Sylvia's Journal

Kabul by night is very different from Kabul by daytime. The streets are mostly empty except for the police trucks and the countless lumbering trucks going to or coming from points further east. They remind me of elephants.

Many of them are the old ‘bedfords’ – the Dari word for trucks – the ones I remember from 30 years ago. They are round and tall, beautifully decorated. The cabins are lit by red lights and full of dangling things. They are much nicer than the square and flatter Japanese trucks with their more minimalistic decorations. Some do have fantastic metal work but not necessarily colored in the vibrant primary colors of the old bedfords.

We drove back across town from where the road forks off to Jalalabad and Pakistan. We had visited new friends who we met at SOLA as fellow teachers. They work for the European Police Force, training the Afghan police. The police trainers are not surprised about what happened in Mazar a few weeks ago, or now in east Kabul where a factory was invaded by an angry mob because the factory made pulp out of recycled Qu’rans and, allegedly, made toiler paper out of the pulp.

Originally the Germans did the training, on their own – you can tell from the many Mercedez Benz SUVs lining the inner parking place. Our friends are German and treated us to a very German dinner, sausage with senf (mustard), warm rye bread straight out of the bread machine, cheese and herring. As if it was not enough they also ordered us three pizzas.

The compound, hardly visible from the road, under the neon lights of one gigantic wedding hall, looked like a college, an outside space lined by three-story galleried dorm rooms and inside rec rooms. It’s a weird kind of existence – the foreigners (now also Dutch and other Europeans) connected only to Afghanistan via the police trainees – and the nearly impossible task of transforming the police force from nothing into something. They teach leadership so we had that in common. But teaching lofty values and risky behavior (leadership is risky in this country and policing even more so) is not very easy. My job seemed pretty easy in comparison.

There were demonstrations in town, along our usual road to the ministry; something about land, promises and ownership in Kunar province. It was a peaceful protest. Still, we drove along the edges of town to avoid the gathering. Here you never know if something might turn ugly suddenly.

At the ministry we discussed the new nursing standards for hospital care – a 5 cm thick tome describing the exact procedures and standards for some eighty common nursing tasks. Except for the people who developed the standards none of the rest of us had read the hundreds of pages. But we did ask questions about implementation and the scoring of the assessment forms.

Making nursing care more legitimate (by setting standards and assessing people) is one first step of improving the hospital experience and trying to keep Afghans from going to Pakistan and India.

Later I heard that the wife of one of our guards died in a private hospital here in Kabul because her high blood pressure was treated with drugs that lowered her blood pressure so drastically that all systems shut down. It was one more of thousands of preventable deaths. That’s why people do seek care outside the country.

In the afternoon we met with our donor to discuss our plans for the extension we hope to get. In the middle of the meeting we heard loudspeakers giving tinny messages (in Dari as it turned out). Someone quipped ‘maybe we get to go to the bunkers!’

Everyone was told to stay inside (this is normal – there is not much of an outside) and we resumed our meeting. This scenario repeated itself a few times but we never got to go to the bunkers. Apparently something or someone suspicious had been spotted on the periphery. The barbed wire was pulled across the road. Everyone is a bit on edge after yesterday’s Defense Ministry suicide bomber. It all turned out to be a false alarm and we were able to return to Afghanistan without any problems at the end of our meeting.

For dinner we took Ankie out to the Sufi restaurant and gave her a last chance to gorge herself on great Afghan food. She is leaving tomorrow for Holland – now that the cheese and the Dutch chocolate Easter eggs are gone there is no point in staying any longer. We are sending her home with authentic Darjeeling tea and two cups and saucers.

Just when I walked over to our cafeteria for lunch I received an SMS from our security that a suicide bomber was on the loose in the ministry of defense. We talked about the message over lunch. No one of us in the ladies lunchroom knew anyone who worked at that ministry. If we had we would have been frantic with worry.

I tried to imagine what it would be like to work in a place full of uniformed men knowing that one of those uniforms was hiding a suicide vest. Minutes later we received another SMS that the vest and its wearer had exploded. Aside from the tragedy it is also a spit into the face of the president and the whole defense apparatus. People were making jokes, ‘how can we count on Afghan defense forces when they can’t even defend themselves?’ But it is no joke at all.

