Sylvia's Journal

Razia jan manages to get the widest variety of nationalities within the smallest number of people together. There was Salima from Reunion, France and Canada; Malalai from France and Afghanistan; Hamida from Afghanistan and the US, like Razia; there was Nilufer from Afghanistan and Russia, Ashnur from Tanzania, Santwana from India and the US, Marzia from Iran and Afghanistan, myself from Holland and the US, a Syrian-American and then three guys, each with only one nationality (US, US and Scotland). All the men were of a certain age while Razia and I were outnumbered by 20 and 30 somethings.

The first question we ask each other at such a gathering, and we’ve had a few by now at Razia’s, is where are you from and what brings you (back) here. All the stories are fascinating and all the women’s stories even more fascinating. And if you didn’t believe that women, and especially young women are an asset rather than a threat, you’d be cured instantly. Meeting these women that Razia collects around herself makes me proud to be a woman. Such energy, such power.

I take advantage of these rare moments in my life here where I am surrounded by women who are not hiding themselves behind cloth to ask them what their experience is like in this society. I am particularly interested in the perspective of the young Afghan women who have lived and studied abroad. I ask about their fathers because they are the ones that have set them free. I want to know what was it about these men that made them go against the grain of the expectations of their society. Or is it maybe the combination of enlightened fathers and regretful mothers?

When I come home from an evening like this I think change is possible and doesn’t need to take 1000 years. But then when I hear the stories that are written up by the Afghan Women’s Writers Project, I think that maybe 1000 years is more likely.

It is rare for me to wonder whether my presence here makes any difference. But today is one of these days as I ponder a vitriolic email, written clearly in great anger by someone who should have known better. Despite its request for ‘utmost confidentiality’ is has, by now I am sure, circulated widely among the friends of the foreigners to whom it was addressed, internationals and locals alike and no doubt reached those who it sought to discredit.

As with so many other things here it is hard to gauge motivation for actions: revenge, a settling of accounts, sabotaging someone else’s ascendancy and (or) an expression of deep hurt, or all of the above. The ripples of this country’s leadership stalemate spread out in ever larger circles and I can’t help but think that nothing good can come from this. It even leads me to question my own mission here.

But then I return to work with people who are serious, confident, and who work hard. They are relatively secure in their professional identity; they are thoughtful and want to do better so they can make things better. Whether what they get in return is worth all of this is hard to gauge. Getting a good salary is nice, and, for the more senior people, myself included, being treated with respect, being listened to, having your words have weight is nice too.

But what I saw today is what might happen if some of these ‘rewards’ are taken away, or perceived to be taken away. It brought the devil out of the basement.

On a more positive note, now that my formal language classes have started, I am even more motivated to speak Dari well and soon. I got a huge amount of homework and only two (work) days to complete it. I was so engrossed in my homework that I didn’t even realize that two hours had passed when a colleague came knocking on my door after dark, surprised to see me still at my desk at dinner time.

I showed him my written homework and he quickly spotted several spelling mistakes. I am trying to write spoken Dari and the two don’t match – he gave me a brief on-the-spot lesson about the differences. May be this is why the language school teaches you transliterated Dari with lower case and upper case vowels but I find those even harder to memorize.

I have learned to use my English keyboard for Dari script, there is no logic: h= A, l=m, k=n, g=l, only the s is the same. As with anything else, it take endless practice until the neural connection is made (done) and then more practice to strengthen the connector (in process). I consider the extra energy now to use the official script a wise investment. And I am sure it will contribute to brain health.

The generator is making the windows rattle. Some nights we get by on town power but not always; still, it is a vast improvement over the conditions I remember from 2002: mostly generator power and only from 5 till 8 AM and then from sunset till 10 PM. It made us all go to bed early. Now Axel can keep on messing around with his computer until the wee hours of the morning.

Axel told me to change my blog header picture, it’s winter now, after all, both in Massachusetts and in Kabul, and Roger told me it was time to change my tagline. I am pleased to say all this was done.

Today I was supposed to meet with the ex minister at his private residence as he no longer has access to his office and entourage at the ministry although his assistant is continuing to assist him in making appointments and the canceling them. I learned that the Dari word for ‘to cancel’ is ‘kensel kardam’ (make kensel). This allowed me to have my first Dari lesson that are now booked into the future on Saturdays and Mondays from 3 to 5.

