Sylvia's Journal

All through the night and the day snow fell, softening the sharp edges of Kabul. Any place is lovely with snow on it. The heavy wet snow also covered our internet antenna and so we were disconnected from the world. That’s the down side of snow.

In my Dari class I finished, after months of slow reading, a history of Afghanistan book. I learned about all the fighters/warriors and craftsmen/poets/scientists that crisscrossed this country, two streams of invasions that have both plagued and uplifted Afghanistan over the centuries. The sad outcome of all this is that there are more signs of the former and less of the latter.

After our Dari class it was still light and we invited our guard to help us make a snow man, an ‘adam-e-barfi’ as such is called here. The snow was perfect for this purpose, solid and heavy. Rabbani, our guard started packing the snow with his bare hands. Afghans appear to have very good circulation in their extremities, wearing flipflops all year round and rarely wearing gloves. Last year I had given each of our staff a pair of gloves fit for New England weather but I never saw them wear them. I suspect they were sold in the bazaar.

For dinner we had Alisa over. We have many intersecting interests, share part of the network of the former Institute of Cultural Affairs, and the experience of trying to change things in Afghanistan, the ups and downs of it all. We treated her to a family home experience (in contrast to her dorm experience in one of her employer’s guesthouses filled with introverted people) with a three course dinner to offset the overdose of Ramen noodles in a cup.

We sent her home with the movie “The Message” which will undoubtedly be shown on Afghan TV, in Dari, on the Prophet’s birthday next week.

This morning our Afghan snow man looked a bit like George Washington with the white snow that had fallen on his headdress overnight.

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Snow falling in Kabul
(internet down)
Baby Abel born in Brussels
Shiola in the oven
Mubarak gone
What now?

One of Axel’s students, the one who went through 12 revisions of his college application essay (over which both lost several pounds) has gotten a job as international staff in East Timor. He invited us for a goodbye lunch in a pricey western restaurant near our house. We had to order for him because he didn’t understand the choices (ham quiche, chicken sausage pie and croquet madams and monsieurs).

It was the day of my SOLA class again, something I always look forward to and immensely enjoy. We read another few pages of A Thousand Splendid Suns, a chapter about Taliban abuses. Two of the girls only knew about the outrageous acts the Taliban committed from hear-say or movies and books like this one. But one girl had lived in Jalalabad at the time, one of the Taliban epicenters. She was too young to suffer much directly but she remembers the secret schools and the women pretending to go to Koran classes. She did remember the beatings with radio antennas and tree branches.

There is no word on the missing girl. Powerful forces have been mobilized around the world to come to her rescue. We keep praying for a good ending and I was reminded tonight to always add an incha’allah to my wishes, as M. taught me since otherwise the good ending is unlikely to happen.

M. and her family are back from dangerous Egypt to the relatively peacefulness of Kabul, proving once more that everything is relative. She invited me to her aunt’s wedding tonight. As usual at such events I found myself in the company of women and watched them as they interacted free and playfully with each other in ways one rarely gets to see. It was a wedding of two older people who chose each other, not assigned by parents and family clans. It was the first wedding I attended where the bride actually smiled and the wedding was not an agonizing removal of the bride from her mother’s home but a conscious choice for a new life and a new love.

I was the only foreigner and received many stares. But unlike the previous weddings I went to I can now converse with people in their language, albeit haltingly and only when the music stops for a moment. I learned one more thing about weddings and that is that the bride’s family members are not allowed to dance; I guess that too has to do with the prescriptive behavior of brides and grooms.

In the middle of the festivities the wedding hall trembled. I was a little nervous but no one else seemed to be in the least perturbed. I had momentary visions of collapsed buildings and ambulances rushing to the scene. But the tremor passed and we continued our wedding meal, thrown on our tables and then taken away amidst much clatter and rice flying off plates onto hapless but well dressed wedding guests.

Back at home (it was an unusual early ending of a wedding party) I found Axel glued to the TV where a promise of some significant change in the Egyptian gridlock was tossed back and forth between correspondents.

Lift, in aviation, happens when the pressure below the wing is higher than the pressure above it. This evening we got some pressure from below.

Every single time we have gone to an evening organized by the French Cultural Center we have received an injection of hope. This evening we got another shot in the arm. We attended the final concert of the Afghan National Institute of Music and were touched deep in our core. Those evenings show an Afghanistan that few people outside this country know – one of beauty, hope, and peaceful coexistence, showcasing the talents of a new generation that grew up knowing little about their country’s heritage and century old talents.

After half an hour of speeches by various notables we were treated to a series of delightful musical pieces including a traditional song played by kids who used to be street kids. There they were in glittering traditional outfits playing their Afghan instruments in front of a packed audience – no seat was left empty in the large auditorium. I was already moved to tears and it was only the beginning. One of the three violin sections was populated by girls only; one had, only 6 months ago, been selling packets of gum on the street.

