Sylvia's Journal

We visited SOLA yesterday after work. I used to teach there every Thursday after work. It was a highlight of my week.

I was totally unprepared for the changes that had taken places since I left nearly two and a half years ago. I remember, in 2011, Axel coming home from his classes there with toes frozen. SOLA was running on a shoe string and sometimes the choice was between food and heat. At that time, volunteer teachers did whatever they wanted and the curriculum was rather loosely organized.

Now, after some very successful fundraising, SOLA is up and running and even working on formal accreditation with the ministry of education. There is now a computer lab, rooms for volunteer faculty (we met a few who had just arrived), an office and one classroom; the latter was now stocked with college type moveable desks.

As soon as we entered four young girls rushed forward to welcome us to SOLA and each introduced herself in excellent English. We learned later that one of them had only just arrived in September, not speaking a word of English.

The new drill at SOLA is that girls have to speak English with each other; clearly, it has paid off. We met a number of the girls who were very eager to speak with us. We stood (I sat) in one of the small dorm rooms, with its two bunk beds and a buchari. Every few minutes another girl knocked on the door and entered and each time I asked them, what did they want to be in the future and where were they from.

Judy and I found ourselves surrounded by future journalists, doctors, lawyers, scientists (put an end to cancer!), economists, the first female Afghan rock climber, a diplomat, even a pilot, in addition to peace, environmental and women’s activists. One young girl was learning Chinese on her own from google translation. She was thrilled to have Judy there who offered to come and teach Chinese whenever she is in Kabul.

We left with reluctance, it was all so very exciting and hopeful and wonderful; a counterpoint to the bad taste we all carried around in our souls from last week’s attack on La Taverna.

We completed the last prep day before it is show time tomorrow. We had one more meeting with the General Director to make sure we are all singing from the same sheet. There are a number of grey areas, mostly related to Terms of Reference, Mission, and a series of proposals towards new and different organizational structures that are mandated for the far future but the process by which the transformation will happen is unclear. The process is confounded by the fact that the local staff doesn’t have experience with the proposed new structures and the foreigners are giving different advice, depending on which donor or agency they work for. No wonder people get confused (including me).

While we were waiting in the DG’s office my colleague from Taiwan explained about a concept in her culture that distinguishes capital letter Me from lower cap me. Capital letter Me is about my contribution, in this case here, to the health of Afghans. Sometimes, as a result of big Me’s commitment, small me suffers a bit – in my case, going on crutches to Afghanistan and living the somewhat complicated life of a one-legged person in this country.

But then I see a man, whose lower body is missing, on a little plank with wheels, trying to cross the street and I realize that I am in pretty good shape. I can’t imagine how this man is keeping himself alive. It’s painful to watch him. Yet he carries a smile on his face as he ducks between cars. From our high SUV we can hardly seem him as we get closer as he is so near the ground, but our driver sees him and steers around him.

A little further down the road a fat little boy ran behind a soccer ball that his friend had kicked across the street. Traffic goes slow so he wasn’t in danger but his ball was as it ended up exactly below our wheels and expired with a loud poof. The boy’s face fell and I told the driver that he just killed a soccer ball and that I would report him to driver Fazle who is a soccer coach of Afghanistan’s national team. I am glad it was only a ball although I felt sorry for the boys. There’s not much space for them to kick balls. Childhood in Afghanistan is no picnic.

I carry with me a card that entitles me to a 15% discount for my next meal at La Taverna. I am holding on to it for reasons I don’t understand, maybe it is gratefulness; gratefulness of having walked out with that card.

Our Afghan colleagues in the office were very solicitous. They know we could have been there. They realize that our vulnerabilities fall into the category of such sudden and unexpected attacks. Theirs are more insidious, the knowledge that this, their home, will remain turbulent and that they have to live with this constant stress of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, all the time, not just, like us, for a few weeks.

Part of my job here is providing a container to hold anxiety. Not the anxiety about violence but the anxiety about the work, about counterparts and clients, about straying outside comfort zones and doing things that are different. Especially when the stakes are high (visibility of the work, attendance of high level people, perceived consequences of failure), the anxiety goes up. I am trying to explain that anything experiential, which is pretty much all I do, by definition requires an experience. No amount of explaining can satisfy the need to completely understand how something will be done. Over the weekend I was holding several anxiety containers, a few Afghan and one African, in my hand, some got a little heavy. When they get too heavy I find myself under stress.

The pace of life is slow compared to the US. I used to have difficulty with that but now I don’t mind. I am more Zen about it. Everything will happen at its own time, not necessarily my clock. As a result some pieces for the strategic planning workshop I will be leading in a few days are not quite in place. They will have to fall in place tomorrow, but even that is beginning to look a little iffy. Hopefully I have buffered my timing enough to accommodate pieces looking for a place to fall in during the workshop itself.

I checked out the names on the participant lists and found several people invited (doesn’t mean they will come) who I know from my previous tenure here. A few of them I worked quite closely with and I wrote them to say I look forward to greeting them the day after tomorrow. But then several of the emails bounced.

Our colleague from DC arrived yesterday so we are now three (ladies) in the guesthouse, which is nice company, since we will be spending much more time there than I had planned, given our restricted movements.