Sylvia's Journal

I spent all day at the 7th annual congress of the Afghan midwives association. I had attended the same meeting last year and noticed how much the fledgling association had grown. It was the kind of growth spurt that is actually a little painful. Still, much had been accomplished in one year and everyone should be proud.

We watched the honoring of the association’s founder and pictures showing her with the first 15 members, not all that long ago. It was a wonderful example of the common exhortation ‘think big, start small.’ She started a movement. She pinked away a few tears as the gratitude of over 600 people in the room enveloped her. It felt all warm and fuzzy but I know that the road she traveled from there to here was all but warm and fuzzy. Sometimes people forget that leadership is actually not all that much fun and requires much sacrifice.

This year I was able to follow a significant part of the local language speeches and studied the Dari spelling of the names of all the 34 provinces, each with its own picture slide shown in one continuous loop. During one long powerpoint presentation, containing 45 slides with charts and print too small to read I studied my new Pashto book, just for the fun of it.

I practiced pronouncing the sounds that are different from Dari,with my neighbor. For one sound, qualified as ‘retroflexed’ the instruction says: ‘the tip of the tongue reaches slightly behind the gum ridge, but the whole tongue curls back, and then it quickly flaps down’ [sic]. I did a lot of curling and flapping and thinking I was making some progress until, in the car on our way home, my Afghan colleagues couldn’t seem to agree on what was the correct pronunciation. Learning Pashto is even more fun than I had expected!

The time management of the congress left a bit to be desired, with tea break at lunch time and lunch served when we should already have been half way through our session which was, quite appropriate, about managing self/managing time – an important facet of leadership and management.

Unfortunately our session coincided with Meghann’s session on pregnancy yoga which I would have given much to witness – all that fabric, all those scarved ladies doing yoga. Meghann herself described her outfit as looking like a cat. She had brought boxes of donated yoga mats with her from the US and had created a private space behind a bunch of screens. I don’t think all the yogis were pregnant. The title of the session guaranteed that no men would attend.

Our own session made me proud. I only did a very short introduction – realizing how much I miss doing this kind of work, a rare occurrence for me since I moved to Afghanistan – and then handed over to my team of colleagues who conducted the brief session skillfully in the local language. A large crowd had shown up, more than could comfortably sit around the large boardroom table. We hope they left with some thoughts lodged in their heads about managing themselves, and thus their (and other people’s) time.