Sylvia's Journal

For the government Saturday is the first day of the week, for us the last day of our weekend. Sometimes we have to give up that last day, as was the case today. I attended a gathering to put the final stamp of approval on a hospital strategy that has been in the making for over a year. It was the crowning event. The Acting Minister attended the entire event, including lunch. She will be a major player in aligning and mobilizing other ministers around this strategy that aims, in the end, to accomplish full hospital autonomy.

The entire meeting was in Dari. I tried to follow the slides, projected on the right side of the room. Those were the ones in Dari. I kept frantically thumbing through my dictionary to look up the words on the slide before they disappeared. It was a relief to have few slides and each slide with very few words. This is a bit of a novelty. I could see the hand of our hospital consultant in the production process.

Speeches, questions and answers were all in Dari which made it a little difficult for the foreigners, some ISAF, some US government, and some EU folks, to follow things closely. There were many opinions expressed, even by people who had not even read the strategy. The minister shook the strategy document in front of everyone asking, how many of you have read it? It was another one of her light touches to gently confront people with the importance of doing their homework.

The total immersion was for me yet another Dari class, which I continued a few hours later with my Dari teacher Najla. She tested my vocabulary by asking me questions in Dari and then requesting answers that used as many new words as possible. In the second hour I tried to read some of the poems from the book my boss has given me. My teacher suggested I just read a few stanzas of the first poem which goes on for pages and pages. Without understanding much of the meaning of what I was reading, I am sure I butchered the treasured poem.

For dinner we worked our way across town to visit Adriana who lives in the UN compound. It took us a long time to get there because of the Shia celebrations that block whole streets and a US army convoy that doesn’t just stop all traffic but also makes our phones inoperable. Once on Jalalabad road we drove several times past the well hidden compound before finding it in the thick smog that comes from wood and diesel stoves, dust and bad gasoline.

Inside the compound is a parallel universe, parallel to the other parallel universes around town: the American compound, the Green Village and the bases. I am glad we live in Afghanistan and not between gray blast walls and barbed wire. We could just imagine the security consultants with their clipboards pointing out where all the soft spots were, putting the fear of God in the UN operations and security folks while doing a brisk business in concrete, wire and related products.

This morning my driver found all the access roads to the massage place blocked. That’s the confusing thing here; one day a road is open, the next week it is blocked. I was finally dropped off in front of a series of road barriers to walk the kilometer or so to the massage place, accompanied by one of our guards. The weather was beautiful and I didn’t mind to stretch my legs although the views were not great: grey blast walls, barbed wire, armed guards and road blocks.

The blockade had also kept the Uzbeki hairdresser away with whom I had made an appointment. Luckily Lisa had brought in three Philippina colleagues, all skilled in the beauty and relaxation business. I was given a quick and adequate haircut squeezed in between the logistics company one and only office desk and the multipurpose couch (nails, feet and facials). More equipment had entered the place since I was last there: 4 large portable air conditioners on wheels and 2 water coolers. It is becoming increasingly hard to move around the furniture, the spa equipment and the four employees.

While my hair was cut, and a massage was given to another expat behind a curtain a few feet away, a Chinese karaoke DVD was put on for my entertainment. It showed D-rated photo models with long blond hair, ill fitting clothes, big mouths and too much lipstick swaying in a light breeze from tree/handrailing to tree/handrailing or staring wistfully out into the future. All the while the words of this then that love song were displayed in large letters across the screen. The words that needed to be sung turned blue so I could participate if I had wanted.

The haircut was followed by an expert reflexology treatment (lower legs and feet) from the new member of the beauty team and then Lisa finished things off with a similarly expert massage of the rest of me. After I emerged from my treatment she introduced me to the next customer who was being pedi-, and manicured on the couch, as ‘my mom.’ I could have been if I too, like her, had conceived at the age of 12.

Before our next social engagement (a delayed Thanksgiving dinner at Razia jan’s) I sat in the warm winter sun on our dusty terrace, tackling the second digit of the left cashmere glove. While people on the US East Coast are shivering, we are quite comfortable high up in the Afghan Alps.

