Sylvia's Journal

Today was all about alignment, or rather, mis or non alignment. Sometimes, in our eagerness to show results or do something (don’t just sit there but do something) we plough ahead leaving those who we are supposed to bring along, behind, chewing on the goodies (trips, per diem, certificates, uniforms, badges, pins, bags) given to them and eventually forgetting all about what they were supposed to do, or even care about. And then we get upset because they don’t seem to care at all, or don’t have the same excitement that we have for whatever it is we are trying to accomplish.

Lots of stuff that is in development plans ends up this way; it gives development a bad rap. This is particularly true for training. And so today was about figuring out how to get people along; how to pass ownership from us to them. There is a common misconception that you can make someone ‘own’ something. I have never seen it happen. I have gotten very good at spotting when that transfer of ownership doesn’t spontaneously take place.

For me the signals are clear. When something remains ‘unclear’ or feet are dragging, work plan upon work plan, strategy upon strategy is developed, meeting after meeting takes place and nothing significantly changes, it’s sure sign that someone in a position of power hasn’t ‘bought in.’ And nothing is owned without buying it first. And nothing is bought without someone selling.

So that brings us back to selling, which is what we do. We sell expertise, we sell solutions, we sell advice, and sometimes we sell hope and encouragement. It’s a very difficult job under any circumstance. Today was one of those days.

A four-day workweek is a good thing, it is weekend now. I can go home in good conscience now that it seems that our hapless travellers are returning home from Dubai in the early morning hours tomorrow; with, I am told, their suitcases.

The whole day was inside work, that is, the work of managing and leading applied to myself and my team. Some days and weeks are all outside work, when I spent most of my working hours at the ministry. The good thing about inside work is that I don’t need to drive across town and be stuck in traffic; the bad thing is that it doesn’t feel all that productive.

I woke up with a sharp pain in my arm yesterday morning and discovered what looked like a 1 inch cut or narrow blister. I did not remember hurting myself and was puzzled. It may have been a small cut or puncture that I never noticed and got infected. And so I asked one of the myriad of doctors who surround me all day what to do.

I was proud to show that I had put lots of anti biotic cream on the wound and bandaged it. But doctor Steve told me to use the ancient wisdom of what to do with infections: hot compresses. The heat mobilizes the white blood cells to attack the enemy. It is the equivalent of the Afghan National Army squelching internal disturbances; the international military forces would be more like the expensive and not always effective (and addictive) antibiotics.

To my great surprise the wound immediately started to get better, no more itching or tenderness (although it is coming back as Ii write this – hot compresses are needed for a while, the doctor told me).

Our hapless travellers in Dubai have still not come to the end of their agony. We had booked them on the afternoon flight back to Kabul but now their suitcases are lots in the mayhem in Dubai. And so their troubles are not over. I am collecting Dari proverbs with which to soothe them when they come back. A nice meal may also be required. I wonder if they ever want to go to an international conference again.

Our cook is using the bilingual cookbook and the meals are getting more interesting. The act of cooking is also more interesting as the electrician installed new lights that have turned our poorly lit kitchen (we needed a flashlight to check what was cooking in the oven) into something akin to a surgical ward.

We also now have fans to move the air around because we cannot open the (unscreened) doors because of the multitude of flies. We are beginning to wonder whether having a house near a rather polluted trickle of a stream may have been a bad decision. Flies like heat, like the bacteria and the white blood cells that will kill them, hopefully soon.

The first roses are out of the bushes that were planted last October, the first act of fixing our house. Bags of cement are heaped on top of each other by the front gate. This is to ‘sanitize and prettify’ the area in front of our house wall.

It is now a strip of broken tiles, soil and dog poop, probably teeming with fleas and other creatures that accompany the many stray, motherless and unwanted dogs that have selected our wall as their home. They are the kind of dogs that people throw stones at and that would keep me from walking out of our gate, if we would be allowed to do so. They are filthy and make a ruckus day and night. I am not enough of a dog lover to take them on as a project.

