Sylvia's Journal

For the umpteenth time I snagged my scarf on something pointy or sharp that is sticking out of something else where you don’t expect it. Some of my loosely woven clothes have little holes here and there; the scarves I can usually fix although some remain a bit loopy.

All this, snags and sharp things, the experience of being snagged and resulting loopiness are delicious metaphors for our lives in Afghanistan.

All day I sat on the side in our Kabul Conference room watching the second day of our leadership program, phase II, watching a team that wasn’t really a team struggle to color between the lines (follow the facilitation notes). A few newbies were observing, sitting at the sidelines with me. I pointed out the snags and how to fix them while they helped me with translation.

Hopefully they were learning along with everyone else and learning from mistakes made. People are critical of each other and so am I of the team and especially one of my staff who is the master facilitator; it is a habit easily acquired here. It is good that the Appreciative Inquiry literature pops up now and then to remind me that good things are happening as well. People are learning and excited about it.

Since I arrived a little over one year ago I have not sat in these workshops much or supervised the staff who are facilitating them as closely as I should have. As a result some ‘fossilization’ has occurred – errors made and not corrected, becoming embedded in the routines.

As a technical director responsible for management and leadership I have many managerial tasks, am expected to attend many internal and external meetings and events. With only so many hours in a day and many double bookings it has been hard to sit in the back when workshops are going on for long periods of time.

And then there is the language barrier. All the workshops are done in Dari. A year and even half a year ago I wasn’t able to follow what people were saying when they didn’t follow the script. Now I am at a 40% level of understanding and can roughly follow the conversations. I can detect when discussion drift into side roads, or, to stick with the metaphor, when facilitators get snagged.

I received a present from my boss, a book of poetry that he claims is simple, third grade level. But my boss is a poet himself and an avid reader and memorizer of poetry. His standards are high, as my colleagues told me. They think it is much too advanced for me. To make things even more challenging, the print is tiny. It is hard for someone who is still reading letter by letter rather than by gestalt, to identify whether there are one, two or three dots on or below the letters. I think I should have asked for a book of simple nursery rhymes instead.

While the teams were doing group work I translated an official (and short) invitation letter from Dari into English. This was made easier because the reverse of the letter had the invitation in English. I am writing the words in a special notebook for work related words. The short letter had about 20 new words. This is helping me to expand my professional vocabulary with words like ‘consensus meeting,’ ‘stakeholders,’ ‘final draft,’ ‘strategy’ (istartezjee), ‘gathering,’ ‘bring to completion,’ ‘presentation,’ ‘date,’ and ‘venue.’ I feel that I am moving off one plateau and heading towards a next one, a little higher up.