Sylvia's Journal

I picked up a book about the performance of emotion among the Pashtoon women in the North West Frontier Province in Pakistan. It is a wonderful piece of ethnographic writing about the misfortunes that have befallen women, the ‘performance of grief.’ The scholarly but easy to read book presents a counterpoint to the more commonly known narrative of Pashtoon men with their code of honor, revenge killing and all that.

The opening chapter about doing ethnographic fieldwork is fascinating because it explains something about being a foreign female in these lands. I have always considered myself and my non Afghan sisters somewhat of a third gender but I now realize that this is not entirely correct.

We can be among the men and the women and move around, seemingly, in either world. But I am learning now that this is not true. The author explains how being among men, as a woman, in the highly segregated places of her fieldwork, she could never get close to the women unless she stopped moving back and forth between the men and the women. It is as if one is not entirely a woman until one moves into parda (purdah) with the local women and behave with modesty (downcast eyes), subservience and shyness when in the company of men (who would be close relatives, not strangers as that would be taboo).

Although I work and live among a group of Afghans who are highly educated and used to this Western mingling of the sexes, I have an inkling that for some this behavior may be problematic, more so because it could never be expressed. I am not behaving as a woman should in that (granted, very rural and not very educated) culture, rarely casting my eyes down, unless I am walking on uneven ground, never subservient. I can’t help but think that my behavior grates on some men here.

One chapter is about the expression of emotion and I realized instantly that our glorification of Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence writing is fine within a western context but entirely inappropriate in this culture. Expression of emotion is a ritual performance, highly gender-dependent, learned early in life by girls and boys, and a collective rather than an individual experience as it is in the west. It is as if a new window has been shoved in front of me with someone whispering, ‘here, look through this, now what do you see?’

I look through this new window pane at my experience of the last 10 days and begin to glimpse why I am having a hard time. I am seeing emotions expressed in behaviors that to me dictate the need for talking things over. It is part of the western management credo in which I am so thoroughly trained: when the surface appears to hide things that are swarming and squirming underneath, investigate!

Now I am trying to look through that new window again and I see steady rituals, maintained over 100s of years with protagonists and extras who all know their place, their role and the rituals they ought to perform. And suddenly there is me, throwing a monkey wrench into the works. Could that be?

I think about my male predecessors and wonder why they never talked to me about these things. Were there any clashes at all? And about what? Or did they just let things slide because of the discomfort that confrontation would bring?

This morning when I woke up I thought about a phrase from Ron Heifetz, noted surgeon/psychiatrist/cellist and most famous as leadership developer at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Heifetz always talks about adaptive work (as contrasted to technical work where there are experts who know the answer). Framing the adaptive work is the work of leaders and the compelling challenge is always, “how can we learn our way out of this mess?”

I recognize that Heifetz is the product of an individualistic society, and so am I. We believe that individuals can change on their own. And here I am in a very collectivist society where an individual who chooses his or her own path takes enormous risks.

My adaptive work, then, in the next 13 months, will be to figure out how to ask the questions that lead to self-initiated and self-propelled change (not imposed) in this context. It requires, among other things, learning at least one of the languages of this place. I need words.

The second day of Ramazan was a workday but only a few people showed up. The streets and offices were empty and stores closed. Walking to my office I pass many fruit trees, two of them fig trees. I plucked a few dark purple figs from the tree for when I would get hungry. I had brought a hardboiled egg just in case. My colleague AB is fasting along with everyone else but for this I have no drive nor desire.

I took furtive sips from my water bottle that was hiding in back of my computer, ate the figs and the egg and made it through a long day dedicated mostly to emptying my overflowing mailbox. In the morning we had our last incomplete directors’ meeting. Our Finance and Operations Director is back and his predecessor is arriving early in the morning. We will finally be able to do a proper handover from one to the other, about 6 weeks overdue. This should be a week of many resolutions and decisions.

In our meeting we talked about how and when to consult with whom and where the boundaries are between our jobs. It is not obvious and will probably remain rather grey. Despite the clamor for clarity, and the countless job descriptions and manuals that experts produce for this purpose in my line of work there is little that is crystal clear. I am finding that the higher you rise the more of your time is spent on relationship building and maintenance, something that is rarely mentioned in job descriptions. The emphasis is on ‘technical’ but I do very little technical work.

