Sylvia's Journal

Karzai really meant it when he said the concrete blast walls and road barriers had to go. This morning, on my way to my massage appointment, we passed several areas where the barriers had already been removed. The Serena Hotel looks decidedly naked as its natural entrance has become visible again. Another street has suddenly become twice as wide. It’s exciting to see more of the city and the removal of the walls makes the town just a tad more normal.

The ‘security chatter’ continued and we received an email from the US warden that all sorts of places we usually go to are off limits for US embassy people; we ‘other’ Americans were warned. What to do? Give up my Friday massage? I listen to our own security chief who is sufficiently connected to get prompt warnings. He is not holding us back. I heard our security systems described as ‘surfing’ – it is about listening to all the chatter and to circles inside the Afghan security forces and sliding along the airwaves. So far it has worked: not too tight, not too loose.

Axel picked me up at the spa and from there we headed to the carpet place where I had bought his birthday present, a kelim that neither of us liked after we had spread it out in the hallway and looked at it for a few days. So we went back to return it. Axel got to pick one for himself, something that looks more like a Yomut, the one we gave to our nephew Daan and his bride Jane for their wedding. Axel had to add some money in addition to the returned kelim as it was an old carpet and therefore more expensive.

Having finally bought his first carpet he got a taste for more. We drove to the place where he has been drooling over the same carpet for 6 months now and, against everyone’s admonishments, had not bought it. But I knew he dreamed about it and now he is earning his own money so he didn’t feel guilty about spending ours.

When we arrived at the shop the carpet was no longer hanging on the wall and his heart sank. Too late? But no, the shopkeeper remembered him and was able to locate the carpet in a pile of folded ones. He smiled and said, “you know this one was made for you!” Of course we all knew that. Axel didn’t even bargain, so happy was he to find it.

We had another nice dinner with Razia Jan and her always interesting circle of friends and relatives. This included an American who spoke perfectly Dutch. Although both his parents are Americans he grew up in Holland and went to school there. He is providing technical assistance to the Baghlan Cheese factory. As it turned out Axel had met him half a year ago at the (near) monthly Dutch embassy ‘borrel’ (cocktail hour/party).

Axel’s wedding outfit was ready. He did one other showing of the suit and looks quite smart. The shirt is dazzling white and therefore needs to be kept far away from catsup, tomato sauce and red wine. My wedding dress was done a week ago, only the dress for the day after the wedding still needs some tweaking and so we will see Razia jan once more before we leave.

On my last day at work we met, our nascent female leadership development team, Ali and myself, with two members of the Executive Board of the Afghan Midwives Association. We discussed the who, what, how, when and where of a leadership program that we will do with them for their provincial chapters and teams of midwives who work in several Kabul hospitals. It’s going to be one of those rare activities where women will predominate.

I used the rest of the day to complete all the tasks that remained on my to-do list, handed over my work to one of my staff who will be acting on my behalf and sent my handover notes to all the program managers. As a last step I activated the out-of-office assistant feature of MS Outlook that will alert every email sender that I am now officially on vacation. The first one and a half days of this vacation will be spent in Kabul over brunch, under the skillful masseuse’s hands and then we will start to pack.

The weather change (cool evenings) is for real we are told. We have crossed the mid-summer/early fall divide, much like in Massachusetts except maybe a few weeks earlier. It means we can turn the airco off at night and open the windows. This is a good thing except that we have to put up again with the incessant barking of dogs and other noises that are not very pleasant. It’s quite a racket outside our garden walls. We wonder why no one has pulled out their gun yet. Strychnine-laced chunks of meat are the preferred way I was told.

I spent all day cleaning papers off my table, taking care of loose ends, and composing my handover notes. I learned about procurement of medical equipment and how pharmaceuticals are managed – I am on a steep learning curve now that the pharmaceutical component of our project has moved into my portfolio – it is fascinating and gives me a completely different view on public health in a developing country.

I now realize how incomplete my understanding was of what it takes to deliver health care services. I wrote chapters and books about management and leadership, emphasizing the human element in health care delivery; now I am learning about the financial and logistics aspects I knew nothing about.

This afternoon the weather changed, rather suddenly. First came heavy clouds. I was happy that I had not been on the flight to Takhar Province with the minister. Flying into Kabul when a front is coming in, especially in a small plane, is not so much fun. Thunder and lightning followed, then heavy rains. The temperature dropped to a level more likely in November.

Here was yet another manifestation of altered weather patterns in the region. But unlike the catastrophic rains in China, Eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan, this was a good change for us and the farmers – relief from the heat and badly needed rains to keep the dust down and crops growing.

