Sylvia's Journal

We are no longer going for our weekly airing around Habibia highschool. Lately the guards wouldn’t let us in. A new arrangement has been made with the Ghazni Olympic stadium. It is the place where supposedly adulterous women (women who had been raped I suspect) were stoned to death and men executed while people watched from the bleachers, during the Taliban days. It is also the stadium where we watched a bushkazi game 31 years ago.

Now it looks like an innocent and run down old stadium. It’s better than Habibia because it is protected from the street and we are just about the only people there except for the ultimate frisbee team and a few people practicing boxing. When you walk up the bleachers you can walk around the stadium and look out into the city: a lovely Moghul type of mosque on one side and what looks like the Afghan cousin of the Air and Space museum, the poor cousin, on the other side.

We joined Steve on his weekly Chicken Street outing for a few very specific items which completes the Christmas shopping.

We had invited a few people over for dinner, a young Afghan midwife who is going to study public health in Dhaka, her brother who is my friend on facebook and two colleagues from MSH.

Although we have a refrigerator full of dishes that the cook prepared for the weekend, Axel was intent on cooking himself. He had bought some cans of various beans. When we returned home from our walk and shopping expedition we realized we did not have a can opener. We asked the guards how they do this and they indicated they open cans with a knife. Axel preferred something a little safer. We also wanted to serve a spinach salad but did not know how to wash the spinach given that we are not supposed to drink the water. We are wondering how the cook has been washing (or not) the vegetables that we eat raw.
When we forget to buy something or missing critical things like a can opener and bleach (to use for washing the spinach) we can’t just go back to the store; it requires calling the transport office and asking for a car, even if the store is a quick and easy walk down the street.

The driver didn’t understand why Axel couldn’t just use a knife to open the cans; and why he needed bleach (‘white maker’ in Dari) was entirely beyond them, but he insisted and they took him to a local grocery store, while I made another Dutch apple pie since we have too many apples and the previous one was a great success.

It was nearly as if we were living on our own and taking care of ourselves, bleaching, cooking, cleaning; only the noises that come from the guards at the back of our house, and the low planes droning overhead remind us that we are someplace else.

It’s getting cold now in the morning and there is, according to Axel, hoarfrost on the ground: tiny solid depositions of water vapor from saturated air which occurs when the temperature of the surface is below freezing. It occurs generally with clear skies. This reminds me of flying: rime ice is not a good thing when you are flying; I learned that from my private pilot exam book which is better than learning from experience.

I am still programmed to look up at the sky when I hear a small plane going overhead. I can’t help myself. I miss flying and wonder whether there will be any time to fly during my short stay in the US.

We received our passports which probably meant that a threat was made to go public with the petty bribery attempts. It seems that the threats and the giving in are part of a ritual that happens over and over again. Someone must be thinking that one day the trick will work. It is of course the big bribe cases that tend to be more successful and go unpunished. Even though the major of Kabul is indicted he still goes to work every day. Some heavyweight must be protecting him and publicity apparently made no difference. Power always wins.

While I was trying to tie various loose strings together, Axel has started his Christmas vacation now that the language school has closed. He went into town for some Christmas shopping, something I don’t particularly like to do. I am enjoying living in a Christmas free zone, although there are signs of Christmas here and there. I did receive my first Christmas gift (a local candy called Antique Gaz) today from one of my (female) staff with a real Christmas card attached. Since this is not a local holiday I was very much touched by this gesture.

Now that everyone around me seems to have been through one form of flu or another I am afraid it is my turn. I can say in Dari that my throat hurts and ask for salt to gargle. I am drinking copious amounts of hot water which is a little problematic given the dearth and state of most female bathrooms. Luckily it is weekend now and I can sleep long and late and have my own bathroom, two actually, close at hand.