Stray dogs like this these are occasionally removed by municipal health officers who give them meat laced with strychnine. One of the provincial health teams that we support in the north had taken this dog problem on as a (minor) public health challenge, mostly because of the dog bites that show up at health facilities.

We always insist that such management and leadership projects produce measurable results. They took pictures of the dead dogs and had a graph showing that the number of patients with dog bites who presented themselves at the hospital had been reduced from 40 to 0 a week. The result was compelling albeit it not one that made a huge public health impact. Still it was good for the kids that would have been bitten.

Our garden furniture arrangement is now complete with glass table tops Axel bought yesterday. I sit outside on the veranda as much as I can: early morning waiting for the car and after I get home – our peaceful existence here stands in such contrast with the recent violence in Kandahar.

I spent this morning in my office attending to supervisory work, the annual performance evaluation process. It is a new task for me who has hardly ever supervised staff. I like it. Unlike many of my colleagues who find the annual performance evaluation process quite annoying, an annual chore, I find it a wonderful opportunity to do the kind of coaching I like to do.

In the afternoon three of us attended the after-action-review of the strategic health retreat at the ministry. I was pleased to hear that people appreciated the design process through its result. It was the same process that they at times had resisted. My next intent is to show people an Open Space event so that they realize we don’t necessarily have to spend 6 months planning a 3 day gathering. I think I have now established enough design credibility that I can take them a little further next time.

Today we briefed our funders about what we did, what we do and what, after our project is over, should be done in the future to make sure that all the efforts take root and planted seeds turn into flowers (not the poppy variety of course). The briefing took a good chunk of the day but was probably worth it as none of us wants things to end when our project is over, some 15 months from now.

Via email I followed the travails of our hapless travellers, still stranded in Dubai. The conference starts tomorrow. When we decided, four months ago, to send two of our provincial health advisors to this conference in Geneva it seemed like a good idea. It was supposed to be a reward but now it seems more like punishment.

We are hearing conflicting stories about the European ash cloud and wonder whether our trip to Holland in three weeks might be in jeopardy. Some pessimists say it can be months before things clear up. It’s hard to imagine as here the skies are blue and full of sun. The baby grapes are no longer the size of a pin point, now easily recognizable as mini grapes, the first roses have budded and the birds are chirping as if their life depends on it.

At the office there are painters everywhere, the entire compound is getting a fresh coat of paint. I found my own small office neatly painted in an off-white colour. All the things on the wall that had finally been nailed in (with the biggest nails) had been taken down and so I am starting all over with requests to hang stuff. When your office is being painted all your furniture and stuff is taken outside where it patiently waits until the paint is dry. Bad luck if it rains!

We are getting more details of the raids on alcohol-serving establishments in Kabul, last week. From the survival guide to Kabul we learned that….”In scenes reminiscent of the Taleban, officers armed with AK47 rifles targeted four well-known nightspots on Monday night and Tuesday morning, calling them ‘centres of immorality.’ The French owner of one of Kabul’s best-known bars was also detained. The waitresses, from an upmarket restaurant popular with diplomats, were forced to undergo intrusive medical tests to ascertain whom they might have been sleeping with, police officials said. Friends said that the women, from Eastern Europe and Central Asia, were still in shock last night.”

I guess we will have to create our own entertainment at home for awhile or eat in some of the local restaurants in our area, something we have wanted to do all along, and have a Fanta or Coke with our meal. We can do that.

We have our tickets for Frankfurt on the Safi flight of May 5. We leave at 9 AM from Kabul and will be in Germany early in the afternoon. From there we will take a rented a car to Holland. The only thing that can come between us and this trip is the ash cloud in Europe.

That same ash cloud has become the last and probably final and insurmountable obstacle for my already severely tested Afghan colleagues who simply tried to get to a conference in Geneva. They braved three trips to Islamabad, crossed borders without a passport, an arrest in Islamabad and now this. After all their trials and tribulations they have finally been halted by ash, such bad luck.

