Sylvia's Journal

This morning I was introduced to the ultimate paper trail, hundreds of meters, stacked sideways and up of files and folders with information about ministry employees. I imagined the KGB catacombs would have looked like that.

I was given a tour of the stepchild of the ministry of health: its administrative and personnel services. I was shown offices with doors that hardly held together, dimly lit hallways with toilets I was told to avoid. Inside a series of grungy offices I saw tons of people, most poorly paid following cumbersome and possibly meaningless bureaucratic processes that revolved around these millions of files. There was an urgency about the work that escaped me.

Some offices were project offices, and thus received donor monies. You could tell instantly because the places were brighter, with flatscreen computers and orderly files that had already been scanned and entered into data bases. They also had staff who addressed me in English and was eager to explain what they were doing.

It was as if I had gone on a field trip to a very remote district. I was allowed to take pictures, even encouraged, except where there were women. Those I would ask and sometimes they said no.

The health retreat where the HR staff will be presenting about their dismal state is potentially an opportunity to change things but the well educated and paid staff is so stretched and overwhelmed that they can’t give time to preparing for the event and delegating the presenting to others not part of the hierarchy.

I tried to explain the symbolism of not having the chief present but I don’t think I got that message across. The folks over there are in survival mode and that makes it hard to think strategically or symbolically for that matter.

I was invited for lunch at another directorate in a better equipped part of the ministry, across the courtyard. It is the department where I used to spend many hours during my trips here as a consultant.

We sat around the table enjoying the fried fish from the ‘hut of desire,’ I had visited late last month. We were two women, Diana and myself and the rest men. I asked how it was possible that here women could eat side by side with the men but in our office they could not. None of the answers were compelling and so I still don’t get it.

After 6 hours of meetings at the ministry, while all of central Kabul was in total gridlock because of Ahmedinajan’s visit, I made it back to the MSH compound for another 3 hours of work to prepare for the handover of my responsibilities for the next 10 days and another long video call with Boston.

And now I am officially exhausted and on vacation, rohsat they call that here.

A local mullah was abducted from a mosque somewhere in Nangarhar province two nights ago. People found his headless body the next morning. No one claimed responsibility. According to the security reports that show up frequently in our email box the motivation behind the assassination remains unclear but the use of beheading as a method of public coercion suggests that this incident was likely carried out by people who did not like the mullah’s former work affiliation with foreign military.

Reading about this after the giddy reports on all the major news networks about mullahs who hand out condoms and encourage family planning gave me pause. It is hard sometimes to grasp the courage it takes to take on the parts of the culture that are punishing for women.

Closer to home I am celebrating ordinary people, like my staff who are, in small ways, braving opinion and ingrained habits to change things that need changing. My cheering and their action bring about tiny movements, millimeters really, but I know in the end they will end up to significant advances.

One of our achievements is the opening of a daycare center on the premises – a small thing for some but a big thing for the nursing mom who needed to take the long ride across town to nurse her baby.

Today all of the women, including myself, had to sign a sheet with our names to acknowledge that we had received a present for women’s day – for the auditors maybe? And so I found out how much the gifts were worth. Now that is a taboo where I come from.

Our cook has started the preparations for a traditional new year’s treat (NaoRoz is on March 21); it is made of wheat grass. In the bottom of a cookie tin and a small plastic container wheat grains have been kept wet and grew into 6 inch tall grasses. They will be cooked, mixed with sugar (according to some, not to others) and then compressed into candies if I understand his Dari well. I missed a few words. I am very curious.

While I was at work Axel got both a job (after much trying) and an exercise machine (after some lobbying). The job is with a social marketing firm that needs help in producing marketing materials in proper English.

The elliptical machine is enormous, a behemoth that is taking up half the upstairs hallway. We thought that by ordering the elliptical rather than the treadmill we’d get the smaller of the two. It may be smaller but it certainly isn’t small.

Now, with Julie’s donated jump rope and stretch bands, are old rowing machine we are ready to get in shape. Tonight I ran a whopping 1 elliptical kilometer in nearly 4 minutes. I am so out of shape.

International Women’s Day came and went. A front page article in the Afghanistan Times reminded its readers that for some women this day was rather meaningless with the headline ‘8th of March doesn’t make any difference to me.’

It tells the story of a woman whose husband lost both of his legs in Northern Afghanistan while fighting the Russians and so the wife goes out begging as she sees no other way. “The government only celebrates women international day for rich women with an income.” I kind of agree with her. What if she, with some educational support, would have turned out to be the next Albert Einstein?