We had our conversation about the American counter-insurgency strategy (COIN) and our position on working with the military, something people in Boston want to know about. I enjoyed the conversation because there are so many stories. I always used to tell the young women I mentored that they should make sure they put all the stories they hear in an imaginary backpack that they should be carrying along all the time. Each new story should be carefully wrapped and placed in the backpack. One day you will need it. Maybe this is why older people have back problems: too many stories.

We listened to the quarterly report presentations of our colleagues and I was struck about the difference with the quarterly reports I listened to only 3 months ago, right after I got here. People may say that capacity building is a slow process but I see people improving in leaps and bounds.

After lunch we left to see the minister of health to talk about one of my primary responsibilities: strengthening leadership at the very top of the institution. Such conversations are always delicate because they have a premise embedded in them that something is wrong at the top. Not everyone at the top is willing to hear that. I had prepared a brief note that spelled out some of the special conditions that make leading at the very top so challenging.

We arrived in the now familiar room, taking our seats behind those who were in audience. Over a period of about 15 minutes people came and went, papers got signed, and there was much talking (mostly in Pashto and Dari) and smiling and handshaking. When people in uniform came in and seated themselves behind us my heart sank because I thought ‘there goes the intimate conversation!’ But then, as fast as they came, they left again.

Finally we were alone with the chief and only his assistant in attendance, pen in hand with a blank piece of paper for notes. When we had made it clear why we were there the assistant was dismissed (“I am sure you have much work to do!”) and we could finally start our intimate conversation about the difficult challenges of leading at the very top. We talked for over an hour and left with doors wide open for new beginnings (after the new cabinet is voted in by Parliament), building the top team, reflecting on learnings and travelling to health facilities in the periphery that are struggling. The work with the top team is the central piece of my job and so far, after three months here, I had not made much progress.

Whether the doors will remain wide open until I come back from Holland remains to be seen but we have passed the first barrier (to get an audience and be heard) and the next ones will be smaller. I consider this my Christmas present, which was augmented with a silver lapis lazuli ring from his Excellency himself and wishes for a merry Christmas and a happy new year. Today was a good day, a very good day.

We started the day with the blast in Wazir Akbar Khan, more or less where we were driving the other day and where we felt rather creepy; so we were right. Luck here is to some degree being somewhere else. We feel quite safe in Karte Seh, far from the Wazir area.

The day ended with shots that were fired on our street while we were having dinner. The guards rushed out with their walkie-talkies and we waited inside for what would happen next. Ten minutes later the guards knocked on our door with big grins on their faces saying something that we understood as ‘firing in the air for joy,’ their movements confirmed our interpretation. Such joy!

In between those two fiery events Axel learned more Dari and I prepared for all sorts of meetings: one with our colleagues here to create a viewpoint about MSH in Afghanistan, something that is needed because of the many requests on the US East Coast for such an opinion. This meeting will happen tomorrow and is somewhat of a challenge: trying to get highly opiniated older (white) male experts to produce one voice together is going to be tricky but we’d better as otherwise the Head office will produce the voice.

We are also getting ready for our quarterly review meetings (called During Action Reviews, DARs here) and the resubmission of our technical proposal for a project extension that will bring us to September 2011. And finally there is the weekly meeting with our donor located not that far from where the blast was.

On the way to our meeting my boss told stories about the Taliban days which include all sorts of variations on highway robberies, always by men with guns and always with the thought that this is the last minute of his life, and then the story takes a turn for the better. He tells the stories with a grin; they are funny in hindsight but not then and I am reminded of the resilience of people here. I think about my work experience at MSH headquarters with a punctured tire as the worst experience.

Our USAID meeting was long, making today another 11 hour day, but interesting. I could see our counterparts in USAID listen intently to what implementation of great ideas looks like on the ground: messy and not according to plan. While we are talking stories emerge about petty attempts at corruption (like: I will give you a travel advance if you promise to hire my cousin’s car or stay in my aunt’s guesthouse; or, I will hold up this bureaucratic transaction in the hope that I can get a small piece of the pie.)