Razia jan had, as usual, produced a delicious mélange of great people and great food. There was one Afghan-American couple with her living ‘behind the wall,’ at the US compound while the Afghan husband lives in town. She used to be in Afghanistan before so she knows what’s missing – and hopes that the one year tour will go quickly.

We had real turkey, stuffing and gravy, mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes. Even the marshmallow dollops were not forgotten. The dessert menu was as extensive as the main meal, served with cardamom tea to help the digestion.

We said goodbye to Razia’s lodger Tina who we got to know over the last 6 months. She is returning home (Atlanta) before starting a degree program in Civil Rights Law in the UK. With studies in religion and conflict, augmented with civil rights law, we think it is highly likely she will come back here sometimes.

We finished phase two of the leadership program. It was good to have sat in the back because I now know better where my work is. I sometimes wished I could look inside people’s minds to find out how the program affects (or not) their thinking. During the closing reflection I tried to pry loose some of these invisible thoughts but here, as a foreigner, one never knows whether the answers one gets are genuine or attempts to please the foreigner. Or whether the clichés I hear are attempts in a language not fully mastered to express thoughts constructed in their own. As I learn the construction of Dari sentences I can recognize when this happens.

Today was SOLA class after work. This time 5 girls showed up, unlike last week when no one did because of exams. Those are now over and we resumed our session about vision and learning how women in Afghanistan are able (or not) to overcome their thousand and one challenges. I had asked each girl to interview a woman, any age, to whom they look up for accomplishments in the face of all these challenges.

Fatima had interviewed their cleaning lady. She read from her handwritten notes. It started cheery enough. She quoted her cleaning lady as saying, “one beautiful day, when I was nine years old, I was coming home from tending the sheep in the fields when my mother told me that I was going to be engaged. I was very happy because it meant I would get new clothes. But then when I got married my world became hell. I had a baby at 12…”

At this point Fatima’s interview was cut short because the cleaning lady could no longer hold her tears. There were, presumably, another 30 intervening years of hell, during which the husband was killed by the Russians and the 5 daughters grew up. Although it is an intensely sad story, I was happy to hear that this story will not repeat itself anymore. Three of the five daughters are now doctors, one is sitting for her high school exams and the last one is in middle school.

Hila read her story about a girl who had lost both her parents at age 12 and then became the primary caretaker of an 11 day old baby while going to school and educating herself. This orphan is now a 25 year old lady doctor. Everyone clapped when Hila finished her story with the surprise revelation that the 11 day old baby was Hila herself and that this lady doctor, although not her biological mother, is the one she calls mommy.

The last twenty minutes we listened, holding our breath, interrupted now and then by gasps and some tears, to another story of a 16 year old, engaged, married, beaten, miscarrying a boy (her fault) at 17, betrayed, beaten, abused and shunned by her husband. We were all looking sadly at each other but then things took a turn for the better and the story became a story of redemption. The husband cut loose from his overbearing parents, choosing his wife over them. He repented, and helped his wife escape from his parents’ house and moved her to her sister’s while he went overseas for a job. Now he is back and preparing for another posting, this time everyone comes along. There is a job, money and love. It was a combination of Cinderella and the frog prince. Safia wiped her tears and everyone sighed. It is then that I realized that these are not stories as they are for us – these are real life experiences surrounding these girls on all sides, sometimes uncomfortably close.

Next week we will start our reading program, now that we have explored their visions and fueled them with stories of women who overcame mountains of misfortune and are now successful, either themselves or their offspring. We explored possible books to read and choose Khalid Hussein’s A Thousand Splendid Suns – a bit of a stretch language-wise, but familiar terrain. This weekend I will be hunting around town for 6 copies and prepare the assignments.

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.

‘Afghan men blamed for gender prejudice,’ is one of the headlines in our local newspaper. It appears right below ‘Poppy cultivation un-Islamic, say scholars.’ I am glad these things are out in the open. At least we are clear on that now.

