Sylvia's Journal

It is weekend and I have some fun things to look forward to, including my SOLA class that starts exactly when my weekend begins on Thursday afternoon.

It was my last class before the summer vacation starts. Summer vacations as we know them in the US and Holland don’t exist here. There are two big holidays here: Naw Roz (the new year that begins on March 21st) and the time of Eid at the end of Ramadan. The long school break is at the beginning of our calendar year when it is mostly cold and snowy in Afghanistan.

The SOLA girls who are currently in 12th grade are busy preparing for their exams that start in about 10 days. After that they get a month off and then we will be deep into Ramadan. Two girls from Kunduz are in a neck-on-neck race to be number one in their class, a goal that is hugely important in this very competitive culture. Although they arrived as newcomers in their Kabul school they have already bypassed everyone else in their class. The rivalry is fierce as each is determined to be better than the other.

They don’t even have time to see the teenage movies that I brought back for them from Jo in Canada. I took the DVDs back to our house so I will have a chance to watch them myself first and then develop some teaching notes for a guided discussion. I have a feeling that just letting them watch the movies without helping them digest it afterwards may not work all that well and may harden certain ideas they have about America.

We finished the young readers version of Three Cups of Tea thanks to F reading in between classes. We had a deal that whoever read furthest, that’s where we would start reading aloud in the next class. It required of the fast reader to give a synopsis of what happened since our last class. F took this very serious. We didn’t miss one single detail of what had happened in the intervening chapters.

At the end of the book I asked if anyone had googled Mortenson so read up on the controversy. Only one had done that. When I asked her what her conclusion were about this man she said, ‘he is a good man.’ I must admit, even if not 100% truthful, it is a very compelling story and it was wonderful to read it with the girls.

Back home I watched Hillary speaking to the Foreign Relations Committee, giving statistics about Afghanistan and the results of the civilian surge. These statistics are extracted from countless databases that we civilians are asked to update frequently and from the quarterly, semi-annual and annual reports that all of us implementing partners are required to submit. She painted a rosy picture that left out all the messy details of daily life. The result was both easy to digest and utterly disconnected from the situation on the ground.

As I write this I watch more reporting by the military top brass and diplomats to present, in a positive light, all three stones (civilian, military and diplomatic efforts) over which we are stirring our Afghan brew.