Our own passports are in a holding pattern for similar reasons, at the passport office. We have a few more days before we will really need them. Our security man laughs about it as it is an old ritual until someone says they will tell USAID or bring in our own warriors. That always breaks the hold, we are told. This is another one of those trust falls.

We talked with Pia over the phone to check out the rumor that the DAI offices are targeted (close to the Kabul blast and another in Paktya where local DAI staff got killed). She feels safe in Jalalabad’s DAI compound but people are on alert. It was a very bad day, she confirms. We are relieved she is OK. People text each other in such circumstances.

While Sita is radicalizing in Copenhagen and demanding a different kind of Christmas, Tessa is busy preparing for an old-fashioned Christmas for this family that she thinks hates Christmas (not true), and we live amidst diesel fumes contributing to Afghanistan’s carbon footprint in exchange for staying warm.

Watching Copenhagen from here is a different experience altogether. Given what is happening (or not happening) in Afghanistan, global climate problems are conceptually remote when you wonder about when things will blow up again, try to stay warm or recognize that there is only one way to get home for Christmas.

Consultant Ankie has left and we are home alone again; the next consultant who will be rooming with us, Susan, won’t be here until early January after our return. Ankie has left us a ‘kaasschaaf’ (cheese slicer) and a huge chunk of Dutch cheese. It was nice having her here and speaking Dutch again. I already miss her.

In the meantime Axel is beginning to build up a network of contacts on his own which includes a surprising number of Dutch people. Tonight he is dining with Martijn and/or Mathijs in their heavily fortified compound in a part of Kabul where many foreign contractors hunker down as if under constant siege.

We are still waiting for the announcement of cabinet positions and hear rumors of tense conversations behind the scenes. Although most people believe the minister of health will remain, nothing can be taken for granted. Whether he leaves or stays we think that there will be occasions for using words such as ‘new beginnings.’ I also hope that one of such new beginnings will be a focus on senior leadership work after I get back – one area I am very keen on because, as one of my staff said earlier, ‘we are busy painting the ceiling under a leaky roof.’

This morning I walked into our Herat conference room where we have our program managers’ meeting each Sunday at 9 AM. I found several of my colleagues standing quietly, looking somber, jaws tight, in their dark clothes. I quipped, ‘hey, what’s the matter, did someone die?’ and immediately regretted my words because that is exactly what had happened.

One of our colleagues had lost his father-in-law to a stroke; another lost a cousin over the weekend at a wedding when something when awry in the handling of guns used to shoot in the air out of joy, an odd habit that is rampant in parts of the Arab world and here as well; and the third and fourth were deaths that occurred during a house search in Laghman Province, by coalition forces; the kind of deaths that can quickly lead to more deaths to revenge the first ones. The relative of these two is one of our housekeepers, who walked around all day with eyes red from crying.

And here I stood, the only female, the only one wearing something other than grey/brown/black, with my brightly colored Bangla scarf and a smile on my face that quickly froze. Deaths is a lot closer in this society that it is back home but that doesn’t make each loss any less painful. I had learned how to say ‘my condolences’ in Dari but of course had forgotten the words at that moment. Actually, words aren’t all that important at such a time. We can speak with our eyes and hand gestures (hand on heart), and the response comes in the same form.

Although there was a whole day that followed, this sad opening of the day stayed with me and made other things less important.

Axel was not well enough to go to Dari school this morning so I took his place. The lessons are given in a nondescript house in our neighborhood, a low profile operation. It is within walking distance but we are not allowed to walk and instead drive there in a roundabout way because the car cannot cross all the open gutters between our house and the school.

Inside, the school is a well organized outfit with tiny class rooms, all heated by small diesel and wood stoves and pots of tea always available. After each hour the housekeeper rings a small bell and the students appear from behind closed doors to huddle around the stoves with a cup of tea in their hands.

There were Susan and Robert from the international school, an older couple. Susan lived here as a child and we discovered we have a common acquaintance, someone else who lived here as a child; a young woman from Canada who has worked for over a year with a women’s education organization where no English is spoken and has taken some time off to catch up on grammar. Another young woman from Colorado is doing the 6 week (daily) intensive.

