Sylvia's Journal

We have a very busy social life in Kabul and on Fridays we are busiest. We had hoped to give Sara a tourist tour of Kabul but the rain and sleet made going up on a mountain for a panorama view of Kabul rather pointless. We were in the clouds.

We did take her down to the spooky Darulaman palace at the end of the road with the same name, going southwest right by our office. A shell of its former glory, what’s left of the palace stands there as a monument to war and destruction, destroyed beyond repair itself. It has been like that for more than a decade I believe and I wonder on whose to-do list this mammoth structure figures.

The newly dug and cemented jewies (open drains on each side of the roads) were no longer draining the snow/rain mixture that was consequently flowing into the street turning everything into mud. On days like this Kabul is very ugly.

We made a last stop on Chicken Street for Sara to buy a few more scarves to gift. We found the chief doctor herself shopping for scarves at the same place and so Sara got to meet her after all.

From there we drove in circles for about half an hour until we found the new Kabul Health Club – the same that we had not found last week. But this time we had a phone number. It took about 4 calls before we found the place, or rather the place found us as they had put a young man out on the street to flag us down.

Inside we discovered another part of Afghanistan – the educated, suave and polished Afghan diaspora that had returned and was determined to (a) help Afghanistan become more like the London, Dubai, Paris or New York they had reluctantly left when the relatives called them back to Kabul and (b) make it more palatable for them to live in.

The health club could have been in London or Dubai with brightly lit and elegantly designed dressing rooms for him and her, each with their steam rooms and saunas, a restaurant, a juice bar and a place to have nails, face and hair done (ladies only for now). The young couple whose venture this was, supported by several generations of family, greeted everyone warmly and flitted from one place to another trying to attract pre-paid one year memberships. The prices being American and the place as far from our house as it is, we decided to wait a while to see whether we can live without it.

Next stop on the agenda was for Sara and me a visit, once again, to the Thai beauty spa, me for a massage and Sara for a pedicure. An hour and a half later, all oily and shiny, while were waiting for our car, several (western) men entered the place, we assumed for a ‘gents beard trim.’ But thenl we noticed that only one of them actually sat down in a barber chair. The others, including two bulky men with military vests that had all their many pockets filled with various lethal objects – walked into the one place where, as far as we know, neither massage nor barber work is done. This parade of testosterone was so out of place in this beauty salon with its diminutive Thai ladies and pictures of smooth skin and Thai hair styles that it made us very curious.

We tried to casually walk by the room in which the men had entered but all we could see was four guys (two armed) sitting in a living room with several Thai ladies. Were we witnessing some historical secret talks? We will never know.

We drove home through more snow and sleet to find our house with doors and windows wide open because the leg of lamb that Axel was cooking had smoked up the house. He was doing this without knowing the oven temperature and had improvised a little bit too much on the hot side.

Nancy and Bill came over for dinner. Nancy lived here in the 50s and speaks fluently Dari – her husband Bill got here in 2002. Between the two of them there were a thousand stories to tell requiring many more than this one dinner.

It’s good to hear stories from people who have lived in a place for a long time as it puts all the current crises in perspective. I found this rather calming.

We have been using the words ‘until the dust settles’ quite a bit lately. The top tiers of the ministry are not fully staffed and there are, as my African wisdom calendar said, many rivers coming together creating turbulence (or dust).

But today it felt as if a giant new vacuum bag full of dust was shaken out over the ministry. None of the new dust is likely to settle soon. The whole place was stirred up by a new org chart that was activated today by the country’s presidential team, producing major changes in reporting relationships – some logical and long overdue and some incomprehensible.

Apparently new org charts are produced repeatedly and once in a while one is approved after much haggling between power broker. Org charts are always about territory and territory means power and the ability to put your friends and family in positions that get nice salaries. This latest org one appears to have its origins in various power battles between people within the ministry and between various government structures that have something to do with staffing, salaries and rules about transparency and equity.

Some people lost whole directorates, others gained new departments, some were split in half and lots of people were unhappy. Since the dust is not settled, and it is weekend in Afghanistan, we don’t quite know all the implications of these changes in the boxes and lines on the org chart. Time will tell but messy it is for sure.

We did get another audience with the chief doctor and her staff and I got to talk about senior leadership challenges, the spiral of visibility and vulnerability that women leaders at the most senior levels get caught in, the balancing acts at the top between the urgencies of now and the necessities of the future; attention to the loud voices of those with power and the absence of voices from those to be served. I am glad it’s not my job.

My boss offered my assistance ‘day and night’ to which I protested. As it turns out this is a literal translation of the Dari expression that means anytime. But first it is weekend. Friday is off for everyone.

