Many Afghans knew from TV, internet, friends or colleagues that the US east coast was hit by a mega winter storm while we got to watch how Kabul digs itself out from a much milder one; wet snow (barfetar) as opposed to dry snow (barfe-something else).

Everywhere I saw people cleaning off their flat roofs, kids and adults throwing wet and hard snow balls at each other and pedestrians trying in vain to avoid the muddy puddles that were everywhere.

Here streets don’t get plowed – I have yet to see a plow. Cars turn the thick heavy snow into muck and on the smaller side roads like in our quartier, the cars create grooves that are hard to navigate for pedestrians and bikes, with a real chance of sliding into one of the jewies (open gutters).

Later in the day a cold front announced itself with a nasty cold wind which left countless people shuddering in their not-very-winter-clothes. Unlike the US where we all have an entire separate winter wardrobe, here people are wearing the same clothes all year round; maybe people have one shalwar kameez made from wool rather than thin cotton, but otherwise the clothes appear the same.

Footwear is another source of wonder: some women wear mules, barefoot, of the kind we’d expect to see on a summer evening; some men even trudge through the thick and slushy snow wearing the ubiquitous plastic slippers, barefoot as well, that you usually find indoors.

I rarely see people wearing gloves but maybe it has not been cold enough. We brought all our guards and household personnel Thinsulate gloves but have never seen them wear these (maybe tomorrow when northern winds will chill us through our bones).