Sylvia's Journal

I took Chris to the massage place to receive her Christmas present: a one hour massage. We squeezed into the tiny bedroom, me on the bed, Chris on the table, and had ourselves oiled and kneaded until we both glowed. Afterward the car dropped me off at Mary’s house where Axel had gone earlier to help with the Democrats Abroad Christmas cookie baking project.

We baked and frosted brownies, cupcakes, fudge, chocolate chip cookies and whoopee pies, put them in plastic baggies and delivered them to the troops at Camp Eggers, until we ran out.

It was a civic responsibility project organized by Mary who had her extended network of family and friends in the US contribute to Christmas packages that she handed out last week, and the baking ingredients for today’s project.

We may not agree with the military approach to rebuilding Afghanistan and the overwhelming militarization of this project we know what it is like to be away from family and friends over the holidays and we feel sorry for people who have to eat the kind of food they serve in military canteens. We hope that what we did was a tiny little spark of light in an otherwise dreary and, we are told, mostly boring set of routines.

Mary is the chair of the Democrats Abroad Afghanistan chapter and she is also working to protect wildlife in Afghanistan. Confiscated rugs and coats, made from bearskin, wolf hides and even sealskin (mostly from Russia) were stashed in her house to serve as examples what not to buy. I imagine that it will take a lot of effort and public education to stop this trade.

A few others showed up in Mary’s lovely old house in a pleasant and very low key part of town where I would have chosen to live if we’d had the choice. For lunch we walked over to the Flower Street Café next door. The place was empty as most of the foreigners who frequent the place had left Kabul for the holidays.

We abandoned our plans to organize a board game night because we don’t know any board game players and besides it is a school night – I will be working with the Environmental Health team to start on something that could be called a new beginning. It seems the right thing to do on the first day of the new year, even though for Afghans it is just an ordinary day.

In a couple of months we hope to showcase some of the health facility teams that have graduated from our leadership program. We are in the process of selecting the best teams, those that have taken leadership to heart and have improved one or another of the ministry’s priority health services: deliveries with skilled birth attendants (in health facilities), TB detection, antenatal visits, etc.

Most of the teams sent us documentation in Dari. In a tedious process of line-by-line translations I finally got a glimpse of what is happening in these third or fourth generation leadership programs that are taught by people who were taught by people who were at some point taught by me.

The language barrier had kept me from following these later generations and the results of their leadership attempts. But the time had come to pay closer attention.

I was pleasantly surprised about the work of the first team we reviewed – there were some things that needed further investigation, explanation, more precision but all in all their analysis was not bad and the result of their work led to actions and interventions that benefited women who would otherwise have delivered without skilled care.

Today was a day of diving; diving below the surface of superficial reasoning, asking people about their ‘theories of change,’ and first having to explain what that was in words that made them realize they already had them. There are countless assumptions about positive change contained in activities that are not being articulated and so can never be tested. In the meantime the activities continue, as if….

This is not just an Afghan thing; the theories of change behind US interventions here, military or otherwise, are loaded with assumptions of the ‘if this…then that’ kind. The election process is one of those where many of these assumptions fell flat on their faces.

It kills me to think how much money was spent on the elections by my and other governments to end up with a result that doesn’t come close to the original intent: building trust in government by the people and for the people, or something like that. The assumptions were all wrong. At least we know that now, but how many more elections do we have to go through before acknowledging that the assumptions were all wrong and that a change in course is needed? Sometimes it feels as if we prefer to continue doing the wrong things before admitting that we don’t know the right things to do.

I was also diving today into tasks that shouldn’t me mine but had become mine because others are not doing what they should be doing because it never occurred to them that they were supposed to have been doing something.

I keep telling myself that this is why I am here; that if the capacity building was easy it would already have been accomplished in the last 9 years and that if all was done as I think it should be done, my presence here would be superfluous. Thus, the diving is both frustrating and satisfying at the same time.

I came home early and put my jammies on ready for an early dinner and early to bed. But Axel had invited one of his students over for a last review of his (US) school application essay before he heads out to the US later this week.

The boy was one of the successful applicants to the YES program that puts Afghan students for a year in a US High School. But the visas didn’t come through in time and so he and some other boys missed half the year. But they are going now for the 2nd semester.

