Sylvia's Journal

Today was a quiet day in Kabul but not in Kandahar and Mazar on the northern and southern ends of Afghanistan. I am getting quite inured to reports of fighting as long as it is not next door.

Preparations for the conference are proceeding with small complications that somehow seem to resolve themselves. Tomorrow we will do a dry run by those who are presenting – assuming that both presenter and poster or powerpoint are ready and available. Nothing can be taken for granted.

One of these complications is that the most senior ministry official cannot sign the several hundreds of certificates before I and the lead trainer, both of us also signatories, have signed them but the lead trainer is in Dubai and won’t be back until tomorrow night while the government has entered its weekend. Still, I think everything will work out OK in the end. Our champion turns out to be there after all.

I joined some friends, one of them the neighbor of the strongman who was killed the other night, at an empty French restaurant with 70 dollar bottle table wine poured into tea cups. We declined that opportunity even though we don’t have many such chances.

Instead we sipped our water while Michael gave us part three, the grand finale, of being a neighbor to an 8 hour battle between the Taliban and the Karzai advisor. He was finally told by the friendly police to leave the (his) house as a suicide bomber was about to explode himself – which he did with a loud kaboom – not a pleasant sight. Getting away as far as possible from things that could break and also explode (like the fire truck) he settled down next to a heavily armed guard from Karzai’s inner circle who was eating a melon and got a piece. I am trying to imagine that scene.

Walking up to the restaurant we were asked to make way for an armored, blinded car, the kind that cost a quarter of a million dollars, followed by another one full of large men with large guns. I prayed that whoever was in the car was not on anyone’s hitlist and was relieved when the convoy had passed and we were out of ear and gunshot. Now I am a bit more suspicious when I see this kind of wealth and power go by and make sure I move in the opposite direction.

We settled on the terrace of the more or less empty restaurant. Outside on the lawn a large table was prepared as for a French Sunday family meal. The people sitting down were indeed French. I found, among them, the circus trainer lady whose boys we had seen tumbling last week. It was an animated (anime) dinner party, partially because of the many teapots and tea cups filled with a Bourgogne-colored liquid. They were drinking away what may well amount to a month’s salary for Afghan workers, while we, continuing to sip our water, after having discussed dread and dysfunction in Kabul, reviewed the Murdoch drama through an American, a British and an Australian lens – quite fun.

Last night I decided to remove all noisy distraction in my room and sleep with my AC and air purifier off. I opened a window, so I would hear mayhem, if there was any, before our security would come to whisk me away. This time I would be prepared, and not in my nightie. But all was quiet and also very hot. At about 11 PM I closed the window and started the AC. After that I slept well and in the morning all was quiet.

I asked the guards why, when I came home over an hour after the fighting had started the night before, had they not mentioned anything to me. The answer was simple, they had not wanted to upset me and make me worry. It is their approach to protecting me.

They figured Axel would have called me (he did indeed) and were anxious for me to convey their best wishes. Life goes on and they keep missing him, not quite the same way I do, but missing nevertheless.

At work, my team and I are in a race against time to get everything, brochures, posters, banners for the conference on Sunday, printed in time, considering that the weekend for the ministry starts tomorrow afternoon and the printers close Thursday afternoon. The printed invitations didn’t arrive as promised – I should have known – and so people will get their invitations two workdays before the event instead of the planned week.

Our champion in the ministry, I found out, will be boarding a plane in Delhi just about the time he was supposed to give the speech I wrote for him. This is a huge disappointment although we knew the risk was there all along. We are one of many shows and side shows in town and the critical things in one person’s universe are not the same as those in my universe. It was for his sake that we changed the date of the event. I try to keep my cool. A deliberate shrugging of my shoulders felt slightly therapeutic.

Back home I settled in front of the TV and watched with great fascination the committee hearings on the BBC about the phone hacking scandal. Especially the interrogation of the Murdochs was as good as a detective movie. This peek behind the curtain of a big news empire and watching this father and son duo perform kept me totally engrossed. I think living in Afghanistan is less painful than what the Murdochs are going through.

And then it got really exciting when a man with a Boston cream pie or platter with foam went for Murdoch senior and we could all see his young pink-clad wife pull a swift right hook and, though off camera but reported on Twitter, threw the plate right back.

The viewers got to see the results of this through the plate glass windows as the perpetrator and the police were busy wiping the white stuff off their faces. That was the best distraction of all and from our troubles here.

