Sylvia's Journal

Today was our quarterly reporting to ourselves. We call it the During Action Review, or the DAR for short. It is a quarterly review ritual that is done, obviously, every three months, in the first week of the new quarter. The format and the dates are known. Yet my team scrambled to put it together the night before as if it totally surprised them. What do they not know about quarterly? I wondered in desperation as I watched several mediocre slide shows.

I have been quite tolerant of poor performance – there are always many excuses and there is much that is not under our control, but this was. I decided not to accept any excuses this time and called the poor performance for what it was. I like to be the nice boss but today I don’t think I was. My staff are probably saying, good thing she is going on leave for two weeks. I agree.

Axel came back from his language class and found me in a jubilant ‘holiday mood,’ with an adult beverage in front of me and a mana’ish (Lebanese wild thyme pizza) in the oven, producing a most wonderful aroma that wafted from the cold kitchen into the rest of the house.

We told the cook to stop buying things that would spoil. I wrote the note entirely in Dari, in the handwriting of a second grader. I got it back with some corrections. I wrote back on the notice, this morning, thank you teachers, and made yet another mistake in the spelling of ‘teacher.’ I can go on forever saying ‘thank you teacher.’ And so, even though some spoilables did get purchased, there is some progress, on all sides, even if it is only measured in millimeters.

I said goodbye to M and her two little boys in their kodakistan (daycare center). They will have left for Egypt by the time I come back. I asked them to keep a journal (I think it is a good habit that cannot start too early) and to write about their trip to Egypt and draw pictures of what they see and learn.

The oldest child gave me a bear hug, his younger brother was less interested in my lecture. I don’t think he quite realizes the adventure he is about to embark on. I would have killed to go to Egypt when I was a little girl. My father went to Egypt when I was about that age. I remember the picture of him on a camel in front of one of the great pyramids, with a fez on his head. It stood for years in its silver frame on a chest in our living room. One of those childhood treasures.

All the to-dos and meetings are now being compressed in the few remaining work hours; right now, one full work day to be exact. There was one last hurried trip to the ministry for a meeting about the various top-level health strategy events, and then the whittling down of what must be done by me and no one else in the next 24 hours.

Our office email system has been severely crippled by an inordinate amount of spam and malicious emails. It is a mystery to me how IT folks can solve this problem without blocking out the good mails along with the bad stuff. As we can see from our ‘undeliverable’ notices, they don’t always succeed. Everyone expects, even here, that emails arrive instantly; so when they don’t we are in big trouble. I am starting to use my gmail and educating people to send emails to both addresses but it may be a little too late.

For reasons I never understand the traffic has been jammed all day and everywhere. The driver took a very roundabout way to the ministry. I passed through neighborhoods that I am not familiar way and watched the hustle and bustle of commerce and trade.

If this was all you got to see of Afghanistan you’d see an industriousness that most people could not imagine. Carts with bags of cement, cans of tomato paste, stacked too high and sacks filled with flour and rice where heaped on rickety ‘karachis’ (the wooden planked two wheeler cards usually pulled by donkeys and sometimes by men) or in wheelbarrows. Spindly little boys or sinewy men pushed carts we wouldn’t even entrust to a donkey or horse. Small and big change is earned there every day.

Axel went to see his four students who are off to various US High Schools, beneficiaries of the US government-sponsored YES program. One is going to be living with a family in Alabama that owns the Polka Dot Café, another will be in the far western part of Massachusetts, near North Adams, the third in Maine and the fourth is still waiting for his host family to turn up, someplace in the US.

I missed the send off party because it was too early in the day. Axel received a chappan (the green/blue Karzai coat with the very long skinny sleeves) and then there was much speechifying, regrets from the YES program alumns, things they should have done but didn’t, plenty of good advice and a SOLA cake, as there always is, the good cake from the Iranian bakery near our house.

I was told this morning by our expeditor that it was time to hand in our passports to get a new visa. This is a process that I initiated about 6 weeks ago but it was too late now. We can’t risk having our passports on someone’s desk waiting to be stamped when our departure is less than 48 hours away. We are supposed to arrive back here the day before our visas expire and keep our fingers crossed that the renewal will be a matter of days.

