Sylvia's Journal

We started Friday with bacon and eggs at the French chaikhana in our neighborhood, served by a young boy in his pristine peach striped uniform, speaking in perfect English. We sat in the garden, surrounded by 6 feet tall cosmos. The only distraction from pure bliss came from the flies that tried to eat and drink everything we were consuming.

SCH and I headed for the spa in the center of town for a monalisa massage. I was welcomed, on this, my second visit, as if I was a regular. I think I will become one if the owners can manage to keep the place. Between the demands of other jobs and the headaches of private business in Kabul, one of the co-owners, a young Greek woman, is looking to sell the business. The male Afghan co-owner cannot come and help out as it is a ‘ladies’ spa and the third owner is helping to rebuild Port au Prince.

A massage table was brought in one of the treatment rooms so that we could receive our massages side by side; I got Mona Lisa and SCH got one of her students, an Afghan masseuse. I continued to extract the missing pieces of Monalisa’s life story and learned that she came to Kabul because she followed her man who was referred to as her fiancé last week but now was referred to both as husband and dad to her daughter.

I was glad that SCH was in the same room and thus hearing the same story as it was told because she would not have believed me. My masseuse runs a shop, her husband’s, on the (international military forces) base and lives there, while her kids live in town. She is not living with her husband. She could not tell us what he does so we assume he is CIA. They met in another part of the Arab world and she has followed him since, running his business (jewelry). I was wondering whether one day this too would be a Charlie Wilson’s War sort of story, first a book, then the movie. She has invited me onto the base to visit her store which also doubles as a guesthouse, furnished or unfurnished (‘as you wish ma’am’).

After our massage, all oily and slippery, we went to the handicraft and gift store that caters mostly to foreigners or well-heeled Afghans to buy a wedding present while SCH stocked up small gifts for back home.

And then it was time for lunch. We had our second meal of the day out rather than at home. Axel joined us in the lovely garden of the café once owned by Debbie of Kabul Beauty School fame. SCH had more bacon, inside a BLT.

Back home we all had naps while I listened to the last chapter of the Oyster book. According to our library’s lending policy, the audiobook goes poof after 2 weeks (tomorrow). I covered 2 hours of reading in half the time by increasing the speed of reading by a factor of 2; it left me breathless but I got to the end in time. When I was done I wished for a large platter of oysters on ice.

After our nap SCH cut our hair out on the terrace. She is a woman of many talents. She also taught Axel how to make chai, which we drank while playing scrabble. She had the longest word (telegram) and won the game. But when it came to facebook she was clueless, so I helped her accept or ignore the 67 friendship requests that were lined up in her unused facebook account.

Thousands of people have registered for the parliamentary elections. Small hand bills and enormous bill boards are covering all the surfaces in the city and lining the roads.

Each candidate has a small white box on their poster that contains one or more images. There is the one desk candidate and the three desk candidate, a one key and three key candidate. There are countless images, single ones, pairs, threesomes and foursomes. Some images I cannot identify.

At first I thought the candidates had selected their own image (to help the illiterate voters) and wondered, what might be the symbolism behind the image of 3 desks, or a horse? But then I was told that these images are random and have no connection to the candidate’s platform. Our Dari teacher told us they were drawn from a hat.

Still it is fun to imagine how candidates may incorporate their symbol in their speeches (I am for people sitting at desks, or my actions will be implemented with the speed of a horse, or I will open doors with this key or govern by the book (or The Book?), or replace the hurricane lamp with electricity.)

Each candidate also has a number, for those voters who can remember numbers but not the images. In addition to the images and the numbers and names of the candidates, there are of course the pictures. Some candidates are smiling, others are serious; there are candidates in western or traditional outfits, with hats or without hats. All the female candidates wear scarves, some showing a little more hair than others, but all are covered.

The elections are on September 18 although there are calls to postpone them. There are candidates who the Independent Election Committee thinks are criminals and they are banned; this then triggers protest marches by their people. It is a complicated business, voting in Afghanistan and I cannot imagine the difficulties and dangers for those who are trying to get people to follow the rules. There are too many variables and factors that cannot be controlled. But someone has to do it and I admire these brave souls, Afghans and foreigners alike.

Later. When I was googling Afghan parliamentary elections, to get the date, I discovered that there is an Afghan Parliament group on facebook. I found the Afghan Parliament group easily. It is classified as ‘student organization.’ It has about 45 friends and some pretty good pictures of the parliament in action. I don’t think the Afghan government knows about it and I don’t think I am going to befriend it just yet.

The Kabul Conference, this big event on the horizon for months, came and went like a puff of air. Of course it was much more important, people said, than a puff of air, but we saw mostly the symbolic aspects of it, on TV and very little of the months of meeting and writing that had gone into the various programs that were being presented and that will determine our agenda for years to come.

