Sylvia's Journal

Our Afghan snowman lost his likeness to George Washington, as well as his eyes (radishes) and nose (half a carrot). I was disappointed that the kids of the childcare center didn’t come out to make their own snowman on the vast expanse of virgin pack snow in from of my office. I had some plan to help them make one at lunch time but instead I had a long and frank talk with one of my staff who surfaced after a two week absence.

M. is back in the office and handed in the first draft of her report; we will work together on a second draft and prepare a presentation for our staff. I was sorry to see her return to her old administrative job as I had hoped to have a promotion in place but it is tied to several other moves that cannot yet happen. And so I counsel patience, to myself, to her and two other people whose job changes are all interconnected.

The US government, as part of a promise at the July Kabul Conference, has to materialize the 50% ‘on-budget’ support to the Afghan government. This means that half of all the monies obligated to rebuild/develop Afghanistan have to flow through the ministry of finance into the various line ministries that receive the assistance. Health is one of those. It is an enormous undertaking of a complexity that is hard to grasp, especially if you have to orchestrate all this from behind the barricades of the US compound.

Things that took 8 years to bring about now (a relatively small percentage of the aid being channeled through the government) have to be done in 2 years. Of course we have learned a lot from the 8 year experience but reducing it to a quarter is a bit of a stretch.

The ripples of the policy change are felt far and wide, including in our project as it affects our immediate (post September 2011) future, the handover of consultants, advisors and program initiatives to a government that is not quite ready to take over.

Ripples also abounded on Darulaman, the main drag that separates us from our guesthouses. The foot of snow that fell on the unpaved and undrained parts of the street turned it into a lake, rippling also wide and far and keeping cars from using their usual bypass of the traffic jams on the harder and drained segments of the road.

And in the middle of the muck, on a plastic bag, huddled a shape in a burqa with her hand outstretched for alms while cars splashed by her as if she was an object rather than a fellow human being. We didn’t stop and I pondered once more the ethical dilemma, does one encourage this practice by giving money, making it worse or does one ignore the plight of this woman, leaving it to someone else to sort out (where does she go at night?)? Sometime I feel so very inadequate here.

All through the night and the day snow fell, softening the sharp edges of Kabul. Any place is lovely with snow on it. The heavy wet snow also covered our internet antenna and so we were disconnected from the world. That’s the down side of snow.

In my Dari class I finished, after months of slow reading, a history of Afghanistan book. I learned about all the fighters/warriors and craftsmen/poets/scientists that crisscrossed this country, two streams of invasions that have both plagued and uplifted Afghanistan over the centuries. The sad outcome of all this is that there are more signs of the former and less of the latter.

After our Dari class it was still light and we invited our guard to help us make a snow man, an ‘adam-e-barfi’ as such is called here. The snow was perfect for this purpose, solid and heavy. Rabbani, our guard started packing the snow with his bare hands. Afghans appear to have very good circulation in their extremities, wearing flipflops all year round and rarely wearing gloves. Last year I had given each of our staff a pair of gloves fit for New England weather but I never saw them wear them. I suspect they were sold in the bazaar.

For dinner we had Alisa over. We have many intersecting interests, share part of the network of the former Institute of Cultural Affairs, and the experience of trying to change things in Afghanistan, the ups and downs of it all. We treated her to a family home experience (in contrast to her dorm experience in one of her employer’s guesthouses filled with introverted people) with a three course dinner to offset the overdose of Ramen noodles in a cup.

We sent her home with the movie “The Message” which will undoubtedly be shown on Afghan TV, in Dari, on the Prophet’s birthday next week.

This morning our Afghan snow man looked a bit like George Washington with the white snow that had fallen on his headdress overnight.

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