Sylvia's Journal

The office car took me to the neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan where MSH used to be housed when I was here 6 years ago. At that time you could walk up the hill, visit shops and restaurants pretty much as you pleased. Mirwais and I talked about the sadness of it all; how each time you hope it gets better and then it gets worse. We did this over a wonderful creamy pistacchio desert with a name I forgot, that was left for us by the invisible chef, at the end of a rainy and cold day. We started to work ourselves up into a depressed state as we got to discuss the arms industry and how there seems to always be money for arms but never for economic development, health or education. In Dubai, on my way to the airport, I had passed a large office building that proudly told the world it was from the ARMS group ltd. I don’t think it was an abbreviation. I sort of expected arms dealers to congregrate in Dubai but I didn’t expect to see a proud advertisement like that. Shouldn’t those people be ashamed?

My Thai massage experience was exquisite. I was led into the house, marked with a small sign that said Thai Salon, by a small Irishman who I could hardly understand, but better than any of the Thai women who worked and lived there. Over the phone she had told me to go to street 15 in Wazir Akbar Khan and then look for, what I understood to be Lin Fai Lev. I had expected this to be a landmark, may be a Chinese-Jewish restaurant . The Irish man later repeated to me the exact same instructions: Lane 5, left.

I was led into a small basement room closed by curtains, made by the same manufacturer, I think, as the one who made our curtains in Guest House Zero. The massage table was large and sturdy and later I found out why. Not those elegant lightwood tables with headrests I am familiar with. One curtain further a British gentleman gets his weekly fix.

The background music to my massage is not the New Age stuff I associate with massage places in the US. No, here it is music from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the Hollies (all I need is the air that I breathe), R.E.M, Sonny & Cher and other great music from my younger years; the second time today.

The two women talked to each other through the curtains, in incomprehensible Thai. There was lots of laughing, interspersed by the occasional slap-slap of a large muscle group. I had the daughter while my neighbor had the mother.

When she climbs on the table and begins to lean onto me with increasing pressure I am grateful I am with the daughter and I pity the Brit. I have to temper her enthusiasm when she gets to my bad foot, but otherwise it was a most wonderful massage. I never had a Thai massage done by a Thai, only by Abi. It is a little different but I’d have another one, either type, anytime.

When I walked out on the street I had the same dilemma again of not knowing which car is there for me. I approached the wrong car, again. I went back inside and waited for a signal that my car had arrived and killed the time by reading more of Fred Hartman’s book and some of his very touching stories about Afghan women needing but not getting proper healthcare. Ten minutes later my driver and body guard showed up and took me home.

The massage was sandwiched in between about 6 hours of work; not quite the weekend experience I had hoped. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go rowing at Guest House 26 and then have a beer for a treat.

It is Friday, Afghanistan’s day off and feels like the equivalent of a rainy Sunday in spring in Holland. Kabul is in the clouds. The farmers will be happy. Mirwas and I had a long drawn out breakfast and talked about everything that is important in the human experience. The cook doesn’t come to our house over the weekend but he leaves plenty of dishes to heat up. Mirwas set the table and did the dishes.

I reconfirmed my Thai massage appointment which has been postponed to later in the day. I arranged for a car from the dispatch and then set to do my homework for this weekend, which is a considerable list, including preparations for the next week and other things not related to Afghanistan.

The email box had filled up while I was asleep and contained some more relational hiccups that generated strong feelings that alternated between anger and sadness. It resulted in a few emails sent impulsively and then retracted, and wondering whether retracted emails can actually be opened. At any rate, when my emotional buttons get pushed, rational thinking about email etiquette tends to go out of the window; I do what I know I should not. For a moment I was little more than a pitiful heap of sorrow but then I collected myself, dusted myself off and went to work again. It did leave me drained and suddenly tired. I am soothing myself with music from Francoise Hardy as it comes with sweet memories of adolescence.

Last night I was invited by Paul, Iain and Brad. They live in Guest House #26 that has nothing of the hideousness of our house and is actually cozy and surprisingly well decorated for a house with gentlemen of a certain age. They had invited me for a dinner with other lowlanders, including Pieter, a compatriot of mine, who is the WHO chief here, Willie from Belgium who is a lab technician working on an EU project and later, halfway through our meal the top Belgian diplomat who got lost because he has an imported driver (for security) and only had military maps that turned out to be of little help (I am on purple street! – where the hell is that?). Brad wanted to welcome his excellency with the Belgian national anthem but the other Belgians did not play along, so Brad made up his own song and I got to sing what I always tell people is the Dutch national anthem (we voeren met een zucht, daar boven in de lucht…). It was a wonderful evening with great food and the best stories about working across cultural and linguistic boundaries and the pickles we get ourselves into sometimes. I also had my first beer and one glass of wine after a week of zero alcohol consumption.

