Sylvia's Journal

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In my best third grade written Dari I wrote a note to my boss asking for permission to go on a shopping spree with Steve, leaving the office an hour before the end of the work day. He wrote me back, in handwriting that I couldn’t quite read on my own, in poetic Dari, that it was OK. My next goal in my lessons is to be able to read handwritten Dari. I can already read some of the graffiti on Kabul’s mud-brick walls.

The reason for this workday shopping trip was the appointment I have made with a shipping company to come and survey my household goods that will be shipped back to the US soon. I wanted to make sure that some last minute purchases would be included in the estimate. Just like the books I have been bringing home from the office.

Canadian friends followed us in their own car to Chicken Street where Steve took them around to his favorite shops. Of course now that he is no longer living here he had to rein himself in and not buy more stuff himself, just being a guide and making social calls. But my upcoming shipment is a great opportunity for him to add a few things to his own collection which, after I gave him a positive nod, he is now enthusiastically doing. It’s a win-win: I have room, he wants to buy the stuff and the shopkeepers need to save up for Eid.

Some of his acquisitions (from last December when he was here for a few weeks) were already waiting in another guesthouse and have since been moved to mine. The small room where his treasures are stored is filling up slowly, just like his room did when he lived in Kabul. I am sorry I did not chronicle it more closely – I could make a flip-book of the expansion of the stuff.

I would have liked to buy lots of the Nuristani carved wooden furniture, some brightly painted, some old, some new. But I have to remember that we don’t have any space for more stuff back home and I don’t have a guaranteed income after October 1; so I limited myself to two things I have been eyeing for a long time.

In the Central Asia jumble shop I priced several instruments – a last opportunity to bring some home for the musicians in our family – these things are either too large or too fragile to carry home by myself. I expect Sita and Jim to say they want me to buy all of them. I don’t know whether they can be restored to full use – something I assume our musicians have in mind. If not they are certainly magnificent pieces of craftmanship.

The driver picked Steve and me up at the usual time and mentioned “I am resigned.” I was just verifying whether this was in the passive or active tense (had he resigned from the job or was he asked to resign) when it dawned on me that this was the first batch of people who had received their ‘termination’ letters – a 30-day notice requirement under Afghan labor law. We have to give these notices because our project extension has not been formalized by the US government and the current ending date is September 30, 2011.

And so the close out has started to become real. I too will receive my notice, next week. In my case the giving notice and receiving notice adds up to the same thing, with a probably departure date around September 11. It’s a fitting day to leave Afghanistan I think, reminding me why I was here in the first place but also that the ripples of that day have not faded away. On the contrary, here the dust clouds of that event have still not cleared. An extraordinary documentary about Osama Bin Laden that I watched on AlJezeera (English) this morning had the same message.

Despite all our communications with our staff that these notifications are formalities – we can’t quite believe that the doomsday scenario of a total project closure is really what the US government wants – having the letters in their hands made many people nervous and suspicious (why me and not him?) as some people got their notice today and others will get them in two weeks. Deep ethnic rifts and other rivalries instantly rose to the surface.

We, the senior staff, try to explain that a project as large as ours cannot be closed in a few days. Some 200 people have to show up at the administrative offices to clear their advances, return computers and any other equipment, and get various superiors to sign off that they leave clean and clear. And staff is just a small part of the closing. There is real estate, millions of dollars of drugs, inventory to distribute and a thousand other things. Normally a close out of a project our size takes 6 to 4 months; we have less than 2 – hoping, hoping all along that the signatures would materialize in time. We still hope but it is getting close to the wire. A bit like the debt ceiling thing.

This turbulence comes at difficult time. First there is Ramazan in the hottest month of the year, then there are the countless acts of revenge and intimidation by insurgents, Taliban or others, across the country, the unease left by the American’s announcement of withdrawal, the talks about the second Bonn conference with endless speculation and rumors about the role of the Taliban.

