Sylvia's Journal

We are all sad about the misfortune of our grandcat Cortez who got hit by a car and is in the emergency room up in Western Massachusetts. Sita compared his post accident experience to ours to which Axel replied, “love and care of those who love him will heal him – it worked with us.”

Tonight is Axel’s turn to be exhausted but he is not sure he should turn in in our sparkly new bedroom – it still smells of paint. We put the air purifier on at full power and waiting for the little blue window to say ‘very good air quality.’ It did that two nights ago in the Solter Suite but we know now it was lying.

In our staff meeting this morning we spent a lot of time talking about people’s concerns about moving into the ministry. “We work in this organization (meaning MSH) for a reason,” several people said. In the ministry one can be lucky and have a good boss with integrity and commitment or you can get the opposite. But the good boss can be replaced by a bad one quite suddenly and you won’t have any recourse and nothing to protect you. People are cynical, sometimes very cynical, about the motives of civil servants, even those who are well paid, and rightly concerned about the arbitrary power of those above them.

The challenge of working with civil servants who are poorly paid (most of them) and ‘building their capacity’ is that they don’t necessarily want their capacity built. Workshops and training courses are a nice way to supplement one’s meager income. Boycotts, while holding out for higher per diems and other goodies that come with training, has become a favorite pastime. For us, who are well paid, committed, motivated, well supported and protected from arbitrariness by organizational procedures, checks and balances, this sort of attitude drives us nuts while we also realize it is totally understandable. That’s why we have ‘minimum wage’ in our part of the world.

The idea that work should be self-actualizing fulfilling and intrinsically rewarding is not a universal concept and probably doesn’t apply to the underpaid civil servants. Work is toil – even Calvin said so.

A dear old friend and ex colleague has returned to Kabul as the chief of a project. When we first met 20 years ago she was an administrative assistant. I am thrilled to see her in this new position and actually got to see her at work right my office, negotiating with someone on her project about something he wanted and she couldn’t give. She was brilliant, he unhappy.

At SOLA only three girls showed up in my class – all three are Axel’s projects. I know the kind of lessons he teaches them and so I can see how they apply what they learn from him as we continue our very slow progress in Three Cups of Tea for young adults. One of the girls has trouble with long and short vowels. When she pronounced the word sheet with a short ‘i’ we did some practicing saying ‘sheet,’ ‘shit,’ and ‘shed.’ I explained the differences.

One of the girls had heard about the Mortenson controversy which led to a conversation about being ‘a critical consumer of information.’ But before I could engage with them about this concept they needed to understand the words ‘critical’ and ‘consumer.’ Armed with the dictionaries Axel bought for them I set them off on a race to get to these words. It is for them as difficult as it is for me to find a Dari word; you have to know your alphabet – which letter comes after which one.

Finally when they got all the words they put them together (Eater of judgmental information. Huh?). We contrasted the way Afghan kids learn to uncritically consume information from adults in authority position and the cost of that. Do they believe their teacher, the press? They looked a bit shocked when I told them that their future classmates in the US might actually argue with their professor or teacher about statements, opinions, view points.

We had fun with the words ‘barked’ and ‘snapped’ used in the context of impolite conversation. After my explanation of these words I had them try the bark and snap dialogue between Greg and his first donor on each other. It led to shrieks of laughter but little success. As always the class lifted my spirits – a good start of the weekend.

We love each other very much but sleeping in a twin bed, even if a wide twin bed, is something we concluded we are too old for. We accused each other this morning of hogging the sheets and not leaving enough room for the other. Suffice to say we didn’t have a good night of sleep. Tonight I am going to sleep Afghan style by plopping down on one of our tushaks in the living room.

We also think that our temporary sleeping quarters had more house dust than our bedroom – our lungs were in bad shape this morning. The coughing and throat clearing did little to improve our breathing; another reason to move downstairs.

Our old bedroom has been tiled and repainted but the fumes are still too strong to move in. The whole thing cost a couple of hundred dollars, most of which went to tiles and grout. The painting was only 40 dollars. Here materials are expensive and labor is cheap.

I spent too many hours at work today. The first meeting started at 7:30AM and the last ended at 7:30 PM. I said goodbye to one colleague who is taking our Manchester local elections ballot home – just in time for the May 17 elections – we do stay connected to our home town even though we needed some external help in choosing candidates.

And now my eyelids are dropping just as Axel is putting a real stir fry on the table that was the best food we have had in a long time.