I discovered that House #26 has a rowing machine. This may be a good opportunity to test whether I can row again in a real boat when I get back to Boston.

We had a fascinating conversation this morning during the first half hour reflection with which we start each day. One of the participants said he was a bit disappointed that the group did not get more of my expertise. I told the group that my content expertise was in the book they have and in the facilitator notes they are using for their practice sessions, but that my real expertise was in creating an environment, a container, in which they can learn and through which they become better at leading and managing. My counterpart, Dr. Ali then completed my answer in Dari so I didn’t know exactly what he said. But I had an idea of what he was talking about. Yesterday afternoon we talked about how our work was always intense at the beginning of a workshop (and just before it) when we were creating the conditions for learning. As the workshop progresses the work shifts towards the participants as they begin to take responsibility for their own learning (‘enabling others…’). When I heard the word ‘enabling’ mixed in with the Dari I knew what he was saying without understanding his language.

There was a moment of silence, and then someone said, yes, this is our notion of learning and expertise: the expert talks and pours his or her knowledge into our heads. And when it does not happen people are disappointed because they think they are not learning. It is a pity that this paradigm is still so firmly established in people’s heads, not just in Afghanistan, but everywhere. The sad thing is that when the learning does not ‘take’ – as is so often the case – the learners are blamed, much like the patient who doesn’t get better because he doesn’t take his medicine. I am working with doctors so this traditional view on how people learn or heal is reinforced from all sides.

Since the participants and my co-facilitators are now running the feedback session I don’t know of course what feedback they are giving to each other and thus what they are learning. That this is sometimes a bit different from what I would have given as feedback is a risk that comes with the approach. I believe it is a risk worth taking. After one session one of the more accomplished facilitators came to me and asked me to defend him because the group had criticized him for doing something that I had earlier suggested he do. Could I please set the record straight? I told him that he should take the feedback for what it is. If feedback comes repeatedly from different people it should be taken more serious than if it comes from one person at one time. I did not exonerate him in public. Later I heard from Ali that taking the feedback is still hard for some. They are after all the country’s elite, doctors, and working at the senior levels in the government – they ought to be perfect by now.

Ali is doing a terrific job and has really taken over from me. We consult a lot and whatever he picks up from those conversations gets integrated into his facilitation. I am seeing the man rise as a facilitator before my eyes. And now I am also beginning to see his colleagues, who are participants, show their talents. It is truly very inspiring and encouraging.

Ali has his cellphone on all the time despite the agreed upon norm to turn it off. He cannot do that because his nephew has leukemia and is in a bad condition somewhere in India. He has just been released from one hospital in Tamil Nadu where the doctors advised the family to give up as his condition is hopeless. The only thing that may save him is a bone marrow transplant. The boy is 17. Ali is contacting every doctor and hospital he knows in England, Pakistan and India. He does this in the background of our workshop. I marvel at his ability to hold this much stress and function at a high level. My other counterpart, Ali’s boss, just lost his father and returned to Kabul the day I arrived. After work he goes home to feed and entertain a steady stream of visitors from all over. His wife cannot receive the male visitors, even though she is highly educated. This is our tradition, he says. And this is how complex the lives are of the people I work with and how remarkable it is to see them function at the high level they do and be so completely available to do the work.

Yesterday the participants were doing the work of teaching and learning by facilitating sessions we assigned to them in teams of three. They continue doing this today, our last day together. We define leading as ‘enabling others to face challenges and produce results in complex conditions.’ So that is what we are doing. Midway through the workshop our work was essentially done; we created the structure, introduced the concepts, laid out the processes and the rookie LDP facilitators are now doing the work. Each team is learning from the feedback given to the preceding team and so the quality of the sessions is steadily going up. This way we are accomplishing three things at once: the participants are learning the things they need to learn, the facilitators learn to be coaches and I am freed up to pay attention to prepare next week’s double workshop and be responsive to other requests from senior project staff. But one thing I have not delegated and that is turning my iPod on and off to play the Afghan music before and after sessions. It makes everyone smile, even the serious types.

