Sylvia's Journal

Things are speeding up and slowing down at the same time. Something interfered with our internet connection and I was told it has something to do with the weather in Hong Kong. Somehow our computers at the office think we are in Hong Kong (our Google homepage is in Chinese) while our computers when plugged in at home think they are in Germany. There is something to this notion of butterflies flapping their wings in one place of the world and storms raging in another.

Thus, the internet problems are slowing us down, albeit it only for awhile. As soon as the internet was repaired, at the end of the day, we were all inundated by a tsunami of emails. Things are coming over the transom so fast that I am having to abandon my discipline of ending the day with an empty inbox. The price for this is working at my computer until far into the evening.

The pace is picking up for an official event in Hirat. I am spelling the name of the city and province with the letter ‘i’ since the computer otherwise keeps changing the spelling to Heart; very annoying. A whole slew of very high level notables will open a new provincial health office in that city, a photo-op/ribbon cutting event that takes lots of time of many very senior people to organize. Since provincial health is part of my portfolio, Steve happily ceded his place to me for this outing.

There is an immutable core to the event, the official opening, which is highly orchestrated and requires endless briefing papers from us. Despite the internet problems all these have been delivered, except for one which I need to chase after tomorrow. Steve and I had to go to one of the guesthouses to send all these documents to the people who requested them.

In the meantime there is also a pedagogical event planned before and after the ceremonies that I have chosen to design, in order to stave off the ubiquitous power point presentation. I want to develop a cadre of people who can design events in more imaginative ways. I have my work cut out.

Greg, our hospital consultant who also knows about building houses that are save to live in (i.e, no electrical outlets in the shower stall, etc.) offered to do a safety audit of my new house. We visited the house and I noticed much progress on the rehabilitation. The grass has been cut, the rose bushes are in, the safe haven installed and a transparent film placed on all the windows in case they shatter. Greg pointed out things that need to be checked (like the septic system!), replacement of water heaters and the ungrounded electrical work. The latter cannot be changed because that is how all of Kabul is wired.

I have an active dream life, which should not be so surprising in a period of such intense transition. Last night I had a series of dreams that were all about transformation; all images were about one state turning into another. There are many attempts at transformation going on here, from individual habits to the systems that keep this country from being the normal democracy that most people want so badly.

My dreams are rudely interrupted every morning between 4 and 5 AM when the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer. The call in my neighborhood is made with an echo. I can just imagine the preacher going to the loudspeaker store and being shown his options. He must have really liked the machine that produced the echo, hearing his voice multiple times, repeating first and then trailing off into the distance.

My morning (and evening) routine still includes shoulder exercises and since I have decided that the home-visit-physical therapist wasn’t adding anything worth 40 dollars a visit, I am my own physical therapist for now, and thus harsh with myself about sticking to my exercise regime. I have the schedule of exercises (new ones, and which to drop), week by week, taped to the inside of my door. Tomorrow it will be 9 weeks post-op and I am ready to move into strength training. I am scouting around the guest house for something weighing about 1 pound.

I made contact with the only female physical therapist I know of in Kabul, who practices out of the military hospital in Wazir Akbar Khan. I am going to ask her to check up on my exercise regime from time to time to make sure I am not getting into bad habits that work the wrong muscle groups.

I spent most of the day in meetings which are not boring yet because I am still learning and trying to understand what this project is all about. I am starting to get used to being the only female; I think it gives me an edge as I can say things no one else does, like verbalizing the mood or feelings of a group. Clearly that is woman’s work. I hope some of it rubs off.

I am seeing a side of the project that remains fairly well hidden when you swing by from time to time as a consultant: the constant demands from this or that stakeholder group for information (needed right now!), requests to provide logistical and administrative support for highly visible visits by senior functionaries from Afghanistan and the US (with all their protocol requirements), and funding of this or that activity, not quite part of our mandate, but an easy way to channel US funds into gestures of goodwill. I am still mostly fascinated by all this but I can see how it distracts from what’s in the work plan; yet in terms of effort from senior staff, it is a big part of the job.