I went to the physical therapy center to drop off part of the goodies that have been collected by my PT in Manchester, more to come in the container that we packed and that should arrive in a few weeks.

In between PT and language classes I decided to try out our new hand-cranked pasta maker. I have never in my life owned such a machine and who would have imagined I’d have one in Kabul.

I was particularly intrigued by the pictures that came with the machine and wondered what the cook thought the machine was about when he opened the box and found the instructions.

The pasta was easy and fun to make but, once we cooked it, clearly too thick and who knows whether the flour I got from the store, in an unmarked package, was the right flour. But with a lot of pesto and red sauce it tasted OK; it’s just that we have enough for a few more meals.

Our new housemate Susan arrived and is settling into the pink room, getting her bearings, her computer settings adjusted and used to the fumes of the heater.

I was told that a woman has been proposed as minister and we are keeping our fingers crossed. It looks promising.

A gorgeous day in Kabul, sun out, blue skies, white mountains. It was a good day for sleeping in and then going for a long walk to the pleasure palace, one of our favorite outings these days.

At the end of our walk we sat down on one of the platforms that are sprinkled among the rose bushes and pine trees and enjoyed a cup of green tea.

Afterwards we had ourselves dropped off at the Wakhan cafe which has an American menu in terms of prices and the best coffee. The only thing that tells you that you are not in America is the large glass of freshly squeezed pomegranate juice. We read up on the Afghan news from the one English language newspaper which we would like to have home delivered but we haven’t quite figured out how to make that happen.

Axel has started to make videos with the little Flip camera that came with our new internet account in the US and we are amazed what it can do and how easy it is to use. We are finally entering the camcorder era. Axel filmed our entire trip back from Shari-nao to our home and you can see where the roads are free from the speed and where they are broken the pictures is a little bumpy. I’ll try to post it.

People were out on the streets and the nice weather made everything look peaceful and people friendly. It’s hard to imagine the violence on a day like this.

When we came back home we set on our terrace in the winter sun and anticipated spring. I discovered that we have three young apple trees and one pear tree and of course there is the grape arbor covering our terrace. In a couple of months we have to decide what we want our garden to be like; no vegetables, as these are plentiful, delicious and cheap. I think we’ll have a garden full of flowers when the time comes.

But at night when the sunny skies were gone we were once more confronted with the dark side of this society. One of our dinner guests was sms-ing with a young bright woman, hiding in the family bathroom, who is about to be sold for 25.000 dollars to a country bumpkin cousin to become a household slave and baby maker.

The young woman (21) speaks and writes fluently in English, and is about to get her masters from Kabul University. She has offers from two American universities to go for her PhD with full scholarship. But her life is about to end and all options are bad: get married with all the consequences of marrying into an uneducated family (this includes ending her education), run away (and be ostracized, not able to ever come back) or be killed by relatives. There are tens of thousands of stories like this. Kabul doesn’t look so sunny anymore.

It is easy to forget how different we are, those of us coming from far West of Afghanistan from those whose entire lives have been lived here. Although the US and European press seem to indicate that everyone here despises us and our ways, I am daily surrounded by people who want to be like us and sometimes pretend to be like us.

But ‘us’ is a fast moving bunch: all fluent or nearly fluent English speakers and writers, very adept with the computer, at ease with abstract concepts and able to say ‘I don’t know’ even if we are very senior. We are also able to confront or challenge our superiors in ways people here cannot even begin to fathom no matter how white their hair is.

Many of us are also speed readers and check our email every 30 seconds and then respond in less than that with impressive intellectual opinions, analyses and critiques. We have been trained like that. We have also been trained to be pro-active, look for knowledge and data and think about connections that may not be obvious to people living close to the ground.

The people we work with, whether our own colleagues or counterparts in the ministry, even those high up the hierarchy have been trained differently: rote learning well into their academic training; total deference to the professor and anyone else in an authority role; always polite no matter how much one is insulted. English remains their third or even fourth language and reading and writing in English takes a lot of energy and time.

Socially we are also very differently. You can see that easily by the hours that the bachelor expats put in, with no family to stop the work. For them time is very elastic and things can be and are done long after the work day is over. As the only expat with a family here I am finally realizing that I need to set my work/family boundaries more sharply.