The Kabul Chief Burger had to do without our business for lunch yesterday. My co-facilitator Ali felt that a change was needed. We were served Kabuli rice, kebabs and a large bone with chunks of meet that you had to hunt for, hard work but delicious, with some unidentifiable mush of spicy greens, also delicious. A small packet of plastic utensils, sugar, salt and pepper in cellophane was offered with the meal. On closer inspection this turned out to be US army issue. It appears there is a flourishing market of American army goods outside the American base in Bagram right under the nose of our men in uniform. There is also a bush (not Bush) market in Kabul where US army products of any kind are available for sale. Our caterer must be getting his take-out utensils there. We did not need the salt/pepper and sugar packets enclosed with the utensils. I really hope someone picks through the garbage and saves the sugar, at least.

The MSH project team is determined to use every second of my time and attention. They are right, since it took a lot of resources to get me here and the end of my trip is showing on the horizon, but it means there is never a dull moment. On Sunday we start another training of trainers for 60 people in two parallel rooms with occasional sessions together. And one piece of my original scope of work that was taken out is put back in again. A proposal has been sent to the ministry to hold a senior alignment meeting to support the scale up of the leadership program in the 13 provinces. It is an all time record for me: three 4-day workshops and one 4-hour alignment meeting all in two weeks time plus strengthening the local team of lead facilitators. The only reason that this is possible is that a good chunk of the work was done in the first few days when the design was tested and finetuned. All I do now is give feedback to the lead team of facilitators and make sure the design for next week will work. My Afghan colleagues will do the heavy lifting from now on, taking my place as a coach, while I sit back and watch them. My job is, in essence, to create the containers in which the learning is most likely to happen with the least effort on anyone’s part. In this way, hopefully, we are cascading the skills sets downward and expanding the pool of LDP facilitators in Afghanistan. Some good results from improved leadership in the provinces over the last year are already in. We are very encouraged. People like to be associated with success and it seems a critical mass is building!

The MSH office was originally built as a house for a person with visions of grandeur and a large family. It has a nice garden with a long pergola that will give wonderful shade when the temperature rises and the grapes will practically jump into your mouth. Now it also has its own petrol station, enormous bars to protect the compound from uninvited loaded cars or trucks and several gates, barbed wire, guard houses on the top of a wall and more that I have not explored and probably won’t.

I finally took some pictures of the two houses that make up Guest House Zero where the Tech-Serve project puts up its visitors from abroad. I am staying in the one with the chimney. In between the two houses is a lawn and rose beds. The grass has started to grow and the dandelions are already seeding the lawn.

We eat wonderful meals cooked by an invisible chef who I never see and who leaves the food in the oven for us to serve whenever we are ready. Mirwais and I are the only ones left and we enjoy quiet meals together. Mirwais is an engineer/architect who is checking out the reconstruction of health facilities, something he supervised under the previous project. He is Afghan but has made himself and his family a life in the US a long time ago. He is one of the few beardless Afghans I have met.

It was only yesterday that I discovered the door handle to our hideous bathroom. It consists of a leg kicking a football. Here is the picture. I quickly scanned the rest of the house to see what other surprises there were by way of doorhandles but there were none. I was trying to imagine the thinking process that led to the installation of such a handle. Is the owner of the house a football fan? Was it put in by one of its occupants over the last few years by an MSH colleague or consultant, or the maintenance man?

When you leave your familiar surroundings and go out into the wide world there are so many strange and funny things that you could easily miss if you didn’t look for them. I got more of an appreciation of this when I started traveling with Sita; first to Burkina Faso, in 2001, then to Senegal in 2005 and finally to Dubai and Kabul in 2006. Sita has a third eye for strange, funny or ugly things that, in their ugliness take on a certain beauty. It is the artist’s eye. My family is full of artists with third eyes: Axel’s eye for Beauty, Tessa’s eye for things that are practical and visually pleasing, and then there is Sita’s for the strange, the quirky, the ugly.

I have now developed my own version of Sita’s third eye, and it has made the experience of living in this guest house rather interesting. My house mate Steve left and I moved into the room he vacated. It is the largest room in the house, the size of our Lobster Cove living room and dining room combined. Although it is as ugly as the rest of the house it has a balcony and I can open windows and look out onto the street if I push the white window covers aside. It also has a garish little bedside lamp that has tiny pulsating red and blue lights in the bottom, twirled around fake pink and purple roses encased in the glass base.

