Sylvia's Journal

On purpose I had ignored my accumulating work over the weekend and so today I paid the price. It was one breathless long day, from 7:00 AM till 6:30 PM. I had hoped to interrupt my day at noon time and go home for lunch; a habit I have not yet developed even though there is no reason not to (other people do). But I picked the one day that Axel was not home at lunch time.

I am now sitting in my jammies at home; dinner is over, elliptical exercise done, shoulder exercises done, Turkish coffee (3 cups) finished, with knitting on my right side and Hofstede’s Software of the Mind on the other side. There is so much I want to do in the few hours before bedtime that I cram everything together, doing nothing quite the way I want.

I am beginning to wonder if my decision of having a four-day workweek simply means stashing 5 days work into 4 days. I can see how easy it would be to make exceptions and do (first a little, then) some work on my Thursday off.

While I am writing I am also Skyp-chatting with one of my team members who is in Yogyakarta at the moment on a study tour. I encouraged him to see the Borobudur temple that I did not visit when I was there in 1991 because I thought I would be back a few months later with more time. I never did go back. Regrets. What regrets will I leave Afghanistan with?

Saturday is physical therapy day, if I can help it. I showed my PT the diagnostic report from the American University Hospital MRI doc and ask for a translation in plain English. I wanted to know first of all if the report contained good news or bad news.

The good news was that the smaller of the two tears, the infraspinatus, had healed well, which meant that a few exercises were no longer needed. But the larger tear had not healed all that well and inflammation explained my recent problems. This meant new execises.

While the PT was attending to me all the other ladies in the room were watching our every movement with great interest. You could see them wonder, who is this blue-eyed foreign lady and why is she here. They asked questions about me, which, unbeknown to them I could follow. I told my PT that she should warn the Afghan patients that I could actually understand their questions.

After PT I scheduled my weekly Thai oil massage which was as good as ever, worth every penny of the 40 dollars and the 5 dollar tip.

I asked the driver and guard whether we could get me some traditional roper furniture. This led to a wild goose hunt from east to west and north to south; we covered most of Kabul in search of the outdoor rope-chair set. It’s the concept, Axel explained later; they simply cannot understand why a foreigner would want traditional rope furniture (‘farnichar’ in Dari) when shiny Pakistani or Chinese furniture can be had.

Strange enough Chinese (read imported) stands for high quality even though, by our standards, it is far from high quality. I was taken to a showroom of fancy (read: cheap) imported ‘farnichar’ even though I thought I had explained I wanted none of it. They kept showing me beds yet I had indicated, I thought, that I didn’t want a bed. My limited Dari was clearly an impediment to expeditious shopping.

After two hours we gave up. I went home, prepared for my Dari class, had two hours of Dari during which I learned more prepositions, and then we went back home for a brief interlude before heading out again for dinner at the Washington Post house where our friend Robin is staying. Around the dinner table we had many nationalities: Japanese, Afghan, American, Canadian, German, Dutch, Spanish, French and Italian, even though there were only 8 people present. Except for Axel, Sabina and Robin, everyone else had at least 2 nationalities.

In an effort to save some of my enormous stash of accumulated vacation days from going ‘poof’ I have decided to join my sister’s family on a boat ride in Holland on May 8 to celebrate the wedding of my nephew Da(a)n and his Scottish bride Jane. Although we haven’t been able to find a reasonable fare, the boss has signed off on my leave request and our fantasies about the trip are dancing far ahead of us.

After some calculations I realized that I stood to lose 28 days (7 weeks of vacation) if I didn’t find a way to use these days. A 5 days trip to Holland and taking Thursdays off from now till the end of June will help a bit but I will still lose days unless a special permission is granted to me to carry more days over the Fiscal Year line than the max (30). This may require an Act of God, I don’t know; maybe a few prayers will help.

I also learned that I cannot be in the US for more than 27 days until the end of September. This has something to do with taxes, as per the advice of a specialist in these matters. So we are counting a lot these days.

For our Friday walk we went to Babur’s garden, a spectacular restoration compliments of Aga Khan. Inside the 7 meter walled garden Afghans can pretend it is peaceful here and enjoy the beautifully landscaped garden with their families, sitting on carpets, cooking whole meals in the ubiquitous little pressure cookers. This is the promise of Afghanistan, if only…(sigh).

After our walk we accompanied Steve on his weekly Chicken Street walk and was drawn to the store of Mr. Happy (Khoshal) who has enormous stash of embroidered pieces from all over Central Asia. Sozani is the local name for embroidery.