Axel spent the afternoon saying his goodbyes and wishing them godspeed, an emotional experience because he has gotten very fond of his students.

As a good woman would in this place, I retired upstairs to the bedroom and left the menfolk downstairs. If or when I get bored I will get dressed again and join them.

I read a brief study of two subsequent strategic planning processes at the ministry of education [briefing paper on capacity-building and policymaking in Afghanistan’s education sector]. It is an interesting paper about capacity building in complex organizations. Any public sector organization is complex because of its multiple stakeholders with their many and often competing agendas, but complexity here is a multiple of this. The paper shows some of the intended and unintended consequences of capacity building work started by foreigners.

Foreigners like me who come in as facilitators often make matters worse. We end up being complexifyers because of the philosophies and models we bring along from different countries, the different processes we invent as we go along, each new invention, new layer adding more complexity.

But when we train others we sometimes train for hypothetical simple organizations that don’t exist in real life. Topics like time management, meeting management, supervision, delegation are often taught as if there are no power dynamics and people gobble it up, exactly because of the illusion that things and people can be managed well, eh ‘simply. Poor coordination is treated like a root cause and the solution is sought in the establishment of yet another coordination mechanism. I could write books about the disconnect between what we teach and the capacity that is needed.

This morning I showed up a little before 10 AM at the office of one of the general directors. To get to him I had to duck below scaffolds and men in coveralls who appeared to have painted themselves first. Strong paint fumes permeated the poorly ventilated hallways and I wrapped my scarf tightly around my nose.

The building contains the two most central and also most under-served general directorates. There is reluctance from the donors to come to their aid because of the opaqueness of and alleged political interference in their processes.

Two dark-clad women scurried around the painters. They looked like they had stepped right out of a Grimm tale, hook-nosed crones, hissing between their bad teeth, a frightening apparition that made me wonder for a brief second, “where am I?”

The meeting we were supposed to be attending (he the Chair, me representing my project) was held at the other end of the compound in the office of one of the deputy ministers. We were late. We dashed out of the dark and dusty building into the bright morning sunlight, with the sun still visible beyond the dust. We ran across the inner courtyard as fast as we could, me limping behind with my arthritic knee that seemed to have gotten little benefit from the Dubai operation.

The meeting was about getting recognition for family medicine as a legitimate and badly needed specialty for Afghanistan at the district level. It was an impressive plea, well documented and well presented by a family doctor who is well known here and deeply committed to improve the health of the least and worst served segments of the population.

Only twenty minutes into this meeting I had to dash out to another meeting because times had shifted and then, an hour later, was back in the same office with a nearly identical cast of characters, about something else. This is the problems here, a thin layer of people does all the work and so you will meet with them all the time, dashing hither and thither with computer, diary and papers under the arm.

Missing lunch because of the commute back to the office for yet another meeting, I ate a few items from Doug’s MRE (Meals-Ready-to-Eat) birthday present to me which I keep in my briefcase for just such eventualities: a peanut butter desert bar and a piece of French Toast with ‘real’ syrup jelly inside. The 4 inches of chemical ingredients listed on the packages left me bloated and full without the pleasant sensation of a good meal – it was an emergency response and not one I want to repeat much.

A thin film of black soot covers everything plastic in my office; plastic filing sleeves, plastic bags, plastic book covers. Everything that is not plastic simply absorbs it, like, I assume, my lungs.

On the way home tonight the dust particles (of whatever origin) clouded the sky, altering the color of the setting sun and reducing visibility to a hundred yards at most.

At this time of the year precipitation, snow or rain, should have pushed all those particles into the ground. People are worried because the only way a drought next summer can be avoided is through snow or rain during the winter months. None has fallen yet.

The temperature is dropping fast and Kabul is getting colder by the day. Nevertheless, many of our office staff are still walking around with their bare feet in plastic slippers and in shirt sleeves.

Every day the household staff hose down the dust in our compound. The dust is covering every surface, including the bottom of the shallow fountain pool in front of the main building. The water turns to ice on the uneven pathways, creating yet another danger for us hapless foreigners.