Some people called the whole thing a waste of money and time while others listened for the story that was being told. One important story that got repeated over and over in the media was that within a few years 50% of all foreign aid should be channeled through the government. I can only say, good luck as I have witnessed up close the hurdles to getting money, once inside the government, out again to pay for services. The combination of corruption and elaborate procedures to counter the corruption combine into a glacial process that includes countless signatures and approvals by an already overworked corps of administrators.

Today’s news report are congratulatory because there was no security breach, like with the Peace Jirga, and no one is relieved from his duties. True, there were some rockets fired, and some other explosions that we were told about via SMS’es. But few people were hurt and as a result the attacks are downplayed. I always thought rockets were the scariest things, but they are different from these local amateur rockets that are fired by bad shots, far from where we live, and that do little or no damage.

And so life returned back to normal today: the airport is open again and people who are not VIPs can come and go as they please. We all went back to work and caught up with our two-day absence from the office while preparing for the next two day break, an ordinary weekend.

Next week I plan to go to Badakhshan, my third attempt since last March to go there and remind myself about the realities of life in the province.

We watched Hillary deliver her speech at the opening of the Kabul Conference. We all noticed it: no scarf draped over her head. It is consistent with her earlier appearance at Karzai’s inauguration. It is a statement. I have long thought about what my statement should be but it is not so simple. I asked colleagues and they suggested I wear a scarf when in public but take it off when in the office or in the ministry, where Afghans are used to interact with foreign women like me.

Anything you do can have a symbolic meaning. But unlike Hillary, I have to work here and don’t want to have small irritations about whether I wear a scarf or not get in the way of my day-to-day work relationships. I am one of the people with a notebook (as opposed to a gun) that Hillary referred to.

Today was our second day at home, a lock-down ‘work-at-home’ day. It allowed me to get to the bottom (not quite, but nearly) of my inbox and dredge up old requests and provide answers if they were still relevant. One good thing about an overflowing mailbox that some things just expire all by themselves.

It was hot again and each of us parked him or herself in front of a fan, and plowed through a long list of to dos. Axel left the house in the afternoon to see his students. He learned about the gruesome consequences of outsiders meddling with internal family matters such as marring bright young women to older and illiterate uncles, for lots of money. From to optimism of Hillary’s words that women are important and the world is not forgetting about the plight of Afghan women my spirits sunk quickly to the depressing reality that there is very little we outsiders can do, even if we think we do.

It’s cocktail hour now and the temperature is becoming more bearable. We can sit outside again and re-surface from our computer work.

A forced day at home, actually a national holiday for Afghans, was for me a day of sleeping in and working at home – catching up, taking care of delayed maintenance so to speak.

A few of us met at one of the guesthouses to figure out the processes and jobs involved in turning a long medical equipment wish list into actual deliveries sometime next year. This is the kind of stuff I knew nothing about when working at headquarters. My learning curve about these matters is steep.

Axel and Sallie Craig prepared a fajita dinner, and Paul helped us eat it. The meal was served outside in the garden, with candles and wine. As appetizers we had the smoked salmon that we had brought back from our June visit, served on toast and with capers that we found in the local supermarket. It was all very civilized and normal, as if we were back in Manchester.

Since the airport has been closed for all but VIPs, every time we heard a plane go overhead we wondered who would be inside it. And then we wondered about the sequence of activities during tomorrow’s Kabul Conference and the messages that the organizers want us, the public, to walk away with. Right now we are clueless.

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.

The Thai massage ladies did not get their visas renewed. This is a becoming a problem for many people, including Axel whose visa expires a week from now. He may need to make a trip to Dubai which makes visa renewal a rather expensive proposition.

And so, this morning I went to check out a new spa in town. It is slightly more expensive but with a whole lot more atmosphere than the Thai basement arrangement. My masseuse’s name was Mona Lisa, a name she gave herself.
While undergoing an exquisite massage that was a combination of Swedish, aroma and Thai massage (the Mona Lisa massage), I teased out her history. I am always interested in how people who don’t work for an international organization, end up in Kabul.

Mona Lisa was born a Muslim, somewhere in the Philippines. At the age of 12 she was married to her cousin, aged 26. At age 13 she delivered a boy who is now also in the family business of massages. He is there for men on ‘family Wednesday.’ He is 23 now. At age 14 she delivered a girl who is also working as a masseuse. That she survived two pregnancies at such a young age, and ended up both looking very good and with a business, and that her two children are doing well, is a miracle.

When she was married off her mother cried and cried and cried and then left her father. I think I would have too. When she was 16 she became a widow and at age 18 she was shipped out to a nearby kingdom to become a servant in the royal family’s household. She served many dignitaries, including Bill Clinton. She said she could write a book about her time in the royal household, but that she would probably be killed is she did.