Our carefully prepared celebration took off slowly. At the start of the event only the women who had organized it sat, in their best dresses, in the empty room. It took an effort to fill the room up. Marzila and I swept through the compound dragging men away from their computer screens and offices (not really dragging but it did take some coaxing).

And then some had the gumption to say at the end that the men should have organized the day for the women. We were all convinced that if we’d left it to the men nothing would have happened. And we have proof for that assertion: since Miho our gender specialist left in 2004 there have been no celebrations of this day.

We also did invite men to be on the organizing committee, several weeks ago, but none joined us. The road ahead is still long and bumpy I am afraid. To get the easy words changed into actions.

But I was proud of my female colleagues who put up a seamless program that lasted a little over one hour. We listened to prayers, poetry, we watched a slide show with dismal statistics, an encouraging film, and after that there was a quiz and gifts.

When everything was done and said sweet milk tea, cookies and cake were served in the adjoining room. Like a bride, I was asked to cut a beautiful cake with a rusty (but clean) Exacto knife that came from someone’s toolbox.

While we stood around the table eating and drinking, we asked people to speak about the extraordinary women in their lives. Of the few who talked most celebrated their mothers, one celebrated his wife and another said he didn’t want to celebrate his wife because things weren’t so good at home.

Some of us tried to give the day some content and meaning beyond the Valentinesque nature of the event. The statistics Marzila presented were dismal but I am not sure that showing them shocked anyone into action. Still, we got women on the screen.

Julie left before the sun came up. By now she will be getting ready to board her plane in Dubai to DC. Going home always is the best part of travelling. I got up early to see her off and offered her our Cape Ann Savings Bank travel mug filled with Peet’s coffee to get herself into shape during the car ride to the airport, the first leg of her very long trip to Boston.

It was a holiday for us because of International Women’s Day, which, I am learning is celebrated here more like Mother’s Day (all mothers are women but not all women are mothers, so this day is more inclusive). There is an expectation of gifts. When I first met with the women in the office and suggested we celebrate the day at MSH they immediately asked about gifts for themselves. I was taken aback and slight annoyed. I think I said something like ‘it’s not about you!’ But now I realize it is about them and all their Afghan sisters.

Despite the holiday that closed our office (but not the government) I had two meetings set up at the ministry. Being in the neighborhood I decided to make a visit to the physical therapist whom I had not seen for three weeks: first Axel was sick, the week after it was me and yesterday I was supposed to have gone to Badakhshan.

The ride into town took longer than ever – something important was happening in town but the driver could not explain it in English and it was too sophisticated for my limited Dari vocabulary. The entire center of Kabul was tied in one huge traffic knot in each and every direction. The usual 20 – 30 minute ride took nearly one a half hour.

Because we were going so slowy, and a different route than normal, I ended up having a long and contemplative ride watching the Kabulis going about their business. I wondered about the lives of all these people I saw: had they gotten worse or better? What losses had they endured, what hopes did they still have?

At the PT office I realized that during my three weeks absence my Dari had improved so much that we could actually have a real conversation as opposed just asking about children and naming body parts. The staff told me they missed their English practice with me – they are rarely among English speakers and so I fill a gap. I warned them all that Dari was no longer a secret language and that I could now figure out what they were talking about.

I was chided by my PT for not doing my exercises as religiously as I should and that it was no wonder my right arm is still very weak. It’s hard to keep doing these exercises, I explained her, if you don’t see much progress. I felt just like when the dentist asks if I floss regularly (when I haven’t).

At the ministry I visited for the first time the section that Peter calls ‘the ghetto,’ and that has never received any donor money for paint jobs, heat or internet connections. It’s a rundown place compared to the DG offices in the other part of the ministry building, the one that is painted blue and purple on the outside. On that side there are offices in which you can actually get work done and receive visitors.

I met with two of the five presenters at the upcoming strategic health retreat in order to fine-tune their presentations, design the rest of their session, focus the group work and do some leadership coaching about aligning and mobilizing people and commitment before the actual event, three weeks from now.

I was supposed to have flown today to and from Badakhshan in a US (civilian) helicopter, with several people from the ministry, including Her Excellency, several people from USAID, UNICEF and a camera man. One of my staff had flown ahead on Wednesday to set thing up for this one day whirlwind visit. US planes and helicopters have to be back on base before the sun sets, so getting up early was critical to get in as much of a day as was possible, given a two hour flight each way.

A colleague from UNICEF was early at the US airport, which is separate from the regular airport, and I got to wait in her armored (hard skin) car. I sent my car back to the office and moved in with her to bide the time. I noticed that slamming the car door shut is not easy when the ‘skin’ is tough like that. With my still weak right arm it was nearly impossible.