We hear from far that in the West a grim picture is presented in the media of the place we live in. One of my colleagues is on home leave in Washington and called me to ask whether it was safe to return – his wife is frantic about him returning. Friends of us are writing what the hell we are doing in this dangerous place. From all this I can only conclude that the Taliban’s PR campaign of creating fear and trembling in the West has worked perfectly.

On the ground here things are fine. We vacuum the dust from the carpets, wash socks, buy milk and yogurt, knit and embroider, text and skype, read, fill in time sheets and sit in traffic jams. We do all this peacefully here in Kabul.

For our Afghan colleagues who travel outside Kabul (we westerners are not allowed) the instructions are simple: wear local clothing (no suits and ties), do not travel after 2:00 PM, use transport that matches the most common kind of vehicles you see on the roads as you move from one place to another (no large SUVs with special plates), keep a very low profile, do not use a cell phone with international names or numbers, and do not carry a laptop. That is the way of blending in. Most of my colleagues are used to this anyways.

I made two visits into town, one to the ministry and a couple of hours later another to the US compound, one the neighbor of the other. There was a sign on the entrance to the security area of the US compound that said that all outdoor activities were suspended. For the denizens of the US compound ‘outdoors’ just means not being indoors in the work and living containers but still being inside the wired fences. Outdoor doesn’t even mean fresh air because of the pollution from dust winds that come from incessant construction and road work, overbuilding and the disappearance of green fields that hold the soil. The air pollution also comes from the ever running generators and vehicles that belch out toxic fumes. Here ‘outdoors’ is stripped of all the usual joys of outdoors: trees, clean air, water, rocks or sand, grass.

I picked Axel up at SOLA and we returned home where we found the tiles already in place in our new (hopefully) allergenic-free bedroom. On the walls, painted yellow one and a half years ago we could see the outlines, in black soot, of furniture and pictures – it is the soot that pervades everything, even when there was only a modern airco in our room; the diesel stoves were in other rooms, not this one. The blackened outlines were everywhere and frightening. No wonder our lungs are protesting.

Tonight we are sleeping in the consultants’ room which we have named the Solter Suite after one of my favorite colleagues who left nearly a year ago. We have to make do sleeping in a twin bed with, what we now realize, not a very good mattress. The room is full of allergenic stuff that we cannot take out so we have the new air purifier working at full tilt and hope for the best. It will be for a few days, if God wills it, as they say here.

And so, I wondered, what would have happened if OBL would have been knocked out on the day of the royal wedding, would he have stolen the moment, soiled the day? The timing was thus perfect – the couple has gone off to their love nest and we can celebrate something else.

I keep wondering about this ‘burial at sea’ thing. For me a burial at sea is men standing on deck, hymns being played, salutes and the body, wrapped in the national flag tilted into the sea. Did they just drop him out of a helicopter? Do we have proof he is really gone or is he going to be like Elvis Presley, popping up everywhere?

The news reached us in the early morning hours and everyone rejoiced while probably wondering, ‘what does this mean for us, here in Afghanistan?’ I did. The UN is closed (already was because of the Taliban’s heavy PR about their spring offensive) and the Germans declared Kabul ‘white city,’ which I think means ‘hunker down.’

We went about our business as usual which included countless project management tasks. It is annual performance review season, it is post project planning time, there are deadlines for registering staff for English classes, filling vacancies, finalizing appointments, contract negotiations etc. And then there are the usual roadblocks to getting things done which require creative thinking about such matters as task versus relationship.

Several hours after the official end of the day a few of us were still looking at pages and pages of Excel worksheets with tiny budget numbers until we were cross-eyed. As if that wasn’t enough I then had to figure out how to get 140 MB of video film to Boston by tomorrow with an on and off internet connection. All in all it made for a very long day that isn’t over quite yet even though it is getting close to bedtime.

On the personal side there is an enormous new challenge thrown at us by Axel’s longstanding allergy to house dust and dust mites. On Saturday the South African doctor told him he should prepare for his immediate departure from Afghanistan before he gets a massive asthma attack.

I suggested a second opinion which came from Dr. Tim. He told Axel that he may be able to stay until we leave for the US in 3 weeks if we rid our bedroom of dust and mites. This is a tall order anywhere in the world, but in particular here. We can’s just simply walk over the Bed & Bath and get the mattress and pillow covers made specially for this purpose. Axel did go to the Safi Landmark hotel where they sell things with HEPA filters, an air purifier and a special vacuum cleaner that doesn’t simply moves dust around like the one we have now.

We are very motivated for Axel to stay here until we leave in the fall and have started tackling this enormous challenge with vim and vigor. We had the nice Afghan carpets taken out, ordered tiles to replace the wall to wall carpet and got a bunch of workmen to start tiling the room tomorrow. This requires removing everything out of the bedroom tonight.

