Sylvia's Journal

Today we started a four-day workshop with one of the general directorates. The purpose is to align everyone around a common understanding of where they need to focus their attention so that the entire team becomes more cohesive, more productive, and more together. The result we expect is a limited number of initiatives that will improve the general directorate’s performance.

All but one of the directors, each with two of their staff, showed up for this collective self-assessment that is spread out over four days. The event is done in Dari and I am sitting on the sidelines to make sure that our facilitators do a good job. I am looking at the level of energy, confusion, collaboration and the proportion of time that participants are actively engaged in solving their own problems. When something looks or feels different I ask for a translation to understand what is going one.

I quickly learned that there are sensitivities about speaking one’s mind. Some brave souls do it because they have been doing it for some time and discovered that their speaking out has a positive effect and did not get them fired. But many are not willing to speak out. There is an ex leader and a new leader (neither present) and much fear to offend one or the other when saying that something is deficient, missing or incorrect.

The subtleties in speech about these sorts of things escape me of course because everything is said in the local language. My colleague Ali is handling things well though. When I make a suggestion about something to say he tells me he already said it. And so I sat there at the sidelines marveling how my Afghan colleagues are running the show pretty much on their own.

During group work I studied flip charts with norms and expectations. This is the next frontier in my study of Dari: to be able to read handwriting. Later, back with my Dari teacher I started my first chapter book – a sort of graduation. It is a book about peace and in the first chapter I learned about all the bad things that happen when there is no peace. Beautiful watercolor paintings of devastation, hunger, poverty and illness accompany the text – I am after all still reading children’s books with lots of illustrations.

When I got home Vince had arrived from South Africa but his luggage had not. I first met Vince some 10 years ago when MSH had a project in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. We lived through some pretty intense group dynamics of his ministry team – then he was on the inside and I on the outside – now things are more or less reversed. He is our house guest for the next 10 days.