Two of my expat colleagues have gone off to India for their quarterly R&R (rest and recuperation). It is an important benefit to be let out of the country from time to time and wander around freely in another place. They both needed it badly. This leaves Steve and me on post, surrounded by a steadily increasing pool of consultants who are flying in after a two month ‘no fly’ period because of the elections. Guesthouse zero is filling up rapidly with Steve and Greg from the US, Ankie and me from Holland and Haran from India. As always, it is a wonderful mix of stories when we meet at night around the dining room table.

Although Saturday is my new Sunday, a day off for us expats, the government of Afghanistan is at work. Whenever we work with government officials, this means that we work too and swallow our day off. Since I am still very much in orientation mode, I made another trip to the ministry to meet with some of my key stakeholders.

First I met with the team at the grants contracting and management unit, for a rehearsal of their quarterly report of accomplishments, challenges, opportunities for improvement and next steps. After that I met with two of the 6 director generals as part of my mandate to work with senior leaders, but also to understand their perspective on how things are going and what needs attention in the relationships between our project and the ministry.

I am learning some fascinating things about differences of interpretation and perspective, which both causes and explains irritations that don’t seemed to be communicated in a way that is actionable. I can play dumb, as the newcomer, and ask questions that insiders cannot ask (anymore).

This is a country where a high degree of surface politeness, especially towards foreigners, but also towards Afghans employed by foreigners, is highly valued and where directness is risky and if not risky, at least difficult. Still, I have met a few people who are very frank with me about things that are not working as they should; maybe I am the (temporary) opening that presents itself now and they are taking advantage of. I consider that a good thing.

It is so easy to misunderstand (an unintentional consequence of communication) or leave things vague (an intentional act). I find many examples of such vagueness or misunderstanding. Working across languages does not help although sometime is serves as a convenient excuse.

There does not seem to be a habit of taking notes of conversations and sharing them. It is extra work but a good discipline for me to model. Since I have to practice everything I preach, I have to give a good example and not only write but also circulate my notes with the risk that they are wrong or cause more irritation. With all the conversations I am having, this has produced a bit of a backlog of notes to share. I will have to catch up in the evening, as tomorrow the work week starts again.

The car sent out to the ministry to pick me up was delayed because of traffic jams. Having the choice of waiting an undetermined time in the middle of a dust storm or jump in another car that was bringing my only female colleague to the other side of town, in high rises near the airport, I chose the latter. As a result I spent nearly two hours in the car. Right now I don’t really mind as it takes me ‘out of the bubble’ as some people call our highly choreographed interactions with Afghan society.

On the way home I stopped at a supermarket, mostly out of curiosity, and picked up some tonic and Becks pretend beer. That was the beer I liked best in the months after the accident when we were not drinking any alcohol at all. It brought back memories to that intense period in our lives. At that time did get used to non alcoholic beer; being in a strict Muslim country I know I can do it again.

Last night Ankie and I had dinner at Razia Jan and met old friends and new ones, among them a young American woman whose field is environment (ecotourism) and gender; this seems like a tall order right now in Afghanistan and I was therefore not surprised that she is currently without a (paying) job.

Internet access is still missing in the guesthouse and Steve lets us use his special line to the office server when we get desperate. It does mean I am rather out of touch; at least the cell phone works and we remain connected to each other and security, just in case something happens.

The weekend has started, my first week completed. It was a good week with me mostly downloading information about practices, work, relationship, politics, and roles. I have my work laid out for me and a list of things I need to pay attention to. The list keeps getting longer.

Although I have learned some Dari words, I have not made much progress on hiring a Dari teacher. It doesn’t turn out to be as easy as I thought. So, in the meantime, I keep using lunchtime with my male colleagues as a lesson and use electronic flashcards at night. Someone told me I am learning Farsi, not Dari; yet the program was sold to me as Dari. At least everyone understands my practice sentences – they just tell me I am learning complicated sentences and these can be simplified. That is encouraging.