There were some very good tidings in the newspaper as well: our Dutch compatriot Peter, kidnapped in October in Kunduz is free and can rejoin his wife and kids in Holland. His picture and that of his driver illustrated the observation that they appeared to be in ‘depressed mental state.’ Who wouldn’t after such an ordeal.

I had an interesting day at work. In the morning some of us met to review the activities in our work plan that are not moving along as planned. It was a small group that came together (too many competing schedules) but the conversation was interesting as we discussed why some things are just not happening. Many of those are in my portfolio with which I have struggled for some time now – how to get senior leaders to accept and make time for improving their leadership skills.

The contradiction is that every document that analyzes what’s wrong here (and there are many because most advisors and technical assistants follow the ‘deficit school’ of institutional development) cites weak leadership skills, but when we propose actions to remedy this other things always take precedence – especially those activities that have immediate, and visible or tangible outcomes.

The irony of my job here is that it would be much easier to do if the leadership and management skills were well developed, which of course would make my presence here redundant.

In the afternoon I sat between my two young female mentees, the ones who will play a facilitator role in an upcoming leadership development program for the midwives, a program that starts next week. They are thrown in the deep but I know they will swim because they are smart and they can. Today they were participatory observers in a similar program, second stage, for some of our own teams, a team from the medical university and one from the ministry.

I can understand a great deal more now of the conversations that are held in Dari, but not yet the jokes. One joke concerned women – there are four in the room – should they have protested? My young mentees are very aware of the roles society has given them: eyes down, be quiet. I am encouraging them to lift their eyes up and not be quiet but it is a hard sell. I offer to speak out for them when they can but reminded them that I am here only for awhile.

I often notice how powerlessness produces a kind of criticism that is counterproductive, not only because it is always (and understandably) voiced when the strong and dominant are out of earshot but also because it focuses energy away from the self and onto the other, which is rather wasteful from an energy conservation point of view.

Our requests for work permits are being processed. So is my request to leave the country for our quarterly R&R, sometime in early January.

While this is being done I returned to my tasks. One of those is to review our activity plan with a view to risk management: identifying where the risks are (of not producing deliverables, of not being prepared for eventualities, of losing people and things, etc.).

It is a good practice introduced by one of my Australian colleagues. I am seeing the advantage of having other nationalities (than those of our host country) on our staff – we are drawing from a much wider reservoir of knowledge instead of recycling our own (American) bathwater.

As the days tick away toward the last day of the project (a little more than 200 days) the competition for timeslots for workshops, study tours, training is becoming more intense. Sometimes different units are targeting the same people, and of course the higher you go in the hierarchy the smaller the pool. Since my focus is senior leadership development I am feeling the squeeze especially hard.

Training activities are tangible and highly desirable if you want to keep up spending rates and have evidence that you are busy implementing your plan, on target, on time. But some of our work plan activities are not so distinct.

In two of my teams work plan activities are of the coaching type, routine and ongoing capacity development that takes place in the workplace – these are the ones hard to connect to results; and if the object of the coaching is not interested (or too busy) it leaves us stranded with our plans.

In contrast, a third team is responsible for ordering, shipping, clearing and distributing millions of dollars of pharmaceutical products to the health facilities in about one third of Afghanistan’s provinces. Compared to the coaching the intended outcome is clear cut and tangible. Not that it is easier (getting things transported here, clearing customs and preventing loss and leakage is no mean task in this part of the world) but when all is said and done at least you can see results for all the efforts: pharmacies being stocked and doling out pills to patients.

Today was one of those days that makes you pull your hair out, a totally non productive day spent mostly in traffic, with three visits to the Indian embassy, a place I prefer to stay away from, given its current history.

It was partially my own fault because I had taken the wrong passport to the Indian embassy and didn’t discover that until we appeared before the official. It required another tedious and long round trip. But at the end of the day we both received our passports with the visa stamp: good until May, officially for 3 visits but since they have to be spaced two months apart I think one can only make two visits, really. It is good enough for now.

