Sylvia's Journal

We have a new lodger. Katie has arrived from Boston. It is her first time in Afghanistan. She’s very cool about being here and brought us some cool gifts: fermented grape juice, yellow and pink, and fair trade coffee. She is a connoisseur of both and shares that interest with Axel.

While Anddy will try to perform a miracle with his team in Kabul, I am going to Bamiyan with Katie, my boss and one of my staff. Katie is also expected to perform miracles, hers are related to monitoring and evaluation. She needs to know what it is like in the provinces, who works there, what they do with data and defining success. Hence our trip out of Kabul.

We are taking the 9:00 AM flight that will circle the entire country before landing in mid afternoon in Bamiyan. The direct flight takes only 40 minutes, but here nothing is direct.

Security has cleared us. It is not easy to take people to the provinces as the pool of allowed provinces is rapidly shrinking. Even the usually peaceful northern provinces are increasingly declared off limits. We can still go to Bamiyan, Herat, Mazar, but that is about it. And now the people in Bamiyan are angry at the (only) female governor and want her to resign. It has something to do with the Kuchis, a kind of Afghan gypsies, nomads, who are fighting with the Hazaras about land and things more complex than that.

Today I finished the big Dari book that I have been studying for 4 months. I have completed all 25 chapters, memorized the bulk of the vocabulary lists, completed the exercises and tried to understand the more complex phrases contained in its 300 pages.

It’s close to a miracle. I can now converse, albeit slowly, with lots of mistakes and with much thinking and looking up of words, with our household staff, guards and drivers. They understand me, more or less. However, my own understanding of them is still rudimentary and the risk of miscommunication is considerable higher than when I didn’t speak any Dari at all.

With the big book completed I am moving into phase 2 of the language program, learning to read and write. I am practicing my letters, still drawing them, rather than writing; discovering which part goes on top of the line and what below it, much like a first grader learning her letters. It’s a lot of fun and I am looking forward to my next lesson on Saturday.

Today I watched Anddy do the kind of work I used to do here; facilitating the change of thinking processes. It made me go back to my files from those trips and look at the designs I used to bring people together. Nostalgia.

Anddy is from Nigeria. It took us months to get him here. And now that he is here I discover that no one was prepared for him. He is finding one obstacle after another on his path because we had not communicated well with key stakeholders. I remember those times too – constantly having to change course, adjust expectations, roll with the punches, and keep smiling all the while. That is what Anddy does, and he does it with grace.

I find myself in a different position. I am no longer like an Anddy; I am senior management. I am the one to talk to senior colleagues of our sister project, and confront them – if you are not available to work with your primary client, then what the heck are your people doing, sitting in front of their computers? Who are you serving?

One person’s mental map is light years away from another. We are on different planets, speaking different languages and pretend we are communicating. I am relying on Anddy’s magic to align these mental maps and create a common language, maybe not on Sunday, but hopefully on Monday.

As if this is not challenging enough, the Peace Jirga is coming to town next week, accompanied by threats from insurgents to blow up prestigious and highly symbolic targets that lie exactly on the road between us and the ministry. If the event is not postponed there will surely be a travel ban which means that Anddy’s work might be cut short by half. I prepared him for that eventuality. “Why the hell are you working here?” he asked.

Still, he keeps smiling and remains dedicated to his assignment, whatever part of it he can fulfil. I like people like that. He can come back anytime, if he wants to.

Crickets, cool summer nights, peaches and plums, no bombs, at least not here, it could go on like this forever. But in places not so far away from here women are being flogged for godknowswhat transgression by mullahs or other self-righteous men who see women as little more than breeding machines or, god forbid, mysterious and slightly scary objects of lust.

Wazhma Frogh who is a social activist studying in the UK wrote about this. I started the day reading her article (Internalizing Impunity in Afghanistan/Daily Times, Pakistan, May 23). It left me feeling angry and impotent. She writes about the impunity with which bullies, armed and dangerous, are left to call the shots in many places in this country. Here, with the crickets and peaches, I live in an entirely different world.

