Sylvia's Journal

Little Assefa with all of her 21 years is managing the massage place while Lisa is in her native Philippines. This includes confirming appointments with clients, getting the room ready, doing the massage, serving tea or coffee and writing receipts for services rendered. Here is one skill set that has been successfully transferred to an Afghan – she may not be quite at Lisa’s level but 15 years from now she surely will if things don’t fall apart here and the foreigners she practices on don’t leave.

Today it was clear that winter was over. Unlike in Massachusetts there is no regressing once this threshold has passed. Spring starts very near the 21st of March, give or take a week. From one day to the other bucharis can we turned off, gloves, hats and winter coats put away.

Fazel showed up with the sapphire earrings and rings that I commissioned last week. I am very happy with the result. Sita and Tessa will have to wait a few months before they get them. He also brought samples of the finest embroidery imaginable, made by his 45 year old mom. She must have very keen eyesight. Compared with that my cross stitching is of the crudest kind.

After lunch we went to Babur Gardens, partially to be outside in the balmy weather but also to see a photo exhibit from 6 accomplished photographers. Four of them Afghan, one contemporary foreigner, and one long since dead, John Burke, an Irish photographer who was the first to capture Kabul on his cumbersome glass plates.
In the evening we joined a mostly World Wildlife crew for an early St. Pats party.

Before we knew it the men were standing outside around a fire pit while the women sat inside – we have taken on the habits of our host country. Axel was happy for once to be with guys who are not doctors and who are not working on USAID projects. He was surrounded by rugged outdoorsy types who, evidently, like fires and strong adult beverages, large slabs of meat and who come from commonwealth countries. They got so carried away that they started to burn the garden furniture. That’s just about when we left.

Back home we watched in disbelief the images of Japan’s earthquake and tsunami and then more Libya scenes to which we are becoming inured.

I am trying to use my teaching skills in-house but I keep walking into walls. There is no time for the things I want to teach about organizational dynamics, teambuilding, leadership, emotional intelligence, dealing with conflict – I can’t seem to get anything going, neither in the ministry nor in our own project. Despite all the expressed wishes about training and development, when I think I have something organized it gets cancelled, or when I propose a session it takes months to actually happen, if at all. The paradox is that this is why I came out here in the first place.

And so I get my jollies reading Three Cups of Tea with the SOLA girls. Connie brought back no less than 10 copies of the young reader version of this book. We tried it out today after most of the girls got stumped by the rather difficult original version. It was a big hit; the glossary at the end of the book is particularly appreciated.

Axel is stepping up his (volunteer) teaching after we have come to the conclusion that the paying jobs that are out there won’t quite give him the satisfaction the teaching is giving him. I think this is good for his soul, aside from being a good thing for the SOLA kids.

He went to the market to buy some flipcharts for his teaching. What he got represents the most creative translation of flipcharts in local (transliterated) language.

The best International Women’s Day gift for me was not the jewelry set I received from the company, even though I love it, especially since it was selected for me with the greatest of care – I wore my red stone/silver setting earrings and pendant to work this morning minus the ring as I am not much of a ring person.

The best gift was the news that M. had organized a gathering in her flat for women in her building. Most of these women are housewives and don’t get out much, let alone meet with a young female organizer who is bent on waking up her sleeping and passive sisters, old and young. The women enjoyed the gathering so much that they wanted to meet again. This is exactly how change begins, oh such joy. S. is also busy planting seeds, these for her own future and education. All this is activity is very hope giving.

Today was a long day that started with an enormous traffic jam that kept us sitting in a hot car for over an hour; once more I arrived half an hour late at a meeting where the entrance door is right next to where the projection screen is so you cannot slip in unnoticed. This was the third time I miscalculated how long it would take me to drive across town. Only on days that I leave extra early is there no traffic and I find myself twiddling my thumbs in an empty meeting room with everyone else coming in late.

The purpose of my trip to the ministry was to listen to and comment on Afghanistan’s national gender strategy. A thick document, beautifully researched and written by a foreigner, listed so many gender mainstreaming interventions that I got dizzy and wondered who would pay attention after the document was filed.

I learned to my great surprise that there is, since 2009 a law on the books (Law on Elimination of Violence Against Women) that has defined no less than 22 acts considered to constitute violence against women. Here they are: rape; forced prostitution; publicizing the identity of a victim in a damaging way; forcing a woman to commit self-immolation; causing injury or disability; beating; selling and buying women for the purpose of or under pretext of marriage; baad (retribution of a woman to settle a dispute); forced marriage; prohibiting the choice of a husband; marriage before the legal age; abuse, humiliation or intimidation; harassment or persecution; forced isolation; forced drug addiction; denial of inheritance rights; denying the right to education, work and access to health services; forced labor and marrying more than one wife without observing Article 86 of the Civil Code.