One rumor that is being aired on various TV stations is that Karzai is keeping several ministries in the hands of acting (caretaker) ministers so that these can be offered to the Taliban. Health is among them. Among my colleagues they make jokes about serving the old Taliban minister of health again, a lawyer mullah who became a health mullah overnight. If true it will probably undo a lot of our work, especially efforts to bring more women into the healthcare professions.

Our first work day of the Holy month of Ramazan started with a ceremony that included a long recitation from the Holy Qu’ran, followed by prayers to usher in this month of daytime fasting. I had forgotten about the event and had rushed down at the last minute. With such ceremonies I never know whether I should attend them, out of respect, or whether I should not be there. I asked one of my female colleagues whether I should quickly go to my office to get my chador to cover my head, to which she replied, “yes, it would be better.” And so I sat there with my head covered listening to the slow, long, nasal cadence of the recitation, wondering how long it took the young man to learn to do it so flawlessly.

Gifts were handed out at the end, a booklet, I presume with prayers, and boxes with dates – the food with which the fast is broken. And then everyone went to work. I had asked the kitchen to keep bringing me a thermos with boiled water so I could at least have my morning cup of Nescafe. For the rest of the day I made do with one hardboiled egg and a airplane peanut packet plus a can of V8 at lunch time. It was enough to keep me going and stop the rumblings in my stomach. Steve went home for lunch to have something more substantive.

Our workdays now end at 3 o’clock as the half hour for lunch is removed from the workday. the ministry is a bit more lenient, letting people go home at 1 PM. In this summer month with its very long days this means that there is still a long wait for it to get dark, about sixteen hours without food and water. But here people don’t see it like that – it is a collective experience of sacrifice and suffering, followed by, what I suspect, joyous family meals together at nightfall and before sunrise. I joined the crowd, eager to leave my hot and stuffy office, to sit for awhile in an air conditioned room and cool off. I suspect most of my colleagues probably laid down for a long nap.

I am preparing for a private MBTI session with one official in the ministry. Reading through all the materials I realized how much I miss this kind of contact with individuals, helping people to become more self aware and recognize their own and other people’s gifts. With all the criticism of the MBTI that I have encountered over the years, it still is one of the best and most compelling tools to help people look at their interactions with the world around them and the world of ideas and thoughts inside them. An new lens on interpersonal relations, whether with a spouse or with one’s nemesis, is always eagerly received in my experience. If, as a result of this looking, people stop wanting other people to be more like themselves the pay off will be grand.

The first day of Ramazan was hot, long and quiet, even for Steve and me who are not fasting. For Steve fasting is more than entirely unimaginable, for me simply hard to imagine. Yet I know from my more devout Muslim colleagues, here and in other parts of the Muslim world, that for them the fast is a significant, holy, even joyous duty.

I spent most of the day listening to Sherlock Holmes stories, four audio books I downloaded from the Manchester public library, while working on the sampler for Sita and Jim – I have just one month to get it finished. I have eight more diamonds of various sizes to complete.

In the afternoon Farid and his brother, a medical student, came by to say hello, collect another donation for the tennis court from one of my colleagues and to talk about his brother’s vision for health services to the severely underserved Hazara population on the western side of the city, the same place where the wool factory is.

Their father worked for MSH some 30 years ago in Ghazni. I called Steve down to join us and be inspired by these two delightful young men who are bright lights in an otherwise dark, depressing and dysfunctional Kabul.

Steve had worked in the district where the boys were born. He treated us to lots of wonderful stories about the place some 40 years ago. There had been quite a bit of progress since he was last there. But when he asked the medical student about how young people are currently trained to become doctors, the news was disappointing.

Things appeared more or less the same they were decades ago: medical students with less than one year to graduation who had never examined a woman, taken blood pressure, held retractors in surgery. It is a bit similar to the little progress in primary school textbooks (none if to judge by the 3rd grade textbook I am using in my Dari class). It leaves one wondering what happened to the millions of dollars and years of technical assistance that were poured into improving the situation?

