Sylvia's Journal

I took Katie along to my physical therapy session, for yet another taste of Kabul, part of her Afghanistan primer.

It took us more than an hour to get across town. Some roads were blocked with heavy construction equipment and angry policemen waving us into a direction we didn’t want to go in; no one quite knows what’s goin on behind the blocades but we all assume it has something to do with the upcoming peace Jirga and the mobilization of thousands of men in uniform. Is anyone seeing the contradiction?

As there are fewer and fewer back roads these days to get to your destination, the traffic jams become more frequent and massive, especially since there are always people in the traffic jam who manage to turn their car around and then try to drive against the traffic to wherever they came from.

Police presence is visibly increading by the day. It is as if the grimmest looking police officers have been mobilized – sometimes it felt like even smiling at them was an infraction. We were pulled over but we were prepared with all our papers, most of which they can’t read anyways.

It is hard to understand why they’d pull us over but may be they have been given quotas: stop x number of people who look like Arabs with bad intention, x number who look like potential suicide bombers, and, for good measure, x number of blond or grey-haired female foreigners.

Eventually we made it, albeit quite late, to the orthopaedic center where we found the female treatment room fuller than I have ever seen it before. The three PTs were all treating several women at once, putting this one in a neck stretching machine, that one on a bench with a hotpack on her back and a third one with the e-stem, the electrical stimulation to activate muscles or reduce pain.

I did not complete my treatment because we had another appointment, with the Thai massage ladies, that I didn’t want to miss for the world. After yesterday’s khakbad (dust storm) my skin was so dried out that I was craving an oil massage. Katie chose for the, much more intense, Thai massage. We agreed that both had been sublime.

Back home we had lunch and I had a little nap before language lessons – I am now about one third through a literacy primer that teaches adult Dari speaking Afghans how to read and write. This meant I was ready for a 12-page Dick, Jane and Spot kind of reading booklet. I am learning about Asad and Nasim, two brothers, who are working on their plot of land. I am halfway through the story and I have no idea how it is going to end; I can’t bear the suspense!

Tomorrow Katie and I are going to Bamyan. I have flown from Kabul to Bamiyan and back on the way to Herat. It is no more than a 45 minute ride; but tomorrow we are scheduled to leave Kabul at 9 AM, touching down on Bamiyan’s small gravel airfield a little before 4 PM. I think Katie is going to get the aerial tour of Afghanistan, Kandahar, Herat, and who knows what else, before getting to our destination.

We filled yesterday (Friday) with all sort of excursions because we hadn’t done any lately and we wanted to show Katie that life here is not all that bad.
First we had breakfast at the Pelican restaurant, a French (real French, you can tell from the croissants) breakfast and lunch place with a lovely garden, not far from our house. It’s the place where Axel goes when he has gone too long without bacon and eggs.

A little further down the road, across from the bombed out shell of Darulaman palace is the Kabul museum. It is probably among the more traumatized musea in the world but it is getting slowly back on its feet. Some of its prize collections aren’t yet in residence though, such as the Bactrian Gold exhibit which has been touring the world for some years now. Much of what was left of its treasures are restored in the basement and then retrieved to put on exhibit.

The wooden Nuristani (Kaffiristani) statues, some of men embracing men, are finally on display in a light and airy room. Those are the statues that survived the wrath and misplaced prudishness of the Taliban. They are reminiscent of African or Polynesian statues, heathen of course in the eyes of those who hacked good chunks of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage into pieces.

Outside the museum is a small rusted locomotive that was bought in 1920 by King Amanullah, one of Afghanistan’s rulers who wanted to modernize Afghanistan (at the same time that Ataturk was, more successfully doing the same in nearby Turkey). The locomotive was used on a 7 km roadside tramway linking Kabul and Darulaman.

Upstairs was a more contemporary exhibit, a photo project that brought Afghan and American youth together through art. Two cultures, all representing minorities, were let loose with a camera to capture the concept of ‘Being We the People’ in their respective countries. They were then blown up and paired up to express similarities or contrasts. One of Axel’s students has one of his pictures on display.