One of my colleagues in Cambridge told me that the EPA did a survey back in 2004 that found the suspended fecal particulate matter in Kabul to be the highest in the world. This has to do with all the animals in town and the dry desert climate. Giardia too may be airborne, as some other colleague here in Kabul told one of our house guests. This may explain the constant throat clearing that we are all collectively engaged in. Hearing others doing this throat clearing drives me nuts and doing it myself is mostly ineffectual, also driving me nuts.

I am imagining the layers of soot, fecal matter and other debris that are floating in the air and then settle in my lungs and wonder whether it is worse than the smoking I gave up some 30 years ago. It is one of the less attractive side effects of living in Kabul, aside from the restricted movement – but so far all of it is worth it.

I just wrote in mirror script on the inside of my office window that is covered with a thin film of soot: please clean me. I could have written it in Dari as I know both the words and the letters, but writing Dari in mirror script is still a challenge.

In our language classrooms there are traditional diesel stoves; a little more primitive than the German designs we have in our house. The bukhari wataniye as it is called is the most basic of designs: a small faucet is turned to slow down or speed up the drip-drip of drops of diesel fuel from the storage tank on the right into a tiny funnel attached to a fuel line that runs into the chamber of the stove on the left. You light a match which lights the fuel and voila…drip, drip, drip. The alternative to the traditional fuel stove is the traditional wood stove which is equally bad for your health according to Axel who read something about our various inefficient heating systems in the New Yorker.

I have a Kenyan flip book on my desk that provides me each day with a piece of African wisdom about leadership. In my experience most of it is ignored in Africa. Also, all of it is applicable to Afghanistan where it is also ignored – but people could be excused because the sayings come from Africa.

As part of my (self-appointed) role as a cross-cultural boundary spanner I am introducing the African wisdom to folks in Kabul. Today, on Ground Hog day, the message from traditional Africa, Kenya to be precise, is “If the leader limps, all the others start limping too.”

The message holds true for Afghanistan as much as for Kenya. I see much limping around me. Some of the limping comes from growing up in a society that knows much violence and some of it comes from not having had enough exercise with both legs. And then of course there are people who had their legs crushed or shot out from under them. I’d limp too.

I am beginning to see that time management issues and the inability to focus are not results of missing skill sets. A culture that is so hierarchical and so stratified practically guarantees that time will not be managed and attention not focused if hierarchy is involved. Those in lower level positions (and one can fall from an exalted status to a lower or no status in no time at all here) cannot push back or stand up against higher ups who don’t respect time limits, hijack meetings or push their agenda onto an already crowded and carefully designed program. Ergo, sending people to time management and focusing workshops will make no difference.

But I can see that people so badly want these to be skill issues rather than cultural issues. Most people can learn new skills but cultural habits are so much more difficult to change. Actually, none of this is exclusive to Afghanistan – I see the same behavior in our own government. Challenging your superior(s) is risky business in any culture. Just try to tell the boss of the boss of your boss that time’s up.

I sometimes forget what it is like to be in the company of women. My young friend Sabera who I met just over a year ago at a conference in Dhaka had invited me to a lunch with 4 of her (female) colleagues and friends to say goodbye before she goes off to Dhaka to get her MPH from BRAC University’s School of Public Health.

High up on the fifth floor of Central Hotel we sat in the sun overlooking the ‘new city’ section of Kabul, just about level with one of the magnificent forts that is perched on one of Kabul’s many hills.

While helping ourselves to a spectacular buffet lunch that Sabera offered us we talked about what it is like to work in a society that doesn’t recognize that it cannot right itself without its women. Here I was, once again, with a bunch of phenomenal women who are professionals and making a difference against so many odds.

I can’t remember anymore all the things we talked about but I do remember basking in the warm sun and the glow and spirit of these women, one old (like me) and the rest much younger. One of them has a brother who has become a Dutch citizen, speaks fluently Dutch and lives in Groningen. We will meet sometime when he comes for a visit. Another Dutch-Afghan connection.

One topic that comes up a lot in conversations here is all the people we work with in the ministry are doctors, few know anything about management or leadership (yup) and many look down on nurses and midwives.

But even female doctors can sometimes be less than kind to their non-doctor sisters. Status does get in the way. There are plenty of tales of doctors, male or female, who cannot accept the oftentimes superior practical skills and advice of nurses and midwives- even if it may kill the patient.

At my Dari class I learned to go shopping for a ‘ser’ of sugar (a measure for flour and sugar representing 7 kilos) and ask for change from a bill (‘black money’). Some of the shopping language I had already learned on the street and so we sped through the lesson at breakneck speed.

During the break between classes I met a Dutch woman whose Dari was far superior to mine. In fact she is trying to write a curriculum about autism in Dari for psychiatric nurses. This place and its various inhabitants continues to surprise me.

The workweek started with a thousand big and small tasks swirling around my head. I am still trying to catch up on an entire work week missed while I was in Herat; from 300 virgin emails down to 75 and back up to 200. Sisyphus comes to mind.

