Sylvia's Journal

The main road through Karte Parwan, past the Intercon Hotel and Bagh-e-Bala is being improved, expanded and paved (‘cooked’). There are two wide lanes, paved and ready for use, but at rush hour only one was open. The lane should be able to hold three cars abreast (there are no white lines) but somehow nine lanes had pressed into the space for three; six lanes going our way and three in the opposite direction.

The whole place was one large parking lot and our driver, Hadji Safar, decided to take a short cut off on the left, but we got even more hopelessly stuck. He managed to turn the car around between two jewies (open sewers) without getting his wheels over the edge and ease back into the space we had formerly occupied. It was a good occasion to quote the saying, ‘faster is slower.’ It took us 2 hours to get form the ministry of health back to our house, a distance of only a few kilometres, 25 minutes on a good day.

I was lucky that i was not traveling along. My co-passenger was one of my staff. We killed the time by deconstructing a complex mess-up in the office that we can ascribe lightly to cultural differences, or deeply to things more sinister (or just the other way around). In the end we agreed that an Afghan proverb described the situation best: if my heart is not narrow, no place can be narrow (aga delem tang nabasha, jay tang neest).

All along during the drive, cheek by jowl with other motorists, I made a point of smiling to people who looked tense. I was able, each time, to get a smile back. I consider this good preventive medicine in a place where road rage can easily get out of hand given the amount of guns that are floating around here; no doubt some of them in the cars we encounter or travel alongside with.

At the ministry we had attended a meeting that was designed to get organizations like us to pay for staff and other things (nobody even nibbled on the request for the new headquarters). It was one of these meetings with multiple layers of meaning. After the meeting, during our long ride home, I understood what was really going on and realized that our response had been the wrong one – a moral high road maybe, but missing the boat in other ways.

The endless requests for things, people, stuff, money is at times exasperating, yet entirely understandable. For one, the strategy ultimately works as there is always someone who is willing to sign the check. In this case that should have been us. Not offering to hire staff would essentially undo a few years of capacity building, as the capacity that we did built is about to slip from our hands – contracts are up and there are better offers out there. There are no easy solutions and we are too far ahead in this game of hiring the people the government needs but cannot afford, to turn our backs.