There are always absences because the mother in law of a cousin of a brother in law has died or something like that. For us these would be too remote to count as reasons for family bereavement leave, but here all that is much closer. I learned that our young dispatcher just married a woman who is both the daughter of his mother’s brother and the daughter of his father’s sister. Go figure that out.

And yet, we work side by side with an American clock ticking on the wall. Sharp deadlines, long documents, high English standards, fast computers and a relentless stream of emails, day and night (night is day at Headquarters and Washington).

I found out that I needed to reset my computer clock everyday because it was 10 minutes late. I was puzzled by that since I assumed computer clocks are always right. As it turned out, the local server was responsible for the delay, but now I realize it was also a signal from the universe that time here is different and a reminder that many of our deadlines are entirely self-imposed and much more elastic than American workers think (except when you have to report results to Congress of course).

I spent a good two hours with one of my staff establishing and explaining performance standards; although he is familiar with the ways of the west, having worked with the UN for many years, I still realized that we were trying to meet across an ocean of differences. Good enough for now has to be the motto as we are all trying to get the work done and earn our pay.

In order to get into one of our two front doors you now have to push aside a heavy quilted blanket. Unlike those that keep the cold air out in yurts and other traditional dwellings and that are more like carpets, ours are simple brown cotton with kapok quilted inside. The temperature is just below freezing and we are happy with this extra protection in our cement house.

My first day at work was right away a long day because Wednesdays are ‘call-with-Cambridge’ days. I had intended to go home when everyone else goes home at 4 PM and take it easy but there are just two of us, Steve and I, because the other Steve is in the US for a long overdue home leave and our boss is in Peshawar tending to a seriously injured nephew.

We are in charge of the house until Sunday. We are the two bosses and can do whatever we do; which is mostly working long hours.

Our security office had circulated an advisory the day before our arrival that a white Toyota Corolla was heading towards town or already in town, driven by a suicide bomber bent on creating some serious damage, and that he was accompanied by gunmen. There were even specific locations to avoid, such as the Pakistani embassy, one of the radio stations and other places that we tend not to visit. Such advisories are not very useful because white Toyota Corollas are ubiquitous in Kabul. Later in the day we heard that a suicide bomber had been busted and killed. How the heck did they find this guy in a city teeming with people and white Toyotas, one wonders.

In the meantime life goes on. I unpacked my new Singer sewing machine bought in Holland and threaded it to mend some clothes. Later I hope to go fabric shopping with Razia and start some sewing projects. That was, after all, part of the promise of being in one place, close to work, for months on end. I had not quite predicted the long workdays but then again, being in a decision making position myself now, I should be able to do something about this.

All the loose ends are tied up, except one about our return trip. We had to fix a reservation error via Skype with Holland where a deep freeze only days before Christmas is causing massive delays in telephone traffic. I was put on hold for the longest time, praying the electricity wouldn’t quit on me while listening to the most atrocious and loud Christmas music. Eventually we sorted things out, a Skype miscommunication that cost us dearly, 50000 miles and 100 euro more for what was supposed a free trip for Axel from Boston to Amsterdam. We discovered the trip had already happened on November 30th and not, as we thought we had booked, on December 30th. There is a lesson in there of checking reservations carefully.

I have handed the baton to one of my staff, a new experience since in the past when I went on leave there was no one to hand the baton to and I just kept checking my email. I am planning to do that only for social reasons. We do have an arrangement with my co-directors: only emails that have URGENT in the subject line are to be looked at (with a promise to have none or very few of those).

During my last trip to and from the ministry of watched the traffic around me more intently than usual and realized that there is something profoundly different about traffic here and in the US or Holland. People may complain that my two home countries are over-regulated, but compared to the non regulation here, such (over) regulation is a heck of a lot better.

People and animals cross the road or what’s available of the road whenever and wherever they want. The road is sometimes not much of a road. Everywhere, probably part of some big road project, drainage ditches are being hacked in the road and piles of rock and dirt continue to accumulate on the remaining surface. Some of these are small side roads, but many are main arteries in and out of town.

Participating in traffic is based on the premise that everyone is on his own, and that there is no collective responsibility to make things work on the roads. Red and green lights, pedestrian crossing, traffic rules are really collective commitments to give everyone a fair chance at moving ahead.