Today Santa delivered the promised cradle. It’s an odd shaped thing, for a thin and long baby, but it is beautiful. It now cradles all my wool and knitting materials. We are accumulating stuff. We can’t help ourselves. We do that everywhere.

The new carpet has gone upstairs, on top of the office-supplied industrial Afghan carpets (sounds bad but even those carpets are quite nice). Axel doesn’t like its new place because the sun doesn’t reach there and the colors need sun to bring out the carpet’s beauty. Later, I think, later, when we are back.

The last few days the thought of going back in 9 months is in our minds a lot. Maybe that comes from our Skype video conversations with the girls; we peeked inside my Lobster Cove office, now occupied by Tessa and Steve, and the kitchen, where our neighbors, the girls and their men congregated for Christmas morning. Seeing all these people we love in a place we love so dearly tugs at our heartstrings.

In the middle of the morning Farid showed up. Farid is one of Axel’s students who is flying to Maine next week to attend an American high school. This is what all our students are preparing for. Farid, we think, is ready. We talked about A Thousands Splendid Suns and how this habit of sending 12 year old girls into marriage must change. I told him that these things will change because of him and his fellow students. He nodded.

Farid took Axel to the Turkish High School from where he graduated last week, to meet one of his teachers. This teacher, and others, want Axel to help them with their English. It’s funny how after years and years of not heeding the call of education, it is the direction in which the forces of the universe are pulling him. I know it is the right direction, it is just not what he thought would bring him what he needs. I think he is figuring that out now.

Each one of us found something under our Norfolk pine Christmas tree – Axel found a carpet he had been admiring at Wahid’s some weeks ago. Santa, helped by Wahid’s amazing memory, was able to find it between the 1000s of carpets heaped in enormous piles in Wahid’s shop. Steve was a co-conspirator and smuggled the carpet into our house.

The other Santa did not make it back in time to get the real object of desire and disclosed it in a card. A picture of my present was hanging in the Christmas tree. It is a traditional cradle that has been described to me but I cannot quite imagine what it is like. Not that we are expecting a baby here – Axel picked it for its extraordinary craftwork.

We cooked the winterfare and deserts for our dual hemisphere Christmas meal until it was time to leave. We dressed Axel up as an Afghan santa: a red turban (the guard helped him to wind my red scarf around his head), white cotton retrieved from pill containers served as beard and mustache, tied around his ears and neck with knitting yarn completed the set. Our Afghan staff looked on in wonder.

At Chris’ and David’s the cook was busy puttering in the kitchen where a large turkey was cooking, stuffed with pistachios, almonds, and raisins. We added our mashed potatoes, carrots and peas while our friend Steve from the consulate brought the necessary grape and hop based beverages to complete the meal.

We guessed our places at the table by looking at the contents of Christmas stockings. Mine was full of Dutch products, cheese, Douwe Egbert’s coffee and Axel had American stuff in his stocking. The men donned their Rudolph antlers, red blinking noses, while the women had flashing snowmen and christmas trees in their ears. We pulled at crackers and made wishes while little Kate checked all wrapped gifts for her name.

I gave her a beginner’s set of knitting needles with some red yarn but she was soon bored with the knitting lessons. Until she is ready for knitting the needles can be used as chopsticks.

Back home we opened the many electronic Christmas cards we received, each one taking a long time to download, and by mistake watched a movie about a family that didn’t get to celebrate Christmas together that left us depressed. We decided that this was the last time we celebrated Christmas without our kids – it’s no fun this way.

After my weekly massage and replenishment of oil in my dry skin we drove to the far northwest corner of Kabul to see M and her family in their new house.

We were greeted outside by her husband and inside found her mom, two sisters, one fiancé, one brother, M herself and her two boys. I have become like an auntie to them. The oldest is particularly affectionate and I get big hugs from him as often as he can give them.

We sat down in the blue room – blue walls, blue curtains and a blue carpet with cartoon racing cars. On top of that was a big Winnie the Pooh carpet, not what people would expect in Afghanistan. In the corner were two small desks from which the oldest boy pulled his first grade reader. We read together the story of the ugly duckling, a favorite children’s story here too.

When we visited M and her family a year ago in their rental apartment the cooking was done on the floor of the kitchen. Now she has a big light and airy kitchen.