Things are a little tense in town; there is much security related chatter in the air and some foreigners are kept on a tight leash. This afternoon a class of girls in a school in Kabul was poisoned by someone who does not believe that girls should be in school. He fumigated the classroom with some chemical, insecticides are popular for this purpose (girl as insect). The entire class landed in the hospital.

In the evening we finally met Courtney’s wife Elaine, who was the one that connected us many months ago via my blog. We became friends with her husband, a Safi pilot and that is how I got to fly from Dubai to Kabul in the cockpit, an unforgettable experience.

Elaine arrived early August for a year in Kabul. She is teaching at the international school while her husband flies in and out of Kabul across the region and now also to Frankfurt.

We went out for dinner, the four of us, sitting outside in the lovely garden of the BBQ Tonight restaurant. Elaine and I kept warm, wrapping our scarves around us, something that would have been unimaginable a day ago.

Countdown started awhile ago but now our departure is in sight, four more days. We checked our tickets, a complicated affair that required a long wait at the Safi offices in downtown Kabul, multiple emails and phone conversations to correct a double booking made three months ago, and two sets of award travel tickets, one from Delta and the other from Air France. I think we are traveling together unless I get an upgrade. Delta keeps sending upgrade certificates to me but I cannot use them because I am booked in the wrong fare class, at least for the next trip.

We learned from Axel’s local doctor that his general malaise, low energy, low appetite and respiratory problems are probably the result of ‘khak’ in his lungs. Khak means dust in Dari and Khakbad (dustwind) is the Afghan (and warm) equivalent of France’s Mistral and Senegal’s Harmattan. It is part of the occupational hazard of living here – the polluted and dusty air not only leaves a fine dust on every surface inside and out, it also coats our lungs. An X-ray, taken to rule out bronchitis or pneumonia, showed a thin white dusting at the bottom of his lungs. That is the ‘khak’ said the doctor, and it can be found in the lungs of almost everyone living here.

For Axel this stuff is causing bronchial spasms. He is taking some liquid that comes in the same bottle as the glycerin for the bubbles. We should be careful not to mistake one for the other. One learns to live with these respiratory problems as one learns to live with security threats. Still, compared to most of Afghanistan’s population, we live a life of luxury here.

We are also learning that Axel has to leave Afghanistan about every 2 months to get his hearing back; it is the same dust that coats the inside of his ears and messes up his hearing aids. The last month of our three-months tours I have to talk a little louder. Some people wonder why we put up with this. The answer is complicated and can be found in many of the last 325 posts on this blog.

This morning about 30 of my colleagues showed up for a simulation exercise about working across cultures. I used a simulation called Ecotonos (authored by Dianne Hofner Saphiere, published by Intercultural Press). In the simulation there are three cultures, green, red and blue, each with a set of cultural norms and ways of being with others, different ideals of leadership and ways of doing work.

I had to change any norms that required people in one of the cultures to hug or touch because both men and women participated in the exercise and this is too strong a norm to change even temporarily.

We called the groups the sorkh culture, the abi culture and the sabs culture. The words mean, respectively, red, blue and green in Dari. People were randomly assigned to the groups.

The red group is preoccupied with time, speed, results, individualism, loudness and assertiveness that verges on aggressiveness; the blues are rational, distant, unemotional, planners, hierarchy conscious and obsessed with getting evidence before taking actions, they abhor touching; and finally the greens value harmony above all, live in a paternalistic culture with a father figure taking care of his people. Under his watchful eye they do everything together and like to be close to each other, like a family, even at work.

The same task is given to all (build a tower with certain specifications). After awhile we dispatched people from one culture to another as consultants, ready to lend their hands and expertise to the task at hand (‘we are here to help you.’). And with that we are off to the races.

The resulting dynamic nicely mimics what happens in real life, especially because feedback loops don’t exist when two or more cultures collide. The reds express the annoyance with anger and loud speaking; the greens pull closer together, excluding the newcomers while keeping a smile on their face and the blues abhor the emotions and chaos they produce, pulling back into their individual safe spaces. The misunderstandings and distractions from the task at hand are only funny because it is a simulated work environment. In real life these things happen also but then they are not funny.

The simulation produced its desired effect and led to some good insights, even though I didn’t get them all as everyone was speaking in Dari. The only thing that didn’t quite work was getting the women out of their traditional and subservient roles.

With hardly an exception they were not able to get into their new role and take on the characteristics of whichever culture they were placed in. For them behavior is so prescribed that stepping out of these roles, even if given permission, is probably too risky. And so the lesson I learned is that in this country, the simulation and possibly any experiential learning is best done in single sex groups. If I had thought about it more, I could have figured this out ahead of time.

