Sylvia's Journal

One of my colleague who manages to live on MREs (Meals-Ready-to-Eat, military fare that has fallen of the truck) had promised me a snack pack for taking notes at a meeting yesterday. This morning he delivered the promised snack pack. It included 2 hard candies, a one serving box of Fruit Loops (but what about the milk? Was I supposed to mix the coffee creamer with water and pour it into the box that had scored lines to turn it into a bowl?).

There was a Nature Valley bar, a bag of Power banana chips, a small pack of sunflower seeds, New York bagel chips, cocoa powder ready to mix, one serving of Maxwell instant coffee, domino sugar, pepper and salt (for what?), a plastic sleeve with a heating element, presumably to heat water for my cocoa or coffee, Red Sox label peanuts and a letter from M.O.M (My Own Meals, the company that packages these) about saffron, including a website in case I want to learn more about saffron.

My colleague lives on these and has bought a year’s worth of snack packs and complete meal packs. He does not participate in the Afghan food economy. It’s very cheap he told me; a year’s worth of supplies is what we spent in two weeks on groceries. But what about these juicy apricots, the pomegranates, the kebabs, I wonder. I suppose it works if food is nothing more than a physical necessity and not high on your list of priorities.

Today we started a two-day partially in-house partially out-of-house training using the leadership development approach that I had wanted to introduce about a year ago to all our colleagues. But then everyone was too busy. Now people want the training. It goes to show that for everything there is a right time and a wrong time.

We did a few attempts last May but it went nowhere. Now we have four teams actively participating: two community health teams, one drug management team, a university team and a few hangers on.

The program is done in Dari. I sit, once again, in the back. I know the program and the daily agenda inside out and can follow some of the discussions. Still, I have a long way to go. And when they switch to Pashto I am lost.

I was proud to see the local facilitators teach the program as a team and with great confidence. One of them is a young woman who has recently been promoted out of a poorly paid and dead-end consultancy job to a UN-financed program manager position in one of the ministry’s directorates. I have seen her grow in just a short two years into a formidable facilitator without any accompanying increase in her ego. It makes all the troubles here vanish – change is possible, even here; especially here.