Sylvia's Journal

Today was a real down-in-the-dumps day. If I could have afforded it and if it wasn’t for my very strong superego I would have boarded a flight and gone home. But there is too much to keep me here and I have to follow my own advice – never give up. Truth is that today I was very close to the edge.

I am trying to figure out what I am up against and felt betrayed by my own people back at headquarters. The view to Afghanistan, from comfortable Boston, is sometimes so off base that I wonder how we can ever work effectively across great cultural divides and distant borders.

The one thing I am trying to do here, which is not in my job description, is getting lost in a myriad of other priorities that makes me feel at times superfluous and my efforts futile. It takes a lot to discourage me but today it all came together in a large oppressive sweep.

We had a long meeting with our funder; for once we were outnumbered by agency people, and discussed both the small victories and the incredible odds we are up against and exhorted each other to hang in there. It is an exhortation I use a lot myself when encouraging others but today I heard it, not uttered it and quietly repeated it to myself. It didn’t help much – a good reminder that my own exhortations don’t always fall on fertile ground.

Coming back to an empty house didn’t help. I keep sticking my fingers out and counting: four more workdays, seven more nights – I am so very ready to go home.

Axel is home in Manchester and breathing, as he told me, the sweet air of Lobster Cove. He is tired but his spirits have lifted. It was good he went ahead of me. We talked in the middle of the night after I had been awakened by an earthquake in Faizabad. Everything swayed gently but nothing fell or broke, at least not here in Kabul. That’s when I called home to see if he had arrived. He had and here they acknowledge that with a ‘Praise the Lord! alhamdu lillah!’

I may finally be successful in getting to the bottom of my email box, what with no one waiting for me at home. As I dig down I am finding reports, some several months old, and I try to at least scan them. This is how I stumbled on a report written by an American consultant about how all donors should coordinate better. It is amazing how many consultants need to be flown in to give that message. The poor coordination, and the repeated calls for better coordination (read: more, different, new structures) is one of those things that baffle me.

My mantra about coordination is that it is easy if people want it and impossible if they don’t. The rhetoric is that everyone wants better coordination but the reality seems to indicate that this is actually not true. As a psychologist I cannot help myself to think that some deeper psychological forces are at work: A fear of loss of control? Forgetfulness (as in ‘Oh, I forget to inform them!”); time pressures (meetings seen as time wasters, which they of course often are); a fear of being held responsible for promises or commitments made, a fear of interference by national or ideological agendas one disagrees with? A fear of getting more work shoved one’s way?

The lengthy report took some stamina to read from beginning to end. It is full of dense language (dense as defined by the number of times my thoughts wander away from the page) and I wonder how many Afghans are actually studying the report and scribbled notes in the margins with questions, comments, observations. My hunch is only a few; those who read English easily and who can read fast to manage the incessant stream of reports coming in from consultants. So what does it mean when few people read but we all pretend the document has been thoroughly vetted?

This particular consultant had work planned out for another 5 months, neatly ‘x-ed’ in a Gantt chart. But something interfered with that plan and it got stalled. And now we are on to other plans, done by other consultants (because the ministry is too thinly staff with people who could write such a plan or they are too busy with other things). And I hear more calls for better coordination in the near and far distance.

I find myself a bit despondent at times, wondering what the heck I am doing here. I have had this sentiment before and it keeps coming back. We foreigners don’t have to live with the decisions we make yet everyone is listening and stamping reports with ‘approved’ and they work their way up the hierarchy until they becomes official policies, strategies, strategic plans, frameworks or what not. And then we go and those who stay have to implement it. And we are surprised that many of these wonderful, comprehensive, complete intentions remain letters on pages.

Because of Axel’s absence the US government is getting more bang for its buck. I worked on various tasks that fall by the wayside during the workweek completing at least a half day of work on this second day of my weekend.

I spent considerable time on the performance review process. I sweated over the evaluations of some of my staff. What to do with positive self evaluations when you don’t agree? If you take this annual ritual serious (I do), doing it well is very complex. You have to think, weigh, balance and try to remember the entire year, not just a few high or low points. You have to imagine how what you say will be interpreted; whether it will trigger defense reactions and how to handle those.

Part of me says ‘hey, why complicate things, just agree with everything and give the score that states all objectives were satisfactorily achieved.’ Many people here do that, or even give a superior rating. People will like you for it and you don’t have to have any difficult conversations. And so the other part of me says, ‘well, if you are not honest what message are you giving?’ I tend to listen to the latter voice. And so I sweat. I must have spent at least 8 hours over the last week just on these performance reviews and I am not done yet. Luckily I have only 4 people reporting to me.

