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.

Today I have been thinking a lot about my two grandmothers. Both broke the mold of what a woman was supposed to do. Both acquired professional skills at a time that few women were allowed or encouraged to pursue a professional education and career.

My mother continued in that tradition, first finishing her studies, and then working as a medical doctor in various capacities after her marriage. She also brought six children into the world (2 girls) and sent them off on their way into schools, marriages with kids and careers with earning power.

I grew up standing on their shoulders. I did not have to fight for my rights, they were given and assumed. In my family women were expected to pursue professional education and a career first before embarking on marriage and then expected to continue to work after the children came. And in home affairs women usually took the lead.

Still, one thing was not entirely worked out yet as the women who followed this new path never gave up their other roles as wives and mothers. Theirs was a triple load and they carried it with their tired bodies and graying hairs. I grew up to consider this normal; only now I see how unfair it was. My generation and those of my daughters are rectifying this imbalance with some success. Loads are more shared now.

I wish I could summon my mother and grandmothers to visit with the young Afghan girls who are repeating their struggles. The fights and sacrifices of my grandmothers and my mother are those of so many of the young women who I have gotten to know here.

What advice would my mother and grandmother give to those girls who are forced into life decisions that are loaded with pain and unhappiness from the get go? Rebel? Bear and grin it? Cut loose? Reason? Find allies? How to end the gut-wrenching agony of hurting either themselves, their prospect for a happy and productive life, or hurting those who are close to them.

My heart is full of sadness to see families willingly sacrifice their young women for the sake of tradition yet fail to see the evidence that sacrificing the girls means holding back the nation.

With the temperature hovering around zero Celsius the rain sometimes turned into snow and sometimes the snow turned into rain. The result of all this was muck, especially in the places where the culverts and drainage arrangements have not quite been finished by the various road building contractors who have been remodeling our main drag, Darulaman, since I arrived here in September 2009.

It seems a fitting metaphor for the continuation of Obama’s Wars as reported by the latest issue of Rolling Stones. [King David’s War by Michael Hastings, February 2, 2011] Combined with Dexter Filkin’s recent story on the Great Kabul Bank Heist in the New Yorker it makes it hard to keep my usual optimism about the direction in which things are going here.

We watched, now a nightly ritual, how Egypt has fared after another day of rage/revolution. To our great surprise, we saw my Egyptian colleague in the crowd, speaking into a BBC microphone. He is the one who should have been guiding us around Egypt now during the study visit that was canceled last week. Our tickets were changed to February 12 but I don’t think Egypt is quite ready to receive us.

I realized that all weekend we have been a little flat, as if in a state of mild depression. The Friday morning massage and dinner with friends on Friday and Saturday provided a little respite. Last week’s suicide attack has led to a sort of self imposed house arrest. The effect on our psyches is palpable.

(audio)Listening to the dark and moody tales of famous Russian authors doesn’t help nor does the strain in some of my relationships at work. This afternoon when I got home from my language class Axel announced that a new friend who only recently arrived had just called so say that the Finest supermarket suicide attack (a place he shops every Friday) had freaked him out so much that he is leaving the country tomorrow morning, for good.

M. is being evacuated from Egypt and flying home tomorrow with her family. That too is disappointing as she is cutting short her stay there by a week and is thus not able to complete her assignment and research study – it was a chance in a lifetime and now it is over.

We feel torn; the quality of life, the air pollution, the constant possibility of disaster around the corner, the concerns from our daughters are tugging at us. Yet much is also tugging at us the other way: some very dear colleagues, counterparts, and other people I work with, the girls I teach and mentor, the progress they make in English (and that we are making in Dari), Axel’s renewed sense of energy as a teacher and the gratefulness of his students are all forces that conspire to keep us here.

I did a lot more thinking about the post September 2011 period, about where will we live and what we will we be doing. The one hour of massage turned out to be a good time for thinking. The existential question is both wonderfully liberating and anxiety provoking. I got some bright red nails while I was pondering my future and left the massage place with my bare feet in hotel slippers so as not to mess up the polish. I felt a little self-conscious but for Afghans bare feet in slippers in the middle of the winter is totally normal.

We stayed home, me knitting for my brother’s first grandchild who is scheduled to enter this world in a couple of weeks and Axel reviewing his students’ US school applications, perfecting the fine art of giving feedback.

I think I am finally getting Axel to consider what should have been his career all along, teaching. He is deeply into his teaching role and responsibilities and making a big difference for a few Afghan kids. I watch him blossoming into this new role, even though it is still a volunteer job. His experimenting with a new role is part of the future scenario making that we have started to engage in.

Despite being for an entire day cooped up in a windowless room refining our work plan for an eventual project extension and the dreariness of a drizzle that left lakes everywhere, today was a better day. The day before a weekend is always a little better than the other days of the week especially because it is my day at SOLA.

Only two girls showed up, both living in the dorm rooms upstairs. It is the only way I can have girls in the class because for those living far away it gets dark too early. This is how I lost a few, at least for the winter.

One of the girls is a breathless young lady whose tries to speak English faster than she can. We read a few paragraphs about an orphanage with too many unknown adjective and nouns in the text. The girl who is both my walking dictionary and assistant teacher did not show up (I had told them I would be in Egypt) so explaining the words was a little tricky, try to explain ‘cynical’ to people with a limited vocabulary; every word I use to explain it requires yet another explanation and this can spiral out of control pretty quickly.

I am starting to think about our next book now that we have come to the end of A Thousand Splendid Suns. I am sure that the book was miles above the reading level of some of the girls, but the familiarity with the context in which the story takes place helped us have a series of wonderful conversations.

Some of the girls want to read Greg Mortimer – they know who he is – but I don’t know the reading level. This is something that Axel and I miss, knowing what level is right for which girl (or boy). Next week we plan to have a Skype conversation with an English teacher from a private school in Connecticut to educate us about this.

We had long Skype conversations with Sita and Jim first and (sick) Tessa later and caught up on things happening in their lives. Sita let us peek at the enormous amounts of snow in Western Massachusetts. We are still trying to figure out how to get the girls here and attach it to a vacation with the entire family – work schedules, climate and Ramadan make this a bit of a challenge.

Tessa gave us the stern message that she doesn’t want us to extend our stay with another year – something that has lately become a real option, though not formally. Here I think people expect me to stay (why else the language learning effort?) but we are very conflicted about this choice. The Finest suicide bombing is still fresh in our minds and has changed the picture rather drastically.

Today was a bit of a dark day, lit up only by our monthly social gathering at the Dutch embassy. The dark matter comes at me from many sides, some minor some big. At home I can’t seem to get the letter Z right on my embroidery sampler and have started over several times (minor), at work I am struggling with strained relationships (big), in the city there are security chatter and rumors (could be big or nothing) and outside Afghanistan I watch the protest in Cairo turning ugly (huge).

The light matter comes, as usual, from people. The ones who went with me to the Dutch event (none are Dutch) and the people I met there, old friends and new acquaintances.

I spent some time with young M, a fluent Dutch speakers of Afghan descent and a student at one of Amsterdam’s universities. He had brought his wife (22) and baby boy (8 months). The wife and I could only smile at each other as our languages did not overlap. All we could do was repeat a few fragments of English and Dutch greeting words in the hi and bye category. I tried my limited Dari on her but as a Pashto speaker she understood little and kept begging her husband with her kohl-lined eyes to interpret my words. I am not quite ready to start learning Pashto though – she will master my mother tongue long before I will master hers (if ever).

These days, on my elliptical treadmill, I listen to Candide by Voltaire, also a dark and light theme, despite Pangloss’ mantra that all is for the best.

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.