Sylvia's Journal

Last evening I watched endless reruns of the bomb blast in Peshawar and the attack on the UN Guesthouse in Kabul while answering emails inquiring about my safety from concerned friends from all over the world. I try to explain that there are many guesthouses in Kabul, more than there are hotels, and that Kabul is a big city and that we live far from where most of the foreigners live; but I do understand the concern and I am grateful for all the good vibes and prayers that are sent our way.

In the meantime Axel’s sewer project has hit a snag which may mean a delay in his arrival, which would have to be at least a week’s delay because of the run-off lockdown. We are receiving instructions from our security men to lay low and refrain from our weekly Chicken street outing; even our walk around the highschool is cancelled. Maybe this is a signal that I should finally try the elliptical in our house or go for a rowing visit to house nr 26.

Half way through the morning I went to take pictures of the hajjis receiving the seasonal flu vaccines at a local mosque. The vaccines have been donated by the American people and arrived at the right place and the right time thanks to many sleepless nights, thousands of phone calls and emails and much sweat and tears from many of my colleagues. My guide was the vaccination chief at the regional health office and he introduced me left and right to bearded men, sometimes introducing them as ‘he used to be a talib!’ and then everyone grinned. I would have loved to find out why the change of heart and label but my Dari is not good enough for such conversations and their English wasn’t either.

At the end of my visit to the mosque I was formally thanked on behalf of the Afghan people by an impeccably dressed religious official who, I was told later, was an official in the provincial health office at the time of the taliban.

Later one of our participants in the workshop told me how you could get your fingers or even your head cut off if the taliban police found you in the possession of a pen drive, as this meant you had a computer and that was of course a machine invented by the devil. He would hide his pendrive in the ashtray in the arm rest of his seat on the bus and pray that they would not find it.

It is hard to imagine that this was no so long ago and it is always surprising how people tell stories about the taliban as if that period was just one big joke. It seems that for my colleagues here taliban means ‘incompetent fanatics’ and sometimes I detect a hint of compassion, as if these poor sods didn’t know any better.

I had lunch again with the only other female in the room; women don’t seem to be able to eat together with men. We occupy her husband’s office and unpack the many wrappings our lunch comes in, always the same: naan (flatbread), a small plastic container with raw vegetables with a packet with low fat mayonaise on top, a plastic spoon, fork, and straw wrapped inside two tissue papers and a plastic sleeve, a plastic container with white rice, some saffron rice mixed in and tiny red berries that i am told are hard to find and good for lowering cholesterol. The last container has a big chunk of mutton, bone and fat included.

We returned early to our hotel because it is Thursday and people go home for the weekend. I came home to a hotel on back-up power which meant I had to get my mail sitting in the lobby. I sat right behind Murad from Jalalabad who was talking on Skype with his fiancée in Pakistan. I could look right over his shoulder into a living room somewhere in Pakistan where he fiancée was sitting next to, presumably, her sister and her mother lying on a mattress in the back, all very intimate, the women only half veiled.

I asked Murad if he could interrupt his video call for a brief moment so I could download my mail and he immediately obliged. As it turned out he also works for a USAID project and pursues similar objectives as we do, except he does procurement, a very tricky field, full of mines as one can expect here. He told me he missed he fiancee so much, emphasizing the ‘so’ so very much that I did not dare to download all my mail for fear of separating these lovebirds.

Tonight we will go out across the street again for dinner in the restaurant with the carpets on the grass and eat kebabs with sabzy (cooked greens) and drink the fermented yoghurt, imagining it is beer.

Our workshop venue is in between the TB ward, the infectious diseases ward and the mortuary, so it may be more dangerous here than in Kabul where gunmen created mayhem and death. Dangers are lurking everywhere in this country, but then, amazing and wonderful things are also staring at you at every street corner – a grandpa climbing over a walk to fetch his little grand or great-granddaughter; and the ancient looking seller of mysterious perfumes sitting by the side of the road. I showed him the picture that I took of him and his wares. He looked at the small display on my camera and I wondered what he thought. Magic? Weird foreigneress?

I am watching the group process that is created by my colleague. I don’t quite agree with his approach and we skirmish a bit on how to proceed. He’s impatient, as most foreign fly-in consultants are because their time frame is short. Now that I live here I see things differently. I try to get people in the habit of reflecting on what they are doing, seeing the big picture, how does what they do fit into the larger whole – because that sort of reflection is not happening. Everyone is so focused on small tasks. People are engaged with the individual trees and losing sight of the woods as a result. Every new consultant brings in new assignments that may look large and important to them, but in the greater scheme of things produce yet another set of tasks that suck up attention and energy.