We listened to a rock band, a piece of chamber music that had a cello play alongside the tabla (drums), traditional string instruments accompanying the mournful voice of a female singer from famous musical stock. A peppy Eric Satie piece was interpreted masterfully and with great joy by talented young percussionists under the guidance of their enthusiastic Mexican teacher.

The grand finale was Vivaldi’s music rewritten as The Four Seasons of Afghanistan with an orchestra that included both western and Afghan/Indian instruments and music switching back and forth from European to Afghan meters. The music described the Afghan spring, summer (dust, heat and thunder claps), fall and winter (snow flakes and warm fires). It ended with an ode to fallen heroes and a call for peace.

A ten year old Hazara boy with the roundest face I ever saw, presumably one of the street kids, played solo on his Afghan violin that looked like a metal box with a wooden stem poking out of the top and a couple of strings. He picked up Vivaldi’s melody from the first violinist, then gave it back and picked it up again. He stole everyone’s hearts and received a thunderous applause and handshakes from several officials. His round face became ever rounder as he took in this homage, beaming from ear to ear.

The concert lifted my spirits that had been rather low lately though the lift was soon undone when we came home and learned of the disappearance of a young talented and smart woman we had gotten to know from the school. Everyone there fears it is a kidnapping, probably by greedy relatives, who were already bought off with an unconscionable amount of money. The girl left a goodbye note that sounded ominous and final. We are back in the shadow side of Afghanistan, universes apart from the Afghanistan in which we were just an hour ago. And all this happened on International Human Rights Day, celebrated with much fanfare with pictures of notables speechifying about the theory of it all.

All day was reading and mailbox clean up day. The cleanup added more documents to read, review and revise to the standing list. One could call it boring, passive or luxurious and I found my mood shift from depressed to relaxed based on the adjective I used. When I look back on the day I feel rather unproductive, uncreative and am left with the sentiment that today I did not add much value to the whole.

Still, I learned something about the impact of the community midwife program in three northern provinces (good news), the nutrition status in a central province (bad news), the hospital strategy (good news), giving and receiving feedback (hardly applicable), and the struggles of young Afghan women who decided to take a stand (good and bad).

This feeling of being not very productive reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my first bosses at MSH, over a decade ago. We talked about what was missing when people insist on improving efficiency in organizations. It is the phenomenon of ‘slack,’ organizational and personal slack. It has a bad name (‘don’t slack off!”) and no one would ever intentionally build it into a plan or a workday. And so it builds itself in no matter what (the bow cannot remain stretched all the time).

We agreed then, and I still believe now that there is a need for slack time. Trips, training, retreats, conferences have often plenty of slack time which is why, I believe, people tend to come back from those experiences in high spirits. There is time for new relationships, new ideas, and digesting all these.

It is a hard sell to senior managers that slack is not wasteful because the cost of people not having slack time (stress, low creativity) is not so visible and the blame is borne by individuals. And then of course some people are slacking all the time, they are the ones that give it a bad name.

Today I definitely felt like a slacker, as if I was doing something slightly illegal. And so I went home exactly at the official end of the day, when the entire office empties into several small buses for their transport back home. I followed the crowd, something I rarely did in my first year here.

There was another loud boom in Kabul, a few districts further into town. The target was the police (as is so often the case), adding slightly to the mounting unease. Our daughters and many of our friends have received the news of our intention to leave Afghanistan when my current contract runs out (October 2011), with cheers.

This decision has brought both relief and regrets; we have poured countless hours into learning Dari and are just getting at a level where we can manage most non professional conversations; we have developed strong relationships with many Afghans, and we are beginning to understand just a little bit how things work here. But then again, we are not disengaging, just moving.

Today I have been thinking a lot about my two grandmothers. Both broke the mold of what a woman was supposed to do. Both acquired professional skills at a time that few women were allowed or encouraged to pursue a professional education and career.

My mother continued in that tradition, first finishing her studies, and then working as a medical doctor in various capacities after her marriage. She also brought six children into the world (2 girls) and sent them off on their way into schools, marriages with kids and careers with earning power.

I grew up standing on their shoulders. I did not have to fight for my rights, they were given and assumed. In my family women were expected to pursue professional education and a career first before embarking on marriage and then expected to continue to work after the children came. And in home affairs women usually took the lead.

Still, one thing was not entirely worked out yet as the women who followed this new path never gave up their other roles as wives and mothers. Theirs was a triple load and they carried it with their tired bodies and graying hairs. I grew up to consider this normal; only now I see how unfair it was. My generation and those of my daughters are rectifying this imbalance with some success. Loads are more shared now.

I wish I could summon my mother and grandmothers to visit with the young Afghan girls who are repeating their struggles. The fights and sacrifices of my grandmothers and my mother are those of so many of the young women who I have gotten to know here.

What advice would my mother and grandmother give to those girls who are forced into life decisions that are loaded with pain and unhappiness from the get go? Rebel? Bear and grin it? Cut loose? Reason? Find allies? How to end the gut-wrenching agony of hurting either themselves, their prospect for a happy and productive life, or hurting those who are close to them.