Lunch was served on the ground as is common in Afghan households, on top of the plastic sheet that we claim has pictures of marihuana leaves on it.

When we left Axel noted the Norwood pine in the hallway and asked for the Dari word, having some idea of finding one on the way home. He should have known better to admire it because it was immediately offered to us, as Afghans are wont to do. We both protested as hard as we could but we lost and M claimed it wasn’t because we admired it. It was their Christmas gift to us. We drove off with the Christmas tree between us in the back side, tickling the neck of our guard. Bystanders smiled as they watched the two foreigners with their Christmas tree. It was the best gift we could have gotten.

On the way home we educated our driver and guard about Christmas. People have odd ideas about Christmas and New Year. We tell them it is our prophet’s birthday, just like they have theirs sometime in Spring and that new year is the beginning of 2011 and has nothing to do with Christmas other than that it is always one week later and also a holiday.

Axel has suffered from Christmas withdrawal in the biggest way, to the point of being a bit teary. The Norwood pine helped a bit. It now stands in our living room decorated with various stringed tchotchkies that I have collected over the year, two tiny Afghan mules on a keyring and one string of very brittle popcorn that took me forever to complete.

Axel was going to go out again for his usual last minute Christmas shopping but an explosion somewhere in town grounded the cars. It bothered him (not being able to get out and also the explosion) but for me Christmas has never been about gifts. The gift we are giving each other is our trip to Holland and India.

I had planned to make a buche the noel for our Australian Christmas lunch tomorrow. Maybe because I was too intently listening to Anna Karenina but it came out all wrong. The jelly roll fell apart and the chocolate and cream separated. I smooched the crumpled cake and the chocolate mixture into a bowl and will pretend it is a traditional Dutch Christmas concoction. It still tastes good but the look leaves something to be desired.

Since I has actually promised to bring a pumpkin cheese cake (the buche was a spontaneous addition to the menu) I tried to come up with at least one presentable desert. It did come out OK. There is more we have to prepare, all the winter vegetable dishes, since Australians celebrate Christmas in the summer and are used to light summer fare. It will be a trip tomorrow to see how the northern and southern hemispheres combine into one Christmas lunch.

I just put Axel in a steaming hot bath. He was practically frozen stiff after spending three hours of teaching in an unheated house. His Afghan students are not fazed by this and their bodies don’t seem to cool off the way ours do. When Axel said goodbye to them and shook hands, theirs were warm, his were like ice cubes. I gave him a whiskey on the rocks to heat him up from the inside. He should be OK in half an hour.

I was dressed in a woolen overcoat and managed to stay warm during my one hour in the same cold classroom. We have started to read A Thousand Splendid Suns. Today only three girls showed up. Traveling after dark is difficult if not impossible for young girls or single women and so it seems we may have lost a few for the winter.

Not being able to find enough copies of the book to purchase one for everyone I copied the first 11 chapters so we could start. I know this is not quite proper and I hope the publisher accepts my apologies. I would have bought the books if I could have but Axel’s two attempts across town left us empty handed.

The reading levels of the girls are wide apart. One girl is maybe at 4th grade level, another at 6th grade and a third is at 10th grade. I sympathize with their challenge of learning to read and understand English and reading with the right intonation as I am learning to do the same in Dari.

The girls took turns reading a few paragraphs. We then went over the words they didn’t know and then I asked them to tell me in their own words what they just read. One of the girls had already read the book (as well as the Kite Runner) but didn’t mind reading it again. She will be my assistant because her vocabulary is considerable and she is able to explain many of the new words to her class mates. When they finally found the corresponding word in Dari I learned a new word as well; sometimes I was able to come up with the Dari word myself.

Although we were only at the very beginning of the intensely sad story, in this first class we already had tears even though the real sadness hasn’t even started. “Why do men hurt women’s feelings? Where do we begin to change that? What can we do? How could we possible change the men?” were the teary words from S. Instantly M. came to the rescue with words wise beyond her years, “Start small, start with your small brothers, cousins, nephews. Teach them about being considerate, treat women well.”

We were able to calm her down and read on but I am a bit worried if the first chapter already makes her cry, what will happen when we come to the really depressing parts?

