Sylvia's Journal

It seemed that I was wearing the Afghan equivalent of hot pants today. I discovered this when I alighted from the car in front of the ministry of health, after my colleague made a comment about women and pants. It took a while to sink in and then I suddenly felt very naked in my mid-calf length dress.

Women were casting fleeting glances at my bare half calf and exposed ankle and men were looking, smiling and then looking away. Unfortunately there was no turning back as I was heading in for a meeting. I tried to bend my knees a bit to bring the hem of my skirts at least an inch or so lower.

This transgression was far from my mind when I put on the dress in the morning. Next time I will have to wear it with some leg covering underneath. I am not sure leggings will be acceptable, so maybe it is back to pants. This is how I had to dress as a little girl in 2nd grade in the middle of the winter: a skirt or dress with pants underneath. I hated it because I thought I looked stupid. I am less interested in looking fashionable now and I am slightly intrigued that my bare ankles and calves might be objects of desire.

The mountains around Kabul were crisp and clear all day today after a night of rain in the city and snow higher up. They looked beautiful and made me want to go for a hike. Of course hiking is out of the question. Between threats of kidnappings and mines, the most beautiful places will remain out of reach for now.

We are continuing to complete our new house with requests for small things like toilet brushes and salt and pepper shakers. Unlike back at home, we can’t just get into a car and drive to the shopping center to take care of everything once and for all. Axel made a trip out of the house with the cook, armed with a dictionary, since they can’t speak each other’s language. They are learning the names for food items and vegetables in each others’ language while filling up our refrigerator.

Our first houseguest will arrive on Wednesday and so we are trying to get his room ready with good lights, extension cords and heat while preserving our own privacy with some last minute purchases that will keep us warm without having to open our door to the diesel-heated hallway and adjacent rooms.

In the meantime at work I am trying to stay at the 30.000 foot level while juggling immediate needs of my own staff, our counterparts in the government and those who pay the bills at the 10 cm level. I am thoroughly enchanted by that challenge as I think it can be managed. This is the stretchy part of my assignment here as I get to put in practice all the coaching advice I have been delivering to senior managers around the world. It’s both a test and a confirmation of what it takes to get off the dance floor and stay on the balcony, as Ron Heifetz suggests to those in senior positions.

For the first time in my life I am looking down from the balcony to the action down below and am resisting the urge to head down there myself. It is not only a natural urge on my side, there is also a pulling that is going on, please come down! In the meantime I have been looking around me and notice that all the light switches are up here, not down below. How’s that for mixing metaphors!

We are now connected to the internet at home; one cable for now, a WAN arrangement that seems to work, although not as fast as the LAN arrangement in Guesthouse zero. Our little diesel stoves are keeping the house warm and toasty and either we are getting accustomed to the fumes or they are burning efficiently now.

While Axel was literally tending the diesel fires at home I started the week with our usual staff meetings, one with my own team and one with all the program managers. This included one in which we strategized about how we can assist the ministry of health now that Influenza A(H1N1) is here to stay for awhile. I was pleased to see how everyone is realizing that our project’s assistance is more in the realm of management and leadership than advice on technical matters. We also recognized that the government’s educational efforts about hygiene and protecting oneself appear to pay off: shaking hands is getting out of fashion, washing them is happening more and more; a good habit no matter what.

After a meeting at the ministry with the director general for health services, to talk about how we can best assist him, Ali and I drove across the river to a conglomeration of the ugliest Russian architecture you can imagine to meet with the Blood Bank team. We think we have found a unit of the ministry that shows leadership in action, from the director down to the cleaners. In the midst of all the architectural ugliness, all 5 stories of the Blood Bank’s working spaces were spic and span; a first impression of an institution that is run well and with great care.

While drinking endless cups of tea and munching on three kinds of mini Toblerone bars I watched before and after pictures on the chief’s computer that spoke for themselves. The staff that is participating in the leadership program had assembled in the training room, another immaculate albeit sparse meeting space. We have been asked to upgrade it and we probably will. Most of the people seated around the table were women, including the deputy chief. The boss is proud about his gender balance track record, and he should be, having so many professional women on staff and, more importantly, in positions of authority.