Oblivious to Europe’s ashes we spent most of the morning getting the best price for our trip to Holland, still a 2000 dollar price tag, but about 1000 dollars less than what we initially calculated. Although Axel complains about the time it took us to get our fare and reservations, I think it was worth it.

I skipped my usual PT session because I had timed things wrong. I have made an appointment with Leslie, the embedded American Navy PT who will interpret my MRI report from Beirut and maybe fine-tune my exercises. I am in much pain again from an inflammation somewhere in the shoulder joint.

After Dari class we were invited by an Australian couple who are relatively new in town. They brought their 3 year old along who is pining for her playmates in the Solomon Islands from where her mom moved her to join dad in Kabul.

The dad left Holland for Australia when he was very young and remembers the 6 week boat trip as an endless ordeal of 6 weeks of sea sickness. He still speaks some Dutch. He is the second Dutch born Australian I spent time with in the last few days. His wife served us a blueberry Bavaroise on tulip plates and then lent us a spectacular cookbook written by Australian Lebanese on their ancestral cuisine (Lebanese and Syrian).

And now my five day absence from work is over. The email box is full to overflowing and there is much work to do and much to catch up with.

This Friday’s walk took us to the European or British cemetery. It is a small plot in the middle of the city with a high mudwal around it. Inside we found two gentleman who live in a small mudbrick hut amidst tall grasses and weeds, a few trees and a hundred or so head stones, some new and neatly inscribed, some smashed up and some old and unreadable.

Against the southern and northern wall plaques have been put up memorializing the 100s of troops who have died here. One both sides of the cemetery are, chiseled into marble, long list of the names of young men who got killed in Afghanistan in the last 10 years, Italians, Germans, Dutch, Brits, American. On the southern wall there are the remains of headstones from over 150 years ago when Brits were also fighting here and not doing so well. Above each stone, neatly typed out, a story of the fallen hero. Sherlock Holmes’ Watson was injured in that same war.

After our cemetery walk we checked out a new coffee house that claims to be the first and only Starbucks in Afghanistan. Inside the fairly new establishment, the coffee bar part of the compound, we found large bags of Starbucks coffee next to neatly arranged coffee cups and glasses with the logo of Starbucks, printed on paper, cut out and pasted on. It looked very real from a distance. We had cappuccino, latte, espresso and Black forest cake that came from the Serena hotel, an off limits place for us.

Afterwards we drove to the main shopping street in old Kabul and wandered along small stalls watching what ordinary Afghans do when in town, while they watched us as if we came from outer space (not many tourists here). We bought something that looked like a scallion pan cake, deep fried, from a food stall by the side of the road; Axel declined but Steve, Alison (who is here on a mission for a sister project) and I threw all the warning about not eating street food to the wind. So far we are doing OK; we all thought it was well worth the risk.

I bought one ‘seer’ (about 7 kilo) of kapok to fill the pillows that I have made from the embroidered and patchwork textiles that I bought last week off Chicken Street. Today I turned all these into 6 pillows. I am quite pleased with my handiwork.

While stuffing the pillows with the kapok that comes in industrial-size bags I practiced my Dari with the day guard. When I heard something come by the house playing a tune I asked whether it was the ice cream man. It was! I asked the guard whether he liked ice cream (he did) and before I knew it he had gone out and bought Axel and me a partially melted Herat ice cream bar. It seems that the cooling mechanism of the tiny hand-driven ice cream cart was not working all that well and so we had to eat the ice cream as quick as we could.

For dinner Axel prepared an Afghan variant of fajitas and invited 6 people over to eat them with us. The talk of the town was the raid on several of the alcohol-serving restaurants last night. For those who need their beer and wine such raids put a damper on the fun of being in Kabul. We are learning to live quite happily without alcohol but occasional visits to these restaurants have been a treat. It seems some of them are now closed for awhile and also had their alcohol supply confiscated. One can only imagine where that went.