And then there is the procurement integrity course we have to take online each year. It takes about 90 minutes according to the instructions. I thought I would do it faster than that – I read fast and take tests easily; at that pace it took 90 minutes. I wonder how long it would take for my Afghan colleagues. Some test questions are complex, representing ambiguous scenarios.

I had two wrong answers of the 50 or so questions, so I passed and am good for another year. I have taken the test several times now and am quite familiar with the content. I love the section about why it is not good to give jobs to relatives. All possible kinds of relatives were named, including ancestors. According to the rules you are not supposed to procure jobs for your ancestors.

In the afternoon I was once again the only student in my weekly Dari grammar class which started with four people back in March. It seems I am the lone survivor. I like it because it means I now have a two hour private lesson from the head teacher and can focus on whatever I want.

Today the teacher helped me write a note in Dari to ‘my esteemed cook’ Amin jan in which I explained that I don’t want him to cook the kind of meals he has cooked so far for us before because I can’t handle that volume now that Axel has left. In my best Dari I asked him to prepare two small salads each day for my dinner: a green/veggie salad and a fruit salad, explaining that I have a solid lunch at the office and am not very hungry when I come home so as not to create any bad feelings about the quality of his cooking.

For dinner I went with a friend to the Gandamack guesthouse where Axel has wanted to go for so long and never went. We sat on a lovely veranda surrounded by grapevines and roses and could imagine we were somewhere in Italy or Spain. One look at the menu (Sheppard Pie or Steak and Kidney Pie) though makes you think that you are in Britain. And then, when you look past the roses and beyond the neat green lawn you see the sandbags and security guards with guns – and you know that you are in Kabul. And finally, when the espresso is served in the little six (eight?) sided stove top espresso maker you are back in Italy.

The Indian prime minister interfered with my weekly Friday morning massage. Our office car park is on one side of the main road that leads to the parliament and our house is on the other. No one could cross the road for hours. Eventually, after a helicopter ferried the Indian and his entourage low overhead back to wherever he came from, the road was opened again and I could proceed to my much delayed massage. It was however too late to have our planned brunch at the Serena hotel – Axel had to pack and that takes time.

When he left I blew him a kiss from the terrace – that is as much open affection I could show. As the car was already moving the flying kiss entered the driver’s window by mistake – this everyone liked.

Our house suddenly felt very big and very empty. Luckily we had organized a repeat party from last week as the restrictions on US government personnel had lifted. I asked the artists to come again and show their wares and tacos were once again on the menu. I ordered a Nuristani wooden lattice, cut out of one piece of cedar wood – intricate and fragrant.

Although some of the company was the same the hoola-hoop crowd was missing and there was no interest in blowing giant bubbles or hoola hoop practice – we simply sat around the table and discussed everything that is happening in Afghanistan while sipping Chianti, a rare treat.

Although it is nearly bedtime, I can’t quite end the day without writing. I started up my computer and stared at the MS desktop background (‘bliss’) and suddenly had this intense urge to get into a small Piper plane, with my buddy Bill, and fly over Vermont. It’s probably because ‘Bliss’ is Vermont. Memories came flooding in about flying over the green mountains. I realized how much I have missed flying. One day…(sigh).

This morning we discussed our project’s extension budget at our funder’s home. I used to think I didn’t understand a thing about budgets, reinforced by my colleagues’ low opinion about my financial skills and insights. I wish they could have seen and heard me talk about millions of dollars of pharmaceuticals and other direct costs as if I was the finance director – well, sort of. Of course I am not, and W. who flew in from HQ, was a great help in explaining things that none of the rest of us could. We are all public health folks, doctors, educators, psychologists…not your typical financial types. We need one more meeting about the budget –I think, I hope, and then we can get on with the work.

W. is a finance professional from Texas. She has worked several years in Afghanistan and Iraq with big contractors, the kind that ‘burn’ a million dollars a day (that takes us about one month, with pharmaceuticals included). She is full of stories that made her leave Afghanistan. They illustrate the dark side of US development work here. I think we, in health, have been spared the really bad stuff that make you want to scream ‘no more dollars, no more lives!” The stories are amazing, juicy, entertaining. They made W. cynical and leave. I have to ration them or else I would want to pack up too.

In the evening we joined P and M in one of the restaurants where expats hang out who cannot have a meal without a beer or a glass of wine. There aren’t many of those left in town. The food is overpriced but the company was excellent. Both M and P are leaving, tomorrow and the day after and so this was our goodbye. We agreed to meet again in Lobster Cove for a mussels and lobster meal. I can just picture us, right by the lilacs and irisses.

