Sylvia's Journal

I am watching Hillary and Karzai on my TV screen. Our cable for English language channels defective and so I watch the local news, with both leaders speaking in dubbed Dari. Not having any linguistic cues I watch their body language; I see tension and much nervous laughter. I am sure that many people here are watching every move of Karzai, especially his ennemies and those whom he owes a debt. There may indeed be much cause for nervous laughter.

Karzai speaks about fruitful talks between his ministers and their American counterparts; that much I get. I wonder how our (health) minister is faring and whether her message is getting through (and what message for that matter).

We hope that everyone will ask the Afghan delegation ‘what about the women?’ With all the talk about the Taliban integrating into the government (mostly men talking to other men), people don’t seem to realize the panic that this creates here among women.

After Hillary and Obama and Karzai at various events, some live, we watched what we believe is a ‘strategic communication’ piece from and about the Afghan army. Axel notices that the footage has no foreigners in it: Afghans training Afghans. This is the new mantra – no foreigners. We are wondering how Karzai walks this fine line in Washington: we want your money but not your strings, or people.

Today was both my first day at work and my last day. This made it a very long day. The presentation I have to give on Monday in Washington was incomplete and had not been mine until today. The planned rehearsal via video today became a presentation of my own version, also still incomplete, to be fixed tomorrow, after my Dari lessons.

Axel had dinner at our house with a woman not his wife while I had dinner with four men not my husbands. Such things get frowned upon when you are an Afghan (woman), but we are forgiven because we are foreigners, odd creatures with strange habits.

We had invited Pia for dinner before I realized that I was supposed to go out for dinner with one of MSH’s VPs who is visiting from Boston. He is the boss of the boss of the boss of the boss of my boss, important enough to join for dinner. And so I left before our dinner guest arrived. When I returned from dinner she was still there. Axel had dragged out dinner long enough for me to catch the tail end of both the dinner and the Lebanese Gris de Gris.

Today I paid dearly for having taken a four day vacation in which I had refused to attend to email. The presence of our VP required all sorts of things not on our usual Sunday schedule: an all staff meeting to introduce our elevated visitor, a courtesy visit to Her Excellency at the ministry, lunch, a trip to the carpet place on Chicken Street and finally a one-on-one meeting filled every minute of the day. It wasn’t until 3:30, just about the time that everyone else left for home, that I could finally start to tackle the accumulated emails and provide promised responses that all need to be taken care off before we leave for Holland.

I started the day waking up from a night full of dreams in which the ugliness of Afghanistan was contrasted with the beauty of the place. The dream images must have come from our visit to the clothing factory where things of great beauty were produced alongside with army uniforms; where the most extraordinary roses bloom in front of blast walls and razor wire, where beautiful carpets are laid out on the dirty road, inviting cars to drive right over them.

Dirty-clean, cloudy-sunny, dusty-clear, chaos-harmony, difficult-easy, war-peace.

I was the only one in an entirely orange outfit; then there were the Dutch embassy employees, some women wearing an orange scarf and most of the men in suits wearing a tiny little orange ribbon. There was one Afghan gentleman wearing what is known as Karzai’s signature robe, the blue/green chapan; and then of course the military (Dutch ISAF) in their usual camouflage outfits.

One things that was very noticeably was the height of the young Dutch men who towered over everyone else. Dutch males are competing with Sudanese males for the tallest in the world. A few of these skinny giants were with us last night.

It was the Queen’s Birthday Party. It is actually the queen mother’s birthday (April 30); but the current queen was born at the end of January which is not a good time to celebrate outdoors in Holland so we kept her mother’s birth date. Last night wasn’t even the 30th of April. The Dutch embassy had to organize the event around Mujahideen day (today), a bridge vacation day, tomorrow, and Friday when everything is closed.

Security notices had been flying around the internet to be careful. Two years ago Karzai was nearly killed on this day. Apparently, it is a day when AOGs (armed opposition groups) flex their muscles.