Our conversation drifted into the topic of the Hazaras, the ethnic group to which the boys belong, and their treatment, as a minority despite the fact they are the third largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. When Farid mentioned how Abdurrahhman Khan (Emir of Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901) had killed or chased away a significant portion of the Hazara population in the late 1800s, Steve pulled out copies of two of Kiplings tongue-in-cheek ballads about the cruel king who was his contemporary. We all listened spellbound as Steve read his favorite poem. Singing, and reading poetry are two of Steve’s many gifts.

In the evening Steve and I watched Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, only the second of countless episodes Axel had bought back in the US in May. I have watched a few episodes alone and realized tonight that one has to watch these movies in company; they are much more fun that way.

We are making some progress, we think, on getting a management and leadership department established in the ministry. We met this morning with the person under whose directorate the department will sit. A course about management and leadership he attended with one of my staff, in Dubai, for which I was criticized (why now? Why them?) is paying off. His attendance at the conference last week put benefit upon benefit and he seems engaged and mobilized to change how things have been done before. I think this is a good and practical definition of leadership.

We explored the form and modality of a leadership program within the general directorate for human resources; funny how something I was tasked to do and had wanted to do from the time I arrived may finally happen on the cusp of my departure. He invited us to have a regular Sunday morning meeting – this too is good as people usually don’t want to make such a commitment unless they find it useful. Usually it is us asking for meetings, and us trying to push a string across the table. This pulling is very encouraging.

It looks also as if the staff, we have been advocating for, to populate this department, can finally be recruited, at least from the ministry’s side. But since we are, for now committed to paying for them, this time it is us who need to stall as we are still waiting for the project extension documents to be signed. Until they are, our project ends on September 30, 2011.

All the women I asked today, and even some of the men, have been busy over the weekend preparing for Ramazan. It is a bit like the spring cleaning that happens around Easter, but for a different reason: no one wants to do any unnecessary heavy lifting during the coming month. And so curtains have been cleaned, windows washed, carpets beaten, pillows fluffed so that the little energy left at the end of a water- and foodless day can be used most economically.

I made arrangements with our cook to prepare two meals a day during Ramazan, especially for Steve, as the lunchroom will be closed. I can manage by taking some fruit and yoghurt in, or an energy bar, which will see me through, but that doesn’t work for Steve who needs real food. I did ask the household staff to continue putting a thermos with hot water in my office for coffee and tea; other than that I expect to lower my caloric intake as well – it is not well regarded to eat and drink in the presence of those who observe the fast.

I am following the mayor of Kabul on Twitter (KabulMayor). He started tweeting on July 24 with the words “This is my first Tweet! I’m a great supporter of information sharing and social networking. Please feel free to contact me.” The mayor and I are both following Obama who was tweeting like crazy last night to constituencies in AK, CA and CO.

I did contact the mayor to find out what’s up with the Darulaman roadbuilding project. He tweeted a few days ago that three major road project will be finished in a month. I hope that this main road we navigate several times everyday is one of those three. This project is the source of much of the dust that has settled in Axel’s lungs (and probably mine but with less ill effects). Today the mayor had another encouraging tweet: 1st phase of Kabul Municipality’s solar street light project complete. More streets have light at night. Important for Kabul security.” It’s good for the night vendors but it makes no difference for the women – taking back the night is a long way into the future. Right now they are focusing on just being able to walk the streets without being hassled, pinched or insulted.

The mayor is a brave soul. Not only is being a mayor is this country a very hazardous occupation, the major of Kandahar was just killed a few days ago, but being modern in this society (as in ‘tweeting’) is also risky where so many want the country to return to the time of the Caliphate. And then of course there is the corruption and the backlash from more powerful people who are unhappy about how the loot is divided.

