Sylvia's Journal

Just like yesterday day we continued to spend more time today than budgeted for each and every session. Yet no one but me seems to care, at least not now. However, I know that at the end when filling in their evaluation people will say (a) we needed more time (true, we always do) and (b) the facilitators didn’t stick to the agenda.

In small groups the participants simulated sessions they are to conduct in the future with the authorities in the provinces and those who have to oversee the technical quality and serve as coaches – a new concept. I circulate muttering to myself ‘trust fall, trust fall,’ and summonned my Afghan co-facilitators to pay attention to the conversations in the small groups to make sure people are learning the right things from their practice. But my co-facilitators are a little like mercury, rolling off in this and that direction to attend to various other things that come up – some urgencies that popped up without warning as well as those that were not urgent months ago when we discussed the program by email.

I introduced the concept of getting out of one’s comfort zone and today they did. There was great unease about having to discover things for themselves rather than have everything spoonfed via powerpoint presentations. I told them we do that with babies but they are not babies – a metaphor some understood and liked (they grinned and nodded their heads – these are the people I have worked with for years); others may have been insulted by this simile but I will never know.

There is a degree of learned helplessness that we, the providers of technical assistance, have created ourselves. If you are told often enough that you don’t know things then, surprise, you don’t think you know things and need to be fed with a spoon.

The venue of the workshop is one of the specialized hospitals in the city. This is a Russian heritage – specialized hospitals. Kabul is full of them.

When you cannot come in through the side door (arriving before 8 AM) you have to go to the backdoor. There doesn’t seem to be a front door. The back door leads you into the hospital, up the stairs where some of the wards are. Men and women mill around, surprisingly, but I assume the wards are segregated.

The place is dark and dungy, not a place I’d associated with healing. The floors are dirty, there are hundreds of cartons stacked against a wall and it is hard to distinguish between hospital staff, patients and visitors; a few white robed figures are, presumably part of the staff but I cannot tell whether they are aids, nurses, doctors or technicians.

To get to the conference room and the offices of our staff a locked gate has to be opened. Behind the gate the paint is new, there is a carpeted runner and a large very warm conference room which is my home for this week.

There is a bathroom on the hospital side of the gate that is is also used as a kitchen. On our side of the gate there is a very clean woman’s bathroom but not one for the men, surprisingly. Maybe, when the gate was installed one of the bathrooms became all purpose.

Our women’s bathroom has three stalls – on the inside of each stall someone wrote in black permanent marker, and in English, ‘woman’s bathroom’ with the number of the stall (1, 2 or 3). It is not clear why it is on the inside rather than the outside; the latter may have discouraged men to go to the women’s bathroom and look for their own. Once they are inside the stall the message comes too late.

I went to bed at 7:30 PM after a quick meal and after re-adjusting the program of day 2 to accommodate the reality of everything taking about twice as long as I had expected; a time budget that I thought was already amply padded. I now see that I had forgotten about what one can realistically do in 6 hours with a group of about 25 people.

Before collapsing into bed I needed a Faro fix and was able to talk on Facetime with Sita and Faro who were on their way to buy a new car after the old one collapsed on the Mass Turnpike. Faro wasn’t too excited about the new car expedition, reminding his mom he wanted to get out of his car seat and play. I agree, playtime should trump everything when you are 20 months old.

To my great surprise the large conference room at one of the Emergency Hospitals where we are holding this week’s workshop was set up with a circle of 30 chairs in the middle and around the outer edges doubled-up desks to accommodate group work. I had sketched it out but because it is not your ordinary room set up but this usual makes no difference. And so I was prepared for a set up that was more formal and traditional; hence my surprise to find something even better than what I had proposed.

Around the perimeter the superfluous small desks were piled on top of each other, blocking the row of windows on one side of the room. When the power went off and I needed the drawn curtains to be opened to get some light into the room, my room helper quickly jumped on top of them and walked from one desk to another as there was no other way to get to the window.

Although I dress for winter (my winter experiences from 2002, and even 2010 included frigid rooms full of people clad in heavy winter coats, hats and even gloves), this time I am perpetually overdressed – the meeting halls now have central heating. Today the radiators (whether open or closed) maintain a tropical temperature of 32 degrees (Celsius). Unfortunately I cannot take off my cardigan as my short sleeved dress underneath would expose a good part of my arms.