It is the Uzbek needlework that I am most enchanted with although, really, everything is vibrant, beautiful, and very very dirty.

I am dipping all the pieces I bought in a bucket with Woolite. I don’t know if that is sacrilege but how else do I get the stains from cooking, eating, living out of these textiles? The first change of water was black, or red if the embroidery was that color.

I have some fantasy of using the pieces in my sewing projects but one has to be practical – they need to be washed sometimes.

Today we learned from the organization that warns us through multiple daily email messages about adverse events in the provinces and in the capital, that a rehearsal of ‘in extremis’ support involving elements from the international military (IMF) as well as the Afghan national security forces (ANSF) was going to take place at the main UN compound earlier this morning.

We were told that this would in all likelihood include several vehicles (‘and other associated gadgets’). The warning continued that, if one was to venture near the UNICA compound (strongly discouraged), one would also see ‘men with grimacing faces and overt displays of various types of weaponry.’ The message concluded with the advise ‘to postpone any intended squash matches.’ Darn!

Of course people play squash here; and cricket (the national cricket team qualified for the Asian Cricket Council), and volleyball, and soccer and tennis. Today our drivers, guards and some of the TB doctors, dressed in blue and white jerseys leftover from World TB Day, played a tournament right outside my office while I was doing a (required) quiz about procurement integrity and struggling with Adobe on how to sign my certificate (I passed) electronically.

After pulling some handles here and there we received word from the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through their Kabul mission that the decision to deny a visa to my two colleagues (to attend a conference in Geneva) was being revisited. After three phone calls from various officials we finally got the word: the visa is granted and they should go back to Islamabad to pick it up. Those who have followed this drama, unfolding over several months with what we thought was the final (and maddening) denouement in Islamabad two weeks ago, can appreciate this new outcome.

The world does run on relationships, which comes right after oil, weapons and drugs I believe. It is once more a reminder that the switch is at the top and if you can make a connection with ‘up there’ everything becomes possible.

It is funny that for some of my Afghan colleagues who are several rungs below me in the hierarchy, I am their switch. This is a new experience and I am starting to learn to recognize when I have a switch-seeker at my door. The higher you climb the easier it is to see the possibilities, and then grant or deny access to them.

Axel, Steve and I went to a lecture by our ex colleague Paul F who shared the findings of his research into the barely examined assumption that development projects will stabilize Afghanistan. It is the basis for policy decisions with enormous consequences.

This was not the first investigation into ‘aid effectiveness’ that I had heard about but this one included the military. Not surprisingly, given that aid was all thrown together into one basket, some of it was appreciated and some of it was useless.

Some of the very large development projects are actually contributing to the destabilization and undermining of the central government because of the opportunities for large scale fraud and corruption that they offer. The amounts of money that are sloshing around in these projects is obscene given that your average Afghan farmer (not a poppy farmer) makes about 300 dollars a year.

The competition that is generated to get a chunk of the pie sometimes turns deadly because settling of accounts is easy here where you can buy your way in and out of anything, including murder and justice.

The military, even in a relatively safe and stable province like Balkh, continues to be an irritant to the general population: the convoys that mess up already congested traffic and jeopardizes anyone in close proximity (we can attest to this from our experience in Kabul), the ignorance about cultural norms, language, the rapid turnover and lack of institutional memory and the easy money that is available to buy the peace here and there with all the perverse incentives that it sets up.

AFP reports in our local newspaper that US Special Forces blast heavy metal, country and rock music from an armored vehicle wired up to speakers that are so powerful that the sound can be heard two kilometers away whenever insurgents open fire. Somehow the military has convinced itself that his will force the hapless locals to choose between the Taliban and the Americans.

What are they thinking? The only people whose hearts and minds are won by the music are the American soldiers themselves who had a blast (pardon the pun) putting the play list together; everyone else is covering their ears and running for cover hating these heathen Americans more with every song.

What was the most worrisome information I got from the lecture was the size of the pot of money that is available to the military to ‘win hearts and minds.’ The Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) has increased its budget from 0 to 1.6 billion dollars in 7 years, leaving all the other so-called development partners way behind in the dust. The distortion that this money influx creates is grotesque.

I had always wondered about what people were thinking about this ‘winning hearts and minds,’ once it was done. What then? Could you lose hearts and minds easily after winning them? One researcher who looked into this found, no surprise, that you cannot stockpile goodwill. When the money dries up, people get upset again – there goes your hard-won heart and mind. Oops.

It seems ages ago that I got up this morning. More than 12 hours later I arrived home to see my honey sitting on the terrace, with glasses of a certain type ready for the cocktail hour. That was a nice reception for a tired worker.