We chatted until the US team arrived to let us further into the heavily guarded part of the airport and then the wait began. Over the next three hours the weather started to deteriorate and the clouds moved in over Kabul and over the Salang Pass. When you fly in a helicopter this is a problem. And so, after three hours of waiting the flight was cancelled and we each went our way again.

But for me the wait was not a waste of time. Although the surroundings were less than comfortable (at least there were chairs), we essentially waited in a container. I got to practice my Dari with some random people who were also waiting – we tackled the list of opposite nouns, like hot-cold, good-bad, light-heavy, etc. My new teachers learned how to pronounce the words in English and I got to memorize the Dari adjective pairs. At times everyone got in on the act and so it was great fun.

We also talked about family planning and the role of the mullahs, after an article in the English language newspaper that had been picked off the wire and told a surprised world that Afghan couples will use family planning if the mullah says it is OK and if given the chance. Family planning remains one of the most effective and inexpensive public health interventions: a child not wanted and not born cannot get sick and cause problems for its mother.

We were all disappointed that the trip got cancelled. There was talk of postponing it to next week but then I will be in Beirut. The cancellation was particularly disappointng to the team up in Badakhshan who had been preparing the scene for this high-powered visit. The only good thing is that I was able to go to my Dari class with Axel and prepare mousse au chocolat from Russian dark chocolate, and watch Julie pack.

Our man in charge of security called it ‘goofy’ but somehow that doesn’t seem to describe it properly when men in uniform tell foreigners to get out of their car and hassle them (‘knock down’ it was called in Australian). This didn’t happen to us but to friends with whom we were supposed to have had dinner tonight. We cancelled and stayed home, cooking our own dinner of Afghan pad thai.

There is a high alert, like a code orange, that has been hovering over the city for some days now. Apparently an Indian delegation is in town to call the authorities to account for the Indian casualties in the last attack; insult upon insult upon injury after two embassy bombings and now their people who were lodging in the destroyed guesthouse.

The US warden circulated another warning, with a precise location. I am glad we live and work nowhere near that location and I wondered about people who do.

Security cleared Julie and me for our Friday massage in Wazir Akbar Khan and the masseuses expertly kneaded the kinks out of my taut muscles. Living under a code orange is no fun.

Afterwards, all oily and relaxed we joined Axel for a lovely spring walk in Bagh-e-Bala park. We saw our first spring blossoms on the rows of almond trees, growing well protected on the sunny side of the hill.

Axel had printed out pictures of the various people we had photographed there, among them the mudir of the pleasure palace. He rewarded us with access to the place, since he had to key to the padlock.

He asked me whether I had brought the medicine (dawa), a request I had clearly not understood at our last visit. He explained once again, this time I understood. He wants medicine that makes him strong and to illustrate this he flexed his weak biceps. Since our last visit I had learned the words for strong and weak and was able to hold up a good chunk of my end of the Dari conversation until he lapsed into Pashto. Next year, I promised.

He told us the pleasure palace is being turned into a guesthouse and to illustrate this he pointed at the electrical wires that were coming out of the walls everywhere. The large Olympic sized pool will also be cleaned up and filled. It’s hard to imagine but it’s a great idea. If Karzai wants it to happen, as he claims, it will. Karzai is after all his boss, he should know.

From there we went back into town for lunch and latte in the sun and in the company of a father and son (or daughter) cat who were after our chicken wrap.

The rest of the afternoon we went shopping in the area that only a week before had been blown to pieces. Things had been cleaned up but broken glass was still visible everywhere, from the top of the buildings down to the ground. Many shop windows, including those as far away as Chicken Street, were cracked or gone and replaced by plastic sheeting.

The sidewalks were cluttered by large piles of twisted metal and other debris and then there was of course the big hole in the ground where the guesthouse has been.

This is something you realize when you live close to such disasters: except for those who died, life goes on.

The balmy weather of the last few days adds to the ‘lightness of being close to vacation and close to spring.’ The leaf buds on the rose bushes and fruit trees are swelling and some tiny leaves are visible on the honey suckle outside my office. After hours some staff had their first volleyball game. It is hawa bahariye, or spring weather, indeed.

Yet in many places spring is still months away. March and April are the rainy months; in elevated Bamiyan precipitation still comes down as snow I suppose, judging from the mountains around Kabul. After an enormous rain and thunderstorm a few days ago, there upper reaches are white again. Down in the valley we are done with the snow. The last vestiges disappeared about just over a week ago.