Several of the basic assumptions for my design, despite having been assured they were correct months ago, turned out to be incorrect requiring a series of on-the-fly adjustments. For one, half the people have had no experience facilitating the leadership program design we have upgraded, so rather than building on existing experience, for some I am building on nothing.

In addition, English was a prerequisite for passing the initial selection and I was told it would be no problem for me to run the workshop in English. I have heard this before – there is embarassment, or even shame, to admit one cannot follow English and so you think you are teaching but you are only talking in a language that is poorly udnerstood. I had been prepared for this and have a team of Afghans around me who are able and willing to run the show in a mix of Pashtu and Dari. With the Pashtu I am lost but the Dari I can more or less follow.

Only one woman is among the 22 men. I knew other qualified women from her organization and asked her why they were not with us. Apparently they didn’t make it through the selection process which is showing more and more of its flaws as I get more involved. That process was supposed to be transparent. My questioning led to a blame game to help explain the poor execution of this process. Men with no relevant experience passed or were invited to the workshop while experienced women did not. If there is a rationale for this I could not extract it from anyone today.

I took the liberty of inviting the missing woman to tomorrow’s session as nearly a quarter of the selected individuals did not show up. I proposed an After Action Review of the selection process. The Division chief under whose responsibility this activity falls also didn’t show up – no one seemed to question that but it is possible the reason is so obvious the others forgot to tell me.

Despite having heavily padded the morning session with its opening protocol, baseline setting, expectations and the like, we found ourselves significantly behind on the schedule by lunch time, so I am dropping bits and pieces here and there. I am sure when I read the evaluations a week from now they will say ‘we needed more time.’ We will do our best is all I can promise, as we swim, sometimes, upstream.

Today’s class at SOLA was on culture. We did a cross cultural simulation. Three culture groups form the basis of the simulation, red, green and blue, and each culture has its own rules. I had asked the girls to come dressed in either red, blue or green clothes, equally divided. It was a colorful gathering at the start of the class.

We talked about culture and then each culture group got used to its rules of behavior: analytic, reserved and distant greens, loud, impatient and active reds, and harmonious close knit blues. In the groups they had to construct a tower out of straws, cupcake holders, bamboo skewers, pipe cleaners, chocolates and candy; after a while I started to move people from one culture into another, then we watched what happened; then more moves.

The girls reflected on what it was like to move into another culture where they were not wanted and related that to their own experiences of leaving a place of comfort for one of discomfort.

I had invited an Afghan family I am quite close to to come along, a father and his two daughters. The father is a journalists and works in the parliament. He was so happy to see these confident girls, learning to become leaders in an Afghanistan that some don’t think is possible (but we think it is); he offered to take them on a tour of the parliament one day. Two of the girls want to become journalists and were happy to talk shop with him.

Afterwards we visited my friend Baba Ted who was celebrating his 70-something birthday with four candles: one for SOLA, one for an new venture to get European and American companies to license Afghans to manufacture their products and sell in the region, one for an organization called Chera Ne (Why not?) that will do things people think impossible and the fourth one an environmental organization in Bamiyan – the best part of all these ventures is that they will all be led by young well educated Afghan women.

My Afghan family invited me to a mantou lunch; by the time I arrived the whole family was involved in making the Afghan dumplings, with dad preparing the thin sheets of pasta using an Italian pasta maker mounted on a filing cabinet placed in the middle of the living room. It was quite a production. A large triple decker steamer barely held the large quantity of mantous; I couldn’t imagine we would eat them all. Soon I discovered that Afghans can eat enormous amounts of dumplings and the supply was soon exhausted.

After lunch we watched a video of the celebration offered to honor boys 40 days after their birth, the family’s first grandchild. Girls don’t get to have such celebrations. But luckily, in this family with two girls and one boy, girls are treated alike with boys and their education is as important.

In the evening I brought three of my newer housemates to Razia’s house for another evening of great conversation and interesting people and good food. We watched Razia on the 2012 CNN heroes celebration in LA and checked out her new children’s book (Razia’s Ray of Hope); so this day was all about bringing out confidence in girls and then letting them change the world for the better. Yeah for SOLA, yeah for the Zabuli school for girls!

