Sylvia's Journal

Nearly every week several of our project’s senior managers traipse off to the US compound to meet with those who make our work possible; who dispense the money from US taxpayers in tranches so we can transform it into, eventually, better health care for Afghans. Sometimes they come to us, which they like because it is like a field visit, with real tea and cake, in our beautiful compound on the other side of town but often we come to them, which is quite an undertaking and not for the faint of heart.

In order for us to pass the many layers of barriers we first have to shed all our electronics: pen drives, CDs, computers. We can keep our cellphones a little longer even though they often don’t work as we walk along the half mile of road behind the first line of defense where military vehicles drive to and fro with jamming equipment is in full operation. This is how we make our way to the next line of defense – a good chance to stretch our legs that have very few opportunities to do so the rest of the week.

When we get to the outer wall of the USAID compound (referred to as CAFÉ), across the road from the embassy buildings, we have to wait outside, rain or shine until we are called in, one by one, by a friendly smiling Ghurka. I always greet them with a Namaste which they respond to with an even bigger grin. I wished I knew a few more words in Nepali.

The entrance and exit signs on the doors in and out are frequently switched from left to right and vice versa. “This is to confuse the terrorists,” quipped one of my colleagues. Once inside we put our few belongings through a screening machine, then ourselves. After that we hand in our IDs that are registered in big books by stern looking and heavily armed marines in exchange for a visitors badge, and this only in the presence of a USAID employee with the right color badge.

This has to be organized long before the visit. Since I was supposed to be in Egypt my name had not been registered. I was asked to bring my American passport which allowed me to be vouched for by an American employee with another color badge.

We have to carry our badges clearly visible; no Ghurka will let you further into the inner sanctum if they cannot see it. They take their task very seriously. In fact, everyone takes their security task very seriously because if you don’t you are out or, at best, barked at in a very unpleasant way (I witnessed one such event, not pretty).

Once inside there are white containers as far as the eye can see, surrounded by blast walls on the perimeter and sandbags around each container. Inside is a beehive of activity with badged people walking hither and thither through narrow passageways decorated with posters of success stories, smiling beneficiaries of USAID support, local artifacts, nice carpets and the life size pictures of the bosses: Obama, Hillary, the VP and the USAID director who are flashing their white teeth and broad smiles at anyone who stops to look them in their eyes.

We are ushered into small windowless offices with large flat screen conference screens, more posters of projects and unlimited supplies of bottles of water (Coca Cola inc.) instead of the habitual way that Afghans welcome their guests (we are of course not considered guests, we are contractors, accounting for our deeds and seeking guidance). I don’t think they have a kitchen and kitchen staff like we do. They have a kitchen and restaurant a few containers over, where flown-in US cafeteria food is served.

We discuss strategic and tactical issues, blockages that we ourselves cannot break through and provide information about what is happening outside ‘the bubble,’ in the real Afghanistan where life continues in its own ways. We leave with promises of help, new assignments, questions to answer or concept papers/workplans/budgets to provide. We never leave empty-handed and we never leave our donor empty handed either. And then we retrace our steps, get our stuff back and walk back to the car through various barriers for the long drive home.

Interpreting behavior, words across the vast cultural divide that exist between me and my Afghan colleagues is hard work. This is a high context culture, I explained to one of my staff with whom I had a hard talk this morning. This means that you can exchange one word with your Afghan colleagues and you entirely understand each other. But when you and I exchange even whole sentences we might as well speak Chinese; we need to turn to a low context conversation for the simple reason that the context needs to be made visible.

I need to say and hear many words to reveal context. In the process both of us risk using words that convey something else, a poor translation of something richer in either one of our languages. This is the constant dilemma and our unending challenge. ‘Oh, by the way,” he said, you have so many words for this word ‘problem,’ where we have only one ‘mushghil.’ You call it a dilemma, a problem, a challenge, hardship, etc. For us these are all musghils.”

