Sylvia's Journal

Today’s class at SOLA was on culture. We did a cross cultural simulation. Three culture groups form the basis of the simulation, red, green and blue, and each culture has its own rules. I had asked the girls to come dressed in either red, blue or green clothes, equally divided. It was a colorful gathering at the start of the class.

We talked about culture and then each culture group got used to its rules of behavior: analytic, reserved and distant greens, loud, impatient and active reds, and harmonious close knit blues. In the groups they had to construct a tower out of straws, cupcake holders, bamboo skewers, pipe cleaners, chocolates and candy; after a while I started to move people from one culture into another, then we watched what happened; then more moves.

The girls reflected on what it was like to move into another culture where they were not wanted and related that to their own experiences of leaving a place of comfort for one of discomfort.

I had invited an Afghan family I am quite close to to come along, a father and his two daughters. The father is a journalists and works in the parliament. He was so happy to see these confident girls, learning to become leaders in an Afghanistan that some don’t think is possible (but we think it is); he offered to take them on a tour of the parliament one day. Two of the girls want to become journalists and were happy to talk shop with him.

Afterwards we visited my friend Baba Ted who was celebrating his 70-something birthday with four candles: one for SOLA, one for an new venture to get European and American companies to license Afghans to manufacture their products and sell in the region, one for an organization called Chera Ne (Why not?) that will do things people think impossible and the fourth one an environmental organization in Bamiyan – the best part of all these ventures is that they will all be led by young well educated Afghan women.

My Afghan family invited me to a mantou lunch; by the time I arrived the whole family was involved in making the Afghan dumplings, with dad preparing the thin sheets of pasta using an Italian pasta maker mounted on a filing cabinet placed in the middle of the living room. It was quite a production. A large triple decker steamer barely held the large quantity of mantous; I couldn’t imagine we would eat them all. Soon I discovered that Afghans can eat enormous amounts of dumplings and the supply was soon exhausted.

After lunch we watched a video of the celebration offered to honor boys 40 days after their birth, the family’s first grandchild. Girls don’t get to have such celebrations. But luckily, in this family with two girls and one boy, girls are treated alike with boys and their education is as important.

In the evening I brought three of my newer housemates to Razia’s house for another evening of great conversation and interesting people and good food. We watched Razia on the 2012 CNN heroes celebration in LA and checked out her new children’s book (Razia’s Ray of Hope); so this day was all about bringing out confidence in girls and then letting them change the world for the better. Yeah for SOLA, yeah for the Zabuli school for girls!

While I was waiting for my ride home today I conversed in Dari with two of the drivers. They wanted to know more about my ankle. The Dari word I have been using, I learned today, refers to the ankle bone that sticks out on the side of the foot. I looked up the word for joint in my dictionary, not sure if it refered to the kind of joint one smokes or the body part. I took the risk of using it and immediately the driver indicated that he loves to gnaw on (cow) joints. At least I got the right word. The gnawing piece made me laugh and I assured the driver that there was nothing yummy about my joint in its permanently inflamed state.

The mornings remain good; I can walk without crutches, even without my boot, which I am not supposed to do but there’s no pain. But by the end of the day I am very sore – the stand-up facilitation and the walking around are the culprits of course but I can’t figure out what to do about it. Seated facilitated may be possible but I can’t get used to it.

I am halfway the Organizational Learning workshop – it’s a learning experience for all of us. Even though my colleagues here understand the notion of learning as a means to stay abreast of developments and draw from each other’s’ experiences, there are strong forces and long standing habits that make it hard to imagine what actions one could take to, for example, bring about something like ‘leadership that reinforces learning.’ I think this one is the most difficult in all the five workshops held so far in Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. The Afghans have decided they will ask the Ethiopians what they are doing about it.

There is a lot of wishing and moralizing about what leaders should do – all directed I am sure at particular people who cannot be named so the conversation happens at two levels – the general ‘should’ as applied to all leaders and the wishes that some particular ones can be coerced to change. I suggest they start looking at themselves as many of them are leading teams. They think they are doing well – although they realized they may not. The problem is that there are no feedback loops that go up the hierarchy, only down.

To create a little diversion from work, which has a tendency to take over one’s life here, we went to the last of the performances in ANIM’s winter concerts. ANIM is Afghanistan’s National Music Institute which was founded by an Australian Afghan and keeps going thanks to the combined efforts of various embassies and passionate musicians from around the world. We listened to Jazz and Blues and Ragas played by young Afghan boys and seasoned professionals from India, Latin America, Europe, Australia, Canada and the US – all bound together by their love of music. The closing piece seamlessly fused jazz and ragas into a delightful mixture formed last night in the musicians’ guesthouse over a dinner of KFC (Kabul Fried Chicken) – or Kabul Fusion Chaos as the christened themselves.