Dr. Tim also told us to wrap our mattress in plastic and remove anything else in which dust mites can thrive. All this doesn’t do much for comfort and aesthetics but it is better than accepting the inevitability of a massive asthma attack and Axel’s departure. Of course there is no guarantee of success – but we decided it is worth a try.

And here, for cricket lovers, a chuckle, with apologies to the artist whose name was blacked out in the local newspaper:

I spent all day at the 7th annual congress of the Afghan midwives association. I had attended the same meeting last year and noticed how much the fledgling association had grown. It was the kind of growth spurt that is actually a little painful. Still, much had been accomplished in one year and everyone should be proud.

We watched the honoring of the association’s founder and pictures showing her with the first 15 members, not all that long ago. It was a wonderful example of the common exhortation ‘think big, start small.’ She started a movement. She pinked away a few tears as the gratitude of over 600 people in the room enveloped her. It felt all warm and fuzzy but I know that the road she traveled from there to here was all but warm and fuzzy. Sometimes people forget that leadership is actually not all that much fun and requires much sacrifice.

This year I was able to follow a significant part of the local language speeches and studied the Dari spelling of the names of all the 34 provinces, each with its own picture slide shown in one continuous loop. During one long powerpoint presentation, containing 45 slides with charts and print too small to read I studied my new Pashto book, just for the fun of it.

I practiced pronouncing the sounds that are different from Dari,with my neighbor. For one sound, qualified as ‘retroflexed’ the instruction says: ‘the tip of the tongue reaches slightly behind the gum ridge, but the whole tongue curls back, and then it quickly flaps down’ [sic]. I did a lot of curling and flapping and thinking I was making some progress until, in the car on our way home, my Afghan colleagues couldn’t seem to agree on what was the correct pronunciation. Learning Pashto is even more fun than I had expected!

The time management of the congress left a bit to be desired, with tea break at lunch time and lunch served when we should already have been half way through our session which was, quite appropriate, about managing self/managing time – an important facet of leadership and management.

Unfortunately our session coincided with Meghann’s session on pregnancy yoga which I would have given much to witness – all that fabric, all those scarved ladies doing yoga. Meghann herself described her outfit as looking like a cat. She had brought boxes of donated yoga mats with her from the US and had created a private space behind a bunch of screens. I don’t think all the yogis were pregnant. The title of the session guaranteed that no men would attend.

Our own session made me proud. I only did a very short introduction – realizing how much I miss doing this kind of work, a rare occurrence for me since I moved to Afghanistan – and then handed over to my team of colleagues who conducted the brief session skillfully in the local language. A large crowd had shown up, more than could comfortably sit around the large boardroom table. We hope they left with some thoughts lodged in their heads about managing themselves, and thus their (and other people’s) time.

From the fairytale wedding with all its love and beauty we are back to ordinary life in Kabul which is about to enter its habitual ‘fighting season’ with all its threats of attacks. It’s a bit of a downer. We will adjust our movements and stay under the radar as much as we can.

All morning I worked on various assignments, including my first half page translation from English into (written) Dari – a convoluted story about broken mobile phones, having misplaced money, gifts that cannot be bought, reading glasses ‘that were put under someone’s foot’ (meaning ‘were broken’).

I learned that reading glasses are called ‘number glasses.’ The number refers to the little plastic sticker that indicates the strength of the glasses. The business of saying ‘glasses were put under my foot’ tells a lot about this culture where stuff happens to people and things rather than people doing stuff themselves.

When I showed up for my Saturday afternoon Dari class I was the only one. As a result I had a private lesson, providing me with a chance to review my translation, not half bad, for the first hour. The second hour we practiced the verb form called the progressive past as well as four words that I keep confusing with each other, such as ‘coming and going’ and ‘bringing and taking.’

For dinner we had a friend of a friend over who is here for only one week and needed some time off from camping out. We fed him tacos and ice cream, preceded by a GT.
Although his business is that of providing loans to small businesses, we discovered that we had many experiences in common, some related to organizational development and others to our experience of watching the royal wedding.

We had all watched the wedding yesterday and agreed that it was a magnificent symbolic event that stressed, for a change, all that is good, beautiful and inspiring, something that is a bit of a luxury out here. I know there is much pooh-poohing in the US about the hype but it lifted our spirits and gave us some respite from the Middle East nastiness and the promise of some more of that over here.