For our next stop we had ourselves driven to the bird (and pet) market in the enormous Kabul bazaar off the main drag, Jade Maiwand in the old part of town. This part of town was entirely destroyed by the Mujahedeen fighting each other but is filled with life again.

Before throwing ourselves in the maze of narrow bazaar streets we ate some Afghan street food, Bolani, a deep fried dough triangle filled with leek or potato, greasy but very tasty. We then followed the narrow alley way, lined with large and small cages, empty or full with all kinds of birds: pigeons first, then the canaries, small birds with sharp beaks that are made to fight, love birds, small parakeets and parrots, finches and finally the magnificent pheasants and partridges, the latter also used for fighting. We bought a small cage, without bird, because it looked so nice and I have some idea that I can turn it upside down to serve as a lampshade and hide our ugly fluorescent terrace light.

Ignoring our guard and driver’s protests that the street food was not as good as what their women cook at home and this was no lunch at all, we asked them to drive us to our next destination, an upscale clothing and handicraft boutique frequented by foreigners to show Katie what she can bring back as gifts to herself and others.

A very special treat here is to go with Steve to Chicken Street. It’s a unique experience, and one that is about to end as there are only 4 weeks left of Steve’s assignment in Kabul. Katie got her outing with Steve just in time yesterday.

Axel declined the Chicken Street experience. Not having eaten the Bolani, he ordered a real lunch for about 100 time the prize of one Bolani, at the upscale French Bistro restaurant around the corner from Chicken Street. He can do that now because he is earning his own money. We found him content, with only a cold beer or glass of white wine missing.

While Axel is dining, we sniffed up years of Central Asian dust in Ibrahim’s shop where we had bought Daniel’s wedding gift only 3 weeks ago. Katie succumbed to her first purchase of a large embroidered bedspread. I succumbed briefly thereafter – not having enough money in your pocket is never a problem as all can be had on credit or a loan taken out from the Dr. Solter Bank.

On our way home we stopped to stock up on self-medication: the faux beer, that is the closest to beer we can have, and some sleep medicine and a blister pack of diazepam (valium) which can come in handy when you have a 16 hour flight in a cramped economy seat, or when you get too stressed out from living here. All this can be had over the counter at less the price of our co-pay back home.

Back home Axel cooked us a Cesar chicken salad (romaine spontaneously growing in our yard) and served it with lit candles and one bottle of Katie’s fermented grape juice, the yellow kind… ‘as if we are on vacation,’ said Katie.

Sometimes I marvel at the complexity of our work, and the implications of what seem to be very straightforward ideas back home in the US.

Take the branding issue. We want the beneficiaries of our donations to know who paid for them (you, the US taxpayer). This means that there need to be US government stickers on the boxes with medicines that we provide to the NGO clinics in the provinces that are supported with US government funds. That’s part of the deal: we pay and the Afghans get to see our good deeds and be grateful. (Funny, now that I think of it, US arms don’t need stickers or do they?)

But when being associated with America becomes a liability and truck drivers get kidnapped and their loads confiscated, this was no longer a good idea and we needed a waiver. So we got the waiver, which is, by the way, not at all easy to get.

And then there is the branding on the health facilities. It became soon clear that the US flag needed to be removed, no matter how patriotic we felt, from the entrance signs of health clinics.

The services are provided by NGOs, they do this on behalf of the Afghan government – they signed contracts to that effect and it is part of the deal. But in some places, even being associated with the Afghan government became a liability and some of the (mostly local) NGOs were balking at this requirement, stating that they are providing humanitarian rather than government services.

But this is how it works: the NGOs get grants from the US government which are channelled through the Afghan government. The idea is to show that the Afghan government cares for peoples’ health and provides services, however indirectly by way of these NGOs. It’s called government stewardship and contracting out. It’s a model that has worked fairly well in this country.

But enforcement of ‘serving on behalf of the government’ is hard to enforce. First many places are too dangerous to get to and second, if the NGO stopped serving people they would get even madder than they already are. It’s a bit of a pickle.

It gets even more complicated because the prescription pads, registers and other signs in the clinics say nothing about the Afghan government (or US government for that matter) and bear the logos of the NGOS. So should we be replacing all the prescription pads, internal signs, registration books? They should have the government logo on them and be provided by the government, but that is a logistical nightmare of untold proportions – what if they run out of the registration books, then patients don’t get registered and then we won’t know what is really happening on the ground. If you follow this thread for a while it gets hopelessly tangled.