And so, for about 5 hours, I sat in a car, trying to knit and then losing stitches because of the bumps in the road and the stops and starts; each time I have to unravel what i did and start over again because of the complex pattern. May be it is time to revisit the glove project – but it is a nice conversation starter.

The very little time I was not in a car I sat at my desk, not in a very good mood; it is good I did not need to meet with anyone and I could blow off steam on my own. It was one of those days where I think we should be let out every 6 weeks instead of every 12.

The stress (and my high blood pressure, not sure what is cause and what is effect) is exacerbated by all the hoops one has to jump through to get the right papers stamped in the right places at the right time in a time span that is short for bureaucratic standards. Next step is the work permit; with that we can apply for the renewal of our Afghanistan visa. How long that will take is anyone’s guess but hopefully before we leave for Amsterdam early January.

I went to see our family doctor, a Ugandan MD trained at the university that MSH has supported in the past, for a consultation about some GYN problems. He decided I needed a more thorough investigation by a specialist. I don’t think it is anything serious, suspecting a minor malfunction caused by switching from American to Iranian hormonal therapy and back to the American one. Still, when he could not recommend any specialist in Kabul and started talking about going to Dubai I cringed. Not again!

He ordered an ultrasound which was to be had at the French Medical Institute for Children. It is where Axel went for his X-ray last summer. It was an Afghan hospital experience that was not bad but made me not want to have any more tests done. Going to the radiology departments is a time-consuming proposition; it is a busy place.

I had made an appointment before heading out there. Most people don’t and crowd around the small glass opening behind which one young lady sits, with her computer, a scanner, a printer and a drawer where the money goes. I brought my knitting (the glove, fourth try) which attracted a lot of attention.

One young woman said, in broken English, that she thought knitting was boring. I wondered what the Dari word was that she translated as ‘boring.’ Men stared at me and women came crowding around, asking what I was knitting and for whom. This was an even better Dari lesson than the one hour I missed because of my trip to the hospital.

Once I had paid (18 dollars) and had a stamped receipt with a number (16) I was sent to a corridor without chairs where sundry people waited, some with kids, some with elderly relatives, in front of various doors marked, in English, with the words, X-Ray, CT Scan, Ultrasound. It was unclear what the drill was so I leaned against the wall and continued knitting. More stares and more attempts at conversation. Finally a young handsome doctor (Ultrasound technician/MD) came out and told me to drink much water. I told him if he had me wait much longer I would burst.

Ten minutes later I was in one of the two tiny portioned alcoves, minimal privacy secured with a curtain and bared my belly. I asked him whether Afghan men would object to revealing their wives’ bellies (I had not seen a female Ultrasound technician) but he told me it was rare, and in those few cases they called on the female doctor, who promptly stuck her head around the curtain.

Although the prescription (provided orally by me as per my doctor’s instructions) asked for a pelvic ultrasound he decided to scan all the organs in my belly. Given the low life expectancy of women and the fact that most go from one pregnancy to another and then die, I think a 59-year old menopausal woman was too good an opportunity to pass up; when else would he have a chance to peek inside and see what everything looks like of someone who has only had two babies and expects to live double the Afghan’s life span.

After awhile he triumphantly exclaimed that he found something, one kidney stone and one gall stone. He turned the US screen towards me and showed me the stones. He suggested I come back later in the day, after fasting, and he would do a more thorough investigation of the gall bladder and kidney but I declined. Given the fact that Axel had been carrying along more than a dozen stones for years without knowing it I thought this exploration could wait.

The doctor left me with a wad of paper towels to clean of the gel. The used papers were dropped on the floor next to the overflowing waste basket with towels from those who had come before me. He then left to write the report and I was back among the curious stares of the people in the waiting room.

Fifteen minutes later I was out of the door with pictures and his report (everything OK except the stones). While waiting for the car a young girl (19) approached me and we started to talk in broken English and Dari. I learned she was a journalism student, engaged to be married next summer to another student and then move with him to Dubai. Her eyes lit up. “I hate Afghanistan. It is not a good place for girls or for boys.”

