Sylvia's Journal

I am feeling a bit more limber after my weekly massage which was given to me ‘with compliments of Lisa’s salon.’ I tried to refuse but failed. Ankie had her massage after me. The young Afghan masseuse is running the show on her own while her boss is refueling in the Philippines. She has come a long way from the very insecure rookie masseuse of a year ago.

I spent most of the day cleaning out my mailbox of which the bottom is still not in sight. I did finally get to read some of the interesting things people sent me and for which I rarely seem to have time. I read the entire email of a listserve that cuts news about Afghanistan out of newspapers from around the world.

And so I learned about the response from the mullahs in Kandahar to the fiery protest that burnt many more Holy Qurans as shops went up in flames. “This is not the way to protest,” they lectured a tent full of turbaned and bearded men. It was an encouraging show of rational thinking in this very emotional affair.

But for every act of rationality there seems to be at least one of irrationality. As part of a government effort to stop the spiraling wedding hall frenzy (no more than 300 guests and no more than $5 a head) that is reducing middle class families to poverty – reactionary and conservative elements have managed to add something more sinister to the bill: the banning of revealing clothes of bride and guests – a direct stab at women who get few other chances to dress up and have fun. Most people like the first part of the bill but not the latter. Tailors who make revealing dresses would have to shut their doors or switch to sewing bedspreads.

Razia jan had invited us for another of her famous social events – it is the place where we meet interesting people and eat the best food in Kabul. Her guests were involved in work that focused on construction, mines, governance, democracy, laws, military/civilian engagement, education, and health – sort of covering the waterfront of Afghanistan’s rebuilding, with all of us reporting some progress and thousands of challenges.

The chief Rotarian of Kabul also attended the gathering and successfully recruited a few new candidates for membership. So far I am a bystander but I do feel this nudge from my father, an ardent Rotarian during his lifetime. I think he would have found it very cool to have his daughter a member of the Kabul Rotary Club.

Getting up was a little hard because we went to a wedding last night. Such events always end late, this one around 1 AM. We left long before that; still I went to bed way past my bedtime. My sleepy start to the day magnified some of the crises that are brewing all around us, all man-made (some by ourselves, some by others), all messy and difficult to deal with.

I am still trying to empty my mail box, paying dearly for not having maintained it while we were in India. But the work got delayed because of an entire morning of meetings and an afternoon of trying to understand the roots and scopes of the various crises.

We had our usual Thursday morning program managers meeting where all the team leaders get together and tell what’s cooking and what is on their plates. It’s a good forum for reminding us that all our activities are supposed to add up. I am happiest when I see people get out of their stovepipes and, in addition to informing, also add, comment, inquire, complement (and compliment) each other.

The second meeting was to explore the possibilities of using ‘zaqat’ and/or ‘sadaqa’ – two forms of Islamic charity – to help hospitals create a fund to provide for the poor and alleviate pain and suffering. We quickly got into theological debates about definitions and what the conditions were for one or the other. My colleagues reverted to their local language to express themselves about a topic that doesn’t lend itself well to translation into English. It was fascinating and I learned a lot, although I also realized that my understanding of Dari is practically nihil when it comes to conversations with a religious theme.

After work I went to my SOLA class. It was a joyous reunion with the girls. We had not seen each other for several weeks. I talked about our trip and they asked questions about Sikkim. They asked about Sikkim’s religion and whether people indeed worshipped cows, a religious practice none of them could fathom. The mention of Ganesha the elephant god and Hanuman the monkey god, two of many thousands of Hindu gods, elicited many giggles. It gave me a chance to put in a plug for religious tolerance.

We continued reading the young reader version of Three Cups of Tea. After three lessons we have made it to page 16. It is slow going, taking turns reading one paragraph at a time, asking questions about understanding, checking on words and, sometimes sidetracking into broader general knowledge topics. The word malnutrition led to one of such conversations. No one knew what it meant. From there we wandered into being skinny not being the same as malnourished and yes, obese people were actually malnourished. There were some giggly comments about some of the girls being a little pudgy and other skinny, requiring me to explain that malnutrition was something more serious.

Some of the girls have made tremendous progress in their reading skills while others had slid back over the four weeks of no lessons. We heard this from the teachers in Sikkim who hate the vacation because of this backsliding. I gave them a little sermon about not giving up, moving centimeter by centimeter to their very distant visions and that practice makes perfect. Everyone nodded. We are reading not to get to the end of the book and tick it off our to do/read list but to marvel about the wonders of this world, the good and the bad, that we need to learn about, if not by direct experience, then by means of a good book. This approach to reading has produced some wonderful conversations – often a high point of my week.