I got up before 2011 had arrived back home in the US. For Afghans it was an ordinary day. Still, a few people wished me happy New Year. I spent the first morning of the new year with the senior staff of one of the preventive medicine directorates. Throughout the morning I was reminded once more how much hand holding is needed and how institutional development needs a lot of sitting around the table.

On my way in to the ministry compound I ran into an Afghan advisor to one of the other general directorates who is on the European Union payroll. He reminded me that the follow up of an intervention we did some months ago had not happened, stressing the word ‘you’ to remind me that it is my, not his job to keep things moving. That is how the Europeans and the Americans are working in parallel. Sometimes I wonder if the follow up of interventions is anyone’s job.

It is rare to see champions emerge who keep things moving after the workshop or the event has ended. It tells me something about how we external agents go about our business and how we design interventions. Follow up action appears too much associated with having another workshop, another action plan created, which always requires an external agency that provides the goodies.

As I am getting more ‘hands-on’ involved in things that I had previous let my staff to do, with the countdown of our project ticking in front of our eyes, I am acutely aware that the hand holding I need to do has to be more constant and more intense. The events are all done in the local language and so I can kill two birds with one stones: my staff translates and in doing so learn how to work with groups in a flexible and focused way as I model the way. May be I should have started doing this a year ago, but then I didn’t know what is possible and what is not, and I certainly could not follow anything of the conversations in Dari.

After lunch I picked up my friend M to meet her tailor and drop off various pieces of fabric I had received for my birthday, to turn them into panjabis, the comfortable tunic and loose pants outfits so popular in this part of the region.

From there we went to see Ibrahim off Chicken Street to pick out the spectacular woven fabrics for M’s sitting cushions and pillows. I picked up a treasure Steve had bought some time ago, a piece of an old Torah scroll that came from Uzbekistan. Axel and I unwrapped the delicate piece from its cloth covering to take a look at the scroll and its Hebrew letters written on soft sheepskin leather and marveled about the hidden history of this artifact. It completes the rest of the scroll already in Steve’s possession.

On the way home I stopped at a widows’ embroidery cooperative. The manager gifted me a bracelet for the New Year and, in celebration of the same, dropped enough off his ordinary prices that I left with a bag full of stuff. My special treatment, he claimed, was also because I reminded him of his grandmother who lives in Washington (and aren’t we are all related through Adam and Eve anyways? said his wife).

My final stop on my afternoon shopping expedition was the supermarket that caters to foreigners. We had pizza on the menu and Axel wished to top it with pork sausage. At the supermarket I found my way to the unmarked pork freezer that was loaded with enormous slabs of bacon, sliced ham, bangers and other forbidden foods, all of it in packages too big for a household of two. So I got something that only looked like pepperoni.

I took Chris to the massage place to receive her Christmas present: a one hour massage. We squeezed into the tiny bedroom, me on the bed, Chris on the table, and had ourselves oiled and kneaded until we both glowed. Afterward the car dropped me off at Mary’s house where Axel had gone earlier to help with the Democrats Abroad Christmas cookie baking project.

We baked and frosted brownies, cupcakes, fudge, chocolate chip cookies and whoopee pies, put them in plastic baggies and delivered them to the troops at Camp Eggers, until we ran out.

It was a civic responsibility project organized by Mary who had her extended network of family and friends in the US contribute to Christmas packages that she handed out last week, and the baking ingredients for today’s project.

We may not agree with the military approach to rebuilding Afghanistan and the overwhelming militarization of this project we know what it is like to be away from family and friends over the holidays and we feel sorry for people who have to eat the kind of food they serve in military canteens. We hope that what we did was a tiny little spark of light in an otherwise dreary and, we are told, mostly boring set of routines.

Mary is the chair of the Democrats Abroad Afghanistan chapter and she is also working to protect wildlife in Afghanistan. Confiscated rugs and coats, made from bearskin, wolf hides and even sealskin (mostly from Russia) were stashed in her house to serve as examples what not to buy. I imagine that it will take a lot of effort and public education to stop this trade.

A few others showed up in Mary’s lovely old house in a pleasant and very low key part of town where I would have chosen to live if we’d had the choice. For lunch we walked over to the Flower Street Café next door. The place was empty as most of the foreigners who frequent the place had left Kabul for the holidays.

