Sylvia's Journal

Sometime when I watch the news I feel tugs into despair – as soon as one crisis fades from the front news, something else takes it place. The current Korean crisis reminds us of a previous Korean crisis. Axel remembers the drills at school. I was too little but remember my uncle whose arm got bent out of shape on his way to Korea. He always held his pipe in a funny way as a result.

But then, at bedtime, I read a few more pages about the history of this region and everything that we think awful and terrible now pales when compared to practices that were normal a couple of hundred years ago: lancing eyeballs, cutting off body parts, and one invasion after another, each followed by rape and pillaging. And that is just the history created and told by men. In all those history books there is no mention of women. I hate to think about what their lives were like, even during those short periods of quiet in between the periods of turmoil.

Today I spent much time on sorting out the sequencing of various procedures that require our passports. First I need to renew one of my two American passports, the one that expires in a few weeks. Then we will apply for an Indian visa. This requires the other passport, the one with the Afghan visa.

After that our work permit needs to be renewed which requires the same passport and without which we cannot even start to request another multiple entry visa to Afghanistan, which expires early January when we will probably be in Holland and without which we cannot get back in. Since getting a visa is a lengthy process, we need to get started soon and get all the other things out of the way. In that sense our lives here are very complicated.

A quiet day – I finished my sewing project, knitted another baby hat and started another knitting project while letting Axel doing all the cooking. It was another beautiful and quiet day in Kabul while outside in the provinces bad things continue to happen.

The Dutch aid worker who was kidnapped over a month ago in Kunduz has still not been found. I learned today that he, his wife and two small children were living in Kunduz until quite recently. When things began to deteriorate in the province he took his family back to Holland and returned to close the project down. He had succeeded in doing so and was on his way to the airport when he got kidnapped. We hope that the quiet diplomacy will lead to a good outcome.

In another province armed men attacked a clinic, tied the hands of the 2 guards, tried to steal the clinic’s solar panels. When they could not unbolt them they smashed the panels and left, taking the clinic’s generator and the guards who were were released later. The advise of the security folks is to bolt one’s solar panels tightly to the roof. The clinic had done precisely that.

While we were in Dubai the spa where I used to go for my weekly massage folded. The masseuses now work out of Lisa’s place which I finally got to see.

In order to get there I had to drive through a part of town that I thought was off limits, in back of the US embassy terrain and in front of something else that is hidden behind enormous blast walls. The alleys between the blast walls are empty except for heavily armed soldiers, many American and a few intrepid Afghans who were trying to sell scarves to a female soldier.

We finally found the place, a small three room house that opens directly onto the street. Lisa stuck her head around the heavy metal door and invited me in while the driver and guard waited around to make sure I was in an OK place. When I gave them the thumbs up they left.

The first room in the house is the main office of a logistics and construction firm, as evidenced by the pictures of various logistics activities: stuff being loaded on pallets onto or off a plane, trucks taking supplies someplace, a forklift, armored vehicles, etc.

I learned that the company has a contract with the European police force to provide armored vehicles. This is where money is being made from all this warmongering. A slick brochure on the table shows various kinds of armored and military vehicles appropriate for places like Afghanistan – it is much like a brochure for luxury cars, no prices. I was introduced to Lisa’s business partner, an Afghan, the one whose name appears on the firm’s business card.

The debris of the failed spa are being absorbed by the company. And so now the office also hosts a good number of spa items (towels, robes, creams, a facial machine, pedicure and manicure equipment). All this, including a massage table that can be curtained off with pieces of cloth, is squeezed in between the desk and the door to the kitchen. It is an odd combination of a very male and very female business, all jumbled together.

If I wanted to I could buy US army backpack (camouflage model), a matching helmet and flak jacket, various types of cellphone holsters (black leather or camouflage cloth), chargers but also Cuban cigars (50% off this month), semi-precious stones, jewelry and probably more.

A plaque on the wall congratulates Jose (husband? Other business partner?) with two years of faithful service to the Afghanistan program of a large supplier to the US army (food stuffs). So maybe, after all, hubby Joe is not with the CIA. He is in Iraq, I am told; maybe feeding the army there, earning another plaque.

The next room is the kitchen, about the same size as the office with a big table in the middle that also serves as a hairdresser’s desk and a place for a manicure. Two enormous cans that can feed an army unit are sitting on a cupboard: vanilla pudding in one and mixed vegetables in the other. A wholesale box of Starbucks coffee is stored on top of the refrigerator and the rest of the kitchen is a jumble of heaters, water coolers, air purifiers and air humidifiers, plus a few odds and ends.