A dinner last night on the lovely terrace of the Gandamack guesthouse, a glass of cold white wine (actually 2) and a nice reunion with P. (last seen over lobster at Lobster Cove) made me forget about all the badness of the day and my sense of gloom. In the garden of the Gandamack you can pretend to be very far away from Afghanistan.

I arrived home in a good mood and went upstairs to make it an early night. I was just stepping in bed when I heard a car enter our compound. That is rather unusual but possible if a guard needs to be changed because of some family urgency. With my air purifier and the AC on full blast I didn’t hear what was happening outside.

But when the car didn’t leave I decided to go downstairs and find out what was going on. In my robe I stepped outside to see several drivers and security guards, talking on walkie-talkies and phones and looking grave. I was made to understand that fighting (‘jang’) was going on across the small river that separates our street from a street with the house of a doomed warlord/Karzai strong man, someone with a profile quite similar to Wali Karzai. My cooling and purifying apparatus had kept me from hearing the shooting and explosions.

I was taken to another guesthouse a few blocks away to reduce the risk of being in the line of fire of stray bullets or breaking glass in case of suicide bombers. I had a restless sleep in one of the empty non AC-ed guestrooms wondering whether all hell had broken loose or this was number 2 in a ‘ten little Indians’ drama and I just happened to live close by.

At 5 AM I returned to my guesthouse and calm had returned just an hour before at 4 AM according to my driver. The fighting had lasted 8 hours. Some of it was done from my friend Michael’s house who had the bad luck of living next door and found his door kicked in by Afghan police who demanded access to his rooftop, eyed his whiskey, and told him not to worry. Michael sent a lively and rather humorous description of the entire night but he is staying home today to collect himself. Trained as a nurse Michael was able to play a role in the improvised field hospital that was set up in his living room and treated some of the terrified women of the household for minor cuts and bruises and its children to chocolate and Pepsi.

I suppose all this was to put in perspective what I had only hours earlier considered a ‘concatenation of bad.’ Actually, today I feel much better, like the clear weather after a thunderstorm. The planning for Sunday’s big conference (my swan song?) about management and leadership for better health is going more or less according to my expectations and pieces are falling into place.

I do worry a bit about who will be the third little Indian, and, more importantly, where he lives.

First I learned from Axel that someone has been busy stealing our identity and was caught by an alert employee of our bank when he asked to have a new ATM card sent to an address that wasn’t ours. The man seemed to know a lot about our finances.

Then I read Paula Constable’s article in the Washington Post (Dysfunction and Dread in Afghanistan) and would have packed my suitcases right there and then to go home – her story resonated painfully with my experience over the last nine years and the last two in particular. I felt very despondent after reading it and I am not even an Afghan and have the ability to leave and go home. I can’t imagine reading this about my own country.

Forces in the universe and in Afghanistan in particular, seem to conspire to worsen my gloom. Over lunch I asked what I thought was an innocent question to two of my colleagues, “How was your weekend?” I expected the usual ‘fine,’ or a description of family and fun activities. But no.

The first one said, “very bad.” I asked what happened. Her 19 year old niece was admitted to the hospital with fluid in her heart or something as serious as that. Her niece is a TB patient. She is a little better now but for the foreseeable future remains a TB patient with continued risks. Tuberculosis is a huge problem here with women more affected than men, a unique situation in the world. One of our MSH projects is aimed specifically at helping to detect and treat TB patients.

The second person I asked about her weekend also said, “very bad.” She and five of her colleagues frequently travel to the provinces to check on the results of clinical training given here in Kabul to specialists from the provincial hospitals. They were on their way to Ghazni when they got caught in the cross fire between government troops and anti government forces who had attacked a fuel convoy. For three hours they hunkered down in their car while fuel tanks got riddled with bullets and fuel streamed out through the holes. Both cases ended OK with an ‘alhamdu-lillah.’

Then, as if this wasn’t enough, I was informed about a team from the ministry that hasn’t settled their account with us about advances given to them for a trip abroad to attend a training course. As it turned out they blatantly falsified their hotel bills (which must have required some bribing) to pad them with an extra 100 dollars per night so that instead of them owing us, we owe them about a thousand dollars each.

The saddest thing about this is that people don’t want to make waves about this and there is a tendency to accept it as the inevitable cost of doing business here. It may well become the only thing that will be institutionalized after we leave. The revelation made me want to cancel all further assistance to this team that includes a senior level director; so much about setting a good example.