We found ourselves (again) in the wake of mismatched expectations. But should I be surprised? Come to think of it, it is more than a miracle that we are not constantly running into problems or mushghils; given our different backgrounds and life experiences we actually should have a very hard time working together.

Luckily we don’t; just an occasional flare up that requires a serious talk. We did that today, first in the morning which left us in an impasse, and then another brief talk which showed some progress and finally over lunch in the privacy of my office, we got sufficiently back on the rails that we can see each other in the eye and move on.

Yesterday’s supermarket suicide bomber was sobering as it signaled the re-appearance of the some or other Taliban group in our midst; too close for comfort. And so we stayed home, watching what is unfolding in Egypt and rejoicing that I am not stuck at the airport there with twenty Afghans.

The only escape from our self-imposed hunkering down was the short trip to my language school for two hours of reading a history of Afghanistan with way too many new words and complex sentence structures that don’t lend themselves to word for word translation.

Back home I baked cookies which I shared with the guards as Axel’s stomach cannot handle all that butter. I worked patiently on my Quaker sampler and washed a few of my scarves; the dirty water revealed how black the air is inside and outside our house (and thus inside our lungs).

Axel’s lungs suffer more from this than mine. Once again he had some sort of bronchial infection which literally knocks the air out of him.

We had Ted (from SOLA) over for dinner and talked about his successful scholarship-raising trip and a thousand other things related to getting Afghan teenagers up to speed to study in the US before coming back to change this country. This is the only antidote to such barbaric practices as the recent stoning of a young couple in Kunduz.

How different the day ended from its start; first there was the news that the Egypt trip I was supposed to pack for was canceled, for obvious reasons. No point in dragging 20 Afghans to a place that, at the moment, appears more dangerous than Afghanistan. So rather than preparing for a trip we had a leisurely morning of sleeping in and making our customary Friday chili omelet.

I made my way through the barricades to see my masseuse Lisa. While Englebert Humperdinck sang about love on a karaoke DVD, she relaxed my sore muscles and then cut my hair. She is a woman of many talents, an all purpose and one-woman beauty parlor.

With my skin all rosy and oily and my hair neatly trimmed I returned home, picked up Axel and returned back to town to join Meghann and Pia for a farewell lunch in one of our favorite coffee houses, the Wakhan Café. After our goodbyes we walked over to a nearby gallery where we never buy anything but feast our eyes on beautiful art, felt products, carpets, saffron, ceramics and carpets until the car came to pick us up.

The dispatcher, announcing that the car was waiting for us, mentioned nonchalantly that there had been an explosion not far from where we had lunched. We had not heard anything.

When we got home we discovered that one of the four supermarkets where we do our shopping had been blown up by someone out to get the heavily armed Blackwater people who tend to shop there. I have seen those folks and shopped with them many times and only now realize that being in the same place with them is not a good idea. Luckily the supermarket chain (Finest) opened a shop near our house which is far from where the Blackwater folks hang out. We often shopped in the blown up place. We probably won’t anymore.

And then we watched, ad nauseam, the Egypt drama unfolding in front of our eyes. The Kabul explosion was not reported here on any of the channels we watch (BBC, EuroNews and Al Jezeera) which were rather preoccupied with the momentous developments in Egypt. I am now glad I am not leaving for Cairo tomorrow.

It seems that the Kabul drama did get some attention in Europe and the US as evidence by a number of emails, checking on our safety. That is when facebook comes in handy.

The suicide attack is a bit unnerving as Kabul has been spared such events. There had appeared to be some pact between those in power and those trying to unseat them. We wonder what this new development means.

This morning was all devoted to drugs, of the legal kind. As our drug management team is transferring from one project to another later this year, the two project leaders and affected staff came together to demystify the transition, deal with rumors and put everyone at ease.