I had two different female teachers, one hour with each. You can request various programs depending on why you are learning Dari. I choose conversation. We asked each other the kinds of questions women ask each other: married, children, house, work, etc. I tried to answer in my best Dari. I realized that I have entered a new level when I dreamed in Dari sentences and woke up with Dari words on my tongue. This was probably triggered by my dinner immersion from last night. I can now have a simple conversation, however imperfect, with an adult speaker who speaks slowly (not with a child). This was the goal I set for myself by December 31. It looks like I on track.

The rest of the day was catching up on work that I have been pushing ahead of me into the weekend. The weekend is nearly over and there is no room to push the work any further because of deadlines, especially since the week that starts tomorrow is the last full week before our departure.

One of the deadlines was a proposal for the Organization Behavior Teaching Conference in new Mexico, next June; the title of my proposal is ‘More than Money and Arms.’ The wish I sent along with that proposal is that it gets accepted and my boss and I attend together; this requires he gets a visa which, for older Afghan males, is a major stumbling block. Incha’allah, they say here, if God wants it, it will happen.

We are dipping deeper into Afghan society while staying firmly connected to our Dutch and American roots. Axel had two interviews today, both more informational interviews than a job interviews, important for purposes of networking. Someone out there, I trust, needs just what Axel has to offer.

While Axel was talking business in the Kabul Coffee House Ankie and I picked Janneke up at the old German Club and went for real coffee in the Wakhan Café, spending a delicious two hours of speaking only Dutch – a rare treat. My re-immersion in Dutch short-circuits my English now and then when I keep talking Dutch to people who stare blankly back at me.

We left Ankie and Janneke to their shopping and made our way to the Russian quarter called Mikroyan for lunch with the aunt and uncle of my brother Reinout’s doctoral assistant at the university of Tilburg, a transplanted Afghan who had invited us to become part of his family. Armed with a dictionary and in broken English we talked our way through a spectacular lunch with grandma, daughter, son in law and grant child.

The family story was sad, as so many others, one brother who disappeared during the mujahideen times and, after much waiting, was finally declared dead, but apparently there was never a body. The picture of a handsome young man in uniform eternalizes him, never growing old, like his brother-in-law. The other handsome young man in the frame is the brother who left with his wife and small children and ended up in Holland. All that grandma has left with her in Kabul is one daughter and her husband and small child.

After lunch Axel had another interview in a part of the city that gives us the creeps. It is where many foreigners and their offices hide behind barricades, blast walls, sand bags and heavily armed guards in bullet-proof vests. This is where MSHers used to live and where we could walk freely seven years ago, with very little outward signs of a city under siege. At the time it wasn’t. Our current quarters are much like that except for the prohibition on walking.

While he had his interview with a Dutch friend of Pia, I had a heavenly Thai oil massage that was badly overdue. After the massage I killed time till Axel was done in one of the local supermarkets where I bumped into the minister of health who was shopping and wished me a merry Christmas. I usually see him on official duty when he is always surrounded by armed guards and people with wires around their ears, as if he was a president. It was comforting to see him as an ordinary citizen, shopping.

Christmas is arriving here and trees can be bought. The German club has a tree with light outside the dining room.

After a brief moment at home we headed out again for another social event, a dinner in the fancy Intercontinental Hotel offered by my boss to our man in Herat and his government counterpart, the provincial health director who had also brought his wife and 5 year old daughter. I was surprised, and then again not so surprised, when I was asked to sit at another table with the wife and daughter. This mirrored my experience in Herat where I was asked whether I wanted to spend the evening with the wife or join the men. Then I joined the men but now I was prepared with my dictionary. I took it as yet another impromptu Dari lesson and learned a few words more and made a new little friend in Herat.