I have now completed the conversations with each of my team members about how we will work together, preferences, worries, roles, etc. Out of that I constructed a short term agenda which I am sharing with me boss who returned from Pakistan and caring for his sick child. I am glad he is back so I can have a similar conversation as I have had with my people, with him.

I am slowly shedding my old role of consultant on temporary duty (called TDY in USAID-speak) and taking on my new role as senior manager and technical director for management and leadership. On Sunday I will move into my own office which has been cleaned today and will get a bookcase and a printer on Sunday. I have established my new authority and position vis-à-vis people who were above me in the pecking order in my earlier role; and finally I think I have found our new house so I can move out of my consultant room and set up our own space.

Tonight we are going out to the restaurant that was on yesterday’s agenda. There are still many blue flashing lights on the street. I was told that this is not an extension of the steel belt operation but some formal event at the Office of Fraud Control that has moved in next to our office. I have heard that everyone wants to work there because of its potential to make good money.

Operation ‘steel belt’ was in place today which meant that cars coming in and out of Kabul are being searched thoroughly, all through the day. The resulting traffic jam kept both good and bad people who were in the know at home or at their offices. Those who did not know had bad luck and spent hours in their cars. My planned visit to the ministry was wisely cancelled.

This worked out OK since we had to finish the workplan down to the nitty gritty detail, neither my, nor Steve’s forte. We soldiered on, as had Alain in Boston, pulling an allnighter to get us his feedback in time. The product was delivered on time to our funder, in spite of the traffic jam. It was accepted and immediately followed by a request for 16 separate provincial work plans. Somehow the database did not capture that distinction and so we are back to another round of workplanning.

I had excused myself from the meeting across town (and thus avoiding hours in the car) to meet with our donor, a weekly event that is attended by our senior leadership, a category I now belong to. Instead I met with one of my teams, an event I could not miss since no one else would have been there to ask the difficult questions and provide feedback, starting the long and painful process of changing the rules of engagement. As the new boss of the team’s boss I suddenly have the kind of formal power and authority I have never had before. I kind of like it. Is this the initial seductive taste of power?

After a first polite but edgy exchange around the quality of the work product that will be showcased on Sunday to all the program managers, we engaged in a sort of dance, with both parties trying to be elegant and not step on toes while getting strong messages across. I had expected some defensive routines and they were there, but slowly, as the minutes passed, I noticed a subtle change from defensiveness to surrender, all of it packaged in light joking remarks. At the end the work product was slightly better, not as good as I would have wanted, but better and more focused, and the mood collegial.

I am getting my own office, with a door and a table, and hopefully some bookshelves to house the books that were sent ahead of me. Our office compound is lovely with the green grass, the roses and grapes, thousands of them.

We had hoped to go out for dinner to the restaurant with the nicely clipped marihuana hedge to celebrate the delivery of the work plan but the steel belt around Kabul was still there, evidenced by big blue flashing lights. We postponed our dinner till tomorrow.

I spent the entire day at the ministry of health, located in the center of Kabul. It’s an old building that has been painted in blue and purple, an odd combination of colors. It used to be of a non descript color when I first saw it years ago but slowly more and more walls got painted. We used to be able to get in through the official entrance into the cavernous lobby.

Over the years the place has gotten increasingly barricaded and now we enter through a heavily fortified side entrance and walk through a container with both ends removed and from there we have to turn a few corners before we get to the courtyard full of benches and roses. It is a lovely place to behold out after the ugliness of the entry experience. Then, after turning a few more corners we enter through the side of the building and up the side staircase. It’s ugly inside and dirty. I can’t help but think that is what you get when you forget about the women (there are women of course who work there, but few in senior positions).

One of the teams in my portfolio is the grants and contracts management unit; not that I have anything to do with the management of this team, not even my colleague Doug who is assigned as their advisor. Their placement and supervision is handled by ministry staff. My role is to support Doug who is supporting them. They had organized an orientation for me that left me inspired and a little worried about how this level of professionalism and intense coaching that they do (of their grantees) can be maintained after our project ends. They laid out for me the process of contracting and grant monitoring of the NGOs that are implementing the government’s Basic Package of Health Services.