After sitting the whole day in a hot and sticky room with a fan blowing papers hither and thither I arrived home hungry and exhausted. I was thinking of all the people who actually fasted and did hard labor without even a fan, and who don’t have an air conditioned bedroom in which to retreat, then multiplied by 30 days. I can’t really complain.

The guards were busy in the back of the house preparing for the breaking of the fast. It starts with fruits and dates. Our pear tree had lost a loaded branch which they relieved of at least 20 pears. We lent them our juicer and they produced the most delicious pear juice, enough for all of us.

We ate our dinner in front of the TV, switching back and forth between EuroNews and the BBC whenever the screen got too pixilated, with heads and bodies no longer matching. The TV makes clicking sounds when the picture breaks apart, as if the San people from South Africa have taken over, click, click. Our TV does that when it gets tired, too hot or the antenna dish got kicked. We were too lazy to try to fix it.

I watched a fierce (and pixilated) debate between women who favor wearing the veil and those who don’t, somewhere in a suburb of Brussels. The topic is so complex that every argument sounds reasonable. Why can’t we let women wear whatever they are comfortable with as long as it doesn’t jeopardize others (as in driving a car or piloting a plane in a burqa).

When I look at pictures from the 50s in Western Europe or even the US you see lots of women wearing scarves and when you go to southern Europe you find most of the older women with a veil or black scarf. When I was a teenager I often wore a scarf. My father had brought me one from Italy that I still have, with horse imagery on it. It had nothing to do with oppression. And here I am learning from some women that they like the anonymity of having most of their bodies hidden even if it is very hot.

Today was the first day of Ramad(z)an and for us a very quiet day. We slept in, had a chili omelet on the terrace and then we started to fantasize how we were going to spend the 2 days in Holland after the wedding, before we head back home to Kabul, on September 10.

We cruised the internet as if we were planning a honeymoon, looking for a B&B in Holland that would allow us some quiet and relaxed moments in between the hectic wedding week in the US and our extraordinary life in Kabul.

We found the most picturesque B&Bs in a small town north of Amsterdam, in Enkhuizen. They all had rave reviews but homemade websites that wouldn’t allow instant occupancy checks or bookings. We sent inquiries about vacancies and are waiting the responses.

We booked our hotel in Dubai for our return trip; the selection criterion was reliable air conditioning. When we get back it will still be in the upper 30s at night. We booked something near one of the gigantic air conditioned malls in case we want to go for a walk.

We are not fasting along with everyone around us although we are asked to not consume or drink in front of our colleagues. The lunch room at work will be closed for the next 30 days and so for lunch we either snack unobtrusively on cliff bars (very cheap here – we think they have fallen of the truck together with our apples from Washington State) or go home for lunch.

Around 6 PM Axel decided that it was time for cocktails. He had been able to find limes (rare here) and decided on Daiquiris. It was then that we found out that we don’t have unfettered access to the internet. Anything related to alcohol is censored. We were just about to send out an SOS on email when he found a recipe hiding deep inside a food website that had escaped the censor’s eye.

We toasted to the good life that we have, not because of where we are but because of being together.

I attended my first Technical Advisory Group meeting. The Japanese were presenting a plan for urban health care in Kabul, an area long neglected in favor of more rural populations. It was interesting as I don’t know that much about urban health planning. Afterwards I walked upstairs to join our team that manages the NGO contracts. It is an expanding family. For lunch we crowded around the conference table for a noisy family lunch.

AB and I walked to the outer USAID gate and waited for the rest of our team to arrive for our weekly meeting. We killed time watching the parade of large armored SUVs exit the heavily protected compound. Each SUV (worth probably a quarter million dollars) was packed full of testosterone: large muscular guys filling up the entire inside of the car. They were going into the dangerous out-of-the-bubble world.

There is some grumbling in the Afghan government about the amount of money that is destined for this country but never makes it here because of all this equipment. For 100.000 dollars you can keep many schools going for a long time or buy four such armored SUVs.