The next space is for storage and has a small bathroom on the side; after that is a small bedroom, dominated by an enormous bed, a safe (money is being made and banks not to be trusted?) and more curtained storage space, clothes hanging from the exposed I-beams, tennis rackets and a thousand other odds and ends. A massage table was set up for me in this place. It was toasty warm because of the space heaters.

This is the temporary spa while bigger quarters are being sought. I was amazed how much spa business was taking place between the armored car, food, clothing, gem and cigar sales. There were three clients (me for a massage, a UN lady who came to celebrate her 60th with a massage, manicure, pedicure and hair coloring, and another person for a massage, two masseuses, one helper (the one who slit open Janneke’s toe some weeks ago) and the hairdresser. The chief of the logistics enterprise wandered in and out.

I was a bit chaotic and crowded but money was being made, which is, after all, the main idea.

In another meeting today, during which much was said but even more left unsaid I pondered about how much time and effort is spent on things that, in the end, don’t improve much on the statusquo. I think it is a fact of organizational life that is rarely acknowledged, or maybe only acknowledged by people who feel useless. But most of us keep up the illusion that, because it should, everything actually is purposeful and productive; that action A leads to B and if not, adding C will help.

I discovered that something we spent a lot of time and energy on a few weeks ago did, in the end, keep things just as they were and life continues as if none of that happened. Was I the only one who noticed? It is interesting to go over to do lists from months ago and see how many of the things that were critical and high priority and took much of our time then have simply become blips on a screen and disappeared.

Does this mean we are wasting much time, money, or energy (and someone will one day call us to task?) Or is this simply part of organizational slack time – the time in between times of tension and stretch? Normal, to be expected and good for our psychological health. There’s comfort in slack.

The short and slackful week is over now. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day which we will celebrate à deux with a stuffed chicken. Axel went shopping and decided that the 25 pound and pricey frozen Butterball Turkey was a bit much. But he got most anything else for making a Thanksgiving meal.

We explained the thanksgiving tradition to our Afghan colleagues. The Dari translation suggests it is a religious holiday and the thanks are for God. That was probably true at the time but that thanks were given to people who were then subsequently killed off or marginalized is more difficult to explain. At any rate, they like the long weekend this holiday creates, just four days after a week long holiday. Now that is real slack!

My workday today consisted of 5 hours in traffic and two meetings of two hours each. I once wrote a poem about being in a traffic jam (It is seven on the highway/I am inching on new asphalt/While an energy crisis is cooking/In the not too distant future/And something big and powerful/Wells up inside of me/Just when the radio announcer/Talks about spirituality/“what’s that precisely?”/I think and, “what’s it got to do with/New roads and power grids?”/And I am sad/Because I want to do well/But I am stuck in a traffic jam.)

Two of my favorite quotes came to mind as I was digesting today’s meetings, the first one in particular:

‘By not understanding human behavior organizations unwittingly go to great lengths to create their own crises’ (James Scarnati), and
‘All problems I have with my fellow men stem from two things: I don’t say what I mean and I don’t mean what I say.’ (Martin Buber).

I watched in consternation as various parties to a complex hospital challenge kept harping at what the other had not done to make the hospital work. There was little evidence of systems thinking in the room and much defensiveness. All the talk was problem driven.

I made a few feeble interventions suggesting a shift in perspective and tackling the challenge by starting with a shared vision, but no one (in a position of authority) picked it up.

I know that it is hard for people who have never experienced what it is like to create a shared vision, to be swayed by words describing it. For many the word ‘vision’ is too fluffy (and maybe not manly enough?). Instead everyone went for the creation of a committee, developing terms of reference, coming up with recommendations. In the self-imposed urgency, which is understandable but arbitrary, roads to creative responses are blocked or hidden from view. Everyone is reverting back to the default: a committee.

And now, oh such irony, I find myself part of this committee which will meet every day between now and December 2nd when the solution or recommendations are due.

Funny that on the way to and from the ministry we talked about the transformation of Kabul by its new mayor, who appears to be led by a vision and had brought many people along with him. He is standing up to bureaucrats who are trying to trip him (saying, let me clean up and fix Kabul first and then you can tie me up).

I am told by an insider in the mayor’s office that he is working with the same staff and pay grades as his predecessor yet people actually get things done (and we are there to witness). The paradox is that the work is aspiration-driven while in the process many problems are solved.

I dreamed about Hammourabi, not the Mesopotamian King, but his name which, in my dream, I translated dutifully from Persian into English as Blue Fish, from the words ‘hammour’ and ‘abi.’ Hammour is a fish and ‘abi’ means blue in Farsi. How’s that for continuous and unconscious language acquisition?

After a dream