My heart is full of sadness to see families willingly sacrifice their young women for the sake of tradition yet fail to see the evidence that sacrificing the girls means holding back the nation.

With the temperature hovering around zero Celsius the rain sometimes turned into snow and sometimes the snow turned into rain. The result of all this was muck, especially in the places where the culverts and drainage arrangements have not quite been finished by the various road building contractors who have been remodeling our main drag, Darulaman, since I arrived here in September 2009.

It seems a fitting metaphor for the continuation of Obama’s Wars as reported by the latest issue of Rolling Stones. [King David’s War by Michael Hastings, February 2, 2011] Combined with Dexter Filkin’s recent story on the Great Kabul Bank Heist in the New Yorker it makes it hard to keep my usual optimism about the direction in which things are going here.

We watched, now a nightly ritual, how Egypt has fared after another day of rage/revolution. To our great surprise, we saw my Egyptian colleague in the crowd, speaking into a BBC microphone. He is the one who should have been guiding us around Egypt now during the study visit that was canceled last week. Our tickets were changed to February 12 but I don’t think Egypt is quite ready to receive us.

I realized that all weekend we have been a little flat, as if in a state of mild depression. The Friday morning massage and dinner with friends on Friday and Saturday provided a little respite. Last week’s suicide attack has led to a sort of self imposed house arrest. The effect on our psyches is palpable.

(audio)Listening to the dark and moody tales of famous Russian authors doesn’t help nor does the strain in some of my relationships at work. This afternoon when I got home from my language class Axel announced that a new friend who only recently arrived had just called so say that the Finest supermarket suicide attack (a place he shops every Friday) had freaked him out so much that he is leaving the country tomorrow morning, for good.

M. is being evacuated from Egypt and flying home tomorrow with her family. That too is disappointing as she is cutting short her stay there by a week and is thus not able to complete her assignment and research study – it was a chance in a lifetime and now it is over.

We feel torn; the quality of life, the air pollution, the constant possibility of disaster around the corner, the concerns from our daughters are tugging at us. Yet much is also tugging at us the other way: some very dear colleagues, counterparts, and other people I work with, the girls I teach and mentor, the progress they make in English (and that we are making in Dari), Axel’s renewed sense of energy as a teacher and the gratefulness of his students are all forces that conspire to keep us here.

I did a lot more thinking about the post September 2011 period, about where will we live and what we will we be doing. The one hour of massage turned out to be a good time for thinking. The existential question is both wonderfully liberating and anxiety provoking. I got some bright red nails while I was pondering my future and left the massage place with my bare feet in hotel slippers so as not to mess up the polish. I felt a little self-conscious but for Afghans bare feet in slippers in the middle of the winter is totally normal.

We stayed home, me knitting for my brother’s first grandchild who is scheduled to enter this world in a couple of weeks and Axel reviewing his students’ US school applications, perfecting the fine art of giving feedback.

I think I am finally getting Axel to consider what should have been his career all along, teaching. He is deeply into his teaching role and responsibilities and making a big difference for a few Afghan kids. I watch him blossoming into this new role, even though it is still a volunteer job. His experimenting with a new role is part of the future scenario making that we have started to engage in.

Despite being for an entire day cooped up in a windowless room refining our work plan for an eventual project extension and the dreariness of a drizzle that left lakes everywhere, today was a better day. The day before a weekend is always a little better than the other days of the week especially because it is my day at SOLA.

Only two girls showed up, both living in the dorm rooms upstairs. It is the only way I can have girls in the class because for those living far away it gets dark too early. This is how I lost a few, at least for the winter.

One of the girls is a breathless young lady whose tries to speak English faster than she can. We read a few paragraphs about an orphanage with too many unknown adjective and nouns in the text. The girl who is both my walking dictionary and assistant teacher did not show up (I had told them I would be in Egypt) so explaining the words was a little tricky, try to explain ‘cynical’ to people with a limited vocabulary; every word I use to explain it requires yet another explanation and this can spiral out of control pretty quickly.

I am starting to think about our next book now that we have come to the end of A Thousand Splendid Suns. I am sure that the book was miles above the reading level of some of the girls, but the familiarity with the context in which the story takes place helped us have a series of wonderful conversations.

Some of the girls want to read Greg Mortimer – they know who he is – but I don’t know the reading level. This is something that Axel and I miss, knowing what level is right for which girl (or boy). Next week we plan to have a Skype conversation with an English teacher from a private school in Connecticut to educate us about this.

We had long Skype conversations with Sita and Jim first and (sick) Tessa later and caught up on things happening in their lives. Sita let us peek at the enormous amounts of snow in Western Massachusetts. We are still trying to figure out how to get the girls here and attach it to a vacation with the entire family – work schedules, climate and Ramadan make this a bit of a challenge.

Tessa gave us the stern message that she doesn’t want us to extend our stay with another year – something that has lately become a real option, though not formally. Here I think people expect me to stay (why else the language learning effort?) but we are very conflicted about this choice. The Finest suicide bombing is still fresh in our minds and has changed the picture rather drastically.