Sylvia's Journal

After months of lingering, Ali and I are picking up the leadership and management work with senior government officials at the central level again. We, or rather I, had held out the last 9 months hoping that the minister would demand that all her senior staff become better managers and leaders, but she didn’t and without it we weren’t getting the kinds of commitments we needed to engage whole directorates in a four month long process.

But then senior leadership got reshuffled and suddenly there were opportunities for new beginnings, new senior leadership teams, the discovery of missing visions, misalignment. And so Ali and are now doing the rounds again among the director generals and finding a positive response. There will be action again, beginning next week. We will start with the curative medicine teams and help them look at their management systems that leave something to be desired. It will all be in Dari and I will follow from the sidelines.

Of course it is possible that with the new parliament, to be announced in the next few weeks if the calls for invalidating the results don’t bring everything to a halt, the acting minister may not be voted in for the second time. That would be her last chance because one cannot be voted on more than once by the same parliament. In that case the president has to appoint someone else. That will of course trigger a new reshuffling. Association with a replaced leader is a liability here.

The highs and lows that go with these stops and starts are part of the pattern of our life here. My mood fluctuates up and down along with these stops and starts.

I have noticed that my mood also fluctuates alongside the level of trust I experience here. There is the ‘being trusted’ and the ‘me trusting.’ The latter is a little murky. There is much gossip. Men engage in it as much as women do. People seem to love to talk negatively about each other and sometimes take me into their confidence. It is as if they want to help me decide who I should and who I should not trust. But I am a little wary of such storytelling because there are agendas, a settling of accounts, or less malignant, a way to lift oneself up above the others; none of it is helpful.

In my line of work it is better to start with the assumption that people are generally well intentioned, competent and honest. If I later find out I was wrong, so be it. It is better than the other way around. And so far I have not been all that much disappointed.