I tried to fall back into my routine but I don’t have the email under control and the computer is still not entirely recovered and there is so much to do, and so many dilemmas that require much thinking.

For example, how can we support prison health if the condition attached to US government funds is that they can’t benefit terrorists? But the terrorists should be in the prisons. Carrying the reasoning through the Afghans should let the terrorists go so we can help the Afghan government provide basic health services to prisoners.

Distinguishing between bad prisoners and the very bad (terrorists) is not that easy in this country. These are the kind of practical dilemmas that our lawmakers may not have thought about.

In the meantime, Karzai is playing noisily with firecrackers on TV and on the front pages of local newspapers. He uses every opportunity to accuse foreigners of messing with his country: they (we) are responsible for botched elections, for invading Afghanistan with ulterior motives (of course), mishandling the millions of dollars that are streaming into this country (I might add, streaming out as well) and ‘mistakenly’ killing civilians (note the quotation marks).

What if we just all walked away? I mean, all of us.

Our guard Rabbani took off the plastic from our windows. We can see outside again; the daylight can come in clear now. In Dari the word for light or clear is roshan, which is also the name of one of the cell phone providers. The plastic was covered with a thin layer of soot, on the outside, which tells me something about what gets in our lungs.

We had breakfast outside in our little garden plot, amidst the rose bushes, the apple trees, the pear tree and the grape vines that are just starting to sprout: tiny light green leaves coming out of what looks like dead wood, but isn’t.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have the same hopes about the deadwood that floats around the ministry.

I spent most of the day rebuilding the folders on my old computer, uploading all the non standard software that got lost in the computer hospital. All at a snail’s pace with frequent interruptions. One of the things that got lost is my Dari program with its memory of the 500 words I had learned, including fresh and stale ones.

My computer and the various external hard disks are a little bit like a linen closet: a mess. It takes much perseverance and patience to sort things out. It turned out to be an all day task.

We had decided not to go out today but stay in our enclosure – partially because it was lovely outside and partially because we want to keep our heads low in case Karzai’s antics produce a reaction against Americans.

Later in the day the weather turned bad (for us) or good (rain is always good here) and Axel went shopping while I packed for my trip to Mazar tomorrow.

Karzai claims that it was not the Afghan people but the UN and Europeans under the leadership of Peter Gailbraith that stole the elections. The comment affected me more than I thought it would. We were saying to each other it must be a joke but we knew it was not. I was very discouraged. How can anything get better in the place if the top makes delusional statements like that? And when the highest authority in the country says it is the foreigners who are bad, in a place like this where a largely uneducated population easily swallows nonsense like this and then takes to the street, one does get a little worried.

Another long day ended this frantic week that started with a working Saturday, then three days of the annual health retreat and then the shadowing. But the shadowing is over now after Steve and I told the minister what we had observed and asked if these observations were on the mark (they were). We then proposed some ways to help her preserve her energy for her four public roles (symbolic, managerial, political and advocacy) and her private role as member of a family. She embraced some of our suggestions with great enthusiasm, judged by her conversation with her Afghan advisers who had joined us. Other ideas just sat on the table. After that we were dismissed. It was time for the weekend for all of us.

With that our brief opportunity of shadowing was over, which was exactly what Steve wanted but I would have prefered some more days. Still, not having to go to the ministry every morning and then coming back at 1 for another full day of work is welcome and more sustainable for my own sanity and my family life.

Axel had a guys-night out in a sportsbar-and-beer-and-meat kind of place (the Sizzler) on the other side of town. Places with TVs on the walls that serve large chunks of meat are not my cup of tea and so I stayed home and watched karzai say silly things while migrating my files from my loaner computer back to my resurrected new computer with its new hard drive that can hold 220 gigs.If Karzai was indeed serious then I passed this April Fool’s Day without any jokes.

Nearly forty years ago, during my studies in psychology, I sat in a day care center and did ethnographic research using a particular technique that required me to indicate with dots on a grid which child moved from where to where and what they were saying and doing. I was not allowed to attach any interpretation to what I was seeing, only descriptions. This was very difficult to do.

Today, as I was once again a fly on the wall, I remembered that time and tried to ‘simply describe’ without trying to attach meaning to acts. It was still difficult but it made me observe better.