Several months ago a powerful opponent of the mayor, probably someone who felt he didn’t get his fare share, threatened to have him brought to court for this or that ‘irregularity.’ The mayor’s response was, that’s fine but first let me get my job done. Since then sidewalks have been created nearly everywhere in town.

I have also befriended the mayor on facebook – he is very much with the times. Sometimes I wonder whether the ideological Taliban (as opposed to the crooks and criminals also heaped under that umbrella) have a division that monitors the electronic media and social networks as part of their intelligence gathering operations.

Last night Steve and I went to the Korean restaurant and had a seafood hot pot – a rare treat in this landlocked place. Afterwards I invited Steve to watch the Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair) but he declined. I watched it on my computer and recognized the pattern of the Hindu wedding but had forgotten much about the movie. It is worth viewing, especially by all of us who went to Kerala. But I think our wedding was funner.

This morning I introduced Katie to Sadiq the woolman who runs the ‘wool fatcory’ – a grandiose name for a mom and pop entreprise in a decrepit old mud-brick house. Armed with cookies, juices and grapes we headed out to the far western corner of the city and visited the place where some twenty women are busy spinning, carding and knitting.

We invited the women to take a break and they obediently sat down with their backa against the wall on the flat mattresses while we tried to communicate in broken Dari and smiles. This time the women allowed themselves very little time for the break that we had introduced – maybe because it was too close to lunch time (and too close to Ramazan?) and they needed time to cook. We were invited to several lunches but politely declined, as would be expected.

We purchased wool, cashmere socks and a hat and talked about the usual topics of age, babies, children, marriage and such. I need to hand over the baton to Katie to support this group, not only financially by buying things but simply by going there from time to time and chatting and having a good time.

This morning I arrived early at Lisa’s place where I got the royal treatment: hair, feet, reflexology, Swedish massage and a mask, ‘because you’re special,” said Lisa. Sammy the hairdresser decided I should have a Princes Di haircut, “because I look like her,” as if she is still around. I did see a picture of Princess Di recently which was photoshopped to show her at age 50 – elegant with a few wrinkles and dyed hair, with a haircut that doesn’t look anything like the one I got today. It was more a Twiggy haircut, a reference no one at the salon would understand.

With face and feet soft as a baby, and very little hair left on my head, I went to the shop where foreigners buy locally produced and highly marked up handicrafts that make us feel good because they make for unusual gifts while we support destitute women. I had received an announcement that they would have a “Blue Herat Glass and Ice cream event.” The blue glass was there but not the ice cream which was cancelled for reasons unknown. I bought a decanter and two water glasses to replace the plastic water bottle on my nightstand – very stylish and very ethnic.

In the afternoon I went over to SOLA to say goodbye to Angela who is leaving for Virginia on Sunday to start her four years of college at the University of Richmond. Her departure is a big loss to SOLA but also a victory as this is yet one more Afghan girl who will come back to join her sisters who are trying to change this place. Connie from the European Police trainers, another volunteer teacher like me, showed up with a lesson plan about the Berlin Wall, German bread and Dutch cheese, complementing my cake with its ‘safar bakhair’ (safe travels) written across the frosting.

Connie always has to come with an armored car and guards, this time one male and one female. The female one was from Sweden and the male one, who patiently waited in the car outside until we called him in, was from the UK. I have met a few of these guardian angels now and all have said that their visit to SOLA is one of their best experiences in Afghanistan. They live between barbed wire and blast walls surrounded by armaments, and corruption, and have an impossible task.

Although not living in the same conditions, I too have found my time at SOLA among my most fun and rewarding experiences here in Kabul. Each time I leave the girls I feel that some good is going to come out of all the good that is streaming into Afghanistan, usually undetected and under the radar compared to the bad stuff, arms, too much money, misguided strategies and arrogance that streams in highly visible and in abundance.

