Sylvia's Journal

With the temperature hovering around zero Celsius the rain sometimes turned into snow and sometimes the snow turned into rain. The result of all this was muck, especially in the places where the culverts and drainage arrangements have not quite been finished by the various road building contractors who have been remodeling our main drag, Darulaman, since I arrived here in September 2009.

It seems a fitting metaphor for the continuation of Obama’s Wars as reported by the latest issue of Rolling Stones. [King David’s War by Michael Hastings, February 2, 2011] Combined with Dexter Filkin’s recent story on the Great Kabul Bank Heist in the New Yorker it makes it hard to keep my usual optimism about the direction in which things are going here.

We watched, now a nightly ritual, how Egypt has fared after another day of rage/revolution. To our great surprise, we saw my Egyptian colleague in the crowd, speaking into a BBC microphone. He is the one who should have been guiding us around Egypt now during the study visit that was canceled last week. Our tickets were changed to February 12 but I don’t think Egypt is quite ready to receive us.

I realized that all weekend we have been a little flat, as if in a state of mild depression. The Friday morning massage and dinner with friends on Friday and Saturday provided a little respite. Last week’s suicide attack has led to a sort of self imposed house arrest. The effect on our psyches is palpable.

(audio)Listening to the dark and moody tales of famous Russian authors doesn’t help nor does the strain in some of my relationships at work. This afternoon when I got home from my language class Axel announced that a new friend who only recently arrived had just called so say that the Finest supermarket suicide attack (a place he shops every Friday) had freaked him out so much that he is leaving the country tomorrow morning, for good.

M. is being evacuated from Egypt and flying home tomorrow with her family. That too is disappointing as she is cutting short her stay there by a week and is thus not able to complete her assignment and research study – it was a chance in a lifetime and now it is over.

We feel torn; the quality of life, the air pollution, the constant possibility of disaster around the corner, the concerns from our daughters are tugging at us. Yet much is also tugging at us the other way: some very dear colleagues, counterparts, and other people I work with, the girls I teach and mentor, the progress they make in English (and that we are making in Dari), Axel’s renewed sense of energy as a teacher and the gratefulness of his students are all forces that conspire to keep us here.

I did a lot more thinking about the post September 2011 period, about where will we live and what we will we be doing. The one hour of massage turned out to be a good time for thinking. The existential question is both wonderfully liberating and anxiety provoking. I got some bright red nails while I was pondering my future and left the massage place with my bare feet in hotel slippers so as not to mess up the polish. I felt a little self-conscious but for Afghans bare feet in slippers in the middle of the winter is totally normal.

We stayed home, me knitting for my brother’s first grandchild who is scheduled to enter this world in a couple of weeks and Axel reviewing his students’ US school applications, perfecting the fine art of giving feedback.

I think I am finally getting Axel to consider what should have been his career all along, teaching. He is deeply into his teaching role and responsibilities and making a big difference for a few Afghan kids. I watch him blossoming into this new role, even though it is still a volunteer job. His experimenting with a new role is part of the future scenario making that we have started to engage in.

Despite being for an entire day cooped up in a windowless room refining our work plan for an eventual project extension and the dreariness of a drizzle that left lakes everywhere, today was a better day. The day before a weekend is always a little better than the other days of the week especially because it is my day at SOLA.

Only two girls showed up, both living in the dorm rooms upstairs. It is the only way I can have girls in the class because for those living far away it gets dark too early. This is how I lost a few, at least for the winter.

One of the girls is a breathless young lady whose tries to speak English faster than she can. We read a few paragraphs about an orphanage with too many unknown adjective and nouns in the text. The girl who is both my walking dictionary and assistant teacher did not show up (I had told them I would be in Egypt) so explaining the words was a little tricky, try to explain ‘cynical’ to people with a limited vocabulary; every word I use to explain it requires yet another explanation and this can spiral out of control pretty quickly.

I am starting to think about our next book now that we have come to the end of A Thousand Splendid Suns. I am sure that the book was miles above the reading level of some of the girls, but the familiarity with the context in which the story takes place helped us have a series of wonderful conversations.

Some of the girls want to read Greg Mortimer – they know who he is – but I don’t know the reading level. This is something that Axel and I miss, knowing what level is right for which girl (or boy). Next week we plan to have a Skype conversation with an English teacher from a private school in Connecticut to educate us about this.

We had long Skype conversations with Sita and Jim first and (sick) Tessa later and caught up on things happening in their lives. Sita let us peek at the enormous amounts of snow in Western Massachusetts. We are still trying to figure out how to get the girls here and attach it to a vacation with the entire family – work schedules, climate and Ramadan make this a bit of a challenge.

Tessa gave us the stern message that she doesn’t want us to extend our stay with another year – something that has lately become a real option, though not formally. Here I think people expect me to stay (why else the language learning effort?) but we are very conflicted about this choice. The Finest suicide bombing is still fresh in our minds and has changed the picture rather drastically.

Today was a bit of a dark day, lit up only by our monthly social gathering at the Dutch embassy. The dark matter comes at me from many sides, some minor some big. At home I can’t seem to get the letter Z right on my embroidery sampler and have started over several times (minor), at work I am struggling with strained relationships (big), in the city there are security chatter and rumors (could be big or nothing) and outside Afghanistan I watch the protest in Cairo turning ugly (huge).