We celebrated Ankie’s birthday in style, first with her chair decorated with plastic flowers, our all purpose celebration flowers that we can use over and over again, a congregation of various tchotchkes around her plate (a camel, a few bronzes). Her present from us consisted of two more cups and saucers of the 17 piece (lids and covers count as pieces) tea/coffee service that she liked so much last time and of which she already took 2 cups and saucers home. Now we have the teapot, the creamer and two more cups and saucers left here (7 pieces). Those she will have to come and get in the US.

I had revealed the secret of her birthday to her Afghan team mates who quickly organized a lovely lunch including a giant decorated cake which caught her somewhat by surprise. I encouraged them to sing but this all male team has some practicing to do. Still we were touched by their enthusiasm and sense of celebration. Birthdays aren’t that important here once you are adult.

On a more serious note, today was our project’s quarterly financial review meeting where where our corporate finance people take a close look at over or underspending and try to minimize risk in the future. For the first time I wasn’t totally intimidated by the review (my fourth since I arrived here). Two key players who were there at the last reviews were not there to do it for us, the three of us remaining had to lead the show. We reviewed and rehearsed in the morning and then we had the real review with our CFO in the late afternoon. I think we passed.

It was a good example of being thrown in the deep and then finding you can stand. It boosted my confidence enormously. I think I can learn this stuff. This will surprise my colleagues back in the home office who associate me with the soft and fuzzy stuff (actually not all that soft) of leadership and organizational behavior, not with financial management.

In between the financial review activities I attended the sometimes weekly sometimes biweekly consultative meeting at the ministry where then this then that taskforce or group presents its policy and/or strategy document that many people worked on for months. Today it was the turn of the HIV/AIDS team with an ambitious agenda for keeping the epidemic at bay before it becomes one. Listening to the strategies and proposed interventions I pondered how difficult it is to set priorities among all the competing agendas. Is dealing with this disease, copying strategies and interventions from Africa, so urgent here? Little research has been done but most of it shows the disease as a trifle compared to the figures in Africa. Questions were raised about this.

This is the problem of arch experts (local or international), or the fly in and fly out consultants who go for comprehensiveness, write such documents. I saw the same with other strategies – they are like A+ academic strategy papers – but do they make sense here? Much effort goes into these documents but then, everyone agrees, they get shelved because there actually aren’t any priorities as nothing is left out, or there aren’t any funds to implement or they aren’t even budgeted. This is the side effect of the very consultative processes – of which I am usually a proponent – but when there is no final single arbiter every member of each group will argue for their piece to be included.

There was very little time to celebrate our 31st wedding anniversary. My workday started before 7 AM and ended 12 hours later; a bit much for a first day at work and not enough to properly celebrate thirty-one years of marriage.

In the morning I attended the start of the fourth and leadership workshop with two of our own and two ministry teams. The leadership program has been stretched out over several months and sometimes I wondered whether we would be able to bring it to a good closure but now I believe we can. Scheduling a series of workshops with the same people is no easy task here.

I was asked to open the workshop. I wished I could have done it in Dari but I will need another year, at least one year.

I visited many of my colleagues to let them know I was back and Axel OK and inquired about what had happened during my absence. As someone quipped, “when you are here in the office people keep you so busy that you think you are indispensable but then when you go away for awhile you find out everything moves along just perfectly without you.” This is true.

In the afternoon I thought I had only one meeting, not having emptied my overflowing mailbox yet, only to find out that two more meetings were stacked right behind the one from 2 till 4 PM. Our office summer hours are now activated. “Good,” said Axel, “you start at 7 AM and are home before 4 PM!” Not so today, and, as I found out, not tomorrow either, what with phone calls with the home office that start after the workday here has ended here.

We are back in Kabul after a very bumpy ride over India’s northern plains where pre-monsoon disturbances pushed our plane like a little toy across the skies.

As luck would have it, my seat neighbor was an Afghan doctor who used to be a very senior government official two (health) administrations ago. He told me he has just published a book about organizational behavior (in the local language) – I couldn’t quite believe my ears. He is heavily into organizational behavior and emotional intelligence. This may not sound so surprising in the US but here such champions are rare.

I told my neighbor that I have been toying with the idea of doing a series of sessions about emotional intelligence as I have witnessed several occasions recently where this intelligence was clearly missing. He offered to do the sessions with me. This perked me right up.