The two remaining boys at SOLA, which will return back to its original state as a girls’ school, are shipping out next month to Kent School in Connecticut – one has his red card in hand (this means he will get the visa) while the other is waiting for some form from the school without which the interview at the consulate cannot be scheduled. We are all keeping our fingers crossed for all the kids who are now waiting for the much coveted visa and start their new lives.

As usual, while the kids introduced themselves, Ted provided editorial comments and context that consist mostly of stories that make you want to cry and that restore one’s faith in the goodness of people, an effective antidote to the constant barrage of bad news. He has a large trunk full of such stories and I can’t hear them enough, even though I have heard many of them more than once already. Apparently during his latest stay in the US he added another layer of stories, of random people stepping in his way and bringing things he needed but did not ask for.

Last night it finally happened: one of my dinner guests stepped blindly into the ditch that runs in front of our house. Here in Kabul, and in this part of the world, these are the drainage ditches that run everywhere along both sides of the street. They are basically open sewers. It was dark, Pierre’s eyesight isn’t so good in the dark and we were chatting when suddenly Pierre dropped down. As he pulled himself out he acted like one would expect a doctor to act, ‘oh, no problem.’

But I know doctors as I was brought up by one and have a few in the family; I was worried that he would not give himself the same advice as he would give to a patient. One of his shins was bloody, skinned from knee to foot. His driver fished one of his shoes and his cellphone out of the ditch. A little later we discovered that Pierre had put on the wrong shoes, and that it was Steve’s shoe that had been submerged.

Steve had earlier quoted me a saying from his time in Shiraz that when you fell into one of these ditches you would never leave town. We thought that had applied to Pierre but since these were Steve’s shoes this may now apply to him. It was an unfortunate ending to a lovely dinner with a few friends.

One of them first arrived in Afghanistan 44 years ago. He also read Paula Constable’s article in the Washington Post a week ago (Dread and Dysfunction in Kabul) and was even harder hit by it than me. He remarked that in the olden days typical Afghan (mudbrick) houses, even in the city, had a series of small rooms built along the walls of the compound around a beautiful garden occupying most of the space; a garden that received attention all day long.

Now garish monstrosities are built to within an inch of the outside walls leaving very little space, not even the size of a walkway, between the house and the house next door. There is no more outdoor life because there is no more outdoors, only cement, brick and tiles. Gone are the roses, the grape vines, the fruit trees. Many people who lived here a long time ago can’t find their houses back. They are gone.

Our Afghan dinner was cooked, served and cleaned up by our cook and housekeeper who had offered to stay, for the evening. Steve and I immediately accepted. That’s one thing I will miss: having a dinner party and when you go to bed everything is cleaned up and put away.

The discovery of a large cache of weapons, explosives, army uniforms, hand grenades, rifles and other instruments of death at the airport left only the very stoic among us untouched. When I left for the airport to go to India some weeks ago, I had been pondering just that question: what’s the next highly visible place for a complex attack? All the fancy hotels in town have been attacked and some of them twice already, there is no railway station so the airport seemed like an obvious target. Of course it is well protected with a perimeter that runs along the international forces bases. But then again, as we discussed yesterday with the midwives, everything, including conscience, can be bought.

One of our consultants is flying out today and is nervous but the rest of us who are flying out in the next couple months think he is lucky – they surely aren’t going to try anything now as the perpetrators have to regroup, steal new uniforms, get new weapons (that’s probably the easy part). Steve is leaving on August 13 when things will have slacked off a bit as the news and attention has worn off. Although we will also be deep into the Ramazan slack; it is not a month of great exertion.

Those of us leaving in September have more to worry about as active life resumes in Kabul after the holidays. There is always the hope that the holy month of Ramazan will put the fear of God in the hearts of the people who are supposed to do the dirty work. And so we pray.

I had lunch with the SOLA founder at the small French restaurant where you can get real coffee, real croissants, real baguettes and real ham. We discussed the fate of SOLA and are in agreement that it has to be Afghan owned and run if it is to survive the no doubt tumultuous years ahead.

