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.

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.