I had dinner with one of our students from the BU course in which I actually taught (July 2006) rather than the one where I was listed as faculty but was indisposed (July 2007). Meghann had suggested we have dinner in one of the few restaurants in Kabul that MSH security staff allowed me to go. It is a congenial Tex Mex place owned and run by a woman who, in her day job writes the good stories about interventions that help Afghans to get back on their feet again.

I was taken there in a sturdy SUV with driver and guard. I don’t know if he was armed but imagine he was. It was a little tricky when I left the place a few hours later to find my car and driver/guard combo among the line up of similar cars and grim looking men, in the dark because you are scanning for exactly the kind of people and cars that you imagine your kidnappers would look like. Luckily they recognized me and brought me safely home through the empty and barricaded streets of Kabul.

A war zone it is, especially without the people. The Serena Hotel that was bombed in January and where Sita and stayed two years ago looked liked it was the Pentagon. Whole streets are blocked by large chunks of concrete and barbed wire everywhere. This is the scar tissue of armed conflict. It is what is left after the bombs have exploded and the fear is firmly planted in people’s minds. And then there is the futility of it all; the barricades go up afterwards, like the shoe checks at the airport. The Serena is unlikely to get bombed again and may well be the safest place in Kabul now with all that protection.

Axel and I also have scar tissue. We don’t know exactly what scar tissue looks like but I suspect it is ugly too and looks and acts like those barricades as it obstructs the flow of things. Axel’s scar tissue is more severe and problematic, especially in his hand where the muscles have not worked properly for so long and have shriveled up to make movement very hard and stressful for the remaining muscle strands. I have scar tissue in my foot and try to break it down through exercises but it is slow going.

I am also struggling with some scar tissue in my heart; that too obstructs the flow of something. I once wrote a little poem that came back to me yesterday: The other day I found/this hard spot in my heart/The one called me and mine/That keeps me separate/From the divine. My heart’s scar tissue is about relationships that have been damaged and obstructed flows of communication. It is creating puddles of stagnant water. It stinks.

The workshop started with about 75% of the participants. Maybe some people were disappointed about this but I was happy as it made the room a little less crowded. The reduced number allowed me to re-arrange the program to accommodate for the opening delays and the fact that everything takes much longer than I guessed because of translation. Oh how I wish I could speak the language of Darius!

We are doing the training in the MSH office This means we are completely self-sufficient: above us is the secretariat, all around us are MSH support and technical staff, down the hall is the kitchen that provides us with food and drink, and next door the prayer room so no one has to leave the place. Next week is going to be quite a show, we will have the biggest of MSH’s conference rooms set up in theater style to seat about 50 people and on each side of it a workshop room seating about 25 provincial health authorities, NGO representatives and technical advisers around smaller tables.

After watching a video of an inspiring leadership program in Egypt that Joan and Morsi launched some 6 years ago we engaged the group in a visioning session that had to break through rigid mental models steeped in current reality problems, abstract language and a focus on action rather than results. This is the contradiction: people are urged to act but then all they can think of is action verbs without any of them being anchored in the end result that the action is supposed to produce. It took some effort to get them down to thinking in pictures and it was a bit of a stretch for my co-facilitators. We switched back and forth between Dari and English and ended up facilitating as a trio. It feels OK, my gut tells me; it is the only honest source of feedback I have because I am unlikely to be criticized. This is a problem I share with top leaders when I am out in the field: severed feedback loops. I have cultivated my gut to compensate for this paucity of information through more direct channels.

Lunch was served in boxes from Kabul’s fast food chain called Chief Burger. It contained a hamburger, fries and a coke. What gives it away as Afghan fast food is the flat bread. It was only halfway through my hamburger that I discovered that the Afghan flat bread was wrapped around kebabs. The first bite brought back memories of the trip Axel and I took around Afghanistan in the fall of 1978. We traveled on a budget of just dollars a day and this is what we ate, pretty much all the time. The only thing missing is the small tray with the three spices: powder made of ground grapes, chili pepper and salt. Taste and smell evoke instant memories of this magical trip along the hippy trail that bonded us together for the rest of our life.

