Sylvia's Journal

It is customary to serve the unsweetened green tea with plates full of candy (called chocolates here though they are rarely chocolates) or sugar-coated almonds. So you don’t drink tea with sugar but through sugar.

Ever since one of my colleagues reported on a documentary about the deplorable hygienic conditions in which these sugary sweets are made in Afghanistan (even the ones that say made in Iran, Turkey or the ones with Cyrillic wrappers) I have restrained myself when these candies are put anywhere near me.

This morning I forgot all about it and a sugar craving got the better of me. By the end of a four hour meeting this same colleague counted no less than eight empty wrappers where I had sat.

After four hours of workplanning with ourselves, we had another meeting at the ministry to deal with the planning on the other side, what we call the ‘on-budget’ planning as opposed to our own (‘off-budget’) planning. It is all part of the transition from American to Afghans in charge – or rather I should say American organizations in charge to Afghan institutions in charge – since nearly all the staff of our American organization is Afghan.

We are moving in unchartered waters and the call for clarity is unlikely to be heeded – no one has been here before and clarity is elusive. But we try nevertheless to get from our funders and clients some degree of clarity of what they want. The next phase is to see what is actually possible – wants and abilities are not necessarily in alignment.

With three colleagues we completed the day coaching the executive team of the Afghan midwives, one of seven that had participated in a leadership development program we started in December and that has been hard to continue. It was all done in rapid Dari which was a little over my head. But once again there were candies, butter toffee, coffee toffee and chocolate toffee. And once again I couldn’t help myself.

We had set up a cascading coaching scheme that had me coaching one of my staff while he was coaching the two female facilitators who were coaching the executive team who were to coach their absent team members. My coachee described me as a ‘coach tond’ which literally translates as ‘spicy coach’ and more loosely as ‘strict/harsh (not soft)’ coach. I like the idea of being a spicy coach.

While we were meeting the daily afternoon dust storm had picked up and the dusty breeze slammed doors left and right. There is something very annoying about this when you watch the open door and know it is about to slam shut and then the wind from the other side pushes it open again, to slam shut again and again. The experience surfaced faint childhood memories of our home (this was long before the arrival of airconditioning) where summer heat was combatted by opening windows and letting the breeze in and out of the house, slamming doors shut and then blowing them open again. The memory was sweeter than the experience of today.