Going over this list with one of my female colleagues she described how she was publicly humiliated in a recent workshop by a prominent politician who got away with what we now know was an act of violence against women, leaving her deeply hurt. The hurt was exacerbated because none of her otherwise supportive male colleagues confronted the man on his unacceptable behavior. The worst part is that, probably, none of the men had any idea about what had just happened. Such things are normal. I am afraid this is the story of so many women here (and not just here of course).

On the home front, I started downloading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, now that I am really into Romans having followed Antony and Cleopatra’s adventures and horrific self-inflicted endings.

With our slow connections downloading is a big deal. It took about 24 hours to download part 1 which is now taking up much space on my iTouch. It will take as long if not longer to download volume 3 (volume 2 is not available). Together with some other books (Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Conrad’s Nostromo and Sinclair’s The Jungle) I have at least 48 more hours of downloading ahead of me which, if successful, will deliver to me about 105 hours of listening pleasure – this should keep me happily exercising on my every-other-elliptical-days till we depart Afghanistan, I calculated.

The real International Women’s Day Celebration was a day off for us at MSH but a workday for the rest of Afghanistan. and ended up a workday for me just as well. In the morning I caught up on outstanding reviews. Never in my life have I had to review so many documents. It is astonishing how many terms of reference, minutes, drafts of strategies, policies and concept notes are being produced here. Not reviewing such documents in time means you cannot complain later. Some of these will serve as foundational documents for activities later so there can be no slacking.

It was a lovely spring day, blue sky, warm sun, which had a softening effect on people’s moods and the pace of work. At the ministry many of the women I had wanted to wish a happy Internal Women’s Day (roz-e-jihan-zan Mubarak) were not in. I don’t know whether they had been given the day off or took leave.

On the streets in our neighborhood I saw clusters of women in their finest walking to or from one celebration or another. The combination of the spring weather and the well dressed women gave the day something festive.

In the evening Ted had organized a dinner at SOLA for the girls and those foreigners who are contributing one way or another to the success of the school and, more importantly, its students, especially the girls. It was a most inspiring evening, with heartfelt speeches, gifts of roses, a heart shape cake and a chance for some of the foreigners who live in bubbles (people from Eupol and the US Consulate) to interact with a most promising segment of young Afghanistan.

Ted told us that one of the SOLA alumna will be with Michele Obama at the White House – such an honor. We are very proud to be part of this school.

Today we had our International Women’s Day celebration. S and I read the poem, she in English and I in Dari – we were equally nervous about reading in each others’ tongue.

There were long speeches and poems by the leaders of our projects which I could barely follow. They were full of references to passages in the Koran and Afghan culture that I did not understand. I can follow meetings about health much better in the local language than these speeches about women.

There were also Pashto poems I did not understand but they sounded nice and poetic, a out mothers and tears and what not.

M. did an excellent job on her presentation about her stay in Egypt. I was very proud. I hope others were too. When I left the celebration she had received three congratulations. I am counting because this is not a culture in which praise is easily dispensed, so three is a victory already.

At the end of the celebration all the women received a gift. After the gifts were handed out we had to sign a paper that we had indeed received them. Those are the rules here – everything needs to be signed for because there has to be proof, just in case.

Here is the poem:

She sits there often
In the rain
On a small piece of cardboard
Hands outstretched
In the mud
In the middle of the street
Cars, bicycles and people rushing by

عموماً در زیر باران
در سر پارچه کوچک کارتن
دستهایش را دراز میکند
در سر گل
در وسط سرک
موترها و بایسکلها و مردم
تیر می شوند
او در کندهار مکتب را شروع می کند
بعداً وقتیکه دیپلوم در دیوال نصب شد
حالا او تا ناوقت شب درس می خواند
بعد از ختم شدن تمام کارهای دیگر

She will start a school in Kandahar
Later, when the diploma
is hanging on the wall
Now she studies
Late at night
After all the other work is done
She entered the room
Eyes red from crying
Why? What happened?
We asked as we embraced her
Back in our midst
I am not allowed to be here anymore

او داخل اطاق شد
چشمهایش از گریه سرخ است
چرا؟ چی گپ شده؟
ما از او پرسیدیم
وقتیکه او را در اغوش گرفتیم
دوباره او را با خود داریم
اجازه ندارم که دیگر اینجا باشم
او سرحدها را تا اندازاهای شکستانده
در اول مشکل بود اما حالا آسانتر است
او در جهان قدم می گذارد
او برای دیگران الهام بخش است
همراه فامیلش که در کنارش است

She pushed the boundaries
An inch at the time
Rigid at first, more supple now
Stepping out into the world
She will become a beacon
With her family by her side
Choices are made that aren’t hers
We don’t do that here they say
And she sits there
With a heavy heart
Will she be one more lost
to her sisters she could have helped?