Just when I was reading about a drug kingpin and Taliban financier who is in a Manhattan jail (probably better than an Afghan one) and reaching the 4 kilometres on the elliptical machine I received a call from Sonia. Sonia was supposed to go to ninth grade in an American girls’ school next fall, something she had arranged on her own.

She had been accepted with a full scholarship and all expenses paid. Steve and I visited Sonia at her uncle’s house, met her mother and grandmother to make sure that Sonia had full family support. I was going to introduce Sonia to the people at the school where Axel teaches to meet other kids who will go to a US high school or college and start the preparations.

I had tried to reach her the last few weeks. She had been with relatives in Ghazni. The relatives got wind of the plans and threatened her father with something akin to ostracism from the family – a death sentence in this culture. And so Sonia will not go to school in America. Afghanistan, once again, shoots itself in the foot as far as I am concerned. I wish my Dari was good enough that I could tell each of her uncles, ‘don’t you understand that Afghanistan’s future lies with its women, young talent like Sonia, spunky, educated, committed and smart?’

Today was my first Thursday off. I didn’t quite know what to do with myself and so I did a bit of everything: knitting, reading, studying Dari, lunch with Sarah from the EU in a pricy French restaurant, and working out.

Axel picked me up and so he met Sarah, who is Italian. We discussed the troubles of the Italian staff from the only trauma hospital in the south. We all think they were framed for an alleged planned attack on Helmand’s governor’s. Sarah knows the war surgeon and wonders where the staff were taken. I can’t help but think that somebody is trying to get money – the Italians are known to have paid hefty ransoms in the past.

After lunch our driver Haji Safar took us to a semi-outdoor furniture market to get the locally produced rope furniture to complete our sitting arrangements in the yard. Except for the glass table tops we are really settled now.

The continuing drama of getting our colleagues to Switzerland is unfolding in ways that are unthinkable anywhere else in the world. I thought the last obstacle was getting out of Kandahar where fighting broke out that killed several people, including a 22 year old girl, staff member of our friend Pia. Our doctor got out unharmed but warned us that his frequent comings and goings through Kandahar airport is being noticed and he has to lie low for a while.

This afternoon I learned that the pair’s troubles weren’t over. The Pakistani police in Islamabad arrested them, asking for security documents, beyond the visa, that they didn’t have (and didn’t need) and so they were taken to the prison. In the meantime the window for picking up their Swiss visa was slowly closing (and with that their entire trip to Geneva) as the clock ticked steadily towards the weekend.

Luckily I didn’t find out until this email arrived: “after 2 hour discussion with police and pay[ing] of some money to police they discharged us and then we went to Swiss embassy and got the visa.”

I am holding my breath as there are so many other things that can go wrong between now and their arrival at the hotel in Geneva – yet, I should have faith as they have already overcome the most amazing obstacles: trips across the border without passports, a denied visa reviewed and re-granted, mayhem in Kandahar, prison in Islamabad.

Nothing is easy in this part of the world, except, as I am learning from reading Gretchen Peters’ Seeds of Terror, laundering drug money and financing the cycle of violence.

Today was jam packed with interesting speakers, lectures, and panels of Afghans and foreigners. We started off with a rather dry subject, Afghan tax law. After the lecture I was happy to know that none of it applied to us; a good thing because somehow the Afghans decided that foreigners who live here at least 150 days or thereabouts, should pay the Afghan government taxes on income earned outside this country.

Axel and my Dari teachers, a man and woman came to explain to us about friendship in the Afghan context; how one makes friends, what kinds of friendships there are and the social rules governing friendships.

A panel of expats, some of whom who had lived here for 20 year, answered several questions we had submitted the previous day. We listened to their joys of living in Afghanistan, their frustrations, how they balance work and play, what they do for play and we learned about their regrets (not spending more time with Afghans in their homes). To my surprise people do mountain bike, hike, go on walks, all things we had not expected possible (they may not be for us). I was inspired by their commitments, their knowledge of the local language, and their insights about how to be a good guest in this country.