There are other, smaller, acts that reek of greed, attempts at self enrichment, unless they are to keep a family alive – how would you know? It reminds me of the moral development questions that we asked to children in (then) war-torn Lebanon. We wanted to test the hypothesis that children who grow up in an environment where the gun and money determine what is lawful and what is not would be amoral or at least behind in their moral development.

We asked them, what if you stole medicine for someone who could not pay and would otherwise die. Would that be OK? These were Kohlberg’s questions, later unmasked by Carol Gilligan as biased – they stem from a time when we thought male development was the norm, which makes women by definition abnormal. I think many men here still believe that.

It is performance evaluation time at MSH. The process, so logical and coherent in the US looks very different here. It is probably as countercultural as a process can get: confronting people directly, black on white, whether they performing well or not. As long as the forms record good or very good performance the process works fine and is motivating and encouraging.

But when someone is not doing what they should be doing it becomes more complicated quickly. In this society where indirect communication is the norm, this is too painfully straightforward – recht voor zijn raap – we call that in Holland, poorly translated as ‘straight for the head.’ Sometimes we confuse transparent with direct. Processes imported from one culture in another have all the basic assumptions about what are appropriate and inappropriate interactions between people attached to them, and then become inseparable.

I try my best to model commitment to the performance review process. I do believe in it as a tool to help people grow and develop. But the deadlines for handing in the signed forms require compliance – I figured I can comply if I do a quick and dirty approach so that the files are complete on time and I am seen as a good manager. Commitment makes for very long work days – compliance is much easier.

Amidst the anger, frustration, impotence and approaching deadlines some very good news is on the horizon: we have another two women shortlisted for positions in our project. Things are looking good.

I slept late and found neither my ticket to the US organized nor the email with Boston working. We use a travel agent but they didn’t kick in until I had organized everything myself, arrangements made via Skype. I learned from the nice Delta lady that the only seat available on the 16 hour flight from Dubai to Atlanta is in the middle of the middle row. I had changed my route with the intent of an upgrade but instead find myself in the least attractive place in the entire plane.

To compensate for this I booked myself in a nice hotel that looks over the Creek in Deira, Dubai. I will hang out there from noon till early evening when it is check-in time for my night flight. I will need to finalize my presentation now that I recieved all the missing pieces by belated email. I plan to cross the creek for a nice lunch at the Lebanese restaurant before heading out to my middle seat.

I had my Dari lesson with a sneezing and coughing teacher who refused to sit next to me, fearing she would infect me. We started on the last lesson, 25, of the here famous Glassman book. After that I will start reading and writing. I am now learning the kind of very complicated sentences that allow me to express hopes or fears or inquire about possibilities that may or may not be realized, some requiring the subjunctive and some requiring the progressive past tense. These lessons require many hours of review and practice. I think my vocabulary is now approaching one thousand words.

A bunch of us got together to watch Proof (Anthony Hopkins, Gwyneth Paltrow) on a big screen after an eclectic meal prepared by the cook of guesthouse 0. It included tuna pizza (hmm), rice, roasted lamb, roasted potatoes and onions, an Afghan dish with eggplant and yogurt and a few other dishes I never even got to.

Our cook had contributed his excellent apple torte and I had made asparagus
soup from the peels and stocky ends of the spears we ate the other day while our cook was watching my every move. I tried to explain in my best Dari what a roux was and why one made one and how it made the thin soup thick. I actually don’t understand the physics and didn’t know the words for thick and thin so I doubt he got it.

Our little Dari/English cookbook has a cauliflower soup in it, made with potato as a thickener and so I pointed to that. I think Axel is going to have cauliflower soup soon, thick soup I imagine.

And now it is way past my bedtime as the driver will show up in about 6 hours and I am not quite ready. The broken email was fixed at the end of the workday here and then let in a long stream of emails that I have not attended to, except for the one with the new ticket that still sits me in the middle back in coach.