While I was waiting for my ride home today I conversed in Dari with two of the drivers. They wanted to know more about my ankle. The Dari word I have been using, I learned today, refers to the ankle bone that sticks out on the side of the foot. I looked up the word for joint in my dictionary, not sure if it refered to the kind of joint one smokes or the body part. I took the risk of using it and immediately the driver indicated that he loves to gnaw on (cow) joints. At least I got the right word. The gnawing piece made me laugh and I assured the driver that there was nothing yummy about my joint in its permanently inflamed state.

The mornings remain good; I can walk without crutches, even without my boot, which I am not supposed to do but there’s no pain. But by the end of the day I am very sore – the stand-up facilitation and the walking around are the culprits of course but I can’t figure out what to do about it. Seated facilitated may be possible but I can’t get used to it.

I am halfway the Organizational Learning workshop – it’s a learning experience for all of us. Even though my colleagues here understand the notion of learning as a means to stay abreast of developments and draw from each other’s’ experiences, there are strong forces and long standing habits that make it hard to imagine what actions one could take to, for example, bring about something like ‘leadership that reinforces learning.’ I think this one is the most difficult in all the five workshops held so far in Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. The Afghans have decided they will ask the Ethiopians what they are doing about it.

There is a lot of wishing and moralizing about what leaders should do – all directed I am sure at particular people who cannot be named so the conversation happens at two levels – the general ‘should’ as applied to all leaders and the wishes that some particular ones can be coerced to change. I suggest they start looking at themselves as many of them are leading teams. They think they are doing well – although they realized they may not. The problem is that there are no feedback loops that go up the hierarchy, only down.

To create a little diversion from work, which has a tendency to take over one’s life here, we went to the last of the performances in ANIM’s winter concerts. ANIM is Afghanistan’s National Music Institute which was founded by an Australian Afghan and keeps going thanks to the combined efforts of various embassies and passionate musicians from around the world. We listened to Jazz and Blues and Ragas played by young Afghan boys and seasoned professionals from India, Latin America, Europe, Australia, Canada and the US – all bound together by their love of music. The closing piece seamlessly fused jazz and ragas into a delightful mixture formed last night in the musicians’ guesthouse over a dinner of KFC (Kabul Fried Chicken) – or Kabul Fusion Chaos as the christened themselves.

Last night my head was spinning. I am working on three assignments, each requiring all my design skills. I can now put these to good use after having successfully convinced my colleagues and counterparts that trying something new is worth the perceived risks. Everyone is on board now and they have experienced the methods I bring. They can now judge for themselves rather than basing decisions on fear.

But last night I was wrestling with a formatting glitch in MSWord that I couldn’t master. I was preparing an agenda from facilitation notes originally developed in either Nigeria or Mexico. The table marked day 3 kept jumping to the head of the line, half overlapping day 1 and day 5 refused to come closer to day 4. I started this work at 7:30 PM and by 9:30PM I was none the wiser, after having created new tables from scratch and cutting and pasting. Eventually I created one separate document for each day and sent the whole darn thing to my Afghan counterpart. In my nearly three weeks here it is the first night I went to bed after 10:30 PM, very late for me. I was exhausted.

Today was better. I learned my lesson to not copy someone else’s design and then altering it. It’s an authentic design based on expressed needs and wishes, not some generic idea of what I/we at HQ think people should know. Progress!

We are 4 hours into the 12 hour Learning Organization workshop and maintain a good showing, 27 people came today, a slight loss over yesterday but at least 3 of our most senior staff were called out to meet with USAID. That trumps most other activities.

We reviewed the here, the there and what’s in the way when it comes to being a learning organization in Afghanistan. Three groups are trying to come up with concrete proposals to change deeply engrained behaviors – yet the willingness to look at those is encouraging. Everyone knows this will be hard but these are their ideas, not mine.

The last hours of the day we had people taste three methods aimed at learning from experience in the system: an After Action Review, a Before Action Review and Peer Assist; two colleagues each took one of those and took people through the steps, using the actual work that is being done here. Some good ideas came out of the exercise which I hope find their way into the plans.