I participated in Julie’s ‘writing good impact stories’ session which was fun. I was partnered with one of our ‘druggies’ as I call them, the people who make sure enormous quantities of drugs get to people in the provinces that are supported by USAID. Simultaneously, on the other side of the sliding glass doors the facilitator training was drawing to its close.

Julie and I watched one of the participants in our session transfer what she learned to the facilitator group. I could follow most of what she said and Julie smiled when she saw her main four points reproduced with great enthusiasm on the other side of the doors. Now that is just-in-time training.

One of my staff had organized a lunch in his office for people he wanted to introduce to each other and who he likes. He is an arch networker and so brought together an interesting cast of characters. Axel was also invited.
We listened to stories about the first day after the Taliban were ousted and the shaving of beards that happened instantly. These stories came from the people who were closely associated with the birth of Afghanistan’s current, post-Taliban, health system. Only the rudiments of a health system existed 8 years ago, which included 3 computers in the entire ministry.

Although we are sometimes impatience with the slow progress and the endless stumbling blocks we encounter, hearing where they started was a good reminder of how much has been accomplished in what is after all only 8 years. New beginnings always happen slowly.

The facilitator said ‘May God kill you,’ and everyone laughed heartily. When asked why this was so funny in this country where many are killed in the name of God, I was told it was an icebreaker joke. Sometimes I don’t get things here at all.

I watched more of the joyful proceedings of the leadership development facilitator refresher training that started on Sunday and the ease with which the team approached the task. This time we were hosted by the Blood Bank, in the Leadership Learning Center there that we equipped and the team there that we helped to become stronger leaders. They have some impressive results to show for it.

I had already arrived there when the security alert came per SMS that the city was on high alert and unnecessary travel across town discouraged. My staff was scattered across town and I phoned each one to determine whether they should stay where they were or move. I stayed where I was and made it safely back to our compound at lunch time. Nothing happened, luckily.

In the morning I heard that two Big Heads, one from our country and one from our host country were meeting today and that one Big Head wanted the name of one corrupt senior ministry official to give to the other Head, like a head on a platter. I got the symbolism. It was a nice idea.

And as the implementing agency in health, we got a last minute request from our own government to provide the name of this person. In theory this sounds reasonable, but if you want to continue to work here and live, providing a name is a terrible idea, even if you had hard evidence.

This is where most of the anti corruption efforts go off the cliff: On the one hand people don’t dare to whistle blow for fear of reprisals. The assumption is that the powerful will never be caught but you, as the small whistle blower will.

On the other hand the people who are supposed to certify transparency and clean books are the ones who ask for bribes to certify you as ‘clean.’ If you decline to pay they will certainly dirty you, your name, your reputation and create big problems for you.

This is what our host was threatened with, not an academic issue. With the labyrinthine government regulations any auditor can find irregularities in the way you run your organization and blow them up into something illegal.

He asked me if we could include ‘ethics’ in our leadership program. I wonder, will that make any difference?

Yesterday I learned in class that a mature man, a ripe piece of fruit and a paved road are all described with the word for ‘cooked’ (pokhta). My questions to the driver to find out if he was ‘cooked’ got a chuckle; indeed he considered himself an ‘adam pokhta,’ a cooked man (all this while driving over a few uncooked and one cooked road).

Some of my early ‘cooking’ efforts here as a coach (from early 2008 on) have produced well cooked facilitators. I watched a trio of people who I first knew as otherwise confident people (all doctors, one young female and two older males) who knew nothing about leadership development. Today, some 2 years later I watched them ‘dance’ with the participants and teach them about being leaders in ways I could only have hoped in my wildest dreams then. Such a joy.

I am now the coach behind the coach behind the coach and am hardly needed except for some pointers about working as a team rather than as accomplished individual facilitators. This fits my different position here as someone who watches the dance floor from the balcony (an image from Ron Heifetz), rather than remaining busy on the dance floor.

Julie and I had a lovely lunch at the Pelican restaurant down the street from our office: an authentic French mushroom quiche with freshly squeezed apple juice served (and maybe cooked as well) by young Hazara boys in white starched shirts and peach striped vests. We ate our lunch outside, sitting on the traditional chaharpai furniture on the terrace in the warm spring sun.

On our way back the road was blocked by buses parked at right angles to the road and many men with guns. Our bad luck was that the Parliament building was right in between our restaurant and the office. It took some maneuvering by our driver through muddy side streets to get from A to B.

In the evening, coming in late from another long work day, I found a slightly altered version of our family’s favorite ‘Chicken Fiszman’ recipee in the oven (named after our kids French teacher at High School). The chicken was so tiny that Julie thought it was one of the missing pigeons from her window sill.