I recorded each visitor, giving them numbers, like V1, V2, etc. and then described what I saw. It went something like this:

V1 enters, reads document, responds, remains standing at considerable distance of HE; exchange of a few minutes, then visitor leaves with paper; V2 enters, reads paper for 5 minutes then comes back with copy while V3 enters and has a particular question that requires some study. V4 enters, sits down, reads paper, responds, then turns to V3 while V5 enters and participates in V3 discussion. V4 gets paper signed and leaves while V6 enters and then leaves with V5; V4 also leaves. V7 enters with V5 and V6, V3 remains for a meeting about…etc, etc.

I did this for about one hour (last recorded visitor was V10). Then there was a change in office and role, from deputy to acting. I observed another meeting till it was time to leave. The first part of the morning was in Dari, the second in English. I am getting a considerable dose of Dari immersion and love it; my Dari language skills are increasing in leaps and bounds.

I left the ministry for the Blood Bank where a refresher meeting was taking place about advanced facilitation techniques with some of our leadership development facilitators. I was there mostly for moral support as I wasn’t really needed; Ali and the team he has coached are doing fine without me. The meeting was mostly in Dari and my understanding has increased from 10% to 20%. It was another one of those very joyful experiences where you can see that planted seeds have taken root and beginning to show what you hoped for.

I finally returned to the office when everyone else was just leaving for home, fanning out over Kabul in 6 or 8 little buses. For me it was the start of my other workday that is centered on my more managerial tasks which have been severely neglected. I am lucky to have such great staff but there comes a time when they need more attention. I attended a rather confusing meeting about data quality and integrity that, I think, was supposed to ensure that the American people get a better idea of what their tax dollars pay for. If the quality of the meeting was any indication of success, we should be a little worried.

After that meeting we, three quarters of the director’s group, discussed our upcoming trip to Mazar and how to handle Axel’s security as a tourist there while we worked. There is no precedent for a hanger-on spouse in this non-family post and so he is treated like an MSH staff member. Since we are not supposed to go touristing in Afghanistan he could only come along if he attended our workshop or stay in the hotel room. For a 600 dollar roundtrip on the UN flight this did not seem like a good idea so we regretfully dropped Axel from our party. We were both hugely disappointed, even more so because this decision dashed all our hopes to use up some of my excess vacation time in the Panshir or Badakhshan, later this spring.

At 5 PM we had our usual weekly call with Boston and so it was yet another long day when I arrived home just before 7 PM, exactly 12 hours after I had left this morning.

The Strategic Health Retreat made it to the front page of the Afghanistan Times; Obama and Karzai in the left column and our event, the Third Annual Strategic Health Retreat in the right column.

We completed the event more or less on time despite some incursions: unprogrammed presentations and questions and answers. It is hard to say to the health advisor of the president ‘time is up,’ but someone has to do it or the program gets really off the rails, time-wise that is. When you are on the last day of an event and the minister has to close and she also has to be someplace else before the day is over there is a really hard stop.

We had just started to become a community and get to know each other when we arrived at the end and this temporary community dissolved. Over the last three days, mostly through observation, I had gotten to know many of the participants better than I have done in months of individual interactions. I don’t think people realize how much they reveal about themselves in public events like this.

After the closing event we all piled into the car and drove to the office where JD got to say his parting words, received a present from the boss and took pictures of our Kabul dream team, the four of us who stay behind. We are sad to see him go – he was yet another great guest in guesthouse 33.

With this event over I have rounded off my first six months here. When I arrived the planning team for this event was just convening. Although I knew some of the people in the ministry I was in no position to direct the preparations, which were preparations for a powerpoint+question+answer event. My hope was that I could shape the design and the process by which we arrived at an agenda, slowly. As the months went by our small MSH team remained engaged, unlike other stakeholders invited to join the planning group who, one by one, peeled off. And so it became eaier and easier to influence the thinking of the group.

I hoped to model good process, good design and good facilitation and much patience. I think I did that, which should make things easier the next time around.I even could have gotten Sita to scribe had Steve and I launched that idea a little earlier.

While I was wrapping things up at the Intercon Axel met Hadji Kazem, our office gardner who looks like he has stepped out of a ancient Chinese novel. He cut our grass, trimmed the roses and other bushes and a made it clear to Axel that he is in charge of both office and guesthouse gardens. I know what wonders he does for our office grounds and so I have full confidence that he will administer our small plot well; Axel has realized that here is yet another thing that he doesn’t have to worry about. It is all part of the good life here in Kabul.

We are going to Mazar, it looks like, on April 2 for a leadership event with the northern and western provinces. We hope one of the deputy ministers will accompany us. Axel will too, so he can experience life outside Kabul before he gets a paying job and won’t have the spare time to come along with me.