Sylvia's Journal

We finished the last day of the leadership and advanced facilitation workshop which ended with each provincial team preparing how they will roll out the program once back home. They used particular templates which they copy out of a book; everyone was scrambling for a ruler to make straight lines. Even though I told them this was not some architectural drawing contest, the lines have to be straight. May be we should print the templates on plastic next time so they can simply fill in the blanks; it would save some time of the preparation for show time – the time for a gallery walk where each team can both show and comment on the other teams’ products.

The time estimates I had received from my colleagues yesterday for the pieces they were to run were off; this happens everywhere in the world and it puzzles me. These facilitators are experienced, they have done many sessions, and going over time is quite common. So why can they not estimate how long something will take? Is it because they calculate the time they think they need but do not include the time needed to engage others in conversation. Maybe at the root is the lecturer mindset. Lectures are predictable; they start when the prof walks in and are over when the prof walks out, whether on time or not.

Sometimes the trust fall finds me falling, and what was designed goes into another direction; I discover I had assumed something about my co-facilitators, that they understood the rationale for having a gallery walk instead of plenary presentations. In those instances I get a little bossy, especially on last days when there is a hard stop. When lunch comes at 1 we need to be done; after lunch are the closing words and the certificates.

The certificates threatened to pose a problem; a workshop can go entirely south when there are no certificates at the end – it’s the first response we get when we ask about expectations. Certificates are hugely important for reasons I don’t quite understand – after all these people are doctors and have academic certificates on their walls – more valuable I would imagine than the ones handed out for attendance at this or that workshop.

In the middle of the morning I was told that the certificates were stuck at the ministry where the official who has to sign them had closed his door and didn’t want to be disturbed. Anyone higher up in the hierarchy doesn’t have to respect this, but my colleagues are lower and therefore stuck. Somehow it got resolved, like so many issues here get somehow resolved.

We all got what we wanted, except a few people who wanted more money for their lodging, hoping I could resolve this (I could not); then they got on the plane and went home, hopefully not too disappointed about that money and happy because of the certificate. Nothing is a straight line here despite everyone’s best efforts.

I am now walking around without crutches, or sticks as the Afghans say, a literal translation from Dari where crutches are called ‘sticks of wood,’ which is what they usually are, if that.

In the morning when I get up my ankle feels great. I can even walk without my orthopedic boot on, nearly normal two-legged again. But by the time I come home from a day of facilitation my ankle is sore. My improvised icing device is a small bottle of water that I put in the freezer in the morning and bind around my ankle when I come home.

The nerves are still in disarray – touching some part of my ankle produces small electric shocks while other parts remain without sensation. I am beginning to suspect that some of the three deck screws damaged the nervous system – hopefully not permanently but I know that nerve damage heals very slowly, if at all. For now both of my feet have compromised nerves – a daily reminder of the crash.

At night I prop my foot up on a pillow next to the ice bottle and that is how I fall asleep. The sore ankle urges me to go to bed early, sometimes as early as 7:30 PM. This means I am making very long nights, 9 hours sometimes. I follow my body’s instructions, assuming it knows best.

At the guesthouse the cast of characters changes nearly daily – some Johns Hopkins professors arrived to teach hospital administrators while our TB team is on its way out; the DHS reconnoitering team will leave after the weekend and a batch of pharmacists will take their rooms. I am the constant, at least for another week when my 5 weeks are up. A week from now I should be making my way to Dubai, incha’allah.

We completed the section of the workshop focused on getting people familiar with the content of the new and improved leadership development program. It was a hard nut to crack, to cover 491 pages in 3 days. The best I could do was to reduce the sense of intimidation people may have felt when they were given a bound copy of the thick facilitator guide. I wanted them to make friends with the hefty tome. Some got too intimate and the poorly bound document fell apart – a sign of things to come?

All of today consisted of practica – twelve pairs of accomplished or would-be facilitators selected a 45 session each and then, in three simultaneous sessions going on in three different parts of the conference floor, facilitated their peers. The last 15 minutes were spent on feedback.

Again, much was done in Pashto and Dari but I got the general gist of the feedback and it was good. One set of session instructions (on priority setting) suggested to ask the women in the group to list the desirable qualities of a husband. The teaching notes says “ask the men to sit on the side and observe.” The two rookie facilitators were puzzled about this exercise (the lone woman left after lunch) and it took a bit of back and forth to change the exercise and ask the men what qualities make for a good wife. The group brainstormed the qualities and I was pleasantly surprised that education came first, then religion, then beauty and lastly wealth.

My Afghan colleagues pretty much run the show now, with the most senior (and my former direct report) taking the lead. I want the team to be able to run this workshop again (and they can) at a later time as repeats are needed: someone’s cousin died and he dropped out; another was sent to Iran on a moment’s notice and left after day 1; another had to wait three days for a plane to take off from Herat because of heavy snow fall (it was exactly 9 years ago that three of my young colleagues perished as the plane they travelled in from Herat to Kabul should have stayed on the ground).

These dropouts (and some drop in again) challenge our certificate rules. Our facilitation team agreed yesterday that the cutoff line to receive a certificate of attendance would be a minimum of 3 days of attendance; a very senior doctor is pleading with each of the facilitators to make an exception for him as he missed the first three days through no fault of his own. But we simply cannot grant a certificate of attendance when there was no attendance. Our compromise is to create a special certificate for him that indicates attendance at the two days that he will have been with us. We will sign it ourselves since it’s too late to go through the government circuit of signatures of a higher order. I am not sure whether this will be acceptable to him but it will have to do.

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.