Not unexpectedly there are few women in the group of participants but those who are there are not keeping quiet and their contributions are important, even though not always recognized as such. It’s a matter of perseverance and finding supporters.

The stand-up facilitation is hard on my ankle. It is sore and swollen when I get to the guesthouse. Judy has put several small bottles of water in the freezer and they serve as my icepack – a little hard to apply but with some ingenuity I can bind the bottle to my ankle where it stays as long as I don’t move.

In the meantime I have developed a tendinitis in my upper left arm, from the overload on my arm I assume. I progress in one place and I fall back in another. The tendinitis makes for uncomfortable sleeping, dressing, showering and in general, raising my left arm.

More guests arrived today, adding America/India and America/Nepal to the mix. Now all the chairs at the dinner table are occupied.

According to my rehab protocol, as of last Wednesday I am to put full weight on my left foot, but only when in the orthopedic boot. Yesterday evening I walked up the stairs without the help of my crutches. There was no pain. Buoyed by my progress I left for the office with only one crutch. I parked it against a wall and never touched it during the work day. I even went to the store without it. And for the first time I took my afternoon shower without the help of crutches or my plastic lawn chair.

The end of phase 3 (the ortho boot phase) is in sight! It is only now, in the evening, that my foot is a little sore.

After work one of my earliest leadership students came by the guesthouse to greet me. Later her husband joined her. It is one of the rare couples I have met here where man and wife share house and children chores together. Most women in my office, young and old, despite having worked hard all week in the office, are busy all weekend with household chores, helping their mothers or serving their husbands. When the come to work on Sunday again, it may feel like a respite from housework. But this husband cooks, cleans and washes and takes care of the children.

I interviewed her about her work that includes training volunteers to advocate, lobby and maybe even harangue legislators to pay attention to the impact on women of new legislation, including the impact when good legislation stalls somewhere in the political process. She is also heavily involved in getting civil society involved in the elections – making sure they are fair and transparent. This is a very big job in this country.

In the meantime Karzai continues to blow off the foreigners, especially the Americans and the Europeans with doctored videos and alleged eye witness reports that turn out to be years old. I am trying to ignore the pull into cynicism by focusing on the wonderful and courageous women and men in my Afghan life.

On Saturday morning, after a nice breakfast presided over by the number one cook, we headed to SOLA for Judy’s presentation about Chinese New Year which is next week. Judy had prepared a wonderful slide show and one of the SOLA students had recruited some 20 students to come to the lecture.

Laura and I sat on the side and learned as much about Chinese New Year as the girls. Judy’s main point was that you cannot learn a language outside its cultural context. Maybe that explains why my efforts over the years to learn languages such as Chinese and Japanese have not been very successful.

The girls concluded that the customs of Chinese New Year are not that different from New Year in Afghanistan: there are new clothes, gifts of money, family dinners and visits.

Judy had sprinkled Chinese words throughout her presentation, explaining the meaning of the characters and showing how to pronounce them. In unison the girls recited after her.

Judy explained the lunar calendar with a chart of the phases of the moon. I thought of how excited Faro would have been to see that. She also showed the animals of the lunar calendar and had covered the pig with a smiley face, recognizing that the animal is taboo here.

The girls learned that next year we enter the year of the horse. One girl had obviously studied the topic before the class and was able to explain why the Chinese use animals for their years. Consequently I learned a few new things as well.

After class Judy had to write every girl’s first and last name in Chinese characters. They proudly showed their papers to everyone who’d care to look while wishing each other a happy day or happy new year in Chinese. It was priceless. I will return next week for a class about culture. It will be Chinese New Year then and I will find out how much they remember.

The rest of the day was spent preparing for a corporate initiative that includes a workshop on becoming a learning organization.

At dinner I found three new guests had arrived: one colleague from MSH/Arlington who had only recently been evacuated from South Sudan, we’ll call him the hotspot guy; another from Holland so I can practice my Dutch and the third, on crutches like me, a woman whom I had met 8 years ago in Kabul when Sita and I facilitated the regional conference on Infectious Diseases.

Now, when we sit down for dinner or breakfast, the table is full and many more stories just flew in.