We had plumb forgotten about the royal wedding – it is not front page news here – until we turned on the BBC in the middle of the afternoon but by then the vows had already been exchanged. We watched the Duchess of Cambridge at the arm of her husband leave the Abbey. After that we stayed glued to the TV. It’s nice to for a change to see people gushing with love and other warm fuzzy feelings rather than looking grim and holding guns.

It was a beautiful day in Kabul and time for Axel to finally get out. He commutes between SOLA and our house, both in the same neighborhood, and needed a change of scenery.

After he dropped me off for my weekly massage indulgence in the middle of the vast US diplomatic and military complex – which required a nice long walk (even if it was between blast walls, tanks and people with guns) – he returned to the car and finally made it to the Shah bookstore of ‘The Bookseller of Kabul’ fame. He said he restrained himself and only bought stuff for SOLA: a large map of the world, an atlas and a book with Afghan legends. He is starting to turn SOLA into a real school rather than a regular home with a bunch of students inside. All this was inspired by our visit to Taktse International School in Sikkim.

I joined Axel later at the Bistro restaurant, a small piece of France off Chicken Street. Sitting there in the lovely garden with the most beautiful carpets draped along all the walls, inside and out, we enjoyed a nice and rather pricey lunch – the only thing missing was a cool glass of white wine – and could pretend for an hour or so that we were living someplace else.
Afterwards we walked over to our favorite carpet seller, who we had not visited for some time, to say hello and learn something more about carpets – he is a great and patient teacher. We could easily have dropped large amounts of money but restrained ourselves. We took pictures of those we liked a lot to add to our illustrated wish list.

For the first time since the supermarket bombing we ventured out into its sister store which is now barricaded behind thick steel plates with controlled entrance and exit sluices. Although the chances are very slim that a repeat will happen I was not quite at ease and was relieved when we were back in the car. I think it was just about that time that the vows were exchanged, a major world news event, with us oblivious to it all.

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Nothing untoward happened, at least not in Kabul during the Mujahideen Day parade. Instead bad things happened where people least expected them, Alabama and environs and Morocco. I watched the pictures on our very pixilated TV screen and thought that life, wherever you live, is risky – not just here in Kabul.

Although it was a holiday I spent most of it in front of my computer screen doing various tasks I can’t seem to find time for at work. It left me feeling fried and dissatisfied.

Axel left early for his SOLA classes and I followed him towards the end of the afternoon. We read another 3 pages of Three Cups of Tea. The story remains compelling to my students in spite of the negative publicity around Mr. Mortenson.

I noticed that two of Axel’s students in my class are practicing what he is teaching them about sounding out words using the syllable approach. We both have noticed progress.

After class we met with the young woman who is in charge of the school – we are both impressed with her management skills and her intuition about how to manage a small organization with young boys, young girls, a cleaner, a cook, and two guards plus a bunch of foreigners who volunteer their services. The set up is rather counter cultural but it seems to work in its own loose ways: the kids are learning and the place is not falling apart.

Back home I realized I had completely missed our quarterly worldwide staff meeting, held at 9 AM in Boston, which was focused on girls and women this time. Our contribution was mostly missing, not for lack of trying – people just have other things on their plates and it was a holiday after all.

We watched another installment of the Number One Ladies Detective Agency – a series that we have come to love and that we can download via iTunes.

We celebrated the Queen (mother’s) birthday today, three days ahead of the real day because the embassy get-togethers are always on Wednesdays. We had lots of haring, paling (eel), old Dutch cheese, bitterballen and other traditional and fattening Dutch goodies. We had extra stuff because the Eupol and ISAF folks of Dutch descent were in lock down. Probably because of the heightened security alerts of Mujahideen Day (tomorrow) and maybe even because the Taliban commanders who emerged out of the tunnel and who are still at large.

We spent much time talking with Afghan/Dutchmen who are here either temporarily or have reestablished themselves doing business in jewelry, traditional law advice and graphic design. All have stories about moving, fleeing, and endless paperwork nightmares, and all spoke much better Dutch than I speak Dari.

We are back home now for a long weekend. I need it as I am very tired. It was an intense week of aligning a thousand small pieces and putting all this on paper plus some significant staff changes. All in all a rather stressful and difficult though short week.

This morning we had a meeting at the American Embassy of Kabul – across the place where we usually have meetings with our donors because USAID is running out of meeting space – that is what happens when you have civilian surges.

Within the span of 30 minutes we travelled from Afghanistan to America, crossing a few checkpoints and seeing many people with guns who are following their very strict SOPs that know no exceptions. Once we emerged at the embassy proper we felt indeed far from Afghanistan. As we walked up to our meeting room we passed gaggles of men in dark suits with wires coming out of their ears. It is dangerous here.