The ministry is slowly coming out of its leadership transition limbo and things are moving again. The National Health Retreat, pushed onto the back burner until May is being pulled back to the front burner again, adding some intensity to our work. The cast of characters has changed rather substantively and I am wondering whether the painstaking process of setting the agenda was all for naught. But such is the process of capacity building and teaching about organizational process: it’s live! One step forward, two back. The good thing is that we are moving again; moving two steps back may be better than not moving at all.

We are going to try once again to start a senior leadership program with the new top team – another one of those steps forward that has to be retraced again with a new cast. I remember thinking we had a breakthrough when we finally sat down with the previous minister about the challenges of leadership at the top. That was in December. Now we are back to square one but this time I am addressing a she rather than a he and the new dynamics between key players hasn’t had a chance to set yet – the pudding is still soft and warm. Everything is possible, or is it?

Sara has started her last week of her assignment and is suddenly worried about the days flying by and there is so much to do – I sense some guilt mixed in about not being as productive as home office people are expected to be. But this is an orientation I tell her and it is part of the work – the pace, hectic as it may be, is different here, the deliverable always in flux. What was up one day is down the next and whole plans get scrapped when priorities change. We are but a small player in a large drama.

A cold spell has hit Kabul as if the winter finally realized it hadn’t done its job yet. The rabbit fur feet muffs that I had thrown into the container at the last minute are coming in handy. I was going to give them away but now I think I am holding on to them a little longer; I too work in a place that is all cement and heats poorly, especially the floor.

Axel is still teaching his young students every day, spinning Martin Luther King’s Dream speech into a long string of conversations about vision, responsibility, minority/majority conflicts, social abuses and what would you do if you were seeing injustice committed right in front of your eyes. He does this in an essentially unheated room coming home chilled to the bone.

And so I reminded him about weather and inappropriate clothing: it is time for long underwear, wool socks and lamb’s wool slippers. Here people seem to have a higher tolerance for the cold – in Dari you are not cold, you ingest it – because they are used to it during the long winter. In most houses only the essential places are heated (main room). We consider a bathroom essential but that’s one room that doesn’t to be heated anywhere except in our house where a visit to the bathroom makes you think you are in the Sahara desert at high noon.

The weekend raced by so much faster than I had wanted. On Friday we went for our walk in Ghazi stadium because the snow and rain had turned the paths in the parks into mud. After our walk we made a quick visit to our furniture man on Chicken Street for some very focused shopping: a small table and a tray. I also discovered some lovely hand-woven upholstery fabric from Mazar-e-Sharif that I think I can turn into a a shalwar kameez.

We had lunch at the Wakhan café among a crowd of foreigners. I heard Dutch spoken in a corner and introduced myself to a young couple checking out various producers of the woolen wraps that men use as coats here. They think there is a market for those in Holland. For people with a nose for business there is a profit to be made by trading with Afghanistan.

Sara and I had ourselves dropped off at the Thai Spa in the Wazir Akbar Khan section of town for a delicious oil massage. We were oiled and pounded and stretched by two diminutive Thai ladies who explained their presence in cold and war-torn Kabul with the words ‘good money.’ A massage here pays about 4 times the price of a massage in Bangkok; yet for us it is a good deal: half the price of a US massage. Shiny from the baby oil we re-appeared one hour later and were taken home.

We tried out the new pasta maker which is much more fun to use with someone else than alone. We produced a great egg noodle which we consumed right away but also a bowl full for vermicelli-like pasta which we dried in the shape of bird’s nests.

On Saturday we all slept in late, had a chili omelet and went to work on a presentation that Sara will do on Sunday.

At noon time I accompanied Sara into town and dropped her off at a pricy French bistro for lunch with of friend of hers who escaped the US compound. I didn’t join them because I was looking for kapok and buttons for which I needed to go to the bazaar. I cannot do this alone but with a guard it is OK.

The guard took me deep into the bowels of the large Kabul bazaar in Jaday Maiwand which is the commercial center of Kabul. It was a treat beyond description to walk around the bazaar, practice my Dari and feast my eyes on all the stuff that is piled up in tiny little stalls for miles on end. I wished I could just amble around the enormous market without having to rush behind a guard who wanted to have his lunch break. Everything is for sale in the market if you search long enough. I could have spent the entire afternoon there.

I found one salesman who was willing to sell me a small plastic bag of cotton stuffing rather than the enormous bales of cotton that are used to make the traditional sitting/sleeping mattresses you find in Afghan homes. We had to go into a dark and clammy basement to find a pile of loose cotton stuffing that he was willing to sell to a stranger for a nice profit: a good deal for both of us.