We found our visiting consultant Ankie at our house. We should have preceded her arrival but our hospital adventure reversed our arrival times. It is her fifth time here and her fourth with us – she classifies as our most regular visitor. She knows what we like and what we miss and brought licorice and cheese; we gave her a packet of Darjeeling tea in return.

After warm Delhi the cold weather in Kabul surprised us. I reinserted the mattress heating pads which I had already put away when we were fooled into thinking that spring was actually summer. It is not, I had forgotten about that.

We are now at a summer schedule in our office which means the car comes to pick me up at 6:45 AM (it also means our workday ends at 3:30).

On the day before our departure I got sick: a sore throat, cold shivers and a bad cough. Halfway through the day, after having made many mistakes (a wrong bank transfer, a wrong accusation, a wrong turn) I accepted defeat and went home to try to sleep off whatever this is. My boss prescribed something to gargle and relieve my sore throat.

All through the winter I have been taking an ayurvedic immunity booster and stopped it last week thinking I could do without. All through the winter I have stayed healthy which is not easy in Kabul. A coincidence?

We checked the internet for the temperatures in our three destinations: Darjeeling (warm), Pemayangtse in West Sikkim (cold) and Gangtok in East Sikkim (in between).

We heard from Tessa that two of her old schoolmates will be teaching at the Gangtok school that is modeled after their secondary school in Beverly MA (and headed by one of Sita’s classmates). Now that Axel is in education (and has been offered the impressive sounding title of headmaster) our visit to the Gangtok is more than a nostalgia trip.

The first day of our COO’s visit went without a hitch. The huge circus size tent stood on our volleyball field and had inside it tables covered with all the stuff our various projects had produced: slideshows, public education announcements, guidelines, pictorial guides for illiterate people, guide books, policies, training manuals, and promotional materials used on national awareness days such as TB Day, HIV/AIDS Day, etc.

Each project had their 10 minutes with the big chief while the rest of the people were busy taking pictures of one another, then in front of this table, then in back of that table. I clicked away myself as I know our 50th anniversary is 10 years away and by that time these old pictures will be priceless.

The current slideshow on which I have been working at least 15 hours was a success and worth all the time I spent on it simply by looking at the faces of those who have been with MSH for a long time. My intent was to make people smile and reminisce, and they did.

All the guesthouse cooks had been drummed up to prepare lunch for all the staff, a cast of over one hundred. The lawn not covered by the tent was covered with chairs and tables. It was a very festive scene.

We celebrated New Year’s Day with an Afghan family. The invitation had come from one of my colleagues. We found ourselves in a small nuclear family, not what one would expect when thinking of Afghan families; two girls, one boy (all young adults) and educated parents, a mother who had studied in Germany and a father who had studied in the USSR.

When we first arrived we sat in the formal salon, sipping tea, eating various New Year’s delicacies and getting to know each other. The mother and I spoke in broken German, the children, except S whose English is quite good, spoke broken English with us and we spoke broken Dari with the father.

I could understand the mother’s German reasonably well but speaking was another thing altogether. The neural connections between the parts in my brain that know German and that are learning Dari intersected so much that I found myself searching frantically for German words and getting Dari replies instead.

The father and son are in politics and with Axel, trained as a Political Scientist, the threesome had a great time together talking about Afghanistan’s parliament. We came to the same conclusions as we always do: progress will be slow but less slow if education of the population becomes a priority, a massive investment in higher education here and abroad, jobs and career opportunities for young people so they want to come back home from study abroad and the strengthening of the judicial system so that consequences are attached to bad behavior. And of course there are the women, but that, everyone agreed, goes without saying.

We had a tour of the house which contained one large formal salon with western furniture, four rooms with tushaks (carpet covered mattresses) and balish (hard back pillows), and some miscellaneous rooms where various possessions were stored.
One major way in which Afghan houses are different from ours is that neither parents nor kids have their own bedroom. According to S at night everyone plops down on one of the tushaks in (I imagine the warmest) room and sleeps. Having a house with young people and none of the privacies our young people have (and expect) is hard to imagine.

We met the house kawk (fighting partridge) which was a mean bird, as one would expect, going after dad’s toes. He was quickly put back in his cage, not a petting kind of bird. Then we admired the hybrid roses which had just started to leaf out. We have to come back to see the result of dad’s green thumbs.

In the back of the house was a separate rental unit, a lovely three story house with a roof terrace that looked out on the narrow and exceedingly dirty Kabul River. In the distance S pointed out the bridge after which the area is called where junkies live.