I spent all day at the Intercontinental hotel, a place I visit only rarely. It is the place where Axel got very sick from eating too much lamb fat. The hotel is a holdover from the 60s and, because of that, rather charming. Today I noticed that it is being renovated. This may be good for travelers – I have never stayed there and don’t know the quality of rooms – but probably a shame as something else that pointed to Kabul’s better days, will be sacrificed to progress and modernity.

I attended a workshop about SWAp which is donor speak for Sector Wide Approach, an ideology about aid effectiveness and donor coordination that has been tried out in several countries and is being proposed for Afghanistan. It’s entire philosophy and its processes/structures rest on the assumption that everyone wants better donor coordination and that alignment is possible. At an abstract level this may be correct, but in practice the multiple constituencies that sit behind donors and Afghans don’t have as much in common as we like to believe.

Experiences elsewhere have been mixed, some good, some disappointing. We heard about successes and shortcomings of SWAps in Malawi and Bangladesh. The people that administer US government funds here in Kabul are a little cautious with this approach because of the ‘fund pooling’ and the difficulty of explaining to the American taxpayer what exactly their dollars have produced in terms of better health services for Afghans, especially women and children. Given the incessant stream of news about corruption here, this is a very reasonable concern.

I learned a new word from my Afghan colleague, ‘fungible,’ which he explained as donor funds earmarked for something being used for something else. He learned the word at the Tropical Institute in Amsterdam while studying for his MPH. I was impressed.

The Intercon sits on top of a hill overlooking two sides of Kabul. While we were waiting for our car to take us back to the office at the end of the day we could see the ‘khakbad’ (Kabul’s infamous dust storms) whirling on our right, picking dust up here and depositing it there. I thought of Axel’s poor lungs and hoped he was inside someplace.

Back home I could see that the hula hoop had been moved. I suspect there has been some more practice during the day although no one said so. Someone is going to show off at the next opportunity I suspect.

I sometimes wonder about our guards who have these long hours sitting in their small, hot and primitive guardhouse in back of our house. They have none of the comforts we have come to expect: airco, electric heat, refrigerator, stove with oven, cupboards, two bathrooms, a bath, carpets (now tiles), windows that let breezes flow through the house. They do have a bed off the ground now after their tushaks got repeatedly wet from water in the walls and in the concrete slab that is the floor of their tiny living room. They also have a small TV which is on most of the night when programs are available.

At the end of Friday night’s party where Meghann showcased her very expert use of hoola-hoops (at one point two at the same time, of different sizes) under the watchful and amazed eyes of our guards. They have been intrigued by this toy. This afternoon I noticed they were trying it on for size. Our housekeeper Ali has mastered the skill but the two night guards can’t keep the hoola hoop off the ground for more than a few seconds at a time. It is a source of great hilarity between them.

We convinced the drivers who dropped Axel off to give the thing a spin but none were able to. The men wouldn’t let Axel off the hook either and he is just as bad. They all stood around taking turns doing something that here is not very manly, and had a good laugh in the process. I think we will find improvements over time as they now have something fun to do other than guard us when we are not there. And besides, Afghans (men and women) appear to be highly competitive.

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Today I was walking across our office compound and heard women laughing. It is then that I realized that, at least at work, I rarely hear women’s laughter – there are not enough of us and there isn’t all that much to be gay about. Back at MSH headquarters in Boston women’s laughter was (and hopefully still is) so much part of the work environment – it is sad that here it is so absent.

I spent all day in the office doing management and administrative chores that have, once again, nothing to do with why I came out here. It is tedious and not very satisfying as it contributes little if anything to improving the health of women and children. It does satisfy the people who want compliance with this and that contractual or organizational requirement: workplans, performance reviews, more workplans, more performance reviews.

We invite colleagues, peers and clients of the person being evaluated to send us their comments. Only very few people sent these in before the requested date and only when the performance review is that of a star it seems. The non-stars get very few and some prefer not even to bother. Someone explained why “we don’t want anything on paper, in an email, formal, that may come back to haunt us.” Of course, I thought, it is safer to either provide a Yes or Very often to all questions or not send anything in at all; so much for our very rudimentary and incomplete 360 reviews. May be I am taking these things much too serious – it must be my tendency to think about development rather than judgment.

Axel’s doctor was not happy with his regression as measured by a little blow tube that indicates lung capacity. It has gone down rather than up. He came home with more pills and we are giving it a few more days before deciding whether he should leave Afghanistan ahead of me. It is possible that the dust stirred up by the tiling and painting may actually have made things worse. So we keep hoping for the best.