When people outside Afghanistan talk about the country as a basket case they are dismissing the extraordinary accomplishments of people like this, thanks to whom capacity is built across the country while health services are delivered to people in far flung places who used to have no services at all. That this is also supported by US tax dollars is hardly known by Joe the plumber.

In between the presentations I made the rounds of the various director-generals with whom I have worked in the past and whose attention I always sought in order to fulfill my scope of work as a consultant in the past. Now I no longer have this need to get all their attention crammed into two short weeks. It is a liberating feeling to be able to take my time. I was warmly greeted by all, and offered a fresh cup of green tea at each stop.

The contracts team eats in their offices, their lunch served by people hired to prepare their noontime meals. This is, for example, how one of the downstairs bathrooms for women has gotten to be a kitchen. At lunch time the courtyard is full of people squatting over small kerosene stoves, cooking. I try to imagine such a practice at the State Department.

Lunch consisted of Kabuli rice (raisins and strips of carrots mixed in with the rice) with a small piece of meat sitting defiantly on top, served with the ubiquitous flat Afghan bread and tea. We ate while sitting around the large conference table and continued our meeting without missing a beat. It was a working lunch, a rather counter-cultural habit that may have slipped in along with the US tax dollars.

I am jumping right into the fray: imagined emergencies that mobilize the energies of many of our most senior staff, here in Kabul and in Cambridge. There are assumptions embedded in the urgent calls for action that are not, and probably cannot be, questioned, because of the high levels of powers involved. This is common practice in most countries of the world, including the US; we too obey when power tells us to jump through this or that hoop. And so we are busy jumping to make sure that, what some of us believe are imagined, and unquestionable consequences, don’t happen.

In between all of this we are chasing deadlines for the work plan review process that got Steve and me sitting in front of a database entry screen fixing errors of thought, grammar and spelling. We labored our way through 35 pages of activities typed in tiny letters, that spell out what everyone plans to be doing starting next week.

Steve and I, being the most senior technical staff, were responsible for getting the best possible draft to Boston by 5 PM our time, when Boston starts its workday. But when you are thirsty, hungry and tired, and mosquitoes are pestering you under the desk, the clearheadedness we were supposed to bring to the task left something to be desired. It’s good we were in this boat together. This reminded me of the title of a quotation book I got from the Hubers a few weeks ago: don’t forget to sing when you are in the life boat. As it so happens, Steve and I love to sing, and so we kept each others’ spirits up.

By the time we got home, itchy from mosquito bites, bleary-eyed and hungry, we had been in the office for 12 hours, non stop, except for a short break for lunch. “Is it always like this?” I asked Steve. “Sometimes,: he responded. He often works 11 hours because the Boston work day starts when our day is over. But without spouses waiting for us at our guesthouses, there are no natural breaks on the work. This is not the case for our Afghan colleagues who are driven home to their families in company buses at 3:30 PM on the dot.

After lunch I met a potential Dari teacher. Although he is currently an English teacher I had to bring in a translator to get him to articulate his teaching philosophy and process; he did not understand the question, even when translated in Dari. The book he uses is the one I am studying from when not using my computerized flash cards. Other than that I did not get a good idea of his approach. I asked him to send me a proposal for lessons and cost attached for various scenarios of intensity (2 days a week, 3 days, 4 days). He kept asking me to name a price, which I refused since I have no sense of the cost of such lessons. He may not be my man.

In the meantime I have asked everyone in the office to be my teacher. Lunch time is like a linguistic field trip and today I learned the word for rice, among others. I tend to eat with the men (foreign women are like a third gender). I am the only female. My female Afghan colleagues eat in a separate room that is hidden behind a curtain. If I want to socialize with them I’d have to go behind the curtain too.

So far, my fantasy of knitting at night or playing the ukulele has not been realized; but then again, I’ve only been here for less than a week.