While Axel played chess on a tiny chess board with S’s dad (and lost) I got to see the family photo albums, just like at M’s house some months ago. I marvel at pictures of these Afghan families, with parents our age, how they dressed and lived in the 70s. It was actually not that different from how we dressed and lived – no chadoors, exposed arms, necks and legs. Looking at these pictures one can see the extent of Afghanistan’s backslide, at least for the middle class. Watching the women now I can’t imagine how this is possible and I am reminded of Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaiden,’ which is, hopefully, a fantasy, about such a backslide in the US.

What amazes me most is that the people who were young adults in the 70s and the parents of many of my colleagues now, have still not be able to regain their and their children’s (especially girls’) freedom from oppressive cultural, social and gender norms despite the fact that the Taliban have long gone.

Aside from the political discussions we also talked about the Holy Qu’ran, the Books of Psalms, the Torah and the Bible, all holy books and all, supposedly, required reading for good Muslims. All books were available in the house, including the King James Bible in English. This led to further conversations about the differences between the various holy books that I found very illuminating as it explained the Moslems low regard for the bible which, they claim, had probably strayed very far from the original stories and texts over the centuries with much lost or added in translation, something that cannot be said of the Holy Qu’ran which remains in its original Arabic.

After a simple but delicious lunch I found myself explaining Quaker traditions before we were treated to a fashion show by the two girls. We think we started the new year in the best possible way.

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I am sitting here writing on the last day of the Afghan year with three and a half kilo of dried fruits and nuts next to me. The order was delivered in the early evening by the woman who runs the Afghan Pride Association. She hand delivered the traditional new year’s delicacy called Seven Fruits (hafta meyva) in seven 500 gram bags. We learned how to process the delicacy from Razia jan who brought us the finished product at just about the same time.

The traditional dish is made from a combination of fruits and nuts: pistachio, almonds, walnuts, dark and golden raisins, tiny dried apricots and something that looks like a different kind of apricot. The ingredients are skinned, washed and then submerged in boiling water to soak overnight. It’s the removing of the skins from the nuts that’s most tedious Razia told me.

M. explained to me that the traditions around the Afghan New Year date back to pre-Islamic time and came from the Zoroastrians in Persia. The celebrations are not universal in this country. There is a divide more or less along ethnic and north-south lines: there are those who welcome the new year with great abundance and those who see it as a heathen practice. The more conservative mullahs are preaching against the exuberant start of the Afghan New Year. The most exuberant of all the action is in Mazar in the north. People are streaming there from all parts of Afghanistan.

We are all told to stay home because there will be crowds everywhere and the rule is, stay away from crowds. We are not as constrained as the people in the US compound who are in lock down since today and until Tuesday evening. At least we can move around a little bit and were allowed to accept an invitation to celebrate the start of the Afghan New Year with S’s family tomorrow. Unfortunately we were not allowed to join the family later to one of the popular outdoor places like Lake Qargha or Babur Gardens where crowds are expected.

I like to believe that there are more people working for the good of this republic, trying to get it into the 21st century and taking care of its citizens than those trying to cripple, destroy, destabilize it for their own benefit or some higher ideal that is at cross purposes of the former group. I was reminded of that this morning while being a fly on the on the wall at a meeting of one of the institutions of higher learning that prepares allied medical professionals (not doctors) for future jobs in health care.

The entire meeting was in Dari, including the agenda and I was grateful for my colleague who came along and helped me understand what was going on.

This observing of her bi-weekly meeting with her senior faculty is a first step in, what we hope, will be a longer process. We had been invited to assist the director in building a strong team that would be able to stand together and withstand the pressures from people with power and connections who are trying to circumvent the rules that apply to most other people. We don’t get many of such invitations and so it was worth sacrificing part of our day off for this purpose.

The director is a graduate from our leadership program, many years ago. It is refreshing to work with someone like that, someone who knows that leading and managing is not an automatic skill set that comes along with a promotion.

It occurred to me while listening to discussions about some of the faculty team’s challenges that in this country many good people are spending enormous amounts of mental and physical energy to counter attempts at circumventing transparent processes. There are so many places where interference happens: there is enrollment which is supposed to be only for students who qualify. There are the diplomas that should be only for people who pass the necessary tests, not for those who think they can buy them either from the professor or in the market.

The US and other government clamor for transparency all the time, rightly so, but I don’t think that people who are not directly involved in this ‘work for the republic’ have any idea what it takes, what courage, what sacrifice, to implement transparency. Like so many other things here it is easier said than done.