And then, as a special bonus to me, a huge dust storm turned the sky yellow and blanketed everything with the fine dust that made Axel so sick. Everything is gritty now.

Before joining some of my colleagues at the ministry (it is a workday for the government) I was invited by one of my staff to his house for a pre-work social with his wife and youngest daughter, an architectural student with impeccable English. They served me fresh apricots and plums from their country house – a place I will not be allowed to visit despite everyone assuring me it is safe.

He lives in one of the ugly Russian apartment blocks, many still pockmarked by gunshots from the Russians and Mujahideen. I have always considered these buildings eyesores and assumed they were also poorly built. But today, in spite of the intense heat in my part of town, these flats were cools even without fans. There are many trees that provide shade and the walls are thick. So I take back some of my criticism (they are still eyesores from the outside).

At the ministry we tackled the difficult question that the Kabul Conference organizers and funders have posed: what have we (the Afghans and those providing funds and/or technical assistance) learned from 10 years of capacity building. It is a very complex question especially since the organizers want evidence for recommendations – yet when looking at the so-called evidence most of it consists of opinions, points of view rather than evidence.

In my book capacity building of individuals can only happen if there is a counterpart and a sense of what capacity is weak or missing and a plan that spells out how one is to go from point A to point B. But not all advisors (those who are supposed to do the capacity building) have counterparts – as we used to joke: we are asked to paint a wall but there is no wall to paint. It is the critical factor that distinguishes those capacity building efforts that have borne fruit and those that have not. It is that simple.

I returned home in time for my Dari class. I have reached a plateau. Where once I thought my Dari was progressing very well and I could understand a lot I now think not. Maybe this feeling is part of a more generalized malaise, induced by the heat, the deteriorating political and security situation and Axel’s absence. And so I am plodding on, wondering sometimes whether I should quit now that my assignment here is coming to an end. But then I so much enjoy my classes that I don’t want to quit.

We read a brief essay in Dari about teamwork that a colleague had been circulating. It comes from the association of Afghan engineers and is a complex piece (both linguistically and culturally) about why the boss should not expect to always have the last word and how to handle opposing views in a team setting. The fact that it was written from within a very hierarchy conscious culture made it all the more interesting.

In the evening I went with two colleagues and their families to a performance by young circus artists – 9 teenage boys who showed us a combination of tumbling, pole climbing, uni-cycling and other easy looking but very difficult acrobatics that required great strength. I have a feeling that in one of my colleagues’ houses there will be some tumbling around bedtime tonight.

The shows put on by the Alliance Francaise are always wonderful. The hall and auditorium where all this takes place are modern, clean, dust-free and comfortable, making you believe you are in France or Europe rather than in Kabul. The French here are masters of the Art of the Possible and always manage to lift my spirit.

The bad news in the world, debt crisis here, debt crisis there, combined with the ever increasing bad news about Afghanistan did nothing to lift my spirits on this Friday weekend day. The distressing news about what is happening in this part of the world, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan is jumping out from every newspaper and newscast, yet I kept on reading and watching. It left me with a big hole in my heart and a strong urge to leave. As if I am on a sinking ship – especially people who write about Afghanistan seem to think it is.

My masseuse told me that many of her foreign clients are indeed leaving and she is wondering whether she can stay afloat without them. I am the only one left who comes to her place – the others ask her to come to their guesthouses and now there are fewer places to go to. We all felt a bit gloomy.

But then she and her young Afghan assistant gave me a four handed massage that made me forget of about everything bad, at least for an hour. Lisa jubilantly stated that all the kinks have been worked out of my muscles – it took about a year. “Look,” she exclaimed, “how my hand slides easily over your back.” It is a small victory but worth celebrating as it is very easy here to get all knotted up.

I found out about the gender of my hairdresser. Sammy is a girl born in a boy’s body. A high priced Chinese doctor has already made some adjustments and more are coming for an exorbitant sum of money that will require a lot of haircutting. Some people think it is ridiculous to pay that much to create congruence between body and mind but I can imagine why that would be worth a lot, especially in societies that are quick to classify people as misfits or degenerates.

I sat down after dinner to watch the Breakfast Club for the umpteenth time but the DVD player keeps stalling and I gave up. I do have to watch it sometime to develop the promised discussion notes for the SOLA girls. Right now they are in the middle of their exams and won’t have time to watch, so I have time.