Sylvia's Journal

I sometimes wonder about our guards who have these long hours sitting in their small, hot and primitive guardhouse in back of our house. They have none of the comforts we have come to expect: airco, electric heat, refrigerator, stove with oven, cupboards, two bathrooms, a bath, carpets (now tiles), windows that let breezes flow through the house. They do have a bed off the ground now after their tushaks got repeatedly wet from water in the walls and in the concrete slab that is the floor of their tiny living room. They also have a small TV which is on most of the night when programs are available.

At the end of Friday night’s party where Meghann showcased her very expert use of hoola-hoops (at one point two at the same time, of different sizes) under the watchful and amazed eyes of our guards. They have been intrigued by this toy. This afternoon I noticed they were trying it on for size. Our housekeeper Ali has mastered the skill but the two night guards can’t keep the hoola hoop off the ground for more than a few seconds at a time. It is a source of great hilarity between them.

We convinced the drivers who dropped Axel off to give the thing a spin but none were able to. The men wouldn’t let Axel off the hook either and he is just as bad. They all stood around taking turns doing something that here is not very manly, and had a good laugh in the process. I think we will find improvements over time as they now have something fun to do other than guard us when we are not there. And besides, Afghans (men and women) appear to be highly competitive.

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Today I was walking across our office compound and heard women laughing. It is then that I realized that, at least at work, I rarely hear women’s laughter – there are not enough of us and there isn’t all that much to be gay about. Back at MSH headquarters in Boston women’s laughter was (and hopefully still is) so much part of the work environment – it is sad that here it is so absent.

I spent all day in the office doing management and administrative chores that have, once again, nothing to do with why I came out here. It is tedious and not very satisfying as it contributes little if anything to improving the health of women and children. It does satisfy the people who want compliance with this and that contractual or organizational requirement: workplans, performance reviews, more workplans, more performance reviews.

We invite colleagues, peers and clients of the person being evaluated to send us their comments. Only very few people sent these in before the requested date and only when the performance review is that of a star it seems. The non-stars get very few and some prefer not even to bother. Someone explained why “we don’t want anything on paper, in an email, formal, that may come back to haunt us.” Of course, I thought, it is safer to either provide a Yes or Very often to all questions or not send anything in at all; so much for our very rudimentary and incomplete 360 reviews. May be I am taking these things much too serious – it must be my tendency to think about development rather than judgment.

Axel’s doctor was not happy with his regression as measured by a little blow tube that indicates lung capacity. It has gone down rather than up. He came home with more pills and we are giving it a few more days before deciding whether he should leave Afghanistan ahead of me. It is possible that the dust stirred up by the tiling and painting may actually have made things worse. So we keep hoping for the best.

In the meantime he keeps coaching SOLA kids as they struggle to fill in complex and lengthy application forms for American schools. W. stayed for 5 hours with us, yesterday afternoon, through dinner and into the evening, diligently working on his application to a school in the US that had explicitly asked for Afghan boys, not girls. The essay had to be cut down from 800 to 500 words and then there are all these difficult questions that no one has ever asked them, such as ‘why do you choose this school over all the others.’ Afghan kids don’t usually make choices about schools. If they were honest they’d say, ‘because Mr. Ted told me to apply at your school.’

Or, ‘how can you contribute to the school community?’ Afghan kids have no idea about this thing called ‘school community.’ Or even better, ‘tell us what you do in your summer vacation?’ Here summer vacations are in winter (from December till March). There are no tennis camps. Afghan kids have to earn money or get sent to ‘centers,’ places to accelerate learning. That is how Z skipped a few grades.

And then there was the question some creative application form designer had cooked up: ‘what piece of music would serve as the soundtrack to a movie about your life?’ It requires tremendous mental gymnastics for Afghan teenagers to understand this idea; even the concept of a soundtrack needed explanation. I was surprised that the kids didn’t select the Titanic song which remains wildly popular (there even used to be a special haircut here called ‘The Titanic’). But Z picked an Afghan singer and included the Dari text in her answer.

W. had to describe his role in his family dynamics (huh?), an optional question but he answered it anyways: ‘my parents want me to get a quality education so I can later help the family.’ Family therapists would call him a ‘family savior’ or something like that – a lot of responsibility resting on his skinny teenage shoulders.