In the meantime he keeps coaching SOLA kids as they struggle to fill in complex and lengthy application forms for American schools. W. stayed for 5 hours with us, yesterday afternoon, through dinner and into the evening, diligently working on his application to a school in the US that had explicitly asked for Afghan boys, not girls. The essay had to be cut down from 800 to 500 words and then there are all these difficult questions that no one has ever asked them, such as ‘why do you choose this school over all the others.’ Afghan kids don’t usually make choices about schools. If they were honest they’d say, ‘because Mr. Ted told me to apply at your school.’

Or, ‘how can you contribute to the school community?’ Afghan kids have no idea about this thing called ‘school community.’ Or even better, ‘tell us what you do in your summer vacation?’ Here summer vacations are in winter (from December till March). There are no tennis camps. Afghan kids have to earn money or get sent to ‘centers,’ places to accelerate learning. That is how Z skipped a few grades.

And then there was the question some creative application form designer had cooked up: ‘what piece of music would serve as the soundtrack to a movie about your life?’ It requires tremendous mental gymnastics for Afghan teenagers to understand this idea; even the concept of a soundtrack needed explanation. I was surprised that the kids didn’t select the Titanic song which remains wildly popular (there even used to be a special haircut here called ‘The Titanic’). But Z picked an Afghan singer and included the Dari text in her answer.

W. had to describe his role in his family dynamics (huh?), an optional question but he answered it anyways: ‘my parents want me to get a quality education so I can later help the family.’ Family therapists would call him a ‘family savior’ or something like that – a lot of responsibility resting on his skinny teenage shoulders.

We have decided that W. has what it takes to succeed and will go far. We happily opened our house to him and fed him a meal appropriate for a growing teenage boy. We did kick him out when it was my bedtime. He had to walk the 30 minutes or so it takes him to get back to his house, fending with roaming dogs along the way. Since we have no transport of our own we couldn’t give him a ride. We were relieved when we received his sms that he had arrived home safely in spite of the dogs.

Axel and I did our yoga practice together this morning. We are eyeing one of the 30 yoga mats that Meghann brought for her session at the AMA congress. They are now stored, it seems, in the basement of the AMA building. I wonder what will become of them.

It is fly season – theya re everywhere. But here, unlike back in the US, we are more worried where these flies have been before they land on our food or bodies. I swatted several flies during my yoga practice which made the poses more challenging.

We slept on the tushaks again because the VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) from the painting job are still in our bedroom and Axel is particular susceptible with his compromised immune system. On Sunday he will see Dr. Tim again and then we’ll decide whether he should go ahead of me to the US. Many will hate to see him go early: the students at SOLA because they badly need his tutoring and guidance – several kids are in the middle of application processes – a very daunting task for them; and me because I am dealing with a complex HR dilemma and can use some psychological support.

Because of Axel’s low energy and coughing we cancelled our visit to the wool ‘factory’ – a very dusty place – to see the carpet that has been created out of the heaps of dirty wool, then spun, then dyed and then knotted. The manager told us the carpet is done and we are interested in it, mostly because we have seen it being created from scratch.

The rest of the day we each tended to our tasks that are both related to capacity building: Axel sat down with Wali to complete his school application – an intensely complex task for young Afghans – and I worked on the annual performance reviews of my four staff members, something I take rather seriously and spent much time on – two done, two to go.

I had very happy dreams last night. They include a flight over the islands in the north of Holland on a beautiful clear sky day. Just before I woke up I was busy baking a yummy New York cheesecake. I think the happy dreams came from the paint fumes that were still strong this morning. I could get addicted to this.

The rest of the day continued to be happy. First there was the chili omelet, now one of Axel’s Friday morning specialties; then a haircut, a massage with four hands, two from Lisa who is back from the Philippines and did the reflexology part of the treatment. Then breakfast quesadilla lunch with Axel, Katie and Pia in the new Wakhan Café.

There was more happiness in the late afternoon when Fazel and his fiancée came to show their wares in a sort of Tupperware part but then for traditional Afghan arts and crafts. We touched everything they had put on display: ceramics, jewelry, wood (a walnut cookie jar in the shape of a Mughal palace) and much calligraphy. We had invited colleagues and friends – everyone went home with something beautiful.

After the artists had left we gorged ourselves on tacos, a variety of desserts and then hoola-hooped the calories off again with Meghann’s two enormous hoops.
It sure was a happy day.