We are still working on the concept of moist and juicy for roasted poultry (or pigeons as the case may be). Our cook tends to produce meals that are a little too ‘pokhta’ for our taste.

Today was one of those days when I was acutely aware of the multiple universes that exist side by side in this enchanting but broken land. I interact with some of those universes and others I only know they exist from hearsay.

First of all there is the universe of the government, which in itself has several substrata. There are the people who are smart, ambitious and quite well paid (for Afghan standards). They want the best for their country. They focus on what makes senses from a technical point of view and they are fully engaged in debates and conversations that tease out where to go next. I love to work with them.

Another stratum consists of what we would call dead wood in the US: people who are beyond capacity building, who are just marking time and for that, get a tiny salary that they supplement in any way they can: petty corruption or second and third jobs or living off relatives. For them the ministry is not about improving health but about employment. Sending these people home doesn’t solve much and just increases the misery of whole families.

A third stratum consists of people who are taking advantage of the chaos and the streams of money coming in with all the possibilities for milking the projects that require millions of dollars in procurements. They are enriching themselves beyond their wildest dreams.

They are the ones building what we call the ‘poppy’ houses, the hideous architectural extravanganzas that are way too big for their tiny plots, that are decorated and embellished with a cacophony of styles, tiles, fences, gates, colored glass and what not while being barricaded behind sand bags and blast walls topped by razor wire. I presume they are also the owners of the billions of dollars, declared or undeclared, that leave the country for investments in Dubai and elsewhere.

The next universe is the one I am part of: well meaning professionals trying to do their best to build capacity of their counterparts in the ministry or local NGOs or businesses. They (we) act as if this is possible and believe we make a difference – sometimes we think this is really true and sometimes we fool ourselves. Actually we probably do make a bit of difference in the lives of individuals, but whether the systemic changes we profess to pursue are really possible in our life time is debatable. We live in this stressful universe and receive handsome compensation and benefits such as danger pay and R&R for putting up with something we don’t have to put up with if we so desire.

Within this universe there are many strata, differentiated by the sources of our contracts and how much we earn. It’s all rather unequitable I suspect and a function of whether we are part of a buyers’ or sellers’ market. I saw an advertisement for a Pashto translator with a base salary of 215.000 dollars. This must pull some Afghan Americans back to their homeland I imagine; a great way to pay for college or medical school.

A third universe is the one inhabited by the foreign Christians who have lived here for ever, moved here with small kids or produced them here, and who are teaching us Dari and about Afghan culture. They live very low to the ground and do good Christian work. They have no SUVs, no army of guards and drivers; they live in simple houses and walk to work or class. They blend in as much as they can. Many speak the local language(s) fluently. They dress either in local garb (especially the men) or they wear frumpy frocks. They are kind and lovely and very sincere. As Christians they are always at risk and they have had some casualties, both in terms of lives and real estate, but they soldier on, as Christians do.

The fourth universe is inhabitated by the Americans who live in hooches (containers) in their own bubble that has nothing to do with Afghanistan. They are guarded by Nepali ghurkas and eat imported food froom imported furniture in imported prefab buildings. They try frantically to implement American policy which changes all the time and serve many masters. We sometimes help a few of them escape into Afghanistan that’s just down the road. They rotate in and out of Afghanistan as fast as windshield wipers which creates an institutional memory problem.

A fifth universe is populated by foreign armies. I know nothing about them expect that they fight, are young and see a totally different Afghanistan than we do. A subset of this universe consist of the civilians embedded in their FOBS (forward operating bases). They are professionals trying to help but because they are from the government, the help is sometimes misguided as when they cut across our path and bypass the government structures we have been trying to build so carefully. Clinics where such doctors work sometimes get shot at.

And then there are the sixth to umpteenth universes that are scattered across the country: the stone-age people that live far from the modern world in places where nothing we take for granted exists; the nomads who try to keep up a lifestyle that is from another century and not good for one’s health; the slave girls in service and bondage, the illiterate couples trying to eke a living out of hostile ground producing baby after baby with few surviving the harsh conditions.

The violence and conflict keep producing more universes: the IDPs (internally displaced persons), the Taliban and Al Qaida fanatics sneaking in every which way, under cover or openly in tanks or pick-up trucks with guns; but also the smart kids that show up in Axel’s school out of nowhere riding on this or that opportunity that fortuitously showed up on their door step or was actively pursued. These are the ones to go for further study to the US, where they will tumble into yet another universe.