While waiting for our driver to pick us up Ali showed me around the grey and dilapidated concrete structures that housed various polyclinics: for eyes, for family planning, for drug counseling, for voluntary HIV/AIDS counseling, etc. The place was deserted; the day had ended, making it look even more ghostly and depressing. When we discovered that our car was stuck in traffic we ventured out into the street outside the polyclinic compound and walked among the vendors who were selling everything that is cheap. I love these rare ventures out into Afghan life as it gives me a chance to practice my Dari and have a taste of Afghanistan. Today this taste included corn roasted in a hot ash and salt mixture.

We moved into our new house. We brought the last load over at noontime and at 7 PM we were receiving our first guests, Janneke and Pia, from our old guesthouse .

The guards welcomed us, saying ‘mabrouk,’ the housekeeper dusted off the last sawdust from the closets, more or less, and the cook set to prepare our first lunch which we ate from our new 12 place-setting dinnerware. Unlike the Pakistani dinnerware at Guesthouse 0 with the gold paint that arcs in the microwave, our fine bone china from China is oven and microwave proof and actually quite lovely with a ginkgo leaf motif.

The silverware is solid German stainless steel with gold edges, also enough to sit 12 people down. It came in a polished wooden box with three drawers and includes several kinds of forks, spoons, knives and serving utensils. It did feel like the delayed wedding presents that I never had; never asked for at my first wedding (we requested donations to Amnesty International) nor for my (our) second wedding when we were already settled enough and had everything we needed.

The only thing missing are drinking glasses and so we sipped our inaugural wine, brought in from Dubai, from the tiny cobalt blue glasses that I bought two weeks ago in Herat.

The internet was not yet connected so we were out of touch with the rest of the world. It felt a little funny, having been so very connected all the time. It was probably a good thing as it kept me away from my computer. Instead I tuned the two ukuleles and enjoyed having a living room instead of being cooped up in our small bedroom which allowed two activities: sleeping or sitting at my desk computering.

And now our new life in Kabul can really start.

After a lovely breakfast at the Pelican cafe with the real French croissants, eggs and bacon, quiche and cafe au lait, we packed up most of our belongings and moved them to the new guesthouse.

We re-arranged the hideous furniture and moved one piece into the guestroom and another to the upstairs hallway. We unfolded the enormous kelim that Steve is letting us use until he leaves next June. It covers the machine-made carpets in the living room and looks perfect.

I arranged the Afghan living room mattresses in a way that is not entirely Afghan but makes for a very comfortable legless couch. The living room looks lovely and invites to lounging. That’s just what I have been waiting for.

The kitchen with our newlywed kitchen stuff was locked because the cook was off. We could peek in through the serving window and noticed that the refrigerator was placed in a way that more or less blocked access to the sink, especially for large people. My suggestion to put the fridge in a better place had clearly gotten lost in all the other repairs and re-arranging.

All the small diesel stoves were on full blast and the house was not only toasty warm but full of diesel smells. We suggested the guard turn all of them off; for one it was a very warm day and secondly, no one was staying in the house yet. Even the small, 7 by 7 feet room was being heated at full blast by a diesel heater that took up about one sixth of the room.

The guard, Abibullah, helped us move furniture and carry boxes and suitcases upstairs. It’s nice not to have to do that oneself. Us moving in also meant he had to remove the meager belongings of the guard and move these to the small guard house oustide.

After everything was unpacked we asked for a car to take us to downtown Shari-Nao, to the Herat restaurant that lies more or less between the latest two blast sites (Indian embassy and UN guesthouse). We had a late lunch consisting of the best kebabs, some spicy spinach, limp fries, creamy yogurt and green tea, followed by ice-milk for me, a kind of not so creamy icecream.

We called our friend Wazmah who lives around the corner but she was in the neighborhood of our guesthouse visiting our friend Razia Jan. Both took a taxi and joined us for a cup of tea at the end of our meal.

We talked about Razia Jan’s school for girls and listened to sad stories of way-to-young girls (11 years) being married of for a dowry consisting of 4 oranges. They are stories about domestic slavery and unimaginable poverty and cruelty to girls. But we also listened to inspiring stories of carpet weavers making finally a decent living and selling to an American market that can appreciate (and pay good $$s) for quality work, improving the lives of people who have otherwise little going for them.

And now I am sitting here, longing to be in my own house while listening to the call for prayer which echos between the mountains in the clear autumn evening sky. We don’t know the mosque situation near our new house and may be in for a surprise when we wake up to the 4:30 AM prayer call on Sunday or Monday morning.

