Sylvia's Journal

All day was reading and mailbox clean up day. The cleanup added more documents to read, review and revise to the standing list. One could call it boring, passive or luxurious and I found my mood shift from depressed to relaxed based on the adjective I used. When I look back on the day I feel rather unproductive, uncreative and am left with the sentiment that today I did not add much value to the whole.

Still, I learned something about the impact of the community midwife program in three northern provinces (good news), the nutrition status in a central province (bad news), the hospital strategy (good news), giving and receiving feedback (hardly applicable), and the struggles of young Afghan women who decided to take a stand (good and bad).

This feeling of being not very productive reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my first bosses at MSH, over a decade ago. We talked about what was missing when people insist on improving efficiency in organizations. It is the phenomenon of ‘slack,’ organizational and personal slack. It has a bad name (‘don’t slack off!”) and no one would ever intentionally build it into a plan or a workday. And so it builds itself in no matter what (the bow cannot remain stretched all the time).

We agreed then, and I still believe now that there is a need for slack time. Trips, training, retreats, conferences have often plenty of slack time which is why, I believe, people tend to come back from those experiences in high spirits. There is time for new relationships, new ideas, and digesting all these.

It is a hard sell to senior managers that slack is not wasteful because the cost of people not having slack time (stress, low creativity) is not so visible and the blame is borne by individuals. And then of course some people are slacking all the time, they are the ones that give it a bad name.

Today I definitely felt like a slacker, as if I was doing something slightly illegal. And so I went home exactly at the official end of the day, when the entire office empties into several small buses for their transport back home. I followed the crowd, something I rarely did in my first year here.

There was another loud boom in Kabul, a few districts further into town. The target was the police (as is so often the case), adding slightly to the mounting unease. Our daughters and many of our friends have received the news of our intention to leave Afghanistan when my current contract runs out (October 2011), with cheers.

This decision has brought both relief and regrets; we have poured countless hours into learning Dari and are just getting at a level where we can manage most non professional conversations; we have developed strong relationships with many Afghans, and we are beginning to understand just a little bit how things work here. But then again, we are not disengaging, just moving.