Afterward I joined the warehouse management team for a tour of the facility where all the bulk drugs are stored and then repacked for distribution to the NGOs. It is a very complex logistical challenge. I know that from the emails about procurement, shipments and clearance on which I am cc-ed. But now I finally got to see the result of all the work: boxes piled on top of boxes with the medicines that appear on the approved drug list for health centers and hospitals and are shipped to Kabul with the compliments of the American people.

The warehouse consists of several large buildings. They were rebuilt from the debris that the Mujahedeen had left behind, which was little when it concerned the traditional mudbrick structures, or dented and pockmarked with bullet holes when it concerned the building put up by the Russians with indestructible and thick cement walls.

The storage is secured, temperature controlled, pest controlled (all the traps have been empty since a food storage place was established nearby) and closely monitored by staff whose offices are dwarfed in the corners of the gigantic spaces. It is not a comfortable work environment in the winter – these spaces are heated only as much as is needed to keep things from freezing – but then, in the summer everything stays naturally cool.

The inventory check that is done quarterly, a yeoman’s job of counting every box, has consistently surfaced numbers that are within the tiniest fractions of allowed discrepancies from what is expected to be there. When you see the number of boxes you realize the accomplishment. I am told that people coming from outside the country, and who are familiar with pharmaceutical logistics systems are awed by it all. It is one of those accomplishments that is invisible because it is not newsworthy. Only a negative event, theft, fire, would make it newsworthy which is too bad.

The next challenge for the combined project teams is how to transfer the responsibility and running of all this to the government. It will be a slow process that will take years but less so because of the strong foundation on which the system is built.

In the evening I tumbled unknowingly into a meeting of the Pakistan District Rotary Club Kabul; complete with banners and District Governors (a Rotary governance title I learned) from Lahore (male) and two from the UK (one male one female), the latter two wearing their red Rotary blazers.

There were many ceremonies that included speeches and gifts: the traditional Afghan gray silk-turban/skullcap combinations for the men and a chador that looked like a fringed American flag without the stars for the lady. This was preceded and followed by many speeches about Service over Self, upcoming events (Lahore and New Orleans), projects, some history and some posing for the obligatory gift receiving pictures.

Razia jan who was hosting the meeting showed a wonderful new documentary about her Zabuli school for girls that her foundation (and Rotary) supports. It included an interview with Khaled Husseini of Kite Runner fame.

I learned that Zabuli was a wealthy Afghan banker responsible for the introduction of checkbooks and other banking novelties, who left all his money for the betterment of Afghanistan. Razia jan’s school got windows and walls and named the school after him in return.

My reservoir of patience has filled up as hoped. I spent the day reading documents that had been languishing in my inbox, waiting for comments, or for my edification. All the while I am putting the finishing touches on a knitted ensemble for Liz who is going to have a baby in spring: jacket, booties and mittens, for next winter.

We watched the analyses and reviews of Obama’s speech while listening to the roar and thunder of helicopters overhead, loaded airships, just in case the people who did not get a seat in parliament were going to cause problems during the official inauguration that had given us a day off (white city the UN calls it – sequestered at home as during a white-out).

In the evening I joined my MSH colleagues from around the world for our quarterly staff meetings. Technology makes it possible to listen to presentations given in Boston, Seattle and Port-au Prince, to ask questions and hear them answered. It is truly amazing to be together like that.

We channel surfed between BBC, Al Jezeera and EuroNews to find out more about what is happening in Egypt, my destination in a few days. Someone said that if Tunisia sneezes the whole Middle East catches a cold. We hope that Egypt’s cold won’t turn into something nastier. Such irony; after over a year of trying to get all the moving pieces of getting Afghans to Egypt fit together, the trip may be cancelled after all. I am crossing my fingers for a good outcome.

Photos: the new dress made from the material M gave me for my birthday, in front of our thriving Christmas tree that Hadji Kazem lovingly tended during our absence. And the sweater for Liz’s baby.