In the end the big idea is that the Afghans will turn away from the insurgents and towards the government. It is of course a hypothesis of major proportions that has so far not been confirmed. So if we wanted to test it, confirm or disconfirm, we should ask the patients exiting the health facility. So let’s assume a fictitious patient leaving the clinic in a district in, say, Ghazni, an increasingly turbulent place. We approach him or her and ask, ‘Who attended to you today?’ How likely is it that they would say, ‘Oh, it was the Afghan government.’

We are all pretty sure that the patient walking out of the clinic would say, it was the doctor (nurse, pharmacist) who attended to my health needs. These patients would have no inkling about the thousands of processes and millions of hours of labor, combined efforts of the US and Afghan governments, that made this encounter with the Afghan health system possible. They would have no idea at all.

I dreamt last night that I lost Axel, in a crowd, couldn’t pick out his blue and black jacket – from then until I woke up I wandered around in my dream world, looking for him – the alarm brought him back to me. Small victories, huge relief.

During the workday I nearly got lost myself in the paper mass that accompanies the annual performance review process. Today the rubber hit the road as I gave my first ‘not met expectations’ judgment, quickly followed by two more. I knew I was going against the grain of this society which prefers politeness over honesty (as I see it) or, as they see it, over directness. What I considered blatant under performance was called ‘met expectations.’ People are hedging their bets. You never know what will happen in the future and so it is better to not make enemies – there are enough of them here already, why risk making more. Your underperforming colleague can one day become your boss.

It is safer to say that a colleague met expectations and so I am finding the term ‘expectations’ rather meaningless; they are all over the map. Except those of my boss who I seemed to have disappointed. I think he expected some magic tricks from me about changing the behaviour of top officials – I am thinking as hard as I can how I can lead horses to water AND make them drink. So far I haven’t come up with anything good. It’s not for lack of trying.

The paperwork and the performance interviews filled another 11 hour workday (but I am done now, with all 27 of them). As a result I have fallen hopelessly behind in processing emails, replying, deleting, reading and whatnot and have reached a point where I am not even trying anymore. Sometimes I am just trying to be too good, too efficient, too organized in a place that is all but that. It is also not something I am being judged on. I am being judged on whether the management and leadership capacity of people at the central and provincial ministry offices has improved. My biggest challenge, aside from doing just that, is figuring out how I could demonstrate that I have been successful, if ever I could.

I felt my frustrations mounting as the hours ticked by and the people wanting things from me (now) kept reminding me. But then, reading the local newspaper on the way home, everything was put right back in its place: ‘girls school bombed, 80% destroyed in Ghazni.’ ‘Governor and police chief in Nuristan not on post of months and selling food donations in the market for cheap, not only depriving the intended beneficiaries of their food but also undercutting farmers trying to sell their stuff at real cost.’ And someone doing work for us has been caught undermining the very ethical behaviour we are trying to model.

Although a war metaphor is not something I like to use, I can’t think of anything else than soldiering on.

Picking up language lessons again – constructions that express probability, possibility or presumption in the past tense…my head is spinning. It is also spinning because I spent the last 3 hours reviewing our last year’s workplan – a level of detail that causes me great stress, but since I have to live with the plan for the next year, I have to bite through the tediousness of it all.

Physical therapy this morning. When I entered the women’s physio room it was very quiet, somber even, where usually I find it filled with laughter, women amongst each other, no fear. The place was filled with women in pain this time – old looking women, probably younger than me, but who had suffered through a lifetime of sorrow and countless pregnancies no doubt. Swollen arms and legs, aching lower backs. A lot of moaning.

I bought Sita some more house-warming curtains, upon request, in the fancy boutique downtown. I also bought myself a beautifully embroidered see-through blouse. Axel was surprised, “you can’t wear that here.” True, but I am not going to spend the rest of my life in Afghanistan – now I am, but not forever (I think now). At some point I expect to be back in a society where I can expose arms, legs, neck, hair. Question: who else is buying all these see-through blouses? For indoor maybe?