Sylvia's Journal

We watched Hillary deliver her speech at the opening of the Kabul Conference. We all noticed it: no scarf draped over her head. It is consistent with her earlier appearance at Karzai’s inauguration. It is a statement. I have long thought about what my statement should be but it is not so simple. I asked colleagues and they suggested I wear a scarf when in public but take it off when in the office or in the ministry, where Afghans are used to interact with foreign women like me.

Anything you do can have a symbolic meaning. But unlike Hillary, I have to work here and don’t want to have small irritations about whether I wear a scarf or not get in the way of my day-to-day work relationships. I am one of the people with a notebook (as opposed to a gun) that Hillary referred to.

Today was our second day at home, a lock-down ‘work-at-home’ day. It allowed me to get to the bottom (not quite, but nearly) of my inbox and dredge up old requests and provide answers if they were still relevant. One good thing about an overflowing mailbox that some things just expire all by themselves.

It was hot again and each of us parked him or herself in front of a fan, and plowed through a long list of to dos. Axel left the house in the afternoon to see his students. He learned about the gruesome consequences of outsiders meddling with internal family matters such as marring bright young women to older and illiterate uncles, for lots of money. From to optimism of Hillary’s words that women are important and the world is not forgetting about the plight of Afghan women my spirits sunk quickly to the depressing reality that there is very little we outsiders can do, even if we think we do.

It’s cocktail hour now and the temperature is becoming more bearable. We can sit outside again and re-surface from our computer work.

A forced day at home, actually a national holiday for Afghans, was for me a day of sleeping in and working at home – catching up, taking care of delayed maintenance so to speak.

A few of us met at one of the guesthouses to figure out the processes and jobs involved in turning a long medical equipment wish list into actual deliveries sometime next year. This is the kind of stuff I knew nothing about when working at headquarters. My learning curve about these matters is steep.

Axel and Sallie Craig prepared a fajita dinner, and Paul helped us eat it. The meal was served outside in the garden, with candles and wine. As appetizers we had the smoked salmon that we had brought back from our June visit, served on toast and with capers that we found in the local supermarket. It was all very civilized and normal, as if we were back in Manchester.

Since the airport has been closed for all but VIPs, every time we heard a plane go overhead we wondered who would be inside it. And then we wondered about the sequence of activities during tomorrow’s Kabul Conference and the messages that the organizers want us, the public, to walk away with. Right now we are clueless.

I have graduated from first grade to second grade in Dari. I am now reading stories with high moral content from the ‘New House New Life’ series of BBC’s adult education soap operas. They are stories about the benefits of literacy, working together rather than fighting, the terrible consequences of laziness, etc.

My teacher and I read each story, page by page: I read, I translate, I write the new words in my notebook, she corrects my spelling, she reads (and in doing so corrects my pronunciation) and we move on to the next page. It is great fun.

Today I learned that sons who fight make trouble for their father and family. A consequence of their bad behavior is that one of their father’s goats dies like a pig (yes, indeed, pig). Interestingly there are no women in the story except the hapless mother who appears to trigger the fighting by doing something stupid like leaving the chicken coop open to predators. The father, on his deathbed, teaches them a lesson about collaboration, using sticks and a piece of string. Even though I have a few more pages to read I know the story has a good ending. Dad does die I think but not before all the brothers join hands (this is the last of the pictures) and everyone looks very happy.

Because I am now in second grade I can instruct our driver in Dari, over the phone, how to get my colleague to the brand new superstore in our part of town. It opened a week ago and we are all discovering it, one by one. I am not sure whether my colleague made it to the store but he never called back so I assume he did.

Although today was the equivalent of a US Sunday, we were summoned to an early morning USAID meeting and present the work plan for the last 15 months of our project. A brand new USAID health team has just arrived, so this was an opportunity to bring them up to speed and hand over the baton.

After two hours a bunch of uniformed men collected in the narrow hallways that separate the pushed-together containers for a next meeting in the same conference room but we weren’t done. Everyone realized it would make sense to combine at least part of our two meetings because we are all talking about the same thing: health services for people (Afghans and military) in the provinces, especially the insecure ones.