After consultation with our security people we got permission to go into town and were even allowed to pass barricades because of the Dutch passport and the invitation. We arrived just when high government officials and other Afghan and foreign dignitaries as well as many military (ISAF) men were leaving the compound and the place was opened to the Dutch community living in Kabul.

Beautiful carpets were laid out over the gravel and mud to welcome us through barricades and past grey blast walls, metal cages, armed men and other signs of war. Overhead crimson canopies were erected to hide other protective constructions and so everything looked quite festive.

Large pictures of Holland’s famous sights (tulip fields, cows and windmills, stately houses in Amsterdam along the canals, orange-dressed fans in a football stadium, close up of a tulip) were strung along another blast wall with potted geraniums in front.

And then there were the Afghan waiters (all male of course) with orange aprons or dressed in traditional farmers costumes with their wide pants, striped fronts and small black caps, quite cute. They were carrying around trays of small canapés (salmon, pate) that would have been more at home in a fancy French restaurant.

And then came the long awaited trays with fresh (raw) herring. I stood close by the service entrance and was able to take one of the few whole herrings that were placed on top of the small pieces on toast. I was very selfish and managed to get two entire herrings.

The herring tray was followed by a tray with small glasses with oranje bitter, an orange colored gin that is only served on this day of the year I believe. For those wanting the plain gin, uncoloured, or Heineken or wine, all was available in unlimted quantities.

We met interesting people, among them two Afghans who had lived in Holland and spoke better Dutch than we did Dari; we talked with the military who are all deeply upset about the decision by the Dutch people to pull out of Afghanistan (Uruzgan). They all believed they have done transformative work there and made the province, among the poorest of Afghanistan, a better place to live in, especially for young girls who are now going to Dutch-built and supported schools.

After our meeting with our donor I had my performance review with my boss, sitting in the back of a pick up truck. By the time we arrived at the office I had my rating (meet expectations) which will be communicated with HQ to determine my salary increment. It is not easy to get the higher ratings of ‘exceed expectations,’ let alone the highest one of ‘outstanding.’

I would of course have liked to get an ‘exceeded expectations,’ but I am not sure anyone knows what can be expected of me, here, in the nebulous arena of capacity building in management and leadership. My conversation with my boss, as well as my own preparation for this, had highlighted again how difficult it is to be in the business of ‘building capacity’ at the most senior levels of a government bureaucracy in a place where there’s a bit of a leadership crisis, not just in the ministry but everywhere in this country, from top to bottom.

The dilemma in my job is that it is easy to improve leadership and management in a place that is well led and well managed; such places don’t need us of course. But here, where management skills, even at the highest levels, are inshort supply and where there is essentially a leadership vacuum, combined with much activity at various levels that cannot withstand scrutiny, there is only so much we can do.

We can, and we do suggest or, if we have a boss’ blessing, put into place processes, procedures, create plan templates, facilitate planning meetings and all that, but we cannot make the boss hold his (rarely her) staff accountable for results, get rid of dead wood or manage politically well connected non performers.

As outsiders who are not holding many strings, we can tell our superiors about corruption stories (oh there are so many, and such clever ones: donated hospital blankets sold in the bazaar while the old hospital blankets are cut in two so that the numbers add up; or old rancid oil used for cooking the hospital food while the fresh oil is sold in the bazaar) – but we can’t do much about it.

Some people at the highest levels are sincerely trying to stamp such practices out while others have a stake in not succeeding. The only way to not get too depressed about is to soldier on and hope that the honest higher ups will eventually prevail and lightning will hit the dishonest ones.

Another dilemma I was confronted with today is about speaking out as a kharidja, a foreigner, whose voice and opinion is more respected (say some people). I am encouraged to be more forceful and forthcoming with my opinion while at the other hand building the capacity of my staff to be listened to and respected. In my view the former undermines the latter and so I tend to be more of a coach than the provider of expert opinion.