Fasting is hard in this hot and dry month of August. I see people wilting during the day like flowers that have run out of water. Some are already wilted before the morning is over. It is the thirst, not the hunger is that hard to endure in this weather. In fact, the oppressive heat and dryness tends to take one’s appetite away.

The wilting makes everything and everyone go slower. We have essentially only the morning hours for any serious work with government employees, except a hardy few who are managing the ministry’s work at all hours. By 1 the government offices empty, by 2 most other offices do and the last hour, till 3, is definitely quiet time in our office.

We are noticing the effects of the Kabul Conference in the number and frequencies of queries about the government’s ability to procure services, goods and construction. There are pressures from the highest levels in the US government to prepare for the implementation of the conference recommendations that 50% of all foreign aid be channeled directly through the Afghan government.

This is an enormous procurement job of which the dimensions and scope are hardly understood even by people who are only a few arm lengths away from these processes. Politicians in the US are thousands of miles away – they have created the conditions that make the USAID lawyers and contract specialists very wary about such a transfer of enormous amounts of money.

They are putting the brakes on their colleagues who run the program, the technical folks. The lawyers and contracts people have tons of questions about how all this is going to work and how to keep everything legal. They are looking at details of transfer processes, slowing things down.

But nothing is as slow as the capacity building that we are trying to do – it is the foundation on which everything else is based. And so in the midst of all these pressures (to go faster, to go slower) we are caught between the long view on capacity building and the short view that requires sticking to promises made, however unrealistic, that it (quick impact, measurable results) can be done.

Early morning I went to see M. at her mother’s house. On the way over I passed by a wall full of brightly colored kites, held in place with thin black yarn tacked into the wall. On the left side were the small kites, 20 cents each and on the right side the larger ones, double that price.

Kites, spindle and string are all sold separately, unlike in the US. The kites are like consumables – they get caught in trees, wires, land on the neighbor’s roof or disappear into someone’s compound. So you buy a new one; they’re cheap. I bought five; two for M’s boys and three for Axel. One was already damaged by nightfall when our guards and Axel tried to fly his new kite.

The spindles and string are the expensive items, 2 dollars for the set. You get a spindle made from small sticks and 2 compact disks and then a separate roll of 100s of feet of string. The label around the string spool says that it is an Obama Special, made in America. It is the same kind of ‘made in’ label that you will find on ‘genuine’ German steel kitchenware. The Chinese are shameless about making their wares appear to come from someplace else. The only way you know is after you buy it and the ‘genuine’ stuff starts to fall apart. We’ll see about the string.

I brought two kites for M’s small boys because apparently they don’t know yet how to fly a kite. I didn’t think that was allowed in this country. But the kites were an afterthought – I had after all come for the bubbles.

We made up the bubble mixture, including what remained of the glycerin bottle (half had leaked out despite the, also genuine, seal). We told M’s boys and the even littler cousins that the bubble juice had to sit for a couple of hours, while we would be away visiting another family. It was a little cruel of us to tell these little tykes to be patient, but we did and put the bubble wand out of reach, just to be on the safe side.

We left to visit the house of my colleague, the father of the injured boys who are recovering well in the military hospital in Germany. It was a ‘grief’ visit like the ones scripted in the ethnography except that I couldn’t really act out my script in the local language. The women sat with me for awhile and then left when other visitors arrived. Platters with melon were served for me, as the only one not fasting. It is impossible to refuse Afghan melons; theya re the best in the world.

When we arrived back at the house of M’s parents the high expectations about giant bubbles were immediately dashed. It was too hot and too dry and the glycerin didn’t seem to add anything to the experience. In the end I was able to produce a few two-footers; but before they were fully developed they were immediately pierced by the youngest of the boys. He wasn’t interested in the beauty of the bubbles – he was bent on destroying each one shrieking loudly his victory cry.

I gave up and withdrew inside while outside a true soap fest took place as the kids whipped up the bubble juice into foamy mounds ignoring my warning that foam was not good. How could I be so wrong, foam is so much gooder than giant bubbles. The giant bubble thing is clearly an adult thing.

Inside I was served a lunch while everyone else around me was fasting. A delicious lunch even though eating by oneself in front of others who are not eating is more than a little uncomfortable. After lunch the photo albums were brought out and I saw wedding pictures from 2009 and from 1978 – from M’s brother and M’s mother.

The pictures from the 70s were amazing and much like the ones that are floating around the internet of the so called golden years of Kabul; a time when women were wearing fashion that matched what was worn in the US: sleeveless dresses and poodle skirts for the women and shirts with long pointy collars for the men; no scarves. The album provided a peek into an Afghanistan that no longer exists. It’s a different place now.