We also discussed the continued denial of American visas to students who have received full scholarships and the difficult line to walk between pushing people at the consulate too hard or too little. Some people in high places really don’t like to be pushed by the ‘representatives of the American people,’ and become even more rigid. Ted is unfazed.

The restaurant with its young Hazara waiters is packing up. I am not entirely sure what the reason is but one rumor has it that the owners are getting squeezed for protection money and that it has something to do with security, threats and such. I haven’t been able to verify that as no one was there to confirm. The place already looked cleaned out, the inside furniture removed, only the second hand French books, a rug, the small shop where you can buy fresh baguettes, jam, fruit tarts and croissants and the kitchen remained. Even the starched peach and white striped vests of the waiters were gone – the boy served us in black street clothes.

The rest of the day was agony as the stifling heat in my office appeared to turn off my brain. All I could manage was clean my inbox, score the MBTI results of a colleague’s husband and write a request to the US government about distributing personal protection equipment kits that are clogging up are scarce warehouse space; and all of these things very slowly. It was one of those slack days that don’t have a place in the American work philosophy of efficiency and effectiveness but are quite common in the rest of the world, especially where it is hot.

Another hot and slow day as we are inching towards Ramadan. Kabul is blanketed by a stupefying heat. Food is spoiling easily, even a hardboiled egg I had on my desk for a day had gone bad. And so, not surprisingly, people get sick, either from food gone bad producing sometimes fever sometimes persistent stomach rumblings or rashes and breathing problems from the stifling and polluted air. Aside from some minor rumblings (I took one bite and swallowed it before realizing that the egg should not be eaten) and very low energy I am doing OK.

I was invited for lunch by the midwives and their allies in the house of the (midwives association’s) president. It is near our house, on a quiet lane off the busy main shopping street, right past the Mann Continental Restaurant which features the McDonald arches. They do serve burgers and Afghan kids apparently love going there as much as kids around the world love going to McD.

From the windows of the second floor salon, the place to receive visitors, covered in traditional Afghan style with carpets, think mattresses and pillows, I could look into neighboring compounds, all hidden from the street by high walls, and imagined myself in a rural area. I could have stood there for a long time, observing, eavesdropping on ordinary lower and middle class Afghan lives I have so very little contact with.

While mom and sister were busy downstairs turning raw materials into a copious and delicious meal, we sat upstairs, eight women in total. I listened to countless tales of corruption, fraud and sexual abuse perpetrated by people, some I knew and had worked with and some I don’t ever want to know, who are all protected at the highest levels of this country’s government.

I heard about the battles to get rid of these folks. Most of these attempts have been unsuccessful and the solution in some cases has been to get rid of oneself by quitting jobs or worse, leaving the country. It was all very discouraging and it made me regret even having had contact with some of those folks and believing the things they told me (about how good and committed they were). I now know they had dollar signs in their eyes and smelled greenbacks when seeing me, a foreigner who could get them a piece of the money pie. My sisters tell their stories with laughter even though I know they hurt deeply inside. But what else can you do if this is your home?

One clever tale was about a man, since found out for many fraudulent actions yet also still in his job, who proposed to open a ‘chance account.’ Later, in the office I asked my colleagues to explain what that was. It was, I learned, a gimmick started by Kabul Bank (now of ill repute) and followed later by others, where one could open a special account that was like a lottery. For every 100 dollar in your account you got one ticket. (Presumably) random drawings paid out to the winning numbers. Prizes would go as high as several million dollars. People could tell me about lucky winners they knew. Of course now we know that this money was ill gotten money after all and the scheme has been abandoned since.

This clever man suggested that the money for a project be put in a chance account so that, if there were any prizes, these could be pocketed. Of course, compared to the Kabul bank fraud this is all petty corruption – but we know that petty can easily slide into serious. I am afraid that the abundance of easy money took many down that path. It also makes me have even more respect for the honest people in this country.