Sylvia's Journal

I spent all day at the Intercontinental hotel, a place I visit only rarely. It is the place where Axel got very sick from eating too much lamb fat. The hotel is a holdover from the 60s and, because of that, rather charming. Today I noticed that it is being renovated. This may be good for travelers – I have never stayed there and don’t know the quality of rooms – but probably a shame as something else that pointed to Kabul’s better days, will be sacrificed to progress and modernity.

I attended a workshop about SWAp which is donor speak for Sector Wide Approach, an ideology about aid effectiveness and donor coordination that has been tried out in several countries and is being proposed for Afghanistan. It’s entire philosophy and its processes/structures rest on the assumption that everyone wants better donor coordination and that alignment is possible. At an abstract level this may be correct, but in practice the multiple constituencies that sit behind donors and Afghans don’t have as much in common as we like to believe.

Experiences elsewhere have been mixed, some good, some disappointing. We heard about successes and shortcomings of SWAps in Malawi and Bangladesh. The people that administer US government funds here in Kabul are a little cautious with this approach because of the ‘fund pooling’ and the difficulty of explaining to the American taxpayer what exactly their dollars have produced in terms of better health services for Afghans, especially women and children. Given the incessant stream of news about corruption here, this is a very reasonable concern.

I learned a new word from my Afghan colleague, ‘fungible,’ which he explained as donor funds earmarked for something being used for something else. He learned the word at the Tropical Institute in Amsterdam while studying for his MPH. I was impressed.

The Intercon sits on top of a hill overlooking two sides of Kabul. While we were waiting for our car to take us back to the office at the end of the day we could see the ‘khakbad’ (Kabul’s infamous dust storms) whirling on our right, picking dust up here and depositing it there. I thought of Axel’s poor lungs and hoped he was inside someplace.

Back home I could see that the hula hoop had been moved. I suspect there has been some more practice during the day although no one said so. Someone is going to show off at the next opportunity I suspect.