The light matter comes, as usual, from people. The ones who went with me to the Dutch event (none are Dutch) and the people I met there, old friends and new acquaintances.

I spent some time with young M, a fluent Dutch speakers of Afghan descent and a student at one of Amsterdam’s universities. He had brought his wife (22) and baby boy (8 months). The wife and I could only smile at each other as our languages did not overlap. All we could do was repeat a few fragments of English and Dutch greeting words in the hi and bye category. I tried my limited Dari on her but as a Pashto speaker she understood little and kept begging her husband with her kohl-lined eyes to interpret my words. I am not quite ready to start learning Pashto though – she will master my mother tongue long before I will master hers (if ever).

These days, on my elliptical treadmill, I listen to Candide by Voltaire, also a dark and light theme, despite Pangloss’ mantra that all is for the best.

I find myself walking on a long and narrow causeway. On my right are daisies; on my left (sinistro) are crocodiles. The daisies are called patience, respect, compassion, praise, acknowledgement, encouragement, recognition (of effort), realism, practicality and acceptance of otherness; the crocodiles are called impatience, outrage, criticism, irritation about otherness, cynicism, judgment, confrontation and other unpleasant things.

I am trying to walk the straight and narrow, picking the daisies (the Appreciative Inquiry folks want me to) while the crocodiles are yapping at my heels. I risk not getting to the end of the causeway (called ‘good enough for now’) and fight being dragged into the morass of failure.

Reading Dexter Filkins piece in the New Yorker about Kabul Bank did not help. What am I trying to do here? Surrounded by crooks, squeezing the ordinary people and the foreigners dry and other sinistros who try to blow us up? The leaders have us by the balls because of the threat of the Taliban, made real in the supermarket blow up that annihilated an entire family in seconds. They are not an imagined threat.

Sometime I fantasize about the easy way out and having someone blow the whistle, ‘game over,’ and everyone packs their bags and we leave en masse, letting Afghanistan stew in its own juices.

But then I think about SOLA and the girls I teach; about young Z. who has to prove to her family in embattled Kunduz that she can become a fluent English speaker in three months or else (she needs a Skype buddy, any takers?). I think about M. who is now in Aswan, a little nervous because she knows what can happen after the common enemy finally leaves and the coalition falls apart. M. had wanted to escape Afghanistan and its brutal or careless treatment of women but now she has stepped up to the leadership challenge and is learning from women leaders in Egypt the lessons that will help her transform Afghanistan.

Packing of bags is not an option because of what will happen next. People who scream ‘leave,’ don’t have to see the resulting unpleasantness, far away from their beds. And so I continue on that narrow path between small ‘good enough for now’ victories and total failure. There will be no success for a long while.

Nearly every week several of our project’s senior managers traipse off to the US compound to meet with those who make our work possible; who dispense the money from US taxpayers in tranches so we can transform it into, eventually, better health care for Afghans. Sometimes they come to us, which they like because it is like a field visit, with real tea and cake, in our beautiful compound on the other side of town but often we come to them, which is quite an undertaking and not for the faint of heart.

In order for us to pass the many layers of barriers we first have to shed all our electronics: pen drives, CDs, computers. We can keep our cellphones a little longer even though they often don’t work as we walk along the half mile of road behind the first line of defense where military vehicles drive to and fro with jamming equipment is in full operation. This is how we make our way to the next line of defense – a good chance to stretch our legs that have very few opportunities to do so the rest of the week.

When we get to the outer wall of the USAID compound (referred to as CAFÉ), across the road from the embassy buildings, we have to wait outside, rain or shine until we are called in, one by one, by a friendly smiling Ghurka. I always greet them with a Namaste which they respond to with an even bigger grin. I wished I knew a few more words in Nepali.

The entrance and exit signs on the doors in and out are frequently switched from left to right and vice versa. “This is to confuse the terrorists,” quipped one of my colleagues. Once inside we put our few belongings through a screening machine, then ourselves. After that we hand in our IDs that are registered in big books by stern looking and heavily armed marines in exchange for a visitors badge, and this only in the presence of a USAID employee with the right color badge.

This has to be organized long before the visit. Since I was supposed to be in Egypt my name had not been registered. I was asked to bring my American passport which allowed me to be vouched for by an American employee with another color badge.

We have to carry our badges clearly visible; no Ghurka will let you further into the inner sanctum if they cannot see it. They take their task very seriously. In fact, everyone takes their security task very seriously because if you don’t you are out or, at best, barked at in a very unpleasant way (I witnessed one such event, not pretty).

Once inside there are white containers as far as the eye can see, surrounded by blast walls on the perimeter and sandbags around each container. Inside is a beehive of activity with badged people walking hither and thither through narrow passageways decorated with posters of success stories, smiling beneficiaries of USAID support, local artifacts, nice carpets and the life size pictures of the bosses: Obama, Hillary, the VP and the USAID director who are flashing their white teeth and broad smiles at anyone who stops to look them in their eyes.