چیزهای برای او انتخاب شده
که دلخواه او نیست
ما ان کارها را انجام نمیدهیم
و او با دل پرازغم انجا میشیند
و او یک باردیگر باخت
که خواهران خود را کمک کند
انها پیش من دویدن
دستهای خود را دراز کردن
با چشمهای روشن
آموختن لذتها به من
دختران و پسران کوچک در کنار هم ایستاده شد
ایا چیزی را که ما نمیتوانیم
انها می توانند؟

They run to me
Outstretched hands, eyes sparkling
Teaching me about joy
And standing side by side
Little boys and girls together
Will they do what we could not?

I came home late, 11 hours after arriving at work, tired and hungry. I found a plastic bag with melting ice cream, two half frozen steaks and a roll of thawing minced meat outside our door. Our refrigerator went to the repair shop – it would only cool correctly if you pushed the door up with your foot before closing it. This I forgot to do 9 out of 10 times. And so they took the refrigerator away after taking everything out.

The temperature in our unheated kitchen is about the same as inside the refrigerator, and so keeping the food out is not a problem at the moment. But it is no longer freezing outside and this did pose a problem for the contents of the freezer. It was my Dutch mentality of never wasting anything, plus being cold, hungry and tired and in great need of comfort that led me to eat the remaining pint or so of mango vanilla ice cream before I had even taken my coat off. There was no time to lose.

Only after that, and some not so nice remarks back and forth about who was to blame for the thawing goods, that we had our pre-dinner drinks with the last of the (also thawing) ice cubes. Every end of day is one day closer to our departure date on March 25 to Sikkim.

At work some of us put the final touches on various Women’s Day Celebrations. M. will do a powerpoint presentation about her stay in Egypt, there will be presents given by the men to the women (though the women bought the gifts), some speeches and I will read my poem in Dari while S. will read the English part. We rehearsed our parts in each other’s language. It will be far from perfect but good enough we hope.

Many people tinkered with the Dari that my teacher and I so carefully crafted yesterday. There were typos and the few men I let in on my secret made corrections that were then corrected again by the next one. I can see why we are having so much trouble with getting agreement on translations of some of our leadership materials.

In the afternoon several of us (health) implementing partners went to hear about the US civilian assistance to Afghanistan version 2.0 and the implications for our work. It is all about migration and transfer, those are the critical words that will have to figure prominently in the paperwork we will need to submit by next month to make the extension of several of our projects official.

The poem is translated now, in more or less poetic Dari. I could not get my teacher to take poetic liberties so the Dari may not sound quite as much like a poem as I would liked. Now I have to work on the pronunciation and practice a bit in the office tomorrow so people can understand what I have to say.

With three hours of Dari lessons and another few hours of catching up on work that had not been done and needed be done before the start of the new work week there was little time left to do all the thousands of things I always plan to do over the weekend: cross stitching, knitting while listening to the adventures of Antony, Cleopatra and the Roman empire (he died, she’s already ensconced in her tomb but still alive and the Roman Empire strong as ever) and cooking.

We had some old and some new friends over for dinner; a small intimate gathering around good food and good conversation – something that makes our constrained existence here so much more interesting.

Now the last guests have left, some by an unmarked car, one by a marked car and the others on foot. We all live by different rules. Which rule depends on one’s employer. Our security regime is somewhat in the middle of those three options, nearly the best of all worlds.

I woke up with a poem in my head – a poem for International Women’s Day – and rushed down to type it before the lines would disintegrate upon leaving my semi-sleep state. I had gone to bed wondering what I would say at our celebration – there is that expectation – and my brain had clearly been working on the task while I slept. Amazing!

I have decided to turn it into a Dari poem. Afghanistan is a land of poets. I started the translation myself and, with the help of press-apply Dari characters on my keyboard, typed in the words I knew, right to left. When my knowledge of Dari was exhausted I wrote to the language school for an extra one hour lesson tomorrow to turn my dictionary words into real poetry. It is a bit of a stretch but that seems appropriate for International Women’s Day.

The gray blast walls on the way to the massage place have been painted a soft ocher color on one side of the narrow passageway that leads past all sorts of military places. I am curious who decided that it was a good use of (military) money to spend it on painting several thousand square feet of concrete. But only one side of the road has been painted which makes me think another part of the military must not think ocher all that important.

There was lots of maneuvering of large trucks between these gray (one side) and ocher (other side) walls; several looked like water or sewage trucks – Kabul is built on ledge and the sewer system is problematic. One of the trucks had the words ‘blue water – black water – grey water’ painted on its sides. I wondered whether they had painted the blue and gray water text on either side of black water to avoid any association with the company that used to have that name; a company that is not very popular here.