There is also grumbling that these cars don’t have license plates. I find it arrogant and I don’t understand the reason. It couldn’t be safety because the only cars without plates are the armored US SUVs – they are easy to spot. The one that flattened the car that my colleague’s kids were driving belonged to this group. The kids are, by the way, still at the air force base in Baghram, not in Germany as I was told earlier. One is still in coma, now 10 days after the accident, the other one conscious and slowly recovering.

I went to dinner at Razia Jan’s house and we planned the mother-of-the-bride dresses (one for the wedding and ne for the day after). After she comes back from Bamiyan she will start sewing.

We heard about the explosion in Taimani, a residential area far from where we live, via an SMS from our security office. It is a place we tend to visit during the weekend because it is where all the coffee houses are. We go there for lunches, massages, movies and visits to friends.

It was not clear what motives drove the suicide kids to their act. I was told that you can go to the bazar in Peshawar and ‘buy’ these suicide kids. They have been brainwashed in the madrasas and told that God wants them to sacrifice themselves for some vague greater good. They have learned not to question what, where and why and, like zombies, have themselves strapped in suicide vests. If you don’t want a suicide kid you could also buy a degree in any field from any university in the world, including Harvard, on official paper, sealed and signed.

My Dari lessons are paying off. This morning, as the most senior person of the project present in the compound, I received our security chief Baba jan for the daily briefing. Usually, with the foreigners, he brings along an interpreter because his English is very poor. Today he came alone and gave me the briefing in Dari. I understood about 80% of it, enough to know what is going on (a demonstration but no cause for concern).

For homework today I had to write a brief summary of two stories I have read, as part of my reading and writing program. The first story was a little weird and I cringed about the message it was giving to young girls: stay home, the world is full of grumpy old bears who will not eat you if you agree to clean their house and cook for them (really!). The other day a (male) colleague told me, ‘you are brave, you go out in the world. But our women are not brave and prefer to stay in the safety of their home.’ The message of the story has clearly stuck and the vicious circle of fear fueled by lack of contact and exposure is reinforced. What is different is dangerous.

I remember feeling that way when I first arrived here, sticking to the safe (but very limiting) routine of going back and forth between the office and the guesthouse, across the street. Every day of doing this made the fear a little stronger. The idea of venturing out into Kabul, let alone into Afghanistan, was frightful. The image I had in my mind was the Afghanistan that is presented to the outside world through the main media: a dangerous and violent place with fully armed bad guys and naïve youngsters with suicide vests lurking behind every corner.

The media imagery is powerful. It also works the other way around: I have encountered many in Afghanistan and heard from Iraqis when I worked with them in Jordan, that for them New York is much more dangerous than their homes, with gangsters at every street corner. What is different and far away is dangerous.

Once we started to venture out the other lesser known side of Afghanistan emerged and we could collect enough experiences of friendliness, hospitality, beauty and charm that it could counteract the nastiness, ugliness and violence and push the balance in favor of staying for awhile. As the events of this last week show, the balance is not steady and events can change the scales. It appears that things are in balance again, for now.

Marzila and I went to a meeting with the deputy minister about eliminating gender-based violence. We think it is a great idea and long overdue. We left our office early to have time for a nice Turkish lunch in the Istanbul restaurant near the ministry. We were still early when we arrived at the ministry and so we walked over to her husband’s office for a quick hello and congratulations on his confirmation as Director General.

We were perfectly gender-balanced in the meeting, with the highest person a woman. “Ah,” I thought, “this should be a picture from the future.” How rare such a setup is nowadays. We sat with all the women on one side of the table and all the men on the other.

The ministry of health, according to the law signed on gender-based violence, needs to report on cases of abuse, both physical and psycho-social, every month. It is good to get that data but I don’t think anyone has thought through carefully how this will happen.

We were shown forms to collect the data, draft templates and I cringed; one had a column for ‘name of victim.’ Someone raised the issue of confidentiality, another how one would spot psycho-social abuse and a third wondered about enforcement. A committee will be created and we will have someone on it from our team.