We abandoned our plans to organize a board game night because we don’t know any board game players and besides it is a school night – I will be working with the Environmental Health team to start on something that could be called a new beginning. It seems the right thing to do on the first day of the new year, even though for Afghans it is just an ordinary day.

In a couple of months we hope to showcase some of the health facility teams that have graduated from our leadership program. We are in the process of selecting the best teams, those that have taken leadership to heart and have improved one or another of the ministry’s priority health services: deliveries with skilled birth attendants (in health facilities), TB detection, antenatal visits, etc.

Most of the teams sent us documentation in Dari. In a tedious process of line-by-line translations I finally got a glimpse of what is happening in these third or fourth generation leadership programs that are taught by people who were taught by people who were at some point taught by me.

The language barrier had kept me from following these later generations and the results of their leadership attempts. But the time had come to pay closer attention.

I was pleasantly surprised about the work of the first team we reviewed – there were some things that needed further investigation, explanation, more precision but all in all their analysis was not bad and the result of their work led to actions and interventions that benefited women who would otherwise have delivered without skilled care.

Today was a day of diving; diving below the surface of superficial reasoning, asking people about their ‘theories of change,’ and first having to explain what that was in words that made them realize they already had them. There are countless assumptions about positive change contained in activities that are not being articulated and so can never be tested. In the meantime the activities continue, as if….

This is not just an Afghan thing; the theories of change behind US interventions here, military or otherwise, are loaded with assumptions of the ‘if this…then that’ kind. The election process is one of those where many of these assumptions fell flat on their faces.

It kills me to think how much money was spent on the elections by my and other governments to end up with a result that doesn’t come close to the original intent: building trust in government by the people and for the people, or something like that. The assumptions were all wrong. At least we know that now, but how many more elections do we have to go through before acknowledging that the assumptions were all wrong and that a change in course is needed? Sometimes it feels as if we prefer to continue doing the wrong things before admitting that we don’t know the right things to do.

I was also diving today into tasks that shouldn’t me mine but had become mine because others are not doing what they should be doing because it never occurred to them that they were supposed to have been doing something.

I keep telling myself that this is why I am here; that if the capacity building was easy it would already have been accomplished in the last 9 years and that if all was done as I think it should be done, my presence here would be superfluous. Thus, the diving is both frustrating and satisfying at the same time.

I came home early and put my jammies on ready for an early dinner and early to bed. But Axel had invited one of his students over for a last review of his (US) school application essay before he heads out to the US later this week.

The boy was one of the successful applicants to the YES program that puts Afghan students for a year in a US High School. But the visas didn’t come through in time and so he and some other boys missed half the year. But they are going now for the 2nd semester.

Axel spent the afternoon saying his goodbyes and wishing them godspeed, an emotional experience because he has gotten very fond of his students.

As a good woman would in this place, I retired upstairs to the bedroom and left the menfolk downstairs. If or when I get bored I will get dressed again and join them.

I read a brief study of two subsequent strategic planning processes at the ministry of education [briefing paper on capacity-building and policymaking in Afghanistan’s education sector]. It is an interesting paper about capacity building in complex organizations. Any public sector organization is complex because of its multiple stakeholders with their many and often competing agendas, but complexity here is a multiple of this. The paper shows some of the intended and unintended consequences of capacity building work started by foreigners.

Foreigners like me who come in as facilitators often make matters worse. We end up being complexifyers because of the philosophies and models we bring along from different countries, the different processes we invent as we go along, each new invention, new layer adding more complexity.

But when we train others we sometimes train for hypothetical simple organizations that don’t exist in real life. Topics like time management, meeting management, supervision, delegation are often taught as if there are no power dynamics and people gobble it up, exactly because of the illusion that things and people can be managed well, eh ‘simply. Poor coordination is treated like a root cause and the solution is sought in the establishment of yet another coordination mechanism. I could write books about the disconnect between what we teach and the capacity that is needed.

This morning I showed up a little before 10 AM at the office of one of the general directors. To get to him I had to duck below scaffolds and men in coveralls who appeared to have painted themselves first. Strong paint fumes permeated the poorly ventilated hallways and I wrapped my scarf tightly around my nose.