A panel of one language teacher, an office manager and two doctors (all Afghans) told us what mistakes foreigners make, and what any foreigner should know and learn about living here. They shared with us what Afghans gossip about when they discuss foreigners, the myths that circulate about us and what they will never tell us directly. The ‘don’t blow your nose in public’ I had already learned after having done so for weeks during a cold in the fall. I also learned it is very impolite to eat an apple without offering people sitting left and right of you a bite, or a piece of any food you may be consuming.

In this and other sessions we were given tips on how to respond to and reciprocate invitations, visits, gifts and etiquette when having or attending a tea party such as where to sit and how to sit, as a woman and as a man. I am glad that I learned that women are not supposed to touch their hearts like men do when greeting because, apparently, only bad (loose?)women do that.

Most amazing were the people in our course. Two young American mothers attended with their 1 month and 3 months old infants, each carefully nursing their babies under an ingenuously designed hooped cloth contraption that allowed the private act of nursing to be done in public. I managed to knit each a pair of baby booties and one also a small hat while listening to the lectures.

I would never have expected that American families would move here with small children, but they do, despite protest from grandparents. Others we met, grandparents themselves, had flown all their offspring, babies and all, into Kabul for Easter vacation. For some people this is as much a family post as any other developing country, and for some of those kids Afghanistan is their first home.

One thing that all the people attending and teaching in this course had in common is their faith – they are part of a Christian community that has been staying here through thick and thin for 40 years. What we consider a long stay (four years) is nothing for them. Their time horizon is long: one gentleman recently left after a 40 year stay.

They lived through the hell of the Mujahedeen fight over Kabul, which totally destroyed the same neighbourhood we are now sharing. They lived through the Taliban with commanders outside their gate to check on the comings and going into their compound. They lived through kidnappings, sudden death, assassinations and much stress – but listening to their stories about being in this country one could only be inspired.

When it comes to faith they are in a way much closer to the Afghans than most other foreigners are as they know and practice what Islam is all about: surrender or submission to God’s will; this maybe why and how they survived, as a tribe, together with all the other tribes here in this wild and beautiful country.

All day I found myself in the presence of pilots, three American pilots who are here with their young families to ferry NGO staff to faraway places to do their good work. So now I can count pilots of another company among my friends which opens the door, quite literally, to fly in another cockpit someday.

They all understood the thrill of flying from Dubai to Kabul in the cockpit. If I am to cash in my present from Axel – a long weekend in Bamiyan in July – it is these guys that will probably take us there.

My colleague AB and I are following an orientation to Afghanistan course, the same Axel was so enthused about several months ago. Today I learned that we should really sleep under a bednet because there is malaria in Kabul, especially near stagnant water. Since we live on River road, the river little more than a trickle and stagnant water on the side, this may be good advice.
The malaria is not of the lethal kind that can kill you but the other kind that doesn’t kill you but that can make you miserable from time to time for the rest of your life.

In the kitchen management course I learned that chlorine kills the bacteria that are in the dust (poo dust she called it) that covers nearly all the food that is produced here, including Afghanistan’s famous dried fruits and nuts. Thus, raisins, nuts should be washed, soaked and then dried again in the oven. This makes the consumption of dried foods a little too cumbersome for my liking. I also learned that chlorine does not kill the worm eggs that hatch into the dreaded long tape worms. So Iodine is now on my shopping list.

I was pleased to learn that we can eat the yummy-looking strawberries that are sold along the road from push carts as long as we let them sit for 20 minutes in water with 5 drops of iodine per liter. That may be worth the effort.

We learned about development philosophy from a compatriot of mine whose family comes from the same town in Holland that was the home of my father’s family for several hundred years. He started his development career as a water engineer in Bangladesh. Battling water (too much of it) is something the Dutch have in common with the Bangladeshis.

