Sylvia's Journal

It has happened: I am acting chief of party. Steve managed to get his final visa in his passport so he can fly to Pakistan tomorrow (he broke all records getting visas for Afghanistan, China and Pakistan in less than 2 weeks – it was a nail biting rollercoaster ride).

With the boss still in Pakistan, till Sunday, I am, in rank, the most senior member of our 225 member team here in Afghanistan. It is a scary thought but everyone is very supportive. I will cover two working days and then it is weekend and I will be off the hook.

I am trying to channel the two Steves which produces a strange triple split personality: my own self, then the bad-cop-rule-bound-strict-no-nonsense operations & finance Steve and the gentle-good-cop-go-with-the-flow-public-health-physician-Steve.

To be more or less ready for this temporary shift to highest ranking employee has taken me about 9 months, a symbolic time period in which I learned a tremendous amount of stuff about things I knew nothing about: compliance with regulations from two governments rather than only one (in Boston I never had to worry about the US regulations as we had an army of people doing that for me); about contracting and monitoring, about recruitment, about patience, about stagnation and white water rafting (that’s what working here feels like).

I now look back on the 20 plus years that I was functioning more as a consultant and see how it is different from my current job in one elementary way: as a fly-in consultant I never had to live with my own advice. I taught, read and wrote books about how to manage and lead but now I actually have to do it; not just for a short assignment, but day after day after day.

During these last nine months I have often thought about a quote from Joseph Mathews, founder of the Ecumenical Institute (later the Institute for Cultural Affairs) that Brian Stanfield quotes in his book ‘The Courage to lead’: “[… ] the source of charisma[tic leadership] is the capacity to stand day after day after day in the waterless desert. While this one falls over and that one fades away in the strain, you just stand day after day after day with the shells falling all around you while this one starts bitching and bitching and bitching, but you give up the luxury of bitching and grind away at the task. It is just that simple. […].”

My colleagues, those leaving and those staying behind with me, have been doing this for much longer and I watch them for cues on how to do this. That is what has made these months exhilarating, humbling, stressful, joyful, intense, and frustrating, sometimes all in one day, sometimes one after the other over a stretch of time.

I rearranged my two office bookshelves today. After my office was painted, a couple of months ago, the housekeeping staff had jumbled all the books together in piles. I took everything off the shelves. Within minutes my hands were black from the soot, reminder of the winter diesel stove, and gritty dust, part of Afghanistan’s landscape.

As I put each book back on the shelf I asked myself whether it contained anything that was immediately helpful and practical to me in my new role as senior manager and now, for a few days, acting chief of party. It was not obvious and I realized the great divide between theory and practice. I also realized I terribly miss teaching, something that I hope to return to, eventually, and something that I think I will be better at because of what I am doing now.