Although all in uniform, these men (and two women) are not fighters. They are medical personnel belonging or seconded to the various armed services (and not all of them US). I missed much of their introductions because they used a whole new set of abbreviations that we are not familiar with. As a result I did not understand exactly what they are all doing but it definitely has something to do with health services in Afghanistan. How their work connects to ours is part of the mystery, but there are special people in USAID (called the the civ-mil folks) who are assigned to bridge the two rather different ecosystems.

I sat between two uniformed men with guns in holsters and i-phones in their hands, each busily sending messages and responding to answers. They were deeply engaged in multitasking – something we cannot do because we have to leave computers and all other electronics, including cell phones, behind in the section where we are screened and checked and X-rayed. There are not many advantages to living in barracks or in the bubble, but that would be one: you can do something else during meetings.

The Thai massage ladies did not get their visas renewed. This is a becoming a problem for many people, including Axel whose visa expires a week from now. He may need to make a trip to Dubai which makes visa renewal a rather expensive proposition.

And so, this morning I went to check out a new spa in town. It is slightly more expensive but with a whole lot more atmosphere than the Thai basement arrangement. My masseuse’s name was Mona Lisa, a name she gave herself.
While undergoing an exquisite massage that was a combination of Swedish, aroma and Thai massage (the Mona Lisa massage), I teased out her history. I am always interested in how people who don’t work for an international organization, end up in Kabul.

Mona Lisa was born a Muslim, somewhere in the Philippines. At the age of 12 she was married to her cousin, aged 26. At age 13 she delivered a boy who is now also in the family business of massages. He is there for men on ‘family Wednesday.’ He is 23 now. At age 14 she delivered a girl who is also working as a masseuse. That she survived two pregnancies at such a young age, and ended up both looking very good and with a business, and that her two children are doing well, is a miracle.

When she was married off her mother cried and cried and cried and then left her father. I think I would have too. When she was 16 she became a widow and at age 18 she was shipped out to a nearby kingdom to become a servant in the royal family’s household. She served many dignitaries, including Bill Clinton. She said she could write a book about her time in the royal household, but that she would probably be killed is she did.

She became the personal attendant of the sick queen and stayed with her during her treatment in the US until the queen died; then the king died and she went home. I haven’t gotten to the part of how she got to Afghanistan – saving that for next time. She is currently engaged to an American who will be shipped out to Iraq.

The spa has a Jacuzzi, a steam shower and a sauna which you can rent for eight dollars an hour. The Jacuzzi looks out on a tiny little enclosed garden where you can relax and have food brought in. You can go with a bunch of girls and spend the whole day there. Aside from the massage rooms there is a yoga/exercise room with beautiful draperies that hide the sandbags that are stacked against the windows on the outside, just in case you’d forget where we are.

I made another appointment for next week.

Last night we celebrated with a bunch of friends and colleagues at the relocated Sufi restaurant. We ordered wine which was poured out of teapots – we asked for another pot of red tea when one was gone, and then another. It made the bill rather high, but celebrating survival is priceless.

I am still not recovered from the wedding party now three days ago. This morning, once again, I dragged myself out of bed and onto the elliptical machine. After about 1 km of walking I learned from my Oyster audio book (Mark Kurlansky) that the last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, behaved rather like a Taliban. Having been sent from the Caribbean to New Amsterdam to whip the unruly colonials into shape, he forced people to worship and repent because of their rather loose lifestyles. I could just imagine him – a simpler kind of Taliban, without the AK47s and the HiLux truck, but with the kind of clothing that people wore 350 years ago, a beard and angry eyes, just like the ones that roam around freely over here.

Today was full of tasks that have to be done but that can be a bit tedious after awhile, especially when your eyes begin to cross and your tolerance for imprecision begins to rise. We got two of these tasks at the same time, a once-a-year occurrence: workplanning and quarterly report writing. The latter requires that I read the reports produced by my staff and look them over with a critical eye. One report needed a significant amount of cutting and pasting – but in the process I began to see the coherence of something that doesn’t look very cohering at a first glance. The big question is, “Does it all add up to something meaningful and lasting?” It is THE big question that we have to ask ourselves. Not too often (we would get too discouraged) and not too infrequently (we end up simply doing stuff). It’s a fine balance.