My one instruction to our project’s representative on this committee would be, don’t let a bunch of people (worse, a bunch of guys) sit around a table in Kabul and decide on how to tackle this incredibly sensitive and complex issue in this country where wife beatings and slicing off nose and ears of young girls is considered the honorable thing to do. It will require a multi-disciplinary approach with women’s groups, local authorities and enlightened elders to come together. It will require much education and the attachment of consequences to (what is now) illegal behavior. It’s going to be a long road ahead.

In the middle of writing, emails, concept pieces, reports, I find my thoughts wander to this place deep into Afghanistan where the Noor Eye team was killed. I can’t focus or concentrate and can only see a picture of these incredibly committed souls as they were lined up for execution and realized they had come to the end of the road. It takes my breath away and leaves me gasping for air; the letters on my computer screen become useless symbols. “What’s the point?,” I wonder, and “Who cares?”.

Afghans around me are as stunned. Some feel a personal sense of failure – these people did things that few Afghans would do. Some call it stupid but I think many are ashamed that this happened here. Afghans have a very strong sense of obligation to care for those who are guests, foreigners and locals alike. This is why I feel so very safe here in Kabul, in our office compound and in our guesthouses.

We would never have been allowed to go on a trek like the Nooristan Eyecare team did; we aren’t even allowed to walk down the street. Sometimes we get overconfident and we walk in certain parts of town where our security guards consider us safe. But never in mountains of Nooristan, a place that is the eastern version of the Wild West. Everyone knew the risks. Sometimes people take risks and are lucky; sometimes they are not.

This morning, in our own small universe at the office, the conversations that needed to happen took place, one private and one with a small group of people over lunch. We talked about stress and the reptilian brain, about cultural and gender divides, about forgiving but not forgetting, about remorse and being sorry. There was much grace in these conversations that were highly unusual in this Afghan context: with a senior and male owning up to errors made to others, mostly female and mostly young.

I had hoped to model that good things can come from bad things. I wanted to show how hurt and anger can be transformed, yet doubting very much that this could be done here. It is hard to gauge whether I was successful; such shifts are not simple or quick. I cannot know yet whether the words spoken are only words, time will tell, but I was told by one of the young women involved in these conversations that sometimes words are more; they can be harbingers of shifts that, though small through one eye, are enormous through the other.

Still, a small seed was dropped that could grow into a decision that this place is not for me. For now the seed is laying dry and cold on the ground. In its current condition and location in cannot germinate, but something can change so it does. There are things that cannot be undone, like certain words spoken in anger. They fly out of the mouth with wings. They can never be put back. For now my heart is light enough that I can work again.

While I am struggling with my own contradictory feelings about working here, the devastating news reached us of the team of medics who were killed in Badakhshan. More heart break. The loss of these lives is indescribable. One of the members of the team attended to our medical needs at a local clinic; others are or had been students at the language school we attend. When we arrived there for our Saturday classes everyone was in tears. Thinking about the lives lost takes my breath away. Only silence can comfort right now.

We are scheduled to go to another fundraiser tonight, for an organization called Parsa. Some people have already cancelled but I find myself obliged to go. The event is at the same place where only a few short weeks ago the team of medics held their own fundraiser. I don’t think this one will be canceled as Ramazan is near, but I don’t think it will be a happy occasion.

We said goodbye to Meghann who has left for the US and her new life as a midwife. As a farewell gift she gave us hoola hoop lessons and her folding travel hoola hoop to keep. “As long as you keep hoola-hooping, you cannot get fat,” she assured us. I could manage to keep the hoop above my hips but Axel has no hips and so his performance was not very good. We will practice, we promised her.

In my Dari class I started working from Afghanistan’s official 2nd grade textbooks – printed cheaply and poorly on thin paper. I can’t read all the letters because of the low print quality and the reproductions of photos are so grainy that I can’t do the exercises that ask me to name what’s in the picture.

The first lesson is about God, the second about Mohamed, the third about knowledge and the fourth about school. It is strange for me to see these topics, coming from a secular society where the lessons for a second grader are about dogs and cats, boys and girls, families, play and school.

His father is a shoemaker in Helmand. He helped his father fix shoes and at night he would count the money. His father then gave him part of it for his English language course. My mother, she is funny, she always wants to keep the money, he laughed, tenderly.

A year ago he rode a bike with is younger brother when shelling started. They were hit and knocked out. When he came to he saw that his brother’s head had been severed; his own eyes were all bloody.