I marvel at the ability of Afghan drivers to get themselves into a total jam, everyone occupying every empty inch of the road and even sidewalks, and as soon as an inch opens, someone jerks into the new space further jamming up the works. Occasionally I have seen someone get out and create rules on the spot, like ‘you there, stay where you are, and you there, move!’ But only once in my three months here.

The same principles of immediate satisfaction, impulsivity, and unenlightened self interest are at work when uncles or fathers ask for compensation from those who offer to educate their girls, or when employees steal money that has been made available to rebuild a piece of this country, their country, or that was to provide medicines, food, schools, anything for the poor. All during the ride I wanted to jump out of the car and grab people by their shoulders and shake them saying ‘don’t you get it? We are all in this together, you lose, I lose, you win, we all lose…But how do you get that across when that’s what life has been like for most people here.

And now we are getting ready for our long (road/air/road/air/road) trip back to Manchester by the say. Departure at 5 :30 AM tomorrow morning. We can’t wait.

I went through the day with only a fraction of my usual energy, the skin between my nose and lips raw from blowing my nose too much. Not surprisingly, I felt very unaccomplished by the end of the day. I quit at the time that everyone else leaves in the many little buses that drive people to all four corners of Kabul. That is usually the time I start emptying my mailbox and get my thinking and writing done, but not today.

Sunday is the day of our weekly touchbase meetings that cascade up from the bottom to the top of the stairs but the stair part didn’t happen because the boss was called out to see the minister and such requests cannot be ignored. I declined to accompany him, feeling too miserable to handle the one hour trip each way.

Axel came over for lunch which was a nice break in the day. He had come to get his MSH identity card to hang around his neck as our compound is instigating increasingly stringent security measures. We now have brick lookout towers, which make me think of Rapunzel each time I pass by them. Such towers were missing at the UN guesthouse. When the guard opened the little sliding door to see who was outside he found a gun in his face, the last thing he saw.

Our walls have been raised, bricked up, by some 3 feet after the surface of the street outside was raised by 3 feet. No one understands why but for the seller of crushed stone it was a good deal no doubt. On top of the new layer of bricks are sharp metal spikes and the front gate is closed. We will have what is called a ‘vapor’ lock and that’s apparently where you need a badge of one sort of another. So Axel now counts, badge-wise, as staff.

When I arrived home Axel was just saying goodbye to two people from a small NGO called SOLA a group he had just contacted by email in the morning. When the founder of the NGO showed up it turned out our housekeeper was his one time and so the visit was a nice reunion.

After they left we visited a Finnish woman who lives around the corner and sells embroidery that is made by Afghan widows and girls to make ends meet. We did our last Christmas shopping there and have now emptied our wallets and finished our shopping.

We had dinner in front of the TV watching Al Jazeera and then the BBC and then Euro News, all of them showing long queues of people waiting at airports (eastern US snowstorms) or train stations (Euro Star mishap in the tunnel). It made you say “I will never travel anywhere for Christmas,” two days before we get on the road ourselves. It’s a long leap of faith.

We both spent the entire day inside, Axel because there was nowhere to go and I because it is finally my turn to be miserable with a full-fledged cold. It is good that we have tissue boxes on practically any horizontal surface, compliments of the people of the United States of America. Axel is feeding me liquids and watching over me, as a devoted husband should.

Because of my sorry state I did not make it to my physical therapy appointment nor to a meeting at USAID that was called at the last minute in an attempt to get decisions made before the departure of many of the Americans who have been saving up for this R&R.

We watched the coming and going of new and old ministers on TV as they finally made their appearance before the members of Parleman as they call it here. I saw our minister of health sauntering into the parliament building with a boyish grin and a cap that made him look very young. I assume he will pass muster. Technocrats is what they are looking for, not politicians. This is funny coming from members of parliament, all of them politicians, several of whom, I suspect, have, as we say it in Holland, butter on their head (which means you have to stay out of the sunlight).

We are beginning to watch the weather in the US, especially the weather in Atlanta and Boston on the 23rd. With snow storms on the eastern seaboard I am reminded of the risk of trying to stick to a schedule when flying in and out of Boston in the middle of the winter. We are asking everyone to keep their fingers crossed, as we are doing too.