Sylvia's Journal

We celebrated Ankie’s birthday in style, first with her chair decorated with plastic flowers, our all purpose celebration flowers that we can use over and over again, a congregation of various tchotchkes around her plate (a camel, a few bronzes). Her present from us consisted of two more cups and saucers of the 17 piece (lids and covers count as pieces) tea/coffee service that she liked so much last time and of which she already took 2 cups and saucers home. Now we have the teapot, the creamer and two more cups and saucers left here (7 pieces). Those she will have to come and get in the US.

I had revealed the secret of her birthday to her Afghan team mates who quickly organized a lovely lunch including a giant decorated cake which caught her somewhat by surprise. I encouraged them to sing but this all male team has some practicing to do. Still we were touched by their enthusiasm and sense of celebration. Birthdays aren’t that important here once you are adult.

On a more serious note, today was our project’s quarterly financial review meeting where where our corporate finance people take a close look at over or underspending and try to minimize risk in the future. For the first time I wasn’t totally intimidated by the review (my fourth since I arrived here). Two key players who were there at the last reviews were not there to do it for us, the three of us remaining had to lead the show. We reviewed and rehearsed in the morning and then we had the real review with our CFO in the late afternoon. I think we passed.

It was a good example of being thrown in the deep and then finding you can stand. It boosted my confidence enormously. I think I can learn this stuff. This will surprise my colleagues back in the home office who associate me with the soft and fuzzy stuff (actually not all that soft) of leadership and organizational behavior, not with financial management.

In between the financial review activities I attended the sometimes weekly sometimes biweekly consultative meeting at the ministry where then this then that taskforce or group presents its policy and/or strategy document that many people worked on for months. Today it was the turn of the HIV/AIDS team with an ambitious agenda for keeping the epidemic at bay before it becomes one. Listening to the strategies and proposed interventions I pondered how difficult it is to set priorities among all the competing agendas. Is dealing with this disease, copying strategies and interventions from Africa, so urgent here? Little research has been done but most of it shows the disease as a trifle compared to the figures in Africa. Questions were raised about this.

This is the problem of arch experts (local or international), or the fly in and fly out consultants who go for comprehensiveness, write such documents. I saw the same with other strategies – they are like A+ academic strategy papers – but do they make sense here? Much effort goes into these documents but then, everyone agrees, they get shelved because there actually aren’t any priorities as nothing is left out, or there aren’t any funds to implement or they aren’t even budgeted. This is the side effect of the very consultative processes – of which I am usually a proponent – but when there is no final single arbiter every member of each group will argue for their piece to be included.