In the evening we watched as BBC program about young boys being recruited by the Taliban in Pakistan to blow themselves up. They are lured away from school with the message that school is useless and that going to heaven is much better.

Sometimes being here feels like Russian roulette although the violence is not random. But who exactly is targeted only becomes known after the fact.

Getting medicines to Afghans follows a logical process, at least for us, but other forces are undermining what we are trying to do. In order to comply with Afghan law all pharmaceuticals that enter the country (legally) have to submit to quality testing. So far we have received a waiver because the medicines we bring in are in compliance with very stringent international quality standards. But the waiver has expired and so we have to comply with Afghan law; this means leaving containers in customs and letting government officials take out samples and test these.

I’d like to think this is the right thing to so. The problem is that we also adhere to our own stringent ethical standards which mean we don’t pay bribes to get things out of customs. Others do, we know that. In fact, of all the containers that are stuck, and will soon be stuck, two were released within a day by a company we hire that does things their own way. Slush funds help. These containers are full of contraceptives which follow a different process than all the other medicines we bring in.

Two containers full of boxes with antibiotics and other life saving drugs are now stuck in customs until the contents are tested for quality. These two containers were first stuck in Karachi customs with thousands of others and were finally freed to find themselves stuck in Kabul. We have another container sitting forlornly at the wrong border crossing from Pakistan into Afghanistan. I suspect that by the time we get that one pried loose the contents will be gone or gone bad as a result of the high temperatures.

The truck drivers who transported these containers from India are also stuck because the containers are sitting on their trucks in a part of the airport from which they are banned. And so they cannot sleep in their cabs which is what they are expected to do; they have no money for hotels. We’d like to send them home (they call us every day) but we cannot offload the drugs from the containers. If we did, millions of dollars of pharmaceuticals with a high street value would be lying around loose in boxes in a space that is open 24 hours and to which we have no access. It is practically an invitation to underpaid airport staff to help themselves to some stuff that gets a good price in the bazaar.

Although we can rent containers here we cannot bring them into the quarantine area to transfer the contents because of restricted access. That would be the simple solution.

I don’t know if practices have changed (most people say not) but several years ago quality control officers insisted on taking samples from each batch – not just one but 40 or even 60 samples. Since each container has many batches in it the extracted number of (highly valued and valuable) vials and pills added up to hundreds if not thousands. People tell me that all these products ended up in the bazaar. Somewhere there is a handsome profit.

And so, in trying to follow official procedures and not participate in the national pastime of petty corruption we may end up encouraging another sort of more perverse kind of corruption. I can see how companies resort to payments under the table. In fact, the few hundred dollars that are being paid to extract containers from customs maybe a lot less than the loss of expensive medicine to either damage caused by improper storage or pilfering.

And in the meantime health facilities are reporting stock outs and ordinary Afghans cannot get the drugs that were supposed to be given to them for free, with the compliments of us, American taxpayers. Instead they have to go to the bazaar and buy them. Whether these are pilfered or not we don’t know since for security reasons there is no indication that these drugs were donated by us. It all seems so intractable. How to untangle this mess? Living wages, ethical banks? stewardship of mineral resources?

We had lunch at SOLA to say goodbye to baba Ted who is off to the US to do his scholarship collection miracles. While waiting for one of the guests we talked about the experience some of the girls had of being mentored by published authors in the US on their essays that they had submitted to Afghan Women’s Writers Project.

The experience of getting positive feedback and encouragement from such mentors or teachers in general is entirely alien to the students. Learning is associated with struggling to keep the teacher happy and lots of punishment, both psychological and corporal.

We told the two girls whose essays we had used in Sikkim about the reaction of the students there about their essays. One was about corporal punishment in schools. This was not mentioned in the essay that contrasted Afghan with American education. The Sikkimese children had talked much about such practices in India. We learned quickly that corporal punishment in Afghan schools is alive and well.