And of course everything everyone tells me is only an opinion that may, or may not be shared by nil or thousands.

The main road through Karte Parwan, past the Intercon Hotel and Bagh-e-Bala is being improved, expanded and paved (‘cooked’). There are two wide lanes, paved and ready for use, but at rush hour only one was open. The lane should be able to hold three cars abreast (there are no white lines) but somehow nine lanes had pressed into the space for three; six lanes going our way and three in the opposite direction.

The whole place was one large parking lot and our driver, Hadji Safar, decided to take a short cut off on the left, but we got even more hopelessly stuck. He managed to turn the car around between two jewies (open sewers) without getting his wheels over the edge and ease back into the space we had formerly occupied. It was a good occasion to quote the saying, ‘faster is slower.’ It took us 2 hours to get form the ministry of health back to our house, a distance of only a few kilometres, 25 minutes on a good day.

I was lucky that i was not traveling along. My co-passenger was one of my staff. We killed the time by deconstructing a complex mess-up in the office that we can ascribe lightly to cultural differences, or deeply to things more sinister (or just the other way around). In the end we agreed that an Afghan proverb described the situation best: if my heart is not narrow, no place can be narrow (aga delem tang nabasha, jay tang neest).

All along during the drive, cheek by jowl with other motorists, I made a point of smiling to people who looked tense. I was able, each time, to get a smile back. I consider this good preventive medicine in a place where road rage can easily get out of hand given the amount of guns that are floating around here; no doubt some of them in the cars we encounter or travel alongside with.

At the ministry we had attended a meeting that was designed to get organizations like us to pay for staff and other things (nobody even nibbled on the request for the new headquarters). It was one of these meetings with multiple layers of meaning. After the meeting, during our long ride home, I understood what was really going on and realized that our response had been the wrong one – a moral high road maybe, but missing the boat in other ways.

The endless requests for things, people, stuff, money is at times exasperating, yet entirely understandable. For one, the strategy ultimately works as there is always someone who is willing to sign the check. In this case that should have been us. Not offering to hire staff would essentially undo a few years of capacity building, as the capacity that we did built is about to slip from our hands – contracts are up and there are better offers out there. There are no easy solutions and we are too far ahead in this game of hiring the people the government needs but cannot afford, to turn our backs.

Thwuck, thwuck, thwuck went the helicopters, rattling our thin glass windows in their poorly constructed frames. They veered south, no more than 500 feet over our heads. A first one batch of 5 and then another batch. In between there was the rumble of low flying planes, labouring towards something that required this much airpower. Off to the unruly, unruled and unrulable south?

The people flying these things, Americans I supposes, are also working in Afghanistan, just like me. For them working in Afghanistan is an entirely different ball game. I sit here with the door to the garden open, listening to the twitter of birds and the voices of children, playing real ball games.

I am reading Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War and in doing so catch a glimpse of the stuff that happens far from our beds, the ugly stuff about this (and Iraq’s) forever war. It’s the picture that most people have of Afghanistan. It is very different from ours.

This morning I handed out the pictures Axel took during our outing this weekend, to the drivers and guards who came with us. The neat thing about Axel’s graphic design skills is that he has everything set up to print out pictures. When we go on a walk to a place we have been before, he prints the pictures and we hand them out, nearly like a Polaroid, except much nicer quality. It is what I have always wanted to do but am never set up to do. People love to have their picture taken here, even women (we do ask first of course).

At work we are cycling into our annual performance review and work planning period. Back in Boston I hated this time because the process was designed by accountants. But here I am part of senior leadership and thus have some say over the process. We use it as a time of reflection and capacity building in house, a use of time I find useful and productive.

While I was at work Axel went with driver Fazle on his day off to deliver the cleats and shin guards and jerseys to the womens’ soccer team, practicing in the far northwest corner of Kabul. This to make sure that the girls had first dibs on the goodies. I asked Axel to take pictures to bring back as proof. He did.