I concluded today that I have been tasked to cross extremely difficult terrain in a car with defective steering, four flat tires and dirty oil. Last week I kicked that car and it came apart. The car got mended and today I lost my temper and kicked it on the other side, leaving a big dent. We’ll see what falls apart next. This is the story of my work here. I don’t think I can get from here to there in the vehicle made available to me. I mean ‘vehicle’ figuratively of course.

There’s more that is not right. I love to teach and I am very good at it but there is little room for me to teach the things I am passionate about. For many what I want to teach is secondary, or fluff. I want to help people design better meetings, teach how to manage power dynamics. It’s partially self interest (or, as they say here ‘cooking my own kebab.’)

I have a very low tolerance for sitting in badly conceived and facilitated meetings that waste every one’s time. I walked out of such a meeting today and threw my hands up. My preventive work as it relates to design and facilitation doesn’t appear to be very effective. Sometimes I get to correct course in midstream of a meeting, when there is a crisis and people notice that the meeting is about to derail or has already done so; when a few people dominate the meeting and influence the outcome in a less than democratic way.
But these are retrofitting or emergency operations that I prefer to avoid because they are awkward and never really coherent, and if they fail I have egg on my face.

So I am spending most of my days managing my own teams and their staff, and being part of the senior management team. I am extremely busy with internal project management tasks and other things that are not really my area of expertise or passion. I have a team under me that manages millions of dollars of pharmaceuticals, calculating, ordering, shipping, negotiating exemptions and other bureaucratic hurdles, custom clearing, distributing, monitoring and fixing problems. I know nothing about any of this. Luckily I have a good team and they do fine with or without me. I am called in when there are morale problems but even those are mostly managed without my interventions, Afghan style.

I have another team that has advisers who work on technical issues I also know little about: child health, public relations, environmental health and my third team is not a team, but a one-man show, an all-eggs-in-one-basket kind of thing.

Tomorrow the parliament will open and our area is already swarming with armed men in pickup trucks. The main access road to our office will be blocked off. As a precautionary measure we are told to stay home. This is a good thing so I can fill up my depleted patience reservoir.

Things are a bit muddled in my head, as if the ideas I have cannot find the right words to convey to others who operate from a different metaphor. I suddenly have a strong urge to go back to school and work within the confines of academic rigor and discipline and express myself in a better way.

We spent the entire day in one of our smaller conference rooms. Small means warm, there is no central heating; but small also means stuffy as we were packed tightly around the conference table on our bulky chairs. We scrutinized every program manager’s plan for this year and explored what we can finish when we are beginning to wind down, in June, and what needs more time and what, if we get another year, we should add or continue.

The conversations were spirited at times, aggressive at others, skeptical or muddled as when we were using the same words but talking about different things. It is then that I felt the disconnect between what I was told to focus on, what I was able to do (and more importantly not do) and how others see those tasks.

Sometimes I felt like I was operating from one bubble trying to communicate with others in their own bubbles. There are those who insist on everything being measurable and precise which leads to deleting all that cannot be made precise. It is the age old dilemma for social scientists struggling to make their science resemble the physical sciences. How do you measure capacity building in management and leadership or process awareness? And if it can’t be precise, how can you know whether you have achieved or not.

Two of Don Schon’s quotes came to mind as I am trying to sort through my muddled thoughts about today:

“It’s as though the teacher said something like this: “I can tell you that there’s something you need to know and I can tell you that with my help you can probably learn it. But I cannot tell you what it is in a way that you can now understand. You must be willing therefore, to undergo certain experiences as I direct you to undergo them, so that you can learn what it is you need to know and what I mean by the words I use. Then and only then can you make an informed choice about whether you wish to learn this new competence. If you are unwilling to step into this new experience without knowing ahead of time what it will be like, then I cannot help you. You must trust me.” (Address at Queen’s University in Australia)

“In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground overlooking a swamp. On the high ground, manageable problems lend themselves to solutions through the application of research-based theory and technique. In the swampy lowland, messy, confusing problems defy technical solution. The irony of this situation is that the problems of the high ground tend to be relatively unimportant to individuals or society at large, however great their technical interest may be, while in the swamp lie the problems of greatest human concern. The practitioner must choose. Shall he remain on the high ground where we can solve relatively unimportant problems according to prevailing standards of rigor, or shall he descend to the swamp of important problems and non rigorous inquiry?” (The Reflective Practitioner)

I ask these questions about measurability myself to students in our leadership program yet I find Schon’s words comforting but I don’t have his authority to use them in the way he does.

