Sylvia's Journal

Just like yesterday day we continued to spend more time today than budgeted for each and every session. Yet no one but me seems to care, at least not now. However, I know that at the end when filling in their evaluation people will say (a) we needed more time (true, we always do) and (b) the facilitators didn’t stick to the agenda.

In small groups the participants simulated sessions they are to conduct in the future with the authorities in the provinces and those who have to oversee the technical quality and serve as coaches – a new concept. I circulate muttering to myself ‘trust fall, trust fall,’ and summonned my Afghan co-facilitators to pay attention to the conversations in the small groups to make sure people are learning the right things from their practice. But my co-facilitators are a little like mercury, rolling off in this and that direction to attend to various other things that come up – some urgencies that popped up without warning as well as those that were not urgent months ago when we discussed the program by email.

I introduced the concept of getting out of one’s comfort zone and today they did. There was great unease about having to discover things for themselves rather than have everything spoonfed via powerpoint presentations. I told them we do that with babies but they are not babies – a metaphor some understood and liked (they grinned and nodded their heads – these are the people I have worked with for years); others may have been insulted by this simile but I will never know.

There is a degree of learned helplessness that we, the providers of technical assistance, have created ourselves. If you are told often enough that you don’t know things then, surprise, you don’t think you know things and need to be fed with a spoon.

The venue of the workshop is one of the specialized hospitals in the city. This is a Russian heritage – specialized hospitals. Kabul is full of them.

When you cannot come in through the side door (arriving before 8 AM) you have to go to the backdoor. There doesn’t seem to be a front door. The back door leads you into the hospital, up the stairs where some of the wards are. Men and women mill around, surprisingly, but I assume the wards are segregated.

The place is dark and dungy, not a place I’d associated with healing. The floors are dirty, there are hundreds of cartons stacked against a wall and it is hard to distinguish between hospital staff, patients and visitors; a few white robed figures are, presumably part of the staff but I cannot tell whether they are aids, nurses, doctors or technicians.

To get to the conference room and the offices of our staff a locked gate has to be opened. Behind the gate the paint is new, there is a carpeted runner and a large very warm conference room which is my home for this week.

There is a bathroom on the hospital side of the gate that is is also used as a kitchen. On our side of the gate there is a very clean woman’s bathroom but not one for the men, surprisingly. Maybe, when the gate was installed one of the bathrooms became all purpose.

Our women’s bathroom has three stalls – on the inside of each stall someone wrote in black permanent marker, and in English, ‘woman’s bathroom’ with the number of the stall (1, 2 or 3). It is not clear why it is on the inside rather than the outside; the latter may have discouraged men to go to the women’s bathroom and look for their own. Once they are inside the stall the message comes too late.