Last night my head was spinning. I am working on three assignments, each requiring all my design skills. I can now put these to good use after having successfully convinced my colleagues and counterparts that trying something new is worth the perceived risks. Everyone is on board now and they have experienced the methods I bring. They can now judge for themselves rather than basing decisions on fear.

But last night I was wrestling with a formatting glitch in MSWord that I couldn’t master. I was preparing an agenda from facilitation notes originally developed in either Nigeria or Mexico. The table marked day 3 kept jumping to the head of the line, half overlapping day 1 and day 5 refused to come closer to day 4. I started this work at 7:30 PM and by 9:30PM I was none the wiser, after having created new tables from scratch and cutting and pasting. Eventually I created one separate document for each day and sent the whole darn thing to my Afghan counterpart. In my nearly three weeks here it is the first night I went to bed after 10:30 PM, very late for me. I was exhausted.

Today was better. I learned my lesson to not copy someone else’s design and then altering it. It’s an authentic design based on expressed needs and wishes, not some generic idea of what I/we at HQ think people should know. Progress!

We are 4 hours into the 12 hour Learning Organization workshop and maintain a good showing, 27 people came today, a slight loss over yesterday but at least 3 of our most senior staff were called out to meet with USAID. That trumps most other activities.

We reviewed the here, the there and what’s in the way when it comes to being a learning organization in Afghanistan. Three groups are trying to come up with concrete proposals to change deeply engrained behaviors – yet the willingness to look at those is encouraging. Everyone knows this will be hard but these are their ideas, not mine.

The last hours of the day we had people taste three methods aimed at learning from experience in the system: an After Action Review, a Before Action Review and Peer Assist; two colleagues each took one of those and took people through the steps, using the actual work that is being done here. Some good ideas came out of the exercise which I hope find their way into the plans.

Not unexpectedly there are few women in the group of participants but those who are there are not keeping quiet and their contributions are important, even though not always recognized as such. It’s a matter of perseverance and finding supporters.

The stand-up facilitation is hard on my ankle. It is sore and swollen when I get to the guesthouse. Judy has put several small bottles of water in the freezer and they serve as my icepack – a little hard to apply but with some ingenuity I can bind the bottle to my ankle where it stays as long as I don’t move.

In the meantime I have developed a tendinitis in my upper left arm, from the overload on my arm I assume. I progress in one place and I fall back in another. The tendinitis makes for uncomfortable sleeping, dressing, showering and in general, raising my left arm.

More guests arrived today, adding America/India and America/Nepal to the mix. Now all the chairs at the dinner table are occupied.

According to my rehab protocol, as of last Wednesday I am to put full weight on my left foot, but only when in the orthopedic boot. Yesterday evening I walked up the stairs without the help of my crutches. There was no pain. Buoyed by my progress I left for the office with only one crutch. I parked it against a wall and never touched it during the work day. I even went to the store without it. And for the first time I took my afternoon shower without the help of crutches or my plastic lawn chair.

The end of phase 3 (the ortho boot phase) is in sight! It is only now, in the evening, that my foot is a little sore.

After work one of my earliest leadership students came by the guesthouse to greet me. Later her husband joined her. It is one of the rare couples I have met here where man and wife share house and children chores together. Most women in my office, young and old, despite having worked hard all week in the office, are busy all weekend with household chores, helping their mothers or serving their husbands. When the come to work on Sunday again, it may feel like a respite from housework. But this husband cooks, cleans and washes and takes care of the children.

I interviewed her about her work that includes training volunteers to advocate, lobby and maybe even harangue legislators to pay attention to the impact on women of new legislation, including the impact when good legislation stalls somewhere in the political process. She is also heavily involved in getting civil society involved in the elections – making sure they are fair and transparent. This is a very big job in this country.

In the meantime Karzai continues to blow off the foreigners, especially the Americans and the Europeans with doctored videos and alleged eye witness reports that turn out to be years old. I am trying to ignore the pull into cynicism by focusing on the wonderful and courageous women and men in my Afghan life.

On Saturday morning, after a nice breakfast presided over by the number one cook, we headed to SOLA for Judy’s presentation about Chinese New Year which is next week. Judy had prepared a wonderful slide show and one of the SOLA students had recruited some 20 students to come to the lecture.

Laura and I sat on the side and learned as much about Chinese New Year as the girls. Judy’s main point was that you cannot learn a language outside its cultural context. Maybe that explains why my efforts over the years to learn languages such as Chinese and Japanese have not been very successful.