We recognize that we have a fundamental philosophical difference about how people learn. My colleague thinks people learn from working on their own and then have their work product critically reviewed in plenary to correct errors and deepen the reasoning. I believe in coaching people in the intimacy of their small work group so that what the groups finally present in plenary is the best possible product. I wonder if this is the kind of philosophical difference that cannot be bridged with compelling arguments.

After lunch I asked to be taken on a tour of the hospital to get some pictures of healthcare in action. It is a regional hospital and people come from all over. I followed the man in charge of the cold chain, I call him Mr. Cool Man but he doesn’t understand that that is funny. He keeps correcting me, emphasizing that he is Mr. Cold Chain man. He is very serious about being addressed with the right title.

We first went to the first aid section where a doctor and a male nurse attended to patients that walked in or were carried in. They were all pleased to pose. I asked if I could take pictures of the patients, victims and families. My security guard and Mr. Cold Chain shrugged but I insisted they ask. No one seemed to mind and most posed with big smiles, except those who were crying or suffering or simply too ill to respond. Occasionally a woman steps out of my picture frame and covers her head. I am surprised that not all women do that. There are discarded burqas, scarves and abayas all over the place. The clothes that the women wear underneath their wraps are exposed in all their wonderful colors.

After we checked in with our Kabul based colleagues to find out what was rumor and what was fact about the early morning attacks, we, the two foreigners only, are ordered back to our hotel at 3 PM. I am both touched about the concern for our well being and annoyed that we have to leave the group. Luckily our Afghan colleagues are allowed to stay and we know the work is in good hands with them.

Once more we are staying in the Nazary hotel that was designed by people who have a very different idea of what hotel room should be like than I do. The bathroom is designed for small people, much smaller than the average Afghan or American. I think the Chinese were in on this deal. The bathroom has a callipgraphy still life design and stickers on everything indicate the manufacturer in Chinese characters.

There is no place to put clothes, only a coatbandi, as the Afghans call the ubiquitous multi-knobbed coat racks. That and the beautiful Herat carpet ar the only non Chinese things in the room. The mattress is hard as a plank and has a sheet put on top of it that is too small to tuck in. The bed is not made up and I wonder what the idea is of the small sheet that is folded on top and that looks like a johnny. Am I supposed to wrap it around me? A clean johhny sheet is put on the bed each night, wrapped in plastic.

The Chinese blanket has the weight of the lead aprons that the X-ray technicians use. I cannot pull the blanket over me because it requires two strong arms and shoulders; with my still inflamed right arm and shoulder I cannot do this. It is good that it is not very cold yet in Herat, so I manage sleeping rolled up in my sheet-johnny.

Our workshop is held in the vaccination training room of the EPI program. Instead of posters, all the vaccine-related information deemed important for trainees is painted on the wall, permanently affixed in bright colors, including a map of Western Afghanistan. All the lettering is in Dari so I am perfecting my reading skills while discussions happen around me that I cannot follow.

We sit on plastic chairs that still have the manufacturer’s plastic protective wrapping around them, half peeled. I cannot help myself peeling the plastic off even further until I encounter a piece of old scotch tape that has melded into the chair’s metal armrests.

At the end of the workshop we check out the cold room to see if the boxes that we sent at great cost to Afghanistan to protect international travelers from seasonal flu had arrived. They had. That required a victory picture. This took some explaining as the employee did not understand Churchill’s victory sign; if I had held up a Kalashnikov with one arm he might have understood better. But I did get the picture with a somewhat tentative V and a puzzled look.

Our security man allowed us to walk back to the hotel across the hospital grounds, an untold freedom. One of my colleagues showed us around telling stories about the time he was a student doctor there; stories about the Taliban waking up students with sticks at 3 AM if they weren’t praying; the removal of the women’s recovery ward from the operating theatre to separate the sexes – this meant that women coming out of surgery had to be wheeled in mid winter on gurneys over uneven ground – it was not uncommon for them to slide off the gurney; and then the bearded men slipping into the nurses quarters at night when no one was looking.