We have decided that W. has what it takes to succeed and will go far. We happily opened our house to him and fed him a meal appropriate for a growing teenage boy. We did kick him out when it was my bedtime. He had to walk the 30 minutes or so it takes him to get back to his house, fending with roaming dogs along the way. Since we have no transport of our own we couldn’t give him a ride. We were relieved when we received his sms that he had arrived home safely in spite of the dogs.

Axel and I did our yoga practice together this morning. We are eyeing one of the 30 yoga mats that Meghann brought for her session at the AMA congress. They are now stored, it seems, in the basement of the AMA building. I wonder what will become of them.

It is fly season – theya re everywhere. But here, unlike back in the US, we are more worried where these flies have been before they land on our food or bodies. I swatted several flies during my yoga practice which made the poses more challenging.

We slept on the tushaks again because the VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) from the painting job are still in our bedroom and Axel is particular susceptible with his compromised immune system. On Sunday he will see Dr. Tim again and then we’ll decide whether he should go ahead of me to the US. Many will hate to see him go early: the students at SOLA because they badly need his tutoring and guidance – several kids are in the middle of application processes – a very daunting task for them; and me because I am dealing with a complex HR dilemma and can use some psychological support.

Because of Axel’s low energy and coughing we cancelled our visit to the wool ‘factory’ – a very dusty place – to see the carpet that has been created out of the heaps of dirty wool, then spun, then dyed and then knotted. The manager told us the carpet is done and we are interested in it, mostly because we have seen it being created from scratch.

The rest of the day we each tended to our tasks that are both related to capacity building: Axel sat down with Wali to complete his school application – an intensely complex task for young Afghans – and I worked on the annual performance reviews of my four staff members, something I take rather seriously and spent much time on – two done, two to go.

I had very happy dreams last night. They include a flight over the islands in the north of Holland on a beautiful clear sky day. Just before I woke up I was busy baking a yummy New York cheesecake. I think the happy dreams came from the paint fumes that were still strong this morning. I could get addicted to this.

The rest of the day continued to be happy. First there was the chili omelet, now one of Axel’s Friday morning specialties; then a haircut, a massage with four hands, two from Lisa who is back from the Philippines and did the reflexology part of the treatment. Then breakfast quesadilla lunch with Axel, Katie and Pia in the new Wakhan Café.

There was more happiness in the late afternoon when Fazel and his fiancée came to show their wares in a sort of Tupperware part but then for traditional Afghan arts and crafts. We touched everything they had put on display: ceramics, jewelry, wood (a walnut cookie jar in the shape of a Mughal palace) and much calligraphy. We had invited colleagues and friends – everyone went home with something beautiful.

After the artists had left we gorged ourselves on tacos, a variety of desserts and then hoola-hooped the calories off again with Meghann’s two enormous hoops.
It sure was a happy day.

We are all sad about the misfortune of our grandcat Cortez who got hit by a car and is in the emergency room up in Western Massachusetts. Sita compared his post accident experience to ours to which Axel replied, “love and care of those who love him will heal him – it worked with us.”

Tonight is Axel’s turn to be exhausted but he is not sure he should turn in in our sparkly new bedroom – it still smells of paint. We put the air purifier on at full power and waiting for the little blue window to say ‘very good air quality.’ It did that two nights ago in the Solter Suite but we know now it was lying.

In our staff meeting this morning we spent a lot of time talking about people’s concerns about moving into the ministry. “We work in this organization (meaning MSH) for a reason,” several people said. In the ministry one can be lucky and have a good boss with integrity and commitment or you can get the opposite. But the good boss can be replaced by a bad one quite suddenly and you won’t have any recourse and nothing to protect you. People are cynical, sometimes very cynical, about the motives of civil servants, even those who are well paid, and rightly concerned about the arbitrary power of those above them.

The challenge of working with civil servants who are poorly paid (most of them) and ‘building their capacity’ is that they don’t necessarily want their capacity built. Workshops and training courses are a nice way to supplement one’s meager income. Boycotts, while holding out for higher per diems and other goodies that come with training, has become a favorite pastime. For us, who are well paid, committed, motivated, well supported and protected from arbitrariness by organizational procedures, checks and balances, this sort of attitude drives us nuts while we also realize it is totally understandable. That’s why we have ‘minimum wage’ in our part of the world.