The measurability focus is both good and bad: good when it forces people to articulate their ‘theories of change,’ and bad when it leads to dropping anything that is too complicated to measure.

My mantra today was, ‘that’s why I am here, that’s why I am here.’ But seeping underneath came that same old question again, ‘can I bring about some of the changes I set out to make?’

I am reading Antony and Cleopatra and am struck by the similarities between Afghanistan now and Rome of that time. They say that those who don’t study history will be condemned to repeat it. Afghans would only have to look at Berlusconi to be horrified about what all these wars produced a few thousand years later.

Last week’s crisis seems to have resolved itself with a recognition of the existence of, respectively one’s shadow, reptilian brain, or an overdose of stress, depending on how one looks at it. The reptilian brain language is mine, by the way.

Today felt like I was entering the rapids, and the rest of the week will remain that way. Still hoping to join the trip to Egypt (though no sign of my visa-stamped passport yet), we are squishing much activity in this week which, for government officials is nearly at the halfway point. There are all sorts of team missioning, visioning and/or planning events that I had hoped for since I arrived here and suddenly they all happen in the same few days.

The opening (or not) of the parliament later this week leaves us with much uncertainty about whether we can even move around at all on Wednesday as the parliament is in our neighborhood, just down the street. We are waiting with baited breath. Will it be calm, will there be demonstrations? Will the cauldron boil over?

My two birthday presents, one from M and the other from our housekeeper, were converted into Punjabi (tunic/loose pants/scarf) outfits. We picked them up at my new tailor, in between the satin-dressed bridal mannequins, apparently the tailor’s main business (photos to follow).

We met up with M who had just come back from a snow hike in Salang. It is hard to imagine that people go skiing and hiking in the winter, a little further north. There are foreigners (and Afghans) who go out every weekend to enjoy the breath taking beauty of the Afghan mountains that we only know from memory (and not in winter) or from pictures. They celebrated their successful ascent with French cheese and wine, she told us. Imagine that, here in Afghanistan. You can do these things when you don’t have a security chief, when you are on your own, or an Afghan, or may be more adventuresome than we are.

We joined her and another friend at the Rumi restaurant, a first time for us even though it has been around for several years. It is an Afghan restaurant in a lovely old house with a nice garden that will see us back when the temperature rises again in a couple of months. We feasted on various comfort/winter dishes before hurrying back to my Dari class. Axel is still in recovery mode and decided to skip classes and have a nap instead.

I am halfway through a chapter book about the history of Afghanistan. Reading Dari is difficult, not only because most vowels are not written but also because it is not clear where one word ends the the next begins; a space can either be a sign that a new word starts or simply be a space after a letter that never connects to the next (a,r,d,w).

Furthermore, unlike English, there is very little punctuation, no capital letters and sentences that go on for half a page with endless clauses and sub-clauses and passive tense verbs. By the time I get to the end of a sentence I have forgotten how it started. Reading and understanding is a very slow process require endless practice.

This is also the advice I give to my students who study English. They too have to read out aloud and I correct their pronunciation and help explain words that are not known just like my teacher does in my Dari class. My students, all Dari speakers, are used to long sentences and unaccustomed to punctuation. Not understanding many of the words, like me in their language, they too drone on.

But one thing is different; while I scan the Dari text for (non existing) periods and commas and places to take a breath, they ignore the countless periods and commas, and read on breathlessly, one sentence after another, until the paragraph is completed or I stop them.