Sylvia's Journal

I find myself walking on a long and narrow causeway. On my right are daisies; on my left (sinistro) are crocodiles. The daisies are called patience, respect, compassion, praise, acknowledgement, encouragement, recognition (of effort), realism, practicality and acceptance of otherness; the crocodiles are called impatience, outrage, criticism, irritation about otherness, cynicism, judgment, confrontation and other unpleasant things.

I am trying to walk the straight and narrow, picking the daisies (the Appreciative Inquiry folks want me to) while the crocodiles are yapping at my heels. I risk not getting to the end of the causeway (called ‘good enough for now’) and fight being dragged into the morass of failure.

Reading Dexter Filkins piece in the New Yorker about Kabul Bank did not help. What am I trying to do here? Surrounded by crooks, squeezing the ordinary people and the foreigners dry and other sinistros who try to blow us up? The leaders have us by the balls because of the threat of the Taliban, made real in the supermarket blow up that annihilated an entire family in seconds. They are not an imagined threat.

Sometime I fantasize about the easy way out and having someone blow the whistle, ‘game over,’ and everyone packs their bags and we leave en masse, letting Afghanistan stew in its own juices.

But then I think about SOLA and the girls I teach; about young Z. who has to prove to her family in embattled Kunduz that she can become a fluent English speaker in three months or else (she needs a Skype buddy, any takers?). I think about M. who is now in Aswan, a little nervous because she knows what can happen after the common enemy finally leaves and the coalition falls apart. M. had wanted to escape Afghanistan and its brutal or careless treatment of women but now she has stepped up to the leadership challenge and is learning from women leaders in Egypt the lessons that will help her transform Afghanistan.

Packing of bags is not an option because of what will happen next. People who scream ‘leave,’ don’t have to see the resulting unpleasantness, far away from their beds. And so I continue on that narrow path between small ‘good enough for now’ victories and total failure. There will be no success for a long while.