Sylvia's Journal

Yesterday I learned in class that a mature man, a ripe piece of fruit and a paved road are all described with the word for ‘cooked’ (pokhta). My questions to the driver to find out if he was ‘cooked’ got a chuckle; indeed he considered himself an ‘adam pokhta,’ a cooked man (all this while driving over a few uncooked and one cooked road).

Some of my early ‘cooking’ efforts here as a coach (from early 2008 on) have produced well cooked facilitators. I watched a trio of people who I first knew as otherwise confident people (all doctors, one young female and two older males) who knew nothing about leadership development. Today, some 2 years later I watched them ‘dance’ with the participants and teach them about being leaders in ways I could only have hoped in my wildest dreams then. Such a joy.

I am now the coach behind the coach behind the coach and am hardly needed except for some pointers about working as a team rather than as accomplished individual facilitators. This fits my different position here as someone who watches the dance floor from the balcony (an image from Ron Heifetz), rather than remaining busy on the dance floor.

Julie and I had a lovely lunch at the Pelican restaurant down the street from our office: an authentic French mushroom quiche with freshly squeezed apple juice served (and maybe cooked as well) by young Hazara boys in white starched shirts and peach striped vests. We ate our lunch outside, sitting on the traditional chaharpai furniture on the terrace in the warm spring sun.

On our way back the road was blocked by buses parked at right angles to the road and many men with guns. Our bad luck was that the Parliament building was right in between our restaurant and the office. It took some maneuvering by our driver through muddy side streets to get from A to B.

In the evening, coming in late from another long work day, I found a slightly altered version of our family’s favorite ‘Chicken Fiszman’ recipee in the oven (named after our kids French teacher at High School). The chicken was so tiny that Julie thought it was one of the missing pigeons from her window sill.

We are still working on the concept of moist and juicy for roasted poultry (or pigeons as the case may be). Our cook tends to produce meals that are a little too ‘pokhta’ for our taste.