We listened to a, somewhat rushed, lecture about the history of Afghanistan, accompanied by slides with neat pictures and too much text. It is time to re-read my smudged and poorly photocopied exemplar of Louis Dupree’s Afghanistan.

Some parts of the program are lectures by expats who have lived here for a long time while other parts are delivered in interview format with an expat, fluent in the local language, asking questions to an Afghan.

And so we had a chance to learn about Islam and family life from the horse’s mouth so to speak. The session about Islam was at times a little awkward when our questions could not be satisfactorily answered with other than the regurgitated answers from mullahs, especially those about sin, forgiveness and the treatment of women.

Religion and tribal customs are so firmly intertwined here that most ordinary people cannot tell them apart, leaving Islam to explain, in very convoluted ways, some of the most striking contradictions, such as why bad things happen to good people (young girls setting themselves on fire to escape abusive husbands their father’s age or small boys being used as playthings by bearded men) and good things happen to bad people (filthy rich drug and/or weapon dealers with much blood on their hands flying first class to Mecca to wash off all their sins).

Today 30 years ago we tied the knot in Dakar; me sick as a dog, a pregnant dog for that matter. Axel was deeply concerned about my health and minus six months Sita, yet wanting to celebrate. We ended up not attending our own wedding party, with a doctor at my bedside; and so we are having a small party tonight, just for the two of us at the Sufi restaurant in town.

This morning, like a miracle, Axel was downstairs and cooking before six o’clock and before I was dressed and showered. On the dining room table I found pain-au-chocolat and real croissants from the French Bakery, while he was making French toast in the kitchen. There was more: a lovely card as only Axel can create them (it’s from a new series called Afghan Textiles), a large jar of Marmite and a pair of earrings with tiny pearls and turquoise – pearl for our pearl (30 year) anniversary and turquoise because they are from Afghanistan (pearls are not).

Also included in the anniversary package was a trip for two to Bamiyan in July. How we are going to get there is not clear yet because the roads are off limits and the UN flights outrageously expensive. But hopefully by then Axel is earning money too and security might be better (this may be wishful thinking, so let me add, incha’allah).

I, on my side, had not done much about this 30th anniversary because I was too pooped and too busy to plan ahead. And so my present is a trip for two, all expenses paid, to Holland in 3 weeks. Not very original since he already knew about it, but still, a nice gift if I may say so.

Back at work the frenzy continued to get our semi-annual report finished (I am using it partially as a supervision tool which makes it a little more cumbersome and time consuming) and to get our two colleagues out the door to Switzerland now that the visa is granted on the last possible day before travel. It is all very complicated, travel wise, and there is much paperwork to complete, non refundable tickets and all and then we send them off in the hope that the visa is really there. One needs trust in ‘the system’ under such circumstances but in this part of the world there is no such thing.

And then there is the poster presentation these two men have to present in Geneva; but we dropped the ball on that since they weren’t going to go until a few days ago and now everyone discovers that the numbers don’t add up and the statistics source is wrong or incomplete and we are grasping at straws. Sometimes you just have to drop the idea of perfection.

And in the middle of this I received an email from one of actors in this drama who is from Kandahar (and is supposed to fly to Kabul tomorrow and then onwards to Islamabad, Dubai, Doha, Geneva). He wrote: Dear all, from 12 o’clock until now there is heavy fighting and blasts around Kandahar national security headquarter. One heavy blast heard. All Provincial Health Office staff and clients are in the big corridor. Doors and windows are open; until now not any casualty report. Best regards.

Thirty minutes later another report: Dear all, The fighting stopped , 6 wounded transferred to Mirwais Hospital, traffic started again on main roads. The AOG (Armed Opposition Groups, i.e. the bad guys) were located in Girl school and started firing on provincial Security headquarter which is adjacent to this school, the details is not clear. Best regards.

Life resumes, always.