We met in a container room off the Kabul Community Center, populated by one very tired soldier stretching out on a barkalounger –and trunks with Mexican blankets that revealed it is also a yoga studio. Outside many uniformed men and women were busy taking pictures of each other against the backdrop of the majestic and ochre colored Embassy building. Photos are a no-no for most of us civilians but not for those in uniform.

With too little time to return back to our office in between meetings I had lunch by myself in the courtyard of the ministry. It was a very unhealthy lunch consisting of 35 cents worth of cookies and cakes – it was all the Afghan money I carried with me and I did not want to embarrass myself by ordering a real lunch for 50 cents that I couldn’t pay for.

I had pulled out my Dari homework to kill more time but was interrupted every few minutes. Afghans cannot simply pass by someone they know without greeting and talking – and by now I know a lot of people here. And so I socialized more than I studied.

After my meeting I returned to the office for our biweekly phone call with Boston before dressing up in orange for the Dutch party. It made for one very long day, made more difficult by a series of dust storms that, except for the lack of snow and cold air, would qualify as blizzards and are really bad for our lungs. They left a layer of fine dust on every surface in our home and offices.

Apparently there is a serial on Afghan TV about a prison break and so there were many jokes about the Taliban having picked up the idea for their tunneling into the Kandahar prison from watching TV (secretly of course). Allegedly, the earth they dug out of the tunnel was put in trucks and sold on the market as fill. I sensed there was some awe about the brazen and clever act that, once again, embarrassed the Afghan leadership – right under their noses.

As we drove across town to the US compound I wondered how many of the liberated commanders had already made their way to Kabul. How would you recognize a Taliban commander from an ordinary Afghan? At the US compound security was enhanced. Four beefy American soldiers in full battle gear stood guard where usually Afghans stand. They frisked my two Afghan colleagues but let me through. I do wonder whether the freeing of prisoners, after 8 months of digging, was intended to happen two days before the big parade of Mujahideen Day – the same day on which Karzai escaped an attempt three years ago. Is there another brazen plan?

I have been having lunch with some of my female colleagues for a few weeks now. With the prohibition that office cleaners can no longer be used to deliver lunch to people’s offices more of the women now come to the cafeteria where there is a separate lunchroom for ladies. When I just arrived I thumped my nose at it, mostly because it was tawdry and uninviting – very few women ever ate there. I had some misguided idea then that these separate lunches were silly and asked both men and women why they couldn’t eat together. Now I know better. Lunching separately makes perfect sense.

We are trying to make the ladies’ lunchroom more welcoming so we can socialize rather than simply fulfilling a physiological need. We have ordered tushaks (the low cushions common in Afghan rooms), a small table, and pillows. I am told that as soon as it is cozy and comfy the men will invade it. We’ll see about that.

Having lunch together is nice – the women talk much more than the men who concentrate on eating, mostly in silence. The women sit around a small round table where we do the opposite: I think we talk more than we eat. Most of the talk is in local langauge so I get some serious language immersion. I also learn a lot about life for Afghan women. Today I learned that in some areas of Afghanistan men traditionally refer to their wife and children as ‘the kids’ a collective noun that doesn’t distinguish between female adults and kids. It takes an assertive woman to change this. Some of my female colleagues have successfully done so.

I disclosed that I had had a lesson in Pashto yesterday and indicated which letters I found hard to pronounce. There is one letter that looks like a N but sounds, at least in Nangahar Province (East of Kabul), like an ‘l’ ‘r’ and ‘n’ all rolled into one. It requires some serious tongue gymnastics.

My innocent inquiry led to a serious discussion about where the most proper Pashto is spoken – none had any standing in this debate as two were native Dari speakers, and three had a Dari speaking mom and a Pashto speaking dad; only one was all Pashto but still a mixture of Kandahari and Kabuli Pashto with the latter having no chance of being considered pure.

My Pashto teacher doesn’t speak much English so I am being taught in Dari., effectively getting two languages for the price of one. There are many words that are the same but also many that are completely different. Unlike in Dari there are male and female words. I am already discovering that plural and singular word forms are quite different from each other. There are new letters that look a bit like Dari letters but with a completely different pronunciation. They have dots and circles at unexpected places – some letters are real tong twisters – and then, I am told, there is a grammar that is much more complex.

I have a Rosetta Stone Pashto program which I tried on for fun over a year ago. At the time I was completely lost and gave up halfway Unit one – Lesson One. Now, with my improved Dari I am no longer lost, progress through many lessons quickly and on some exercises did quite well at least in word/sound recognition.