At 10:00 Am this morning Axel, Doug and I sneaked out of the office for a private tour of the Murad Khani urban restoration project by Will from the Turquoise Mountain Foundation that is undertaking this massive project.
He and others have seen through mountains of garbage, kilometers of red tape, and who knows what other obstacles why holding fast onto a vision that is becoming reality right now. The digging and constructing is still going on but what has already emerged is breathtaking.
If ever I need an example of the power of vision and how it transforms people and things into something only dreamed of a few years ago, in spite of numerous obstacles, it’s right here in Kabul, about a 20 minutes ride from our office. I think I may take people on a field trip to see what having a vision, a shared vision, does. Some people think that this vision stuff is fluff but what we saw today is all but fluff.
We visited a primary school that is now teaching 200 kids from the neighborhood. When we visited a group of kids was practicing circus acts. The school is in one of the many restored old buildings, with classrooms filled with eager little kids, boys and girls three to a bench, singing us a welcome. The teacher hoisted on of the girls top of a schoolbench to read the numbers one to 10 in English. I could have stayed the whole day there.
We went to a pristine little clinic, set up in a few small rooms with a male and female doctor. They were able to reduce the number of cases of watery diarrhea to very low levels, tackled the problem of acute respiratory disease and organized a community that never was organized to pull together the necessary funds to send a very ill 29 year old mother to Pakistan for treatment not available here.
A new urban health clinic is being built. We met the young female Iranian-German architect who is specializing in buildings that are green, use local technology (mud clay, straw and egg whites for waterproof walls and roofs) and makes sure that surfaces allow for easy infection control.
On the way back to our office I talked Doug into considering a vision-driven intervention rather than a problem-driven one to deal with one of the large urban hospital that has been sucking up drugs and money as if there is no tomorrow. The visit had made the case better than I could in a hundred years. That’s what seeing things for yourself does. I am a big fan of field visits.
I left work in the midst of a terrible dust storm that blocked everything further than 10 meters away from sight. Everyone wrapped their heads with whatever cloth was on hand. At such time scarves come in very handy.
Today was SOLA day. Three girls showed up, all also part of Axel’s writing class. We talked more about vision. One of the girls is slowly filling in a poster with details about her vision, every week there is more detail. Today she had included a round table with people sitting around it and with microphones in front of them. It is about working together to solve the problems of Afghanistan. I wondered whether the Taliban were at the table but I did not ask.
Instead I asked what they would do if (once) they were president of Afghanistan and they had one million dollar to spend. How would they allocate it? Without any hesitation all three said ‘education,’ though they did not all start with the same age group. That they picked education is not a surprise. They themselves are beneficiaries of education when they are not victims of ignorance.
This led us to a fascinating conversation about the future husband, if there were to be one. After revelations about the age their mothers were married (12, 14) and whether there was such a thing as a good marriage (not obvious), we discussed the ideal husband (kind, let’s me work, talk with other men, move around freely).
Very quickly the conversation drifted into horror stories about girls being bought and sold for 25 thousand dollar. I wondered whether some of these thousands of dollars come from the enormous amounts of dollars that are sloshing around in this country.
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