The girls concluded that the customs of Chinese New Year are not that different from New Year in Afghanistan: there are new clothes, gifts of money, family dinners and visits.

Judy had sprinkled Chinese words throughout her presentation, explaining the meaning of the characters and showing how to pronounce them. In unison the girls recited after her.

Judy explained the lunar calendar with a chart of the phases of the moon. I thought of how excited Faro would have been to see that. She also showed the animals of the lunar calendar and had covered the pig with a smiley face, recognizing that the animal is taboo here.

The girls learned that next year we enter the year of the horse. One girl had obviously studied the topic before the class and was able to explain why the Chinese use animals for their years. Consequently I learned a few new things as well.

After class Judy had to write every girl’s first and last name in Chinese characters. They proudly showed their papers to everyone who’d care to look while wishing each other a happy day or happy new year in Chinese. It was priceless. I will return next week for a class about culture. It will be Chinese New Year then and I will find out how much they remember.

The rest of the day was spent preparing for a corporate initiative that includes a workshop on becoming a learning organization.

At dinner I found three new guests had arrived: one colleague from MSH/Arlington who had only recently been evacuated from South Sudan, we’ll call him the hotspot guy; another from Holland so I can practice my Dutch and the third, on crutches like me, a woman whom I had met 8 years ago in Kabul when Sita and I facilitated the regional conference on Infectious Diseases.

Now, when we sit down for dinner or breakfast, the table is full and many more stories just flew in.

I had arranged for a full program for Friday, the last weekend of the consultants who are exploring options for the future of the medicine supply chain here in Afghanistan. We started the day with a visit to the ugly remains of what was once a beautiful palace at the end of Darulaman Avenue DarulAman Palace.

Unlike former visits we were allowed to ride up to the terrace on the southern side that now faces the new Parliament building which is still under construction. I don’t know what will happen with the huge dilapidated shell of the former palace, a stark reminder of the Muhajideen landgrab of Kabul. It’s not a particularly inspiring site for the parliamentarians once they move into their new home.

Next stop was the Kabul museum. It hasn’t changed all that much since I last visited it, some 3 years ago, except for the addition of statues that have been recovered through the committed effort of people patrolling the borders, those being alert in the international art trade circuit, archeologists who have turned piles of ceramic rubble into statues again and the staff of the Kabul museum who saved this rubble. The story of the Kabul museum is a great tribute to those who believe in the positive power of art.

I was happy to see many families with children and school children with notebooks copying text from the explanations that were given in Dari and English. The museum design still has a long way to go but its treasures speak for themselves, even if poorly displayed in cold rooms.

We piled back into our cars and drove through town to drive up Televisyon Hill, a high peak over Kabul where all the antennas and radio transmitters are, including the one that our guards and drivers use to keep us safe and in contact with each other at all times. It’s a rather ugly site, this forest of metal and concrete, but it does give one an amazing view of Kabul. During the day the view is hazy and the contours of the city hardly discernible. Now one knows exactly how big the city is, maybe 5 million, more than a tenfold increase since my first visit in 1978.

We returned to our guesthouse after stopping by Bresil Pizza for a large order of party pizza, half of which went to the guards and drivers. We showed our supply chain colleagues our guesthouse which is quite luxurious compared to where they are staying, one of the old personal homes still heated by petroleum stoves.

In the evening a smaller subset of the group went to the house of the fashion show organizer and we were able to fundraise at least a bit, with each of us returning with a piece of clothing and a donation to the school. We met several young professionals, a musician, a lawyer, an advisor to a deputy minister, a mining engineer, a vet, a journalist (most of them women) from Canada/Pakistan, Germany/Afghanistan, Germany/Holland, Singapore/Germany, Afghanistan, America/Afghanistan, and Maine. We added Sri Lanka/Australia, Danmark and US. It was quite the United Nations in that small room. All of these people are doing amazing work without all the protection and luxuries that we enjoy as members of a large and well-funded organization. They showed up in ordinary taxis, live in ordinary homes and have blended in well with Afghanistan.

We had front row seats to a violin solo by the young American director of the local music institute, enjoyed a fabulous meal and then paraded some of the clothes before we returned happy and exhausted to our respective guesthouses. It was a day with lots of filaments connecting us to each other, the past horrors of this place and 9/11 but also to the hope of a better future for this amazing country.

I tumbled into bed right after dinner yesterday when the first part of the strategic planning exercise was completed. At the beginning of the day I was able to facilitate without crutches but as the day wore on I returned first to one and then to two crutches. By the time I came home I was very sore. People around me chided me for not taking it easy. This, of course, is difficult for me. When I am on, I am on for 200%.