We went for a visit to the new house yesterday morning, in between meetings (me) and naps (Axel).

We stopped at guesthouse 26 to pick up the TV from Brad who left in September. This caused a flurry of radio calls. Even if you are a trustworthy foreigner, you can’t just show up at a house and take a TV away. After the necessary signatures in logbooks they let it go and we moved the TV to our new house.

At guesthouse 33 we found the cook and various workers and guards busy with installing, moving, more buffing and polishing. Only the refrigerator was still standing outside on the terrace; all the kitchen cabinets had been moved in place and the kitchen floor was about to be installed.

We are like newlyweds after the party is over. The dining room cabinets were filled with kitchen stuff of the kind you would get at a wedding: food processor, thermos flasks, a box with a complete set of pans, silverware, dinnerware, etc. I could tell that the cook was anxious to move everything into the kitchen and start cooking on the brand-new stove. All these expenses are, in a way part of the Quick Impact surge to win hearts and minds. I am sure that the heart and mind of our cook is already won, plus that of all the other laborers in and around our house.

The curtains were installed over the white cotton cloth that covers all the windows. The result of this is that, in a way, there are no windows and you cannot look inside out or outside in. Part of this cover up is to catch shattering glass but it is also to protect me from the eyes of the male workers in and around the house or them from catching glimpses of me. It’s a modern variation of purdah but I do plan to roll the cloth up and let some real light come in. I just have to be aware of my state of (un)dress.

After that Axel went for lunch while I continued what would be a very long day with an afternoon meeting at USAID. It is very hard to get into the embassy compound as is to be expected. The security contractors outside the outer perimeter change all the time and so there never seem to be standards operating procedures. This time, after waiting for about 20 minutes by the entrance we were let in but my name was missing from the list (no spontaneous meetings here). Luckily an official (as shown by the ID card on a lanyard) came to get us and I was let in. From leaving our office to getting seated at the conference table takes over an hour.

After that Steve and I participated in a conference call with Boston in a quarterly ritual to check on money matters. We hovered over a cellphone speaker and I listened to a kind of conversation I have never in my 23 years been part of. On the Cambridge site contracts, finance and admin people get a chance to ask questions (or chastise us as the case may be, not this time) to make sure all project transactions are transparent and in line with rules, regulations and contract requirements.

I was only listening in, not contributing, because I am still learning this financial and contract management language, while wondering how the hell financial and operations managers can see order into what is a process of enormous complexity and constant flux, with dollars going in and Afs and dollars going out (such as paying for all our wedding gifts).

All the while Axel was sitting in my office trying to get to his email in a system that doesn’t know about Macs. It’s good I liberated him from that frustration to take him home, and myself, after another 11 hour workday.

At home I was too pooped to blog, hence the late posting; instead we joined our housemates eating in front of the TV watching the BBC interview Kai Eide explain the removal of some 600 UN workers from Kabul. I was surprised how little this bothered me. We are just settling in, and leaving is very far from our minds.

While I was sitting in a basement meeting room in the center of Kabul, comparing notes on work with colleagues working in other health projects, to see if we were overlapping or leaving holes, Axel landed, as planned, at Kabul International Airport.

My colleague Steve picked him up because I couldn’t; being the token woman in an all male meeting, as is so often the case, sometime I am also the only foreigner. It can be an advantage.

At the head of our basement meeting room was a large plastic banner that indicated that this place was also the meeting place of Toastmasters International’s Afghan Chapter, founded in April 2008. That is good to know; I always recommend people who want to learn to speak in public to join this group and so now I know there is a place to send them to in Kabul.

Earlier in the morning I attended another photo op with the same cast of characters: the US ambassador and the minister of health. This time security was even tighter than during the previous event on Sunday; so tight that several Afghan dignitaries’ weren’t even let in. I feel sorry for American security people who have to work in this place where everyone looks like a Talib. Who’s to tell the difference between a good and a bad man?

I remember when I was first here in 2002 and found a poster with 24 passport pictures stuck to the front of each of our guesthouses to indicate who the guards were. The poster was not that different from the poster with the head shots of the nineteen 9/11 terrorist. Yet the people on our poster were there to guard us. How to know the difference?