She became the personal attendant of the sick queen and stayed with her during her treatment in the US until the queen died; then the king died and she went home. I haven’t gotten to the part of how she got to Afghanistan – saving that for next time. She is currently engaged to an American who will be shipped out to Iraq.

The spa has a Jacuzzi, a steam shower and a sauna which you can rent for eight dollars an hour. The Jacuzzi looks out on a tiny little enclosed garden where you can relax and have food brought in. You can go with a bunch of girls and spend the whole day there. Aside from the massage rooms there is a yoga/exercise room with beautiful draperies that hide the sandbags that are stacked against the windows on the outside, just in case you’d forget where we are.

I made another appointment for next week.

Last night we celebrated with a bunch of friends and colleagues at the relocated Sufi restaurant. We ordered wine which was poured out of teapots – we asked for another pot of red tea when one was gone, and then another. It made the bill rather high, but celebrating survival is priceless.

I am still not recovered from the wedding party now three days ago. This morning, once again, I dragged myself out of bed and onto the elliptical machine. After about 1 km of walking I learned from my Oyster audio book (Mark Kurlansky) that the last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, behaved rather like a Taliban. Having been sent from the Caribbean to New Amsterdam to whip the unruly colonials into shape, he forced people to worship and repent because of their rather loose lifestyles. I could just imagine him – a simpler kind of Taliban, without the AK47s and the HiLux truck, but with the kind of clothing that people wore 350 years ago, a beard and angry eyes, just like the ones that roam around freely over here.

Today was full of tasks that have to be done but that can be a bit tedious after awhile, especially when your eyes begin to cross and your tolerance for imprecision begins to rise. We got two of these tasks at the same time, a once-a-year occurrence: workplanning and quarterly report writing. The latter requires that I read the reports produced by my staff and look them over with a critical eye. One report needed a significant amount of cutting and pasting – but in the process I began to see the coherence of something that doesn’t look very cohering at a first glance. The big question is, “Does it all add up to something meaningful and lasting?” It is THE big question that we have to ask ourselves. Not too often (we would get too discouraged) and not too infrequently (we end up simply doing stuff). It’s a fine balance.

In between these tasks I had to put a derailed train back on its track: a pseudo collaborative piece of work that had gone off the tracks without me knowing it. It involved hearing perceptions from colleagues across the compound that stood diametrically opposed to perceptions I had heard from my own team. The derailment was caused by poor preparations and management with many people playing, unwittingly, a role for which they were not prepared. Everyone wanted to be the one who did right – and if you listened carefully, everyone was right. It is one of life’s dilemmas – perception is reality.

Things got more complicated by an exasperated and uncensored blog entry that showed up in someone’s search and involved one of the actors who played a brief but important role in the drama. As a blogger, and knowing the context in which it spontaneously emerged, I understood where it came from, but I also alerted the author that it was very inappropriate and unprofessional and had to be removed. I had hoped that that would be the end but the blog had been shown and printed to several people and the cat was out of the bag, greatly complicating my task of putting the train back in its place. This, I gather, will take awhile.

I arrived home cross-eyed from tiredness, had myself served a cocktail and dinner, and then managed to write this. But now even the typing gets to be hard. It’s weekend and tomorrow at 11 AM I am going to check out a new massage place. Yeah!

Yesterday and this morning I dragged myself out of bed, sleep-drunk. It looks like the short wedding-party-night of yesterday will haunt me longer than I thought. I think I am going to decline school-night weddings in the future. Axel and I concluded this morning that this reaction has something to do with increasing age. I used to be able to function fine after a short night. It seems those days are gone.

Nevertheless I did my early morning 30 minute exercise routine which had me walking a distance of only 4.4 km rather than the usual 5.2 to 5.5.
All day there were meetings here in the compound. I hardly had time to breathe – with only a brief lunch break. Towards the end of the day we had our weekly call with the students in Boston who are learning about the Millennium Development Goals and leadership at Boston University. The class has a website where we can see pictures of the students in class and where we can follow their conversations with the faculty, all colleagues of mine. I used to be on the other side, teaching.

We are working with a team of four students (three Americans and one Pakistani) on an enormous leadership challenge here: how to create champions within ministry structures (outside health) that can advocate for using religious leaders to advocate for family planning. Everyone is looking for clarity about the challenge – it takes many patient Skype and phone calls to sort things out between us. It is hard to find clarity in an ambiguous assignment, but it is also good leadership practice.

Today is Bastille Day which, for us, is also crash day: it was exactly 3 years ago today that 4337P crashed near Gardner airport, and Axel, Joan and I miraculously escaped death. Axel and I celebrated the survival and recovery of the three of us when we were in Kabul last year, at the Sufi restaurant. We are going to celebrate there again tonight and, as long as we are here in Kabul, will make it an annual ritual.