Several of the girls told us stories that made us cringe. Like a pencil threaded under and over the fingers and then slamming all fingers down. It’s a great way to break a kid’s fingers. Hitting a child on the head is apparently another common method by which teachers express discontent. F. told us about her classmate who, after being hit on the head with a heavy book had blood coming out of her nose, coloring her white chador red with blood. Z was eager to tell us her story; she got hit over the head by her teacher because she had misinterpreted her homework assignment. She had a headache for a week.

The most amazing thing is that they all laugh when they tell these stories. I asked whether parents didn’t get upset – in the US the school would have a lawsuit on its hands – but all told us that it was no use to send parents to school to complain because the teacher would simply say that the parents should take their child out of school if they weren’t happy with the methods of discipline.

These cruelties are inflicted by female teachers to female students. But they also have male teachers who cannot touch them and so the punishment is done by reducing grades or other forms of psychological harassment. Of course girls in this society are used to that. F told us that often, after we give her a ride to the corner of our street, saving her a long walk, the policeman standing there harasses her, calling her bad names because she gets out of a car with foreigners, worse, a car with a foreign man in it.

I am feeling a bit more limber after my weekly massage which was given to me ‘with compliments of Lisa’s salon.’ I tried to refuse but failed. Ankie had her massage after me. The young Afghan masseuse is running the show on her own while her boss is refueling in the Philippines. She has come a long way from the very insecure rookie masseuse of a year ago.

I spent most of the day cleaning out my mailbox of which the bottom is still not in sight. I did finally get to read some of the interesting things people sent me and for which I rarely seem to have time. I read the entire email of a listserve that cuts news about Afghanistan out of newspapers from around the world.

And so I learned about the response from the mullahs in Kandahar to the fiery protest that burnt many more Holy Qurans as shops went up in flames. “This is not the way to protest,” they lectured a tent full of turbaned and bearded men. It was an encouraging show of rational thinking in this very emotional affair.

But for every act of rationality there seems to be at least one of irrationality. As part of a government effort to stop the spiraling wedding hall frenzy (no more than 300 guests and no more than $5 a head) that is reducing middle class families to poverty – reactionary and conservative elements have managed to add something more sinister to the bill: the banning of revealing clothes of bride and guests – a direct stab at women who get few other chances to dress up and have fun. Most people like the first part of the bill but not the latter. Tailors who make revealing dresses would have to shut their doors or switch to sewing bedspreads.

Razia jan had invited us for another of her famous social events – it is the place where we meet interesting people and eat the best food in Kabul. Her guests were involved in work that focused on construction, mines, governance, democracy, laws, military/civilian engagement, education, and health – sort of covering the waterfront of Afghanistan’s rebuilding, with all of us reporting some progress and thousands of challenges.

The chief Rotarian of Kabul also attended the gathering and successfully recruited a few new candidates for membership. So far I am a bystander but I do feel this nudge from my father, an ardent Rotarian during his lifetime. I think he would have found it very cool to have his daughter a member of the Kabul Rotary Club.

Getting up was a little hard because we went to a wedding last night. Such events always end late, this one around 1 AM. We left long before that; still I went to bed way past my bedtime. My sleepy start to the day magnified some of the crises that are brewing all around us, all man-made (some by ourselves, some by others), all messy and difficult to deal with.

I am still trying to empty my mail box, paying dearly for not having maintained it while we were in India. But the work got delayed because of an entire morning of meetings and an afternoon of trying to understand the roots and scopes of the various crises.

We had our usual Thursday morning program managers meeting where all the team leaders get together and tell what’s cooking and what is on their plates. It’s a good forum for reminding us that all our activities are supposed to add up. I am happiest when I see people get out of their stovepipes and, in addition to informing, also add, comment, inquire, complement (and compliment) each other.

The second meeting was to explore the possibilities of using ‘zaqat’ and/or ‘sadaqa’ – two forms of Islamic charity – to help hospitals create a fund to provide for the poor and alleviate pain and suffering. We quickly got into theological debates about definitions and what the conditions were for one or the other. My colleagues reverted to their local language to express themselves about a topic that doesn’t lend itself well to translation into English. It was fascinating and I learned a lot, although I also realized that my understanding of Dari is practically nihil when it comes to conversations with a religious theme.

