Sylvia's Journal

I got up before 2011 had arrived back home in the US. For Afghans it was an ordinary day. Still, a few people wished me happy New Year. I spent the first morning of the new year with the senior staff of one of the preventive medicine directorates. Throughout the morning I was reminded once more how much hand holding is needed and how institutional development needs a lot of sitting around the table.

On my way in to the ministry compound I ran into an Afghan advisor to one of the other general directorates who is on the European Union payroll. He reminded me that the follow up of an intervention we did some months ago had not happened, stressing the word ‘you’ to remind me that it is my, not his job to keep things moving. That is how the Europeans and the Americans are working in parallel. Sometimes I wonder if the follow up of interventions is anyone’s job.

It is rare to see champions emerge who keep things moving after the workshop or the event has ended. It tells me something about how we external agents go about our business and how we design interventions. Follow up action appears too much associated with having another workshop, another action plan created, which always requires an external agency that provides the goodies.

As I am getting more ‘hands-on’ involved in things that I had previous let my staff to do, with the countdown of our project ticking in front of our eyes, I am acutely aware that the hand holding I need to do has to be more constant and more intense. The events are all done in the local language and so I can kill two birds with one stones: my staff translates and in doing so learn how to work with groups in a flexible and focused way as I model the way. May be I should have started doing this a year ago, but then I didn’t know what is possible and what is not, and I certainly could not follow anything of the conversations in Dari.

After lunch I picked up my friend M to meet her tailor and drop off various pieces of fabric I had received for my birthday, to turn them into panjabis, the comfortable tunic and loose pants outfits so popular in this part of the region.

From there we went to see Ibrahim off Chicken Street to pick out the spectacular woven fabrics for M’s sitting cushions and pillows. I picked up a treasure Steve had bought some time ago, a piece of an old Torah scroll that came from Uzbekistan. Axel and I unwrapped the delicate piece from its cloth covering to take a look at the scroll and its Hebrew letters written on soft sheepskin leather and marveled about the hidden history of this artifact. It completes the rest of the scroll already in Steve’s possession.

On the way home I stopped at a widows’ embroidery cooperative. The manager gifted me a bracelet for the New Year and, in celebration of the same, dropped enough off his ordinary prices that I left with a bag full of stuff. My special treatment, he claimed, was also because I reminded him of his grandmother who lives in Washington (and aren’t we are all related through Adam and Eve anyways? said his wife).

My final stop on my afternoon shopping expedition was the supermarket that caters to foreigners. We had pizza on the menu and Axel wished to top it with pork sausage. At the supermarket I found my way to the unmarked pork freezer that was loaded with enormous slabs of bacon, sliced ham, bangers and other forbidden foods, all of it in packages too big for a household of two. So I got something that only looked like pepperoni.