We are ushered into small windowless offices with large flat screen conference screens, more posters of projects and unlimited supplies of bottles of water (Coca Cola inc.) instead of the habitual way that Afghans welcome their guests (we are of course not considered guests, we are contractors, accounting for our deeds and seeking guidance). I don’t think they have a kitchen and kitchen staff like we do. They have a kitchen and restaurant a few containers over, where flown-in US cafeteria food is served.

We discuss strategic and tactical issues, blockages that we ourselves cannot break through and provide information about what is happening outside ‘the bubble,’ in the real Afghanistan where life continues in its own ways. We leave with promises of help, new assignments, questions to answer or concept papers/workplans/budgets to provide. We never leave empty-handed and we never leave our donor empty handed either. And then we retrace our steps, get our stuff back and walk back to the car through various barriers for the long drive home.

Interpreting behavior, words across the vast cultural divide that exist between me and my Afghan colleagues is hard work. This is a high context culture, I explained to one of my staff with whom I had a hard talk this morning. This means that you can exchange one word with your Afghan colleagues and you entirely understand each other. But when you and I exchange even whole sentences we might as well speak Chinese; we need to turn to a low context conversation for the simple reason that the context needs to be made visible.

I need to say and hear many words to reveal context. In the process both of us risk using words that convey something else, a poor translation of something richer in either one of our languages. This is the constant dilemma and our unending challenge. ‘Oh, by the way,” he said, you have so many words for this word ‘problem,’ where we have only one ‘mushghil.’ You call it a dilemma, a problem, a challenge, hardship, etc. For us these are all musghils.”

We found ourselves (again) in the wake of mismatched expectations. But should I be surprised? Come to think of it, it is more than a miracle that we are not constantly running into problems or mushghils; given our different backgrounds and life experiences we actually should have a very hard time working together.

Luckily we don’t; just an occasional flare up that requires a serious talk. We did that today, first in the morning which left us in an impasse, and then another brief talk which showed some progress and finally over lunch in the privacy of my office, we got sufficiently back on the rails that we can see each other in the eye and move on.

Yesterday’s supermarket suicide bomber was sobering as it signaled the re-appearance of the some or other Taliban group in our midst; too close for comfort. And so we stayed home, watching what is unfolding in Egypt and rejoicing that I am not stuck at the airport there with twenty Afghans.

The only escape from our self-imposed hunkering down was the short trip to my language school for two hours of reading a history of Afghanistan with way too many new words and complex sentence structures that don’t lend themselves to word for word translation.

Back home I baked cookies which I shared with the guards as Axel’s stomach cannot handle all that butter. I worked patiently on my Quaker sampler and washed a few of my scarves; the dirty water revealed how black the air is inside and outside our house (and thus inside our lungs).

Axel’s lungs suffer more from this than mine. Once again he had some sort of bronchial infection which literally knocks the air out of him.

We had Ted (from SOLA) over for dinner and talked about his successful scholarship-raising trip and a thousand other things related to getting Afghan teenagers up to speed to study in the US before coming back to change this country. This is the only antidote to such barbaric practices as the recent stoning of a young couple in Kunduz.

How different the day ended from its start; first there was the news that the Egypt trip I was supposed to pack for was canceled, for obvious reasons. No point in dragging 20 Afghans to a place that, at the moment, appears more dangerous than Afghanistan. So rather than preparing for a trip we had a leisurely morning of sleeping in and making our customary Friday chili omelet.

I made my way through the barricades to see my masseuse Lisa. While Englebert Humperdinck sang about love on a karaoke DVD, she relaxed my sore muscles and then cut my hair. She is a woman of many talents, an all purpose and one-woman beauty parlor.

With my skin all rosy and oily and my hair neatly trimmed I returned home, picked up Axel and returned back to town to join Meghann and Pia for a farewell lunch in one of our favorite coffee houses, the Wakhan Café. After our goodbyes we walked over to a nearby gallery where we never buy anything but feast our eyes on beautiful art, felt products, carpets, saffron, ceramics and carpets until the car came to pick us up.

The dispatcher, announcing that the car was waiting for us, mentioned nonchalantly that there had been an explosion not far from where we had lunched. We had not heard anything.

When we got home we discovered that one of the four supermarkets where we do our shopping had been blown up by someone out to get the heavily armed Blackwater people who tend to shop there. I have seen those folks and shopped with them many times and only now realize that being in the same place with them is not a good idea. Luckily the supermarket chain (Finest) opened a shop near our house which is far from where the Blackwater folks hang out. We often shopped in the blown up place. We probably won’t anymore.

And then we watched, ad nauseam, the Egypt drama unfolding in front of our eyes. The Kabul explosion was not reported here on any of the channels we watch (BBC, EuroNews and Al Jezeera) which were rather preoccupied with the momentous developments in Egypt. I am now glad I am not leaving for Cairo tomorrow.

It seems that the Kabul drama did get some attention in Europe and the US as evidence by a number of emails, checking on our safety. That is when facebook comes in handy.

The suicide attack is a bit unnerving as Kabul has been spared such events. There had appeared to be some pact between those in power and those trying to unseat them. We wonder what this new development means.