The drive to the office this morning was a treat for the senses: the smells that came from the warm Uzbeki naan stacked on the front seat and the snow on the mountains surrounding the city. I had to pinch myself that this was real and I had that giddy feeling again – I am really living in Afghanistan!

I like Thursdays because the week is coming to an end thereis the promise of sleeping tomorrow and take a break from the intensity of work. And this Thursday was extra special because we had planned our first social event in our new house.

This first dinner party was catered by our housekeeper and cook who stayed late to leave us a spotless kitchen and every dish cleaned and put away. With some technical assistance from the cook from guesthouse zero they had been busy for the last few days preparing a spectacular meal and presented us with a table overflowing with goodies.

Our guests were Afghan-American, Afghan, American and Dutch, some people knew each other but others had never met. Two people escaped the US embassy compound by emphasizing the work relationship building aspect of our dinner party. This was only the 2nd time in 6 months that they had been let out of the US bubble, apart from their quarterly leave. They also never have a chance to eat Afghan food as strange as that may sound.

I had invited one of the general directors from the ministry who came with his wife, also in the ministry and his young son. We practiced pointing at body parts in Dari and English, while his wife and I conversed in halting English and Dari sentences. In the meantime Axel learned a lot about traditional Afghan herbal medicine. It was good we had several Afghan-Americans in the room who were called to find the right word now and then in either language for non-everyday expressions.

We hatched plans to try out a hammam sometimes with the ladies and also plot another escape for our new US bubble friends. All this stands in sharp contrast to what everyone in the US thinks about living here. It’s very nice!

Our weekly meetings with USAID and our weekly call with Boston make Tuesdays and Wednesdays into 11 hour days. The pace is intensifying. We are gearing up for gearing down. In 13 days we will be in Dubai, on our way home via Atlanta. Before that much has to be finished or started.

The joy of today was seeing our provincial health advisors (PHAs) during their quarterly meetings at our main office. I have known some of them for some time. The first time I saw them in a meeting together was more than one a half year ago. Many are still there; one has become a provincial health director, the representative of the minister of health at the provincial level. He has taken everything he learned during his time as a PHA to heart (or Herat for that matter). His PHA tenure was like training wheels on a bicycle. He is now running a tight ship with a wonderful team, one of our model provinces.

Our job is capacity building which is hard to measure in the short time spans that evaluators give us. And so, more often than not, people count the number of workshops given. This is something that irritates people who are looking for impact and it sometimes irritates me. But what I am seeing here is the cumulative effect of many workshops given to the same people over time. This is usually something that is frowned upon: why train the same people over and over when others should also have a chance?

What I am seeing more clearly now is that by giving many workshops to many different people we dilute the impact to such an extent that there is little to show years later. The provincial management support strengthening program on the other hand is highly focused: a small group of people is trained, coached, mentored, ‘refreshed’ as they call it here, over and over. It may be a significant investment (although compared to the military bill it is small change) but the payoff is visible now.

We did after action reviews with them to see how the planning for health emergencies has paid of with the arrival of H1N1 – it looks good. We are also looking for what was there to learn from the handover of contracts from one NGO to another, not an easy task because there is money at stake, livelihoods, and reputations. Once again, given what could have gone wrong, I am deeply impressed to see how much didn’t.

But maybe the best thing is that the facilitation techniques that I and other colleagues first modeled years ago, to an audience that knew only about powerpoints, and bad ones at that (too many, too many words per bullet, bullets per page and letters flying in from left and right) are now part of their repertoire. They have become facilitators. That is probably the most rewarding thing of all. The confidence is enabling them to be at ease with soliciting opinions from the group, even when they are controversial or counter to their own views. As far as that part of my previous role as consultant is concerned I have worked myself out of a job.

My new job is very different and requires me to practice what I have been preaching for a long time. That it is all actionable knowledge I can now say with certitude as a practitioner. I have my eyes (as well as the eyes of my superiors) set on the most senior ranks in the ministry – a place that generates much fear although few people actually realize that. It’s a journey into the unknown past a set of doors that are barely open.