In between these tasks I had to put a derailed train back on its track: a pseudo collaborative piece of work that had gone off the tracks without me knowing it. It involved hearing perceptions from colleagues across the compound that stood diametrically opposed to perceptions I had heard from my own team. The derailment was caused by poor preparations and management with many people playing, unwittingly, a role for which they were not prepared. Everyone wanted to be the one who did right – and if you listened carefully, everyone was right. It is one of life’s dilemmas – perception is reality.

Things got more complicated by an exasperated and uncensored blog entry that showed up in someone’s search and involved one of the actors who played a brief but important role in the drama. As a blogger, and knowing the context in which it spontaneously emerged, I understood where it came from, but I also alerted the author that it was very inappropriate and unprofessional and had to be removed. I had hoped that that would be the end but the blog had been shown and printed to several people and the cat was out of the bag, greatly complicating my task of putting the train back in its place. This, I gather, will take awhile.

I arrived home cross-eyed from tiredness, had myself served a cocktail and dinner, and then managed to write this. But now even the typing gets to be hard. It’s weekend and tomorrow at 11 AM I am going to check out a new massage place. Yeah!

Yesterday and this morning I dragged myself out of bed, sleep-drunk. It looks like the short wedding-party-night of yesterday will haunt me longer than I thought. I think I am going to decline school-night weddings in the future. Axel and I concluded this morning that this reaction has something to do with increasing age. I used to be able to function fine after a short night. It seems those days are gone.

Nevertheless I did my early morning 30 minute exercise routine which had me walking a distance of only 4.4 km rather than the usual 5.2 to 5.5.
All day there were meetings here in the compound. I hardly had time to breathe – with only a brief lunch break. Towards the end of the day we had our weekly call with the students in Boston who are learning about the Millennium Development Goals and leadership at Boston University. The class has a website where we can see pictures of the students in class and where we can follow their conversations with the faculty, all colleagues of mine. I used to be on the other side, teaching.

We are working with a team of four students (three Americans and one Pakistani) on an enormous leadership challenge here: how to create champions within ministry structures (outside health) that can advocate for using religious leaders to advocate for family planning. Everyone is looking for clarity about the challenge – it takes many patient Skype and phone calls to sort things out between us. It is hard to find clarity in an ambiguous assignment, but it is also good leadership practice.

Today is Bastille Day which, for us, is also crash day: it was exactly 3 years ago today that 4337P crashed near Gardner airport, and Axel, Joan and I miraculously escaped death. Axel and I celebrated the survival and recovery of the three of us when we were in Kabul last year, at the Sufi restaurant. We are going to celebrate there again tonight and, as long as we are here in Kabul, will make it an annual ritual.

We picked up my brand new young colleague, the one who didn’t find out the name of her fiance until 2 weeks after the engagement party, and her 21 year old sister in a part of Kabul I had never been to. It was a crowded popular area of the city. On our way to fetch her we ran into a demonstration of young angry males with so much testosterone that the police had to intervene. Apparently it was an election rally that had gone sour.

In typical motherly fashion I was thinking, “What are all these young men doing on the streets after dark? It is a school night; they should be studying,” a thought I believe many Afghan mothers share with me. It sort of sums up the problem and its solution, two very old ideas: idleness (the devil’s playground or, as the Dutch claim, ‘Satan’s pillow’) and education.

The wedding party invitation, which I took to my Dari teacher for practice, indicated that guests should arrive at 5 PM. We arrived at 8:30 PM and were still over two hours early if the serving of dinner counts as the real start (and end) of the party.

The invitation also said ‘no children and no cameras.’ But that, I learned is not taken seriously by anyone. When we arrived, a gulf of overexcited kids poured out of all nooks and crannies of the large building that contains several wedding halls. They were in various states of dress up: from outfits that would befit a beauty pageant (in mini size) to ordinary t-shirts and dirty pants (mostly the boys). Also, everyone had cameras and clicked away like crazy – so I will have pictures later to post.

Most of the little girls were dressed to the nines, even though at 8:30 most of these outfits were showing the wear and there or the frantic running around. You’d think all the kids had been given speed. Yet there was no sugary drink or food in sight. Nothing is served, except the occasional bottle of water (people brought?) that I could see on some tables.

By the time dinner arrived several kids had collapsed, some of the boys had joined their father in the adjacent but hidden room – I suspect because they knew that the men get served first. I had to suppress some outrage that the women and children were served close to midnight. Who thought of this idea? I was happy that my colleague Fahima plans to reverse things when her son gets married next year. Someone has to knock some sense into the men.

In the meantime the bride, unsmiling as she is supposed to, stood stiffly next to her new husband, posing for dozens of pictures then with this relative or friend, then that one. The father and brother(s?) were allowed to be on our side and posed a lot. One brother even danced with a woman from the bridal party, I presumed his wife. It was odd to see a couple dancing like that in public. It was an elegant dance and fun to watch.

Everyone was bedecked and bejeweled in ways that made even my colleagues unrecognizable. Some had so much make up and and gold jewelry, and without their veils, that I had to look twice before recognizing them.

I pointed at my 1 dollar silver like ear-rings. “You are smart,” said one, “we spent way too much money on jewelry.” After which she showed me her 750 dollar ring. There was more, much more, hanging around her neck and all the necks within a 30 meter radius.

When dinner finally arrived it arrived with a vengeance. It was as if the wait staff wanted to say; ‘What? You want dinner? Here, take this!” The platters of food were practically thrown on the table, dishes piled upon each other with no sense of aesthetics or cook’s pride.

My colleague was whacked in the head by a waiter’s arm thrusting a dish onto our table; another waiter slipped on the wet floor (all waiters were running fast and furiously, on bare feet, with heaped platters between the tables) dumping his dishes unceremoniously on the floor and on some fancy dresses.

Fahima commented, “you see, you have schools were people learn how to serve meals, but here they take just anyone who can carry a platter.” That was certainly true. The table next to us didn’t get served until after we had finished eating. At our table it was hard to get to the saran-wrapped dishes at the bottom of the pile.

The mothers of the bride and groom walked busily between the tables to make sure everyone was served well (well referred to quantity rather than quality of the serving experience). We all said we were full but more dishes arrived and were piled on top of the debris on our table.

I the meantime the bride and groom and their families ate in a separate room downstairs; we went to see them and give Rabia, our colleague, a hug. She was allowed to smile in the intimate setting, but not in public. I hardly recognized her under her heavy makeup and the hairdo that looked more like a sculpture.

We left before the bride and groom changed from their green into white outfits, indicating that the religious ceremony, the Nikah, had been performed. It was way past my bedtime and we skipped whatever next parts of the wedding had yet to be completed.

I am waiting for a car with several of my female colleagues to take me to a wedding hall in Karte Parwan. I am dressed in my finest; a gift from the company to all its female employees on International Women’s Day (bought by the women themselves). Somebody selected my dress, red with glitters and white glittery pants plus a shawl that looks like Mother Teresa’s except it has a red band rather than a blue band around the edges. Axel had me pose in the garden and made pictures.

When I unpacked the gift, early March, I discovered that it was a three piece outfit that was only partially sewn. It was more like a kit. The seams of the pants needed to be stitched and the dress had no opening at the bottom (huh?) but the sides were open and those seams that were stitched were not finished.
Over the weekend and tonight after coming home I put the finishing touches on the outfit – it was time to go out in public. I hemmed and stitched enough to keep the cloth from exposing me or unraveling. On the inside it would make by sewing teacher gasp. But it will do for now – its test ride.

It’s a week night and I wasn’t particularly keen to show up at a 5 PM wedding when everyone knows that food won’t be served till 10 or even later. It is apparently not polite to leave before the food. So Axel, Sallie Craig and I, in my finery, had dinner at home so I wouldn’t starve before 10 PM.

And then I discovered that the car that was supposed to pick me up with the ladies went another route, without me. The dispatcher revealed the miscommunication and I graciously backed out. But then another young staff member called up that she was waiting too. If I wasn’t going, she couldn’t either, on her own. That’s the way things are here. So the wedding party is on again. More later.