When I asked her who or how would this country change to become more friendly to boys and girls she shrugged her shoulders, saying, ‘I am alone.’ I assured her she was not, and told her about my students, the two who want to become president of Afghanistan, the one who will be a directors of an Afghan business school, and the one who will be Afghanistan’s ambassador to the UN (we are talking 20 years from now at least). I think these visions puzzled her.

We exchanged email addresses. I would love to introduce her to my students.

I awoke to a French toast breakfast (my first, etc.) and a loving husband serving me tea. The birthday massage was cancelled because the masseuse was sick and the only other one available was the young inexperienced one who sliced of part of Janneke’s toe some weeks ago.

Instead we went to find the nice gentleman, agricultural student and manager of a women’s spinning and knitting coop, for some more yarn. It was a long ride to the edge of Kabul, a Shia neighborhood that was getting ready for some big religious festival that requires many large colored flags (green, red and black).

The woolman came to our car with a bag of sheeps wool, cashmere yarn and several knitted hats. After I haggled a bit about some cashmere yarn, and we had agreed on a price he gave me the remainder of the bag. “Please find us some buyers,” he said. I have never been in the wool/yarn/knitted hats business but I promised I would and promptly announced his request on facebook. We will see where it goes from here.

We had lunch in the garden of the Wakhan Café, sending the driver and guard off to prayers and their kind of lunch, before a few more errands that involved large cushions to accommodate our party guests and camembert to go with the French Bakery bread. That camembert came in handy when the delivery boy for the food was about an hour late.

We had forgotten to put ‘no presents’ on the invitation and so presents came along with the guests. The best one was a large orange camel with a Christmas bell around its neck and two camel bags that, I discovered, can hold a cell phone. There were also several bouquets of the type that you give to Olympic champions or opera singers, some bottles of grape beverage, a few cans of adult hop beverages, some made from cherries, a winter snuggly for adults, a Nooristani wooden box and, from Axel, a dress made by Razia jan that he bought last summer at her fashion show/school fundraiser – and kept hidden somehow in this small house that hardly has any hiding places.

The big joy of this evening was the connecting of people – we connected pilots with pilots, neighbors who live across the street from one another, knitters and colleagues. Many of our friends used to be fellow guests at one of Razia jan’s fabulous dinner parties – things clicked and we went on seeing each other when she was not around.

After all the guests left we prepared leftover platters for the guards who had been busy guiding people to our house and opening and closing the gate for everyone, with or without cars. The only disappointment was that none of our friends and family in Holland and the USA came. After all Axel had sent them all invitations with precise directions to our house. One of my brothers cheerfully replied that he was checking out the bus schedule from The Hague to Kabul and then reported there was no good connection.

All through my childhood the day before my birthday I was reminded that this or that activity was the last one I did while being this or that old. It is a habit that Axel has assimilated. And so he prepared my last breakfast consumed during my 59th year on this planet and reminded me that I was drinking my last cocktail (ginger beer and dark rum) and had just finished my last workday. As of tomorrow I will be entering my 60th year with the big birthday looming at the end of this next year. I used to think 60 year olds were ancient; now I think we 60-ish folks are pretty cool.

We had dinner at Paul’s. Over a delicious and enormous meal, accompanied by real wine, we discussed Wiki leaks between us six nationalities: Belgian, Dutch, American, British, Australian and Sierra Leonean (with some of us of double nationality). After that we drifted into other philosophical matters such as ‘meaning what we say and saying what we mean.’ We laughed about things and people, complained about things and people, marveled at things and people, agreed on things, disagreed on things and then (because all the things we said and thought we all agreed that Wiki leaks was not a good idea. And then we parted.

Back home I unraveled the fancy vintage glove I am knitting from real Cashmere wool ($40 per glove!). It was a little disappointing as I thought I was nearly done. However, after the thumb and index finger were completed it stopped looking like a glove. Knitting is a great exercise in patience, humility and perseverance.