This is the heart breaking story that one of the students of the leadership school where Axel works, told me. He had read it as a speech, in halting but very clear English in front of an audience of fellow students, teachers, well wishers and sponsors, just when we walked in at the restaurant where the fundraiser was held. A poster on the wall was entitled ‘Mr. Axel’s class.’ It an enlarged picture of Axel and his students around the table and sheets with poetry and prose pasted on it.

American eye surgeons have been working on the young man’s eye. The work is not done; he is waiting for a visa to go back to the surgeons in North Carolina. He doesn’t know if he will get the visa this time.

He talked lovingly about his parents and how he misses them while he lives in Kabul. They cannot read or write even their own language, let alone English. They are still in Helmand, a dangerous place as his story proves. It complements the other heartbreaking story of the girl without the nose, now of Time Magazine fame. Multiply these by tens of 1000s. This is Afghanistan – one long drawn out heart break in a place of stunning beauty, natural and manmade, and unspeakable violence.

A group of musicians called Sufi played and sang long mournful songs, intensely beautiful and sad as if to illustrate this juxtaposition of this country’s beauty and pain. I finally met Sabera, another student who Axel says reminds him of me because of the discipline with which she tackles life.

This was the second fundraiser we went to. The first one was to keep a school for girls going. I lounged most of the afternoon on a carpeted platform, leaning on cushions while watching Sisilia practice walking the catwalk for the fashion show of clothes made by Razia Jan.

It was an entire day of rest that started with coffee at Chris’ house, a badly needed massage at the spa, lunch with a new found friend and the fastest haircut I have ever had by a (male) Palestinian hair stylist, more artist than technician. Sisilia, watching me in the mirror, approved of my new style. She blew me little kisses while she watched in amazement how a foreigner (male) received a pedicure side by side with his female companion.

I sat in a restaurant realizing I needed to get to the airport and was already late. I called a taxi company and told them I had my own transport. The taxi dispatcher was friendly and said he would give me directions. With one hand on the phone and another busy scribbling instructions, I had no hands free to deal with an attacker who approached my table menacingly and started to take away foods. I ended up using my elbows to hurl plates towards him, in the hope of attracting attention through the clatter of dishes breaking. But the dishes fell down with a soft plop and no one came to the rescue. I was on my own and the attacker went on undisturbed. That’s when I woke up, with a great sense of loss in my heart.

The events of yesterday are recognizable in the dream. I haven’t had such a vivid dream in a long time; at least one I remember. The sense of assault is still present, so are the doubts about my presence here. Axel and I talked for a long time. He has been sensing that this was coming. We went to bed intensely sad.

Today should be better; it will be a girls’ day. First the massage, then, hopefully a lovely girls’ lunch outside with people I care deeply about. After that I will take one my colleagues’ young African wife to the fundraising party that went nowhere last week because of the ISAF vehicle accident and the drama that unfolded after that. She will be modeling clothes in a fundraising fashion show. Although I was also asked to model, I declined, having not quite the right body; but she does and she is excited about the prospect, having been sitting at home watching television the entire week with her husband on assignment outside the country. Her excitement is contagious. I think today I can forget about the dream.

Working here is like a roller coaster ride. Some days I am high and full of hope and confidence, like yesterday when the acting minister invited me to take a seat on the Technical Advisory Committee, or when the revised Basic Package of Health Services was signed. Or when I see people behaving with more confidence, strength, insight.

But now I am down in the dumps, so deep down that I am considering packing my bags and leaving. It is one of these days that I think the challenges are too big, the divides too wide to bridge and that there is little I can do to contribute to the kind of Afghanistan people dream about. For me, the arch-optimist, it is hard to even ask the question that so many other people ask, ‘can it be done?’

There are so many factors that make working here challenging. Surprisingly the security is the least of them all. Today I stumbled upon a landmine, figuratively I must add, since there are plenty of the real things here. The explosive response to my naïve stumble left me stunned and convinced that it’s this gender thing again and that it is going to break me.

We have three fundraisers lined up for the next three days – all to benefit girls in one way or another. It will provide a good antidote for the dark thoughts that are crowding in on my heart.