Both Axel and I had our Dari classes in the afternoon which left very little time to relax and enjoy the final part of our weekend. Especially since at 6 PM the container that the movers had packed on the 30th of December in Manchester arrived on our doorstep and flooded our already full house with more stuff, some of which we missed and some we could probably have done well without: Axel’s new printers so we can print out pictures we take of people to give to them, coffee, winter boots, our wok and some other kitchen stuff that we now know could have been purchased here, and a good supply of books and videos. We are now officially settled with nothing left to be desired.

Yesterday I bought a bouquet of fresh daffodils (from Jalalabad) and a video with cooking lessons in Persian, for our cook. The fresh flowers needed a vase and are now nicely settled into a Herat blue glass vase, drooping a bit, but still nice. The cooking video was pirated from a German show and dubbed in Farsi.

Sara and I watched lesson one of the cooking class: rosemary and garlic roasted lamb, braised carrots with carrot greens and thyme, and tiny leek-and-apple tarts. I noticed that all the ingredients and utensils needed for the meal are available. It was a good exercise from a language perspective and will be a good lesson for our cook from a quality-of-life perspective.

I started the day with a meeting with Douglas who works in the ministry and who I won’t get to see for a week to make sure everything is moving along well as we prepare for the potential impact of the new US Government AFPAK strategy that landed in our mailboxes yesterday. It feels like a tsunami coming our way.

Douglas left with Sara for a meeting with the military to educate them about how health services are delivered (through a grant project that is managed by the government with our assistance). While they were educating the ISAF folks I was educating myself further about the AFPAK strategy: ambitious and clean, sometimes a bit too clean knowing the messy reality of daily Afghan government life.

It was a beautiful day, spring like again, still no snow in sight, which made it possible to sit on the terrace without a coat (but otherwise well covered), preparing for my Dari class.

We had dinner with Razia Jan which I am now discovering is like a refueling visit. When I see too many men make dumb decisions or get embroiled in sandbox fights or think narrowly about their work, all I have to do is go to Razia’s house and meet the extraordinary women she collects around her.

I talked with one young woman who got an MBA in the US some years ago. She told me that in her life at work here in Kabul she thinks about the lessons from her leadership and OB classes more than any other of her MBA classes. I asked her why. She told me the consequences of not understanding OB and poor leadership are visible all around her.

Few people see the gender dynamics at work when the (few) women who hold professional positions try hard to avoid making mistakes, creating a whole series of non events, while the men (98% of all decision makers both in civil and military life) get away with making one bad judgment after another, poorly thought through decisions, cover their behinds and take silly risks; the damage of this is then either cleaned up by women or good men (this goes mostly unnoticed) or the day is saved by other men who then become heroes.

We went on our usual walk in Bagh-e-bala below the Intercontinental hotel. As we walked back Janneke spotted a hole in the fence and a path up the hill where a bunch of young girls and boys were carrying a variety of jugs with water. The older girl would gather as many jugs as she could, carry about 50 yards up the hill and then return to get another bunch that the smallest kids were not able to manage.

We picked up the jugs and took them to another hole in another fence all the while enjoying our escape into the wide open of Kabul. Our guard walked along and we would look at him each time we moved further away from the path as if to ask whether our jail break was OK.

But then finally the call came from our security folks that we had strayed too far and we marched obediently back to the main road. We ended our walk seeking out a different tea tent and settled on a carpeted platform to enjoy green tea and a snack that was fried and served in vinegar. It led to conversations about GI afflictions but some of us were too curious not to try. Now, many hours later, I can say that all is well and the snack was quite nice.

We had lunch at the Wakhan Cafe which serves the best espresso and macchiato in Kabul, nearly as good as the macchiato in Addis. It was a balmy winter day, more like spring, and so had out lunch outside in the withered garden.

On our way to the newly opened Kabul health club we stopped at one of the supermarkets that cater to the foreign community. Sara ran into a colleague from CRS who took her job in Bolivia before moving to Herat, right in front of the frozen meats, imagine that!

Right in the middle of the candy aisle I dropped a bottle of fish sauce which stank the place up so badly that the staff thought it a good idea to cover up the smell with room fresheners. The end result of this is best described as rotting fish in a perfume store. These odors mingled with the very strong chemicals from the painting that was done on the second floor – a nasty cocktail of chemicals that gave me an instant headache.

We never found the Kabul health club. Because it expects to cater to the well-heeled foreign community it is trying to fly so far under the radar that we couldn’t find it.

After introducing Sara to Chicken Street we returned home with a bunch of daffodils, green peppers for our chili omelet tomorrow and a bag full of eggs. Back home it was time for Dari homework (write down your daily routines in Dari), learning the vocabulary words for lesson 9. The reward for all this studying was watching Seinfeld for the remainder of the evening. It was a good Friday! No bombs, no explosions, no kidnappings.