The idea that work should be self-actualizing fulfilling and intrinsically rewarding is not a universal concept and probably doesn’t apply to the underpaid civil servants. Work is toil – even Calvin said so.

A dear old friend and ex colleague has returned to Kabul as the chief of a project. When we first met 20 years ago she was an administrative assistant. I am thrilled to see her in this new position and actually got to see her at work right my office, negotiating with someone on her project about something he wanted and she couldn’t give. She was brilliant, he unhappy.

At SOLA only three girls showed up in my class – all three are Axel’s projects. I know the kind of lessons he teaches them and so I can see how they apply what they learn from him as we continue our very slow progress in Three Cups of Tea for young adults. One of the girls has trouble with long and short vowels. When she pronounced the word sheet with a short ‘i’ we did some practicing saying ‘sheet,’ ‘shit,’ and ‘shed.’ I explained the differences.

One of the girls had heard about the Mortenson controversy which led to a conversation about being ‘a critical consumer of information.’ But before I could engage with them about this concept they needed to understand the words ‘critical’ and ‘consumer.’ Armed with the dictionaries Axel bought for them I set them off on a race to get to these words. It is for them as difficult as it is for me to find a Dari word; you have to know your alphabet – which letter comes after which one.

Finally when they got all the words they put them together (Eater of judgmental information. Huh?). We contrasted the way Afghan kids learn to uncritically consume information from adults in authority position and the cost of that. Do they believe their teacher, the press? They looked a bit shocked when I told them that their future classmates in the US might actually argue with their professor or teacher about statements, opinions, view points.

We had fun with the words ‘barked’ and ‘snapped’ used in the context of impolite conversation. After my explanation of these words I had them try the bark and snap dialogue between Greg and his first donor on each other. It led to shrieks of laughter but little success. As always the class lifted my spirits – a good start of the weekend.

We love each other very much but sleeping in a twin bed, even if a wide twin bed, is something we concluded we are too old for. We accused each other this morning of hogging the sheets and not leaving enough room for the other. Suffice to say we didn’t have a good night of sleep. Tonight I am going to sleep Afghan style by plopping down on one of our tushaks in the living room.

We also think that our temporary sleeping quarters had more house dust than our bedroom – our lungs were in bad shape this morning. The coughing and throat clearing did little to improve our breathing; another reason to move downstairs.

Our old bedroom has been tiled and repainted but the fumes are still too strong to move in. The whole thing cost a couple of hundred dollars, most of which went to tiles and grout. The painting was only 40 dollars. Here materials are expensive and labor is cheap.

I spent too many hours at work today. The first meeting started at 7:30AM and the last ended at 7:30 PM. I said goodbye to one colleague who is taking our Manchester local elections ballot home – just in time for the May 17 elections – we do stay connected to our home town even though we needed some external help in choosing candidates.

And now my eyelids are dropping just as Axel is putting a real stir fry on the table that was the best food we have had in a long time.

We hear from far that in the West a grim picture is presented in the media of the place we live in. One of my colleagues is on home leave in Washington and called me to ask whether it was safe to return – his wife is frantic about him returning. Friends of us are writing what the hell we are doing in this dangerous place. From all this I can only conclude that the Taliban’s PR campaign of creating fear and trembling in the West has worked perfectly.

On the ground here things are fine. We vacuum the dust from the carpets, wash socks, buy milk and yogurt, knit and embroider, text and skype, read, fill in time sheets and sit in traffic jams. We do all this peacefully here in Kabul.

For our Afghan colleagues who travel outside Kabul (we westerners are not allowed) the instructions are simple: wear local clothing (no suits and ties), do not travel after 2:00 PM, use transport that matches the most common kind of vehicles you see on the roads as you move from one place to another (no large SUVs with special plates), keep a very low profile, do not use a cell phone with international names or numbers, and do not carry a laptop. That is the way of blending in. Most of my colleagues are used to this anyways.