I had a good and calm first day at work; unfortunately my boss had not been able to return yet from Peshawar and so I concentrated on being a good boss myself. I met with one of the three people I supervise to understand what’s going on in his unit and agree on how we will work together. I will meet with the others tomorrow.

We are still in the throes of work planning which keeps many people extremely busy and some on edge. When the workday starts in Boston, tomorrow night for us, all has to be as final as we can make it. In the past some not so perfect plans had been passed on to Boston triggering reactions that people still talk about; they don’t want a repeat and we are striving for better this time.

The large offices are being re-arranged to accommodate new/more staff which means that I am temporarily parked at a visitor’s table in the space where the technical advisors are sitting when not with their counterparts in the ministry. Eventually I will get a space all to myself with a door than can be closed, a luxury I haven’t had in 16 years. I am looking forward to such a space, mostly so that I can unpack the five boxes of books that were shipped from Boston.

I learned that a couple of new guesthouses are being rented and I get to have first dibs if I like one of them. This makes my living quarters also temporary – and I will keep camping out in the office and at home until final decisions are made. I hope this is done before Axel shows up; I promised him that our nest would be ready to receive him when he arrives in a few weeks. I prefer a more permanent over a temporary nest.

Back at the guest house I noticed that the housekeeper had contributed to my settling in by hammering a 5 inch nail in one of the kitchen cabinets to hold a towel that I had put on the counter; a degree of overkill that practically pulled the cabinet apart. It seems that hammering huge nails in the wall is what you do here when you want to hang things. All the beautiful Central Asian textiles in my room are also nailed into the walls with similar large stakes.

Soon after my return an office car pulled up tat the guesthouse and deposited our new housemate, a Dutch woman named Ankie, who had just flown in from Amsterdam. As it turned out I had met her husband in Ghana in March, small world. Her first name is the same as my sister’s and her last name the same as the last name of my best friend in Holland (no relation). With this Steve is once more outnumbered by Dutch people. This seems to happen a lot in guesthouse zero.

The physical therapist I had found on the internet came to our guesthouse after dinner for an initial consultation. He is a wandering PT and only does house calls, mostly consulting to foreigners. He was astonished by my range of motion and flexibility 8 weeks post-op and did not feel he had much to contribute as this point, since my recovery will be dictated by how serious I take my exercises (very!). The protocol I follow is apparently quite standard and with all the exercises for the next couple of months already printed out by my US PT, he had little to add. Instead he gave me some exercises to strengthen my upperback and offset the strains of sitting in front of a computer that are compounded by two-year old whiplash. We agreed to check in again in a few weeks.

I never left the guesthouse during the weekend. I sat mostly in front of my computer, digging through the contents of my inbox to make sure that I am as well informed and prepared as I can be for the meetings that are lined up for me tomorrow, my first official workday in Kabul.

I took breaks from time to time to study Dari using a program from Transparent Language (free on the web, Byki 4) that drilled me ad nauseam in both recognition, recall and writing. It was pretty tedious at first but I am getting the hang of it and can now type in Dari using the English keyboard. I feel very accomplished about that. Now I have to keep it up. The program has a feature called ‘stale words’- words that I haven’t ‘touched’ for a certain amount of time, to make sure I don’t lose them.

My Dari teacher has made contact by email and I hope to meet with him soon. I want to take advantage of my evenings alone to study as much as I can. I made a deal with the Director General  for health services that I will be able to have a meaningful conversation with him in Dari before the end of the year. I am putting the Pashto on hold for now.

I am still home alone and that makes the dinners pretty boring; not just the lack of company but also because I am eating the same thing at every meal. The cook had prepared massive quantities of rice and a minced meat/bean/tomato stew and a plate full of dried out slices of eggplant and zucchini that noone had touched so far. It looks pretty bad but tastes OK.

For snacks there are inexhaustible supplies of the sweetest grapes dangling from the long arbor that covers the entry way into our compound. There are many more at the office which has an arbor three time the size. If only I had the wherewithal to make wine…(sigh).

This is what my room looks like now that everything has been neatly stowed. It’s like being a student again, everything in one room.