In the afternoon we had strayed so much from the program that it was no use trying to catch up. Instead I used the dynamics in the room to illustrate some facilitation do’s and dont’s; like how to recognize and then deal with energy dips; how to respond to the incessant requests for explanations about how scanning is different from monitoring and evaluation (it turned out the Dari translators used the same word) and the most engaging ways to handle the reporting out by small groups.

The first day ended on a high note and was closed by the DG of Provincial Public Health exhorting everyone to write down every word I say. I’ll try not to make that happen. Here too I am amazed again how new and novel adult education methodology is. Everyone knows the theory but translating it into action does not happen. It is no wonder training has gotten such a bad rap; and it is no wonder that people believe training workshops are not complete without ice-breakers; of course, something’s got to break the ice, since powerpoint slides don’t.

We are all early risers in this place. The built-in alarm is the generator if you manage to sleep through the morning prayers that precede the generator. The call to prayer is coming from a distance, not like the one in Wazir Khan where it would practically levitate me out of my bed.

Breakfast is informal, help-yourself style, with many choices: cold cereal, yogurt, juices, eggs, Afghan flat bread and Western brown bread, even home-made breakfast bars and a large choice of local jams and honey. The car arrived promptly at 7:10 – as I was told. It announced itself with the chirping of a bird, which I learn quickly, is the doorbell. We piled in the car and drove the 100 meters to the heavily guarded compound. It does look indeed like we are in a war zone. But inside is a lovely courtyard with blossoming trees and a light veil of green hanging over the branches and bushes. If I ignore the barbed wire rolled on top of the walls I can imagine the lovely gardens and freedom of movement I remember from the Kabul I first encountered 30 years ago.

The morning was spent aligning expectations and greeting old friends and settling in my temporary office. Iain who was supposed to be living in Spain with his wife Riitta-Liisa, is here while she is in Nepal. And the story of Paul and Laurence is a bit like that too. These people are never home, or else everywhere is their home. Paul is Flemish and he has invited me to meet other Lowlanders at his guesthouse on Thursday. I will be halfway through my stay in Kabul by then.

Over lunch I met with the project staff who will be playing a key role in the workshop and beyond as the project is thinking about the sustainability of all its initiatives. We sat around the table and talked so that I could learn about their challenges and realities and they about how people deal with such challenges (some the same, some different) elsewhere. Three of the staff members of the Capacity Building group will be the facilitators for the next few days; the others will participate and become the facilitators in the next round of workshops, 5 days from now, when the provincial people arrive and we’ll do a twofer.

We had a working lunch which showed that the Afghan staff has taken over some bad American habits. Everyone is working very hard and long hours in an environment that is always full of surprises.

The rest of the day went faster and faster, or rather, tomorrow came closer and closer, faster and faster. It was truly a flying start but everyone is cool about it and so am I; after all, the Afghan staff will do the bulk of the stand up facilitation; in fact I would not be surprised if much of it will happen in one or the other of the local languages.

I received my security briefing, more of the dos and don’ts I can now practically recite, from Baba Jan, MSH’s Security Director. I learned from the book Window on Afghanistan that is written by my colleague Fred Hartman and his wife Mary that Baba Jan used to be Ahmad Shah Massoud’s field commander. The briefing occurred in triangular fashion through one other man who speaks English. It is odd to be in conversation with someone on your right when the meaning of what is being said comes from your left; the dilemma is where to fix your eyes? Baba Jan has never spoken in English to me, and I never in Dari to him. My hunch is that he understands English better than I Dari. I first met him in 2002 and the re-acquaintance was not lost in translation.

I arrived home parched despite drinking at least a liter of water and many cups of green tea. There is not one drop of humidity in the air. It is the kind of dry air that provokes the most awful cough attacks. The late afternoon sun lit the bathroom perfectly and I took the picture I promised yesterday. The fixtures are Afghan-de-luxe; there are gold-colored knobs and covers and matching sets of water cup and tooth bush holders, soap dishes, towel racks, etc which have lost some of their former glory or functionality. But the toilet works, there is running water for now and the shower is hot and wonderful.

Dinner with Mirwas and Steve was much nicer than sitting alone in a hotel restaurant. There was much talk about leadership. It is a never ending topic for inquiry, challenge and surprise. After that I willed myself to complete the support materials for tomorrow’s facilitators. It truly was a heroic act of willpower to overcome the heavy pull of my bed. That willpower is now gone and there is no more resistance possible.