In sharp contrast to this experience late in the day, several of my colleagues and I met earlier with the medical chief of the international security forces and his sidekick, a young woman who looked like she was just out of college but turned out to be an internist from Pensacola.

Getting the military folks to our compound was a major accomplishment. I exchanged many phone calls and emails with the gentleman in charge of transport. The military don’t know anything about the names of roads and neighborhood of Kabul as we and the Kabulis know them so none of our usual directions worked.

I finally gave them the longitude and latitude coordinates thinking that the military would know how to find us that way. But the reply was, “sorry ma’am, we don’t use that system.” In desperation I sent them the Google Earth map, which I couldn’t open myself, complemented by some extra instructions by phone. That seemed to work as they did arrive and dropped their officials off at our compound at the appointed time.

We had a good meeting and could have gone on for hours if they hadn’t been picked up by their details. There is much good that the military can do in the medical field – they have the expertise, the equipment, the means and the goodwill to give things like emergency care a huge boost here. We explored ways in which they can support the ministry and how we can work together. We saw a side of the military that few Americans get to see.

When the drivers and security people came back to pick up their charges we were not quite ready with our working lunch. Our kitchen staff sat them down in another conference room, flack jackets, helmets and all and served them the same fancy Afghan lunch we had given our guests. I was relieved that we had enough meals (as I would have ordered just the right amount). My Afghan colleagues commented that if you expect 6 people for a meal you cook or order for 18. That is exactly what they had done.

It is really bad form here to not have enough food when you have guests. There can never be too much food. And so we were able to feed the drivers and logistics officers a real nice Afghan lunch, something they don’t get in their army barracks. All was new and wonderful to them, even the Afghan naan (bread) that we so take for granted.

We are busy organizing our trip to India and emailing with two agencies that claim they will delight us. The language of the emails is wonderful, as if we are talking with Jeeves, PG Wodehouse’s famous butler. Each new email is better than the previous one. We are being treated to one piece of adjective-laden after another:

“[…] India provides an authentic adventure – stimulating, absorbing, daunting, sometimes moving and shocking. Here is one of the world’s great dramas; an ancient, vast and crowded land committed to the most formidably challenging exercise in mass democracy. It is a spectacle in which hope, pride, paradox and uncertainty mingle and struggle. […] Here is a society of over a 1000 million people, growing by a million a month, divided and united by language, caste, religion and regional loyalties. It has often been described as a functioning anarchy; and it is in many ways an amiable one, of marvelous fluidity and tolerance. Indeed, the true Indian motif is not the Tajmahal, the elephant or the patient peasant behind the ox drawn plough. It is the crowd, the ocean of faces in the land of multitudes, endlessly stirring, pushing and moving. It is in this human circulation that one sees India’s colour, variety, busyness, and, senses also its power, vitality and grandeur.”

We are negotiating to lower the rather steep rates for our excursions. That too is met by the most wonderful prose: “Namaste & Good Morning Axel ! (Will you be offended if I addressed you by your first name ?, let me take a chance ! Actually, India is a pretty warm country and salutations as ‘Mrs.’, ‘Mr.’ are formal ‘wares’ as neckties which can be mistaken for the hangman’s noose !!!).”

He continues, “[…] Thank you for sharing your concerns with regards to cost. […] Axel, let us walk towards each other. I have walked USD 106 and I will request you to gently tread the other USD 94. Let us meet at USD 594 Per Person. […] Come on my friend, the hand remains extended in friendship and in goodwill – please hold and let me not fall !!! In all humility, I wish to state that, we do not promise just a tour. We are offering an experience. This is an experience that would communicate happiness, smiles and fulfillment. […].” He signs off with lots of love. There is the illusion (or is it pretense?) of deep friendship that is both creepy and seductive. We are definitely being seduced in a most wonderful prosaic way.

We are inclined to tell Mr. Manodj that we will go with the competition. Mr. M is the travel agent who Steve has used in the past and who is now organizing a tour for him and various family members following a similar route, but in a bus and for 10 days, a trip that starts tomorrow as he leaves Kabul for Delhi. But the prose of Mr. Banerjee is just too good to pass up. We will do a little more due diligence by checking some references but my heart has already decided.