The building contains the two most central and also most under-served general directorates. There is reluctance from the donors to come to their aid because of the opaqueness of and alleged political interference in their processes.

Two dark-clad women scurried around the painters. They looked like they had stepped right out of a Grimm tale, hook-nosed crones, hissing between their bad teeth, a frightening apparition that made me wonder for a brief second, “where am I?”

The meeting we were supposed to be attending (he the Chair, me representing my project) was held at the other end of the compound in the office of one of the deputy ministers. We were late. We dashed out of the dark and dusty building into the bright morning sunlight, with the sun still visible beyond the dust. We ran across the inner courtyard as fast as we could, me limping behind with my arthritic knee that seemed to have gotten little benefit from the Dubai operation.

The meeting was about getting recognition for family medicine as a legitimate and badly needed specialty for Afghanistan at the district level. It was an impressive plea, well documented and well presented by a family doctor who is well known here and deeply committed to improve the health of the least and worst served segments of the population.

Only twenty minutes into this meeting I had to dash out to another meeting because times had shifted and then, an hour later, was back in the same office with a nearly identical cast of characters, about something else. This is the problems here, a thin layer of people does all the work and so you will meet with them all the time, dashing hither and thither with computer, diary and papers under the arm.

Missing lunch because of the commute back to the office for yet another meeting, I ate a few items from Doug’s MRE (Meals-Ready-to-Eat) birthday present to me which I keep in my briefcase for just such eventualities: a peanut butter desert bar and a piece of French Toast with ‘real’ syrup jelly inside. The 4 inches of chemical ingredients listed on the packages left me bloated and full without the pleasant sensation of a good meal – it was an emergency response and not one I want to repeat much.

A thin film of black soot covers everything plastic in my office; plastic filing sleeves, plastic bags, plastic book covers. Everything that is not plastic simply absorbs it, like, I assume, my lungs.

On the way home tonight the dust particles (of whatever origin) clouded the sky, altering the color of the setting sun and reducing visibility to a hundred yards at most.

At this time of the year precipitation, snow or rain, should have pushed all those particles into the ground. People are worried because the only way a drought next summer can be avoided is through snow or rain during the winter months. None has fallen yet.

The temperature is dropping fast and Kabul is getting colder by the day. Nevertheless, many of our office staff are still walking around with their bare feet in plastic slippers and in shirt sleeves.

Every day the household staff hose down the dust in our compound. The dust is covering every surface, including the bottom of the shallow fountain pool in front of the main building. The water turns to ice on the uneven pathways, creating yet another danger for us hapless foreigners.

Today Santa delivered the promised cradle. It’s an odd shaped thing, for a thin and long baby, but it is beautiful. It now cradles all my wool and knitting materials. We are accumulating stuff. We can’t help ourselves. We do that everywhere.

The new carpet has gone upstairs, on top of the office-supplied industrial Afghan carpets (sounds bad but even those carpets are quite nice). Axel doesn’t like its new place because the sun doesn’t reach there and the colors need sun to bring out the carpet’s beauty. Later, I think, later, when we are back.

The last few days the thought of going back in 9 months is in our minds a lot. Maybe that comes from our Skype video conversations with the girls; we peeked inside my Lobster Cove office, now occupied by Tessa and Steve, and the kitchen, where our neighbors, the girls and their men congregated for Christmas morning. Seeing all these people we love in a place we love so dearly tugs at our heartstrings.

In the middle of the morning Farid showed up. Farid is one of Axel’s students who is flying to Maine next week to attend an American high school. This is what all our students are preparing for. Farid, we think, is ready. We talked about A Thousands Splendid Suns and how this habit of sending 12 year old girls into marriage must change. I told him that these things will change because of him and his fellow students. He nodded.

Farid took Axel to the Turkish High School from where he graduated last week, to meet one of his teachers. This teacher, and others, want Axel to help them with their English. It’s funny how after years and years of not heeding the call of education, it is the direction in which the forces of the universe are pulling him. I know it is the right direction, it is just not what he thought would bring him what he needs. I think he is figuring that out now.