Sylvia's Journal

I have graduated from first grade to second grade in Dari. I am now reading stories with high moral content from the ‘New House New Life’ series of BBC’s adult education soap operas. They are stories about the benefits of literacy, working together rather than fighting, the terrible consequences of laziness, etc.

My teacher and I read each story, page by page: I read, I translate, I write the new words in my notebook, she corrects my spelling, she reads (and in doing so corrects my pronunciation) and we move on to the next page. It is great fun.

Today I learned that sons who fight make trouble for their father and family. A consequence of their bad behavior is that one of their father’s goats dies like a pig (yes, indeed, pig). Interestingly there are no women in the story except the hapless mother who appears to trigger the fighting by doing something stupid like leaving the chicken coop open to predators. The father, on his deathbed, teaches them a lesson about collaboration, using sticks and a piece of string. Even though I have a few more pages to read I know the story has a good ending. Dad does die I think but not before all the brothers join hands (this is the last of the pictures) and everyone looks very happy.

Because I am now in second grade I can instruct our driver in Dari, over the phone, how to get my colleague to the brand new superstore in our part of town. It opened a week ago and we are all discovering it, one by one. I am not sure whether my colleague made it to the store but he never called back so I assume he did.

Although today was the equivalent of a US Sunday, we were summoned to an early morning USAID meeting and present the work plan for the last 15 months of our project. A brand new USAID health team has just arrived, so this was an opportunity to bring them up to speed and hand over the baton.

After two hours a bunch of uniformed men collected in the narrow hallways that separate the pushed-together containers for a next meeting in the same conference room but we weren’t done. Everyone realized it would make sense to combine at least part of our two meetings because we are all talking about the same thing: health services for people (Afghans and military) in the provinces, especially the insecure ones.

Although all in uniform, these men (and two women) are not fighters. They are medical personnel belonging or seconded to the various armed services (and not all of them US). I missed much of their introductions because they used a whole new set of abbreviations that we are not familiar with. As a result I did not understand exactly what they are all doing but it definitely has something to do with health services in Afghanistan. How their work connects to ours is part of the mystery, but there are special people in USAID (called the the civ-mil folks) who are assigned to bridge the two rather different ecosystems.

I sat between two uniformed men with guns in holsters and i-phones in their hands, each busily sending messages and responding to answers. They were deeply engaged in multitasking – something we cannot do because we have to leave computers and all other electronics, including cell phones, behind in the section where we are screened and checked and X-rayed. There are not many advantages to living in barracks or in the bubble, but that would be one: you can do something else during meetings.