The H1N1 tally is now up to 80 deaths and 800 confirmed cases and, who knows, how many undiagnosed. The ministry has declared a public health emergency, just like our president. I am watching the processes unfold and look for what works and what doesn’t work of the emergency preparedness planning that has been taking place for months now. It will certainly help me make a case for more attention to management and leadership.

And now a toast on being re-united with my best friend, a rare sip of authentic Dr. Beam, hidden in a cup of hot licorice tea.

Maybe it is axel’s imminent arrival that makes me wax poetic and wanting to write poetry after reading Bill Collins. And reading Collins came from finding out that the Obamas held a poetry reading event at their white house. This is how one thing leads to another.

Collins’ poem ‘Some day’ reminds me of a childhood pre-occupation that I discovered much later I shared with my younger brother, and who knows how many other earthlings. It is (or rather was as it has stopped haunting me), the feeling that I am just a small puppet in a large play and that some giant (we don’t have to get religious about this) is looking at us ant like creatures scurrying around our small universe that we think so big, doing stuff that doesn’t matter on a cosmic scale.

The childhood image was always accompanied by a weird physical sensation of distancing – a sudden telescoping of the world into the infinite distance and me getting to be the size of a pinpoint, the space around me of cosmic proportions. The most salient part of the experience was always this telescoping which I haven’t heard anyone else talk about, not even my brother; but the notion that we are actors in some larger play I know I share with many.

I haven’t written any poetry lately but I know something is formulating itself in some part of my being. I have this image of me sitting in my new lemon ice living room, on the Afghan tushaq with my laptop – trying not to look at the hideous furniture because it might take the poetry away, or, the opposite, looking for a spot of beauty behind the ugliness that will unleash a torrent of poetic thoughts. Maybe.

Axel wrote me from Dubai after an Indian meal and a lassie. He is already foregoing beer when he doesn’t have to. A beerless existence is actually not all that bad for 6 weeks, I can testify to that. In another 6 weeks we will be returning to the US already, incha’llah, as they say here. Deo (or puppetmaster) volente.

The H1N1 virus is here for real. We are told not to use the word swine, this according to the WHO. We are to refer to the virus as Influenza A (H1N1) or, in Dari, eech yak ahn yak.

A website alerting the Afghan population tells us that: (1) All kindergartens, schools, vocational training institutes, higher education institutions will be closed for 3 weeks as of 2 November 2009 (will students here be happy or disappointed I wonder); (2) All gatherings in wedding halls, public baths (Turkish Baths), and other public indoor areas are forbidden (this will make for some unhappy brides, grooms, families, and most of all those in the business of weddings); (3) Indoor Sport Matches are forbidden; and (4) Greetings with hand shaking, hugging and kissing should be avoided.

The latter is already quite restricted here when you are not a close friend or part of the family. We are all trying to be more like the Japanese, bowing to each other or nodding with a hand on our heart. There are many habits to be broken, a good reminder that change is hard if you have to do it yourself and much easier if you can just tell others.

We had an all staff meeting to discuss health, hygiene and flu shots. It was done in Dari, including the slides, giving me plenty of opportunity to practice my reading skills and enlarge my vocabulary. I was happy to hear that alcohol-based hand sanitizers are OK for Muslims to use. I have a small bottle strategically placed on my desk for all sneezers, no matter what their religious persuasion, including myself.

In the meantime I am anxiously following Axel as he makes his way over here. I am using Flight Aware to track the plane from Atlanta to Dubai but after Gander it stopped tracking so I only followed him for about five hours into the 13 hour flight, a piece of information that has not changed in many hours. This in itself is a little scary. I had forgotten what it feels like to have loved ones in planes, being the one that is usually in a plane myself.

I hope to see an email from him from Dubai to put my mind at ease. It’s nice to know he is near.

Today I went for a visit to the new house, khana nao, aka khana si-o-seh (33). In one week much had changed. I found an army of MSH staff and contractors cleaning and buffing the place. Only the kitchen was not done yet but the new cabinets were waiting outside to be put in next to a brand new American size refrigerator.

The living room is multi-cultural: not quite my taste of shiny dark wood couches and chairs with a Chinese motif, made in China or made by Chinese people in Pakistan (everything here comes from China or Pakistan it seems), on one end of the room and the locally produced Afghan tushaq mattresses waiting for their covers on the other side of the room. The Chinese furniture is for people with bad knees while the Afghan ‘furniture’ is for people with flexible and supple knees.