I made two visits into town, one to the ministry and a couple of hours later another to the US compound, one the neighbor of the other. There was a sign on the entrance to the security area of the US compound that said that all outdoor activities were suspended. For the denizens of the US compound ‘outdoors’ just means not being indoors in the work and living containers but still being inside the wired fences. Outdoor doesn’t even mean fresh air because of the pollution from dust winds that come from incessant construction and road work, overbuilding and the disappearance of green fields that hold the soil. The air pollution also comes from the ever running generators and vehicles that belch out toxic fumes. Here ‘outdoors’ is stripped of all the usual joys of outdoors: trees, clean air, water, rocks or sand, grass.

I picked Axel up at SOLA and we returned home where we found the tiles already in place in our new (hopefully) allergenic-free bedroom. On the walls, painted yellow one and a half years ago we could see the outlines, in black soot, of furniture and pictures – it is the soot that pervades everything, even when there was only a modern airco in our room; the diesel stoves were in other rooms, not this one. The blackened outlines were everywhere and frightening. No wonder our lungs are protesting.

Tonight we are sleeping in the consultants’ room which we have named the Solter Suite after one of my favorite colleagues who left nearly a year ago. We have to make do sleeping in a twin bed with, what we now realize, not a very good mattress. The room is full of allergenic stuff that we cannot take out so we have the new air purifier working at full tilt and hope for the best. It will be for a few days, if God wills it, as they say here.

And so, I wondered, what would have happened if OBL would have been knocked out on the day of the royal wedding, would he have stolen the moment, soiled the day? The timing was thus perfect – the couple has gone off to their love nest and we can celebrate something else.

I keep wondering about this ‘burial at sea’ thing. For me a burial at sea is men standing on deck, hymns being played, salutes and the body, wrapped in the national flag tilted into the sea. Did they just drop him out of a helicopter? Do we have proof he is really gone or is he going to be like Elvis Presley, popping up everywhere?

The news reached us in the early morning hours and everyone rejoiced while probably wondering, ‘what does this mean for us, here in Afghanistan?’ I did. The UN is closed (already was because of the Taliban’s heavy PR about their spring offensive) and the Germans declared Kabul ‘white city,’ which I think means ‘hunker down.’

We went about our business as usual which included countless project management tasks. It is annual performance review season, it is post project planning time, there are deadlines for registering staff for English classes, filling vacancies, finalizing appointments, contract negotiations etc. And then there are the usual roadblocks to getting things done which require creative thinking about such matters as task versus relationship.

Several hours after the official end of the day a few of us were still looking at pages and pages of Excel worksheets with tiny budget numbers until we were cross-eyed. As if that wasn’t enough I then had to figure out how to get 140 MB of video film to Boston by tomorrow with an on and off internet connection. All in all it made for a very long day that isn’t over quite yet even though it is getting close to bedtime.

On the personal side there is an enormous new challenge thrown at us by Axel’s longstanding allergy to house dust and dust mites. On Saturday the South African doctor told him he should prepare for his immediate departure from Afghanistan before he gets a massive asthma attack.

I suggested a second opinion which came from Dr. Tim. He told Axel that he may be able to stay until we leave for the US in 3 weeks if we rid our bedroom of dust and mites. This is a tall order anywhere in the world, but in particular here. We can’s just simply walk over the Bed & Bath and get the mattress and pillow covers made specially for this purpose. Axel did go to the Safi Landmark hotel where they sell things with HEPA filters, an air purifier and a special vacuum cleaner that doesn’t simply moves dust around like the one we have now.

We are very motivated for Axel to stay here until we leave in the fall and have started tackling this enormous challenge with vim and vigor. We had the nice Afghan carpets taken out, ordered tiles to replace the wall to wall carpet and got a bunch of workmen to start tiling the room tomorrow. This requires removing everything out of the bedroom tonight.

Dr. Tim also told us to wrap our mattress in plastic and remove anything else in which dust mites can thrive. All this doesn’t do much for comfort and aesthetics but it is better than accepting the inevitability of a massive asthma attack and Axel’s departure. Of course there is no guarantee of success – but we decided it is worth a try.

And here, for cricket lovers, a chuckle, with apologies to the artist whose name was blacked out in the local newspaper:

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.