After work I went to my SOLA class. It was a joyous reunion with the girls. We had not seen each other for several weeks. I talked about our trip and they asked questions about Sikkim. They asked about Sikkim’s religion and whether people indeed worshipped cows, a religious practice none of them could fathom. The mention of Ganesha the elephant god and Hanuman the monkey god, two of many thousands of Hindu gods, elicited many giggles. It gave me a chance to put in a plug for religious tolerance.

We continued reading the young reader version of Three Cups of Tea. After three lessons we have made it to page 16. It is slow going, taking turns reading one paragraph at a time, asking questions about understanding, checking on words and, sometimes sidetracking into broader general knowledge topics. The word malnutrition led to one of such conversations. No one knew what it meant. From there we wandered into being skinny not being the same as malnourished and yes, obese people were actually malnourished. There were some giggly comments about some of the girls being a little pudgy and other skinny, requiring me to explain that malnutrition was something more serious.

Some of the girls have made tremendous progress in their reading skills while others had slid back over the four weeks of no lessons. We heard this from the teachers in Sikkim who hate the vacation because of this backsliding. I gave them a little sermon about not giving up, moving centimeter by centimeter to their very distant visions and that practice makes perfect. Everyone nodded. We are reading not to get to the end of the book and tick it off our to do/read list but to marvel about the wonders of this world, the good and the bad, that we need to learn about, if not by direct experience, then by means of a good book. This approach to reading has produced some wonderful conversations – often a high point of my week.

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.

There was very little time to celebrate our 31st wedding anniversary. My workday started before 7 AM and ended 12 hours later; a bit much for a first day at work and not enough to properly celebrate thirty-one years of marriage.

In the morning I attended the start of the fourth and leadership workshop with two of our own and two ministry teams. The leadership program has been stretched out over several months and sometimes I wondered whether we would be able to bring it to a good closure but now I believe we can. Scheduling a series of workshops with the same people is no easy task here.

I was asked to open the workshop. I wished I could have done it in Dari but I will need another year, at least one year.

I visited many of my colleagues to let them know I was back and Axel OK and inquired about what had happened during my absence. As someone quipped, “when you are here in the office people keep you so busy that you think you are indispensable but then when you go away for awhile you find out everything moves along just perfectly without you.” This is true.

In the afternoon I thought I had only one meeting, not having emptied my overflowing mailbox yet, only to find out that two more meetings were stacked right behind the one from 2 till 4 PM. Our office summer hours are now activated. “Good,” said Axel, “you start at 7 AM and are home before 4 PM!” Not so today, and, as I found out, not tomorrow either, what with phone calls with the home office that start after the workday here has ended here.

We are back in Kabul after a very bumpy ride over India’s northern plains where pre-monsoon disturbances pushed our plane like a little toy across the skies.

As luck would have it, my seat neighbor was an Afghan doctor who used to be a very senior government official two (health) administrations ago. He told me he has just published a book about organizational behavior (in the local language) – I couldn’t quite believe my ears. He is heavily into organizational behavior and emotional intelligence. This may not sound so surprising in the US but here such champions are rare.

I told my neighbor that I have been toying with the idea of doing a series of sessions about emotional intelligence as I have witnessed several occasions recently where this intelligence was clearly missing. He offered to do the sessions with me. This perked me right up.

We found our visiting consultant Ankie at our house. We should have preceded her arrival but our hospital adventure reversed our arrival times. It is her fifth time here and her fourth with us – she classifies as our most regular visitor. She knows what we like and what we miss and brought licorice and cheese; we gave her a packet of Darjeeling tea in return.

After warm Delhi the cold weather in Kabul surprised us. I reinserted the mattress heating pads which I had already put away when we were fooled into thinking that spring was actually summer. It is not, I had forgotten about that.

We are now at a summer schedule in our office which means the car comes to pick me up at 6:45 AM (it also means our workday ends at 3:30).