In the afternoon F. came over to our house to propose some designs around the sapphire stones that Lisa gave me for Valentine’s Day – rings for the girls and earrings for me. F. is part of a new company that was founded by graduates of the Turquoise Foundation’s revitalization of old Afghan crafts. After a three year study under the watchful eye of master jewelers he completed his schooling and struck out on his own. That is the idea. His shop is in Murad Khani where the jewelry school is now located, next to the ceramics and woodworking schools.

He brought more than his sketchbook – a large bag full of boxes with rings, necklaces, bracelets, pendants, lapis lazuli, polished and rough cut emeralds, rubies, tourmaline, turquoise, old coins turned into jewelry, finely worked Turkmen boxes and more. I talked Axel into a birthday present and stepped out of the room so he could complete the transaction and keep up the appearance of a future surprise.

I invited some friends and colleagues to partake in this jewelry feast, as if it was a Tupperware party – a concept of course unknown to F. I think F had a good day and expanded his network and several of us got some new treasures.

Axel has discovered how to rent movies via the internet. The downloading takes awhile but it is worth it as the movies disappear without us having to get ever larger hard drives. We watched A Room With A View and commented how similar the social mores and gender norms of England of 1900 were to those we see around us in Afghanistan one hundred years later.

It snowed on and off, with some hail and rain in between. All the unpaved streets turned into mud flats and mud spatter covered our shoes/boots and pants/skirts. Although for me this is lousy weather it is good for the farmers and therefore for Afghanistan. And so we take all the mud in stride.

My day was also a bit muddy as I tried to sort of various activities that are very challenging to manage; each with many stakeholders dancing to different tunes. In the middle of this I violated my own norms about consultation and not bypassing people. It was good that I was promptly called on this by one of my colleagues and I promised to mend my ways, wondering how I managed to miss my own cues. There is a constant struggle of staying on the rails, sliding off and trying to get back on. It’s not for lack of trying when we don’t easily (and sometimes not at all) get the results we intend.

Both Axel and I taught our English classes again. Although many of the girls haven’t finished the 1000 splendid suns book, we started reading Three Cups of Tea. This time I was able to get each girl her own book rather than the illegal photocopies with their wavy and hard to reach pages.

Z. showed up at the beginning of the class in tears because her brother won’t let her study. I don’t understand much of all these family dynamics especially since her father is very supportive of her. But the father appears no longer in charge. That’s also when R. got into trouble (when her father died) and her brothers essentially sold her to a cousin for very much money. One of the girls took Z. under her care and promised that she will talk with the brother. She spoke with such confidence that I trust things will work out.

This morning I witnessed one of the ways that this country is shooting itself in the foot. A member of parliament visited the office of a director of a training institution and insisted that her daughter be granted admission, bypassing the usual registration procedures. The request was given some weight by implying that if the wish was not granted there would be negative consequences during next week’s voting procedures in the parliament when the president re-introduces the caretaker ministers. Ours is one of those.

There is much intimidation like this and much fear about consequences. even if they are sometimes nothing more than threats. Last year I learned of one of such threats which turned out to be an empty one once (another) director had called the person bluff. The threat was empty. But knowing whether to call someone bluff or not is risky business because you never know. There is much fear in the country and understandably so.

Warlords and their cronies still have much power and can protect incompetent or dishonest people from having to live by the rules that everyone else has to live by. It causes much grief and headache for many serious and committed people I know who have to manage these situations. It also uses up much of the little energy they have left over from simply living in extended families and under much social pressures to conform, to do the job they were hired to do.

I made two round trips into the center of town for meetings which meant over 3 hours in traffic, nearly half my day not counting the time spent in the meetings themselves.

I used my afternoon outbound car ride into town to study my Dari assignment which is reading a newspaper from December about the elections. I used my colleague as a dictionary. On the way back he used me as a dictionary, testing English expressions on me to see if he used them well: like the difference between blow-by-blow and nitty gritty, what puddles and slush have in common and what it means to ‘be versed’ in something.

We both love languages, learning someone else’s language and trying out whether something is OK to say in the other’s language, like ‘can I say “I got off late?”’ and me: “yes, you can but don’t leave out the word ‘off.’” His mastery of the English language is far superior to my mastery of Dari but the enthusiasm with which we learn a new language is the same. Maybe I was a linguist in my previous life or this is just preparation for my next one.

We ended today with the monthly get together at the Dutch embassy for our monthly allotment of grape and/or hop-based beverages, and lots of haring and cheese this time.

A speech by the ambassador assured us that the Dutch ministry of foreign affairs has activated evacuation planning in light of what is happening in the Arab world. Axel asked whether we were on the Dutch list and I said we were not because we are on the American list. “Why?” he asked, impressed with how the Dutch have already organized their four phase alert plan, with the last phase being the airlifting of Dutch citizens off Afghan soil. The Americans tell us to check out their website – no personal speeches like that. But then again, there are only very few Dutch people here and many, very many Americans.