Sylvia's Journal

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.