All day people worked collaboratively to discern the strategic directions. Once they were done, posted on the wall and we came to the final consensus check, a few outspoken individuals, with specific agendas jumped up and insisted that their issue, now subsumed under a larger heading, would be inserted as a separate objective or strategic direction, all by itself.

It’s a tricky dynamic to manage, especially when they make their plea in Dari and by the time you understand what they are saying, the horses are out of the barn. There were moments of total chaos, in Dari. My lonely English voice, as I hobbled in front on my crutches, had little force.

Luckily the chief disagreed with the alterations that violated the integrity of the process and removed the inserted text and we returned to what we had all agreed on, about 45 minutes later, long past closing time. The energy was high and people stayed without showing signs of wanting to go home.

I think the product is good, giving direction to the general directorate, to get its own house in order and to work at getting the political and hierarchical support it needs to fulfill its mission.

We will meet again in early February to tease out some actions that can be done, successfully, in the next 6 to 12 months, assign accountabilities and a rough agenda for the next few years. The challenge is to maintain a sense of movement and the excitement and energy we saw over the last two days.

And now it is the last day of the week, when the ministry is off. This means we can tend to our own affairs in all quiet, finishing things off, writing reports. I have a proposed a one page strategic plan. At first there was disbelief but some are warming up to the idea: front Dari, back English. I also need to turn my attention to my next assignment which starts Monday afternoon and occupy me for the rest of the week.

Day one of our strategic planning workshop is over. We started, as I had predicted (and planned for in my design), about an hour after the announced starting time. This time the late start was not entirely preventable as the president of the country was in the neighborhood for an official function. As a result the traffic in our part of the city had come to a complete stop for most of the morning. This meant that the cake for the tea break and the lunch food did not arrive as planned.

And so we skipped the morning break and then continued the afternoon program with empty bellies until the president had gone home and the road had opened and the food could come through.

I took the participants on an imaginary trip to the year 1398 (Afghan’s solar calendar, our year 2018) and let them dream and fantasize what was in place then, related to pharmaceutical affairs in Afghanistan, and what stood in sharp contrast with the current situation which we had explored earlier in the morning.

The event is essentially in Dari. I can follow some of the deliberations but not enough to facilitate on my own. One of my colleagues is my co-facilitator. He is learning on the job to facilitate a design that is totally new to him, but he is game. We practiced the guided imagery and then he got it. As I faded towards the end of the day, because one-legged facilitation is a little more challenging than the two-legged kind, he and Judy took over. I seated myself out of the line of sight, massaging my sore ankle which I had liberated from it boot.

Spirits were up when we closed the day. I know what we did was the easy part: restating what had already been stated a thousand times, namely the key conditions of the present that need to be addressed in order to get out of the doldrums, and dreaming about the future. Tomorrow will be more challenging as they need to commit to actions that will put wheels under their dreams.

We visited SOLA yesterday after work. I used to teach there every Thursday after work. It was a highlight of my week.

I was totally unprepared for the changes that had taken places since I left nearly two and a half years ago. I remember, in 2011, Axel coming home from his classes there with toes frozen. SOLA was running on a shoe string and sometimes the choice was between food and heat. At that time, volunteer teachers did whatever they wanted and the curriculum was rather loosely organized.

Now, after some very successful fundraising, SOLA is up and running and even working on formal accreditation with the ministry of education. There is now a computer lab, rooms for volunteer faculty (we met a few who had just arrived), an office and one classroom; the latter was now stocked with college type moveable desks.

As soon as we entered four young girls rushed forward to welcome us to SOLA and each introduced herself in excellent English. We learned later that one of them had only just arrived in September, not speaking a word of English.

The new drill at SOLA is that girls have to speak English with each other; clearly, it has paid off. We met a number of the girls who were very eager to speak with us. We stood (I sat) in one of the small dorm rooms, with its two bunk beds and a buchari. Every few minutes another girl knocked on the door and entered and each time I asked them, what did they want to be in the future and where were they from.

Judy and I found ourselves surrounded by future journalists, doctors, lawyers, scientists (put an end to cancer!), economists, the first female Afghan rock climber, a diplomat, even a pilot, in addition to peace, environmental and women’s activists. One young girl was learning Chinese on her own from google translation. She was thrilled to have Judy there who offered to come and teach Chinese whenever she is in Kabul.

We left with reluctance, it was all so very exciting and hopeful and wonderful; a counterpoint to the bad taste we all carried around in our souls from last week’s attack on La Taverna.