A stylish dark wood dining room set is the center piece in the dining room. This is for the weak-kneed people, while the rest can eat off the floor in the living room, Afghan style, from a plastic cloth spread on top of the brand-new carpet. The cook and housekeeper were already on board and buffing their own places in the back of the house. Everyone was all smiles when I came to inspect and I felt a bit like the English landholder madam who comes home to her estate and is welcomed by all the staff flanking the entrance. It wasn’t quite like that but I am not used to have all these people laboring for me.

Back in the office we are preparing for major office swap moves as some projects are expanding and re-arranging reporting relationships which requires much back and forth consultations on a variety of options. I am also mentally preparing for the departure of half the senior management team, leaving me the most senior technical staff in place, side by side with the deputy who is a master of operations. I will be involved in my first financial management consultation call with Headquarters – talking about matters of millions and financial affairs I have successfully avoided in my career at MSH. That’s part of the stretch of this new job.

I am being let in on squabbles and jealousies between government officials, with fairly senior people taking me into confidence, even traveling all the way over from the ministry to our outskirts office. I am a little guarded about these confidences as it is risky to take sides and get pushed into one camp or another. I know that all the information I get is filtered and incomplete.

I received the Obama cloth from Ghana that made its way from Ghana to Addis to Cambridge to Kabul and is now decorating a table in my office (note the fresh box of tissues). Everyone who comes in gives Obama a pat on the cheek, encouraging him to keep inspiring everyone despite the Afghan and Iraqi messes we are all in.

How is it that all the tissue boxes are empty at the same time? A cosmic alignment of some sort? I have never been in a place where there are so many tissue boxes, one on every horizontal surface. How can they all be empty at the same time? These are the important matters with which I occupy myself after yet another 11 hour workday.

Working long days is easy when there is no one waiting at home and reading and thinking is pushed to the outer edges of the day because in between there are meetings and ceremonies to attend. Today there was another hajji vaccination photo op, this time with the minister and the US ambassador himself, the top man, as opposed to the other 3 ambassadors that our country has posted here.

On our way to the ministry I realized I had forgotten my ‘chadoor’ (or ‘doekje’ as we Dutch girls call it) – this of course was a problem given that I would be in the presence of excellencies, media and hajjis, and I don’t want to offend or distract from the importance of the photo op. And so we stopped by the side of the road and my boss jumped out and got me a small scarf, the one that gets knotted under one’s chin. It made me look like a Russian babouchka, but it did the trick and can now serve as a large handkerchief.

We listened to speeches while tea and cake was served by our own personnel that we had brought along for the occasion – an unusual form of technical assistance. When the ceremony was over the male and female vaccinators did their job (of vaccinating). I couldn’t see the poor hajjis, male and female, who had been carefully selected to get vaccinated in front of the excellencies with all the media in attendance, shooting (video) and snapping (pictures). All this news will appear in the invisible newspapers and on TV. It will bracket the not so heartwarming announcement from Karzai’s rival that he is pulling out of the race, leaving everyone wondering, what now?

In the meantime foreigners are being evacuated left and right as the aftershocks of the UN guesthouse attack ripple on. Unlike us, they are working and living in the area where the attacks took place and their headquarters are worried. These working and living spaces are far away from where we are ensconced in our ordinary looking houses that are blended into middle class neighborhoods. Our office complex is a good neighbor, not a magnet for dark forces as the downtown expat places are.

Our house is nearly fixed up, getting ready for Axel’s arrival. The wall to wall carpet has been installed, the walls painted (“Lemon Ice”), the security fortifications made, the blast film put on the windows, the new water heaters put in, wired for internet in every room, the wall in the back extended by another four feet and a safe haven under the stairs.

Today I had to select the material for the curtains and the tushaqs (the traditional mattresses that serve as couch, bed and dining room ‘chairs.’) The samples I was given to choose from were hideous, one even more than the other. I picked the least hideous two fabrics (still hideous in my book) that probably don’t go at all with the lemon ice paint on the wall, but I was in a hurry and the choice was presented as a life or death one. It is such a shame that in a place where the old furniture and textiles are beautiful beyond description I am to choose from such ugly things. At least it is not our permanent house for ever and we know there is a much more beautiful place waiting for our return.