For dinner we walked across the street to a restaurant that presented itself as a small store front. But once inside the store opened in the back to a grassy courtyard with carpets spread out on the lush green grass and amidst rose bushes. It was nearly surreal, seeing groups of men here, a family there, sitting cross legged on the carpets eating kebabs and drinking fermented yoghurt, the closest to alcohol we have had. We asked for chairs and a table, to spare our knees that aren’t used to eating on carpets. All this on a mild autumn night on Sita’s 29th birthday.

To catch a 7 AM plane I had to get up in the middle of the night. I had set my alarm for 3:30, was picked up an hour later and from then on it was endless waiting. Waiting at checkpoints, or waiting for my male colleagues who had their bodies and luggage checked at various points, all in the dark because the electricity was out.

At this early hour female guards cannot be on the job because it would require that they travel in the dark and that is not allowed. Between the electricity outage and the absence of females at the checkpoints, the security arrangements were like Swiss cheese: full of holes.

I killed the hours of waiting by working on my Dari homework and learning some new words. I learned among other things that a wise old man, someone with much gravitas as we would call him, is called a cooked man in Dari. IN return, my Afghan colleagues thought that the expression ‘he travels light,’ referring to our guard, was odd – languages are funny that way.

By the time we had inched our way to the beginning of the runway, about three quarters of a regular workday had passed and our 7 o’clock plane finally took to the skies at 10 AM. We flew the Afghan version of the now defunct People’s Express, a no frills airline company called Pamir Airways. To fly this carrier, as opposed to the UN flight, you have to have an enormous dose of patience and you get nothing to eat, just a cup of water.

We spent nearly an hour on the taxiway, moving a little and then standing still for 15 minutes. There is only 1 runway at Kabul International Airport and between the many military and unmarked planes there is much coming and going, at a ratio of at least 3 coming for every one going.

During out one hour on the taxiway the passengers, nearly all men, started to get a little unruly; and here, unruly bearded and turbaned men are a little scary – luckily there are no arms allowed on the plane. People were talking on their cell phones and walking back and forth as if we were boarding and the flight attendants did not seem to care much.

Occasionally people pushed their call buttons and some heated discussions would ensue while everyone and their brother would get in on the conversation, interrupting my cat naps. I could understand a word here and there but it wasn’t difficult to figure out what they were talking about. It was a rather lively ride up to the start of the runway. Luckily there was also much laughing and that put my mind at rest.

I sat next to a young female lawyer who works with an NGO that has taken on the impossible task of defending the rights of women in Kandahar. She spoke to me in her best English and told me the most incredible stories about life of a 20-year old, unmarried Afghan lawyer who defends the underdog in one of Afghanistan’s most conservative areas.

I soon learned that she had never lost a case of her 258 taken on so far. She is independent, that is, not living with her father or brothers and has no husband, and might never get one as she probably scares the shit out of bearded men who beat or cheat on their wives. I gather from her stories that she is quickly becoming the bane of existence of men who abuse, rape, abduct, cheat or otherwise treat women badly. I asked her how she could live in a place where men so despise women and where her life is all the time in danger. She gave me a big smile and said, if they want to kill me, let them, I am here to help the women and I will never give up.

She pleads her cases in court from the anonymity of the burka. Still, I wondered, with such a dangerous profession, “don’t people know who you are?” They do of course and she knows that if there are people who want to get rid of her they can easily do this but she is unfazed. She is careful tough and does not have a business card or an email address. Everything is done by phone, the gadget practically attached to her ear. I am thinking of Sita and Tessa at 20 – such a different life.

Shabbana’s biggest wish is to go to the bazaar and buy herself some new shoes but she can’t do this, not even in relative free Herat or Kabul, not without her mother or father. She sighed, “I have so many wishes,” but then she smiled and said, “may be one day they will come true,” followed by the predictable Incha’allah.

I asked her if she voted and will vote again, something that is, for a woman in Kandahar, an act of unimaginable bravery. But she is not afraid. After she tells me about men who got their inked fingers hacked off I ask how she manages that. She wore gloves for a week, she said matter-of-factly and will do so again.

I had so many questions, I would have liked to fly for hours more. Being a mother myself of young women I wondered what her mother thought about her dangerous vocation and place of residence. “She cried each time I would visit,’” Shabanna told me. But the mother is also proud of her : in primary school at 2, secondary school at 13 and university at 16, becoming a lawyer at 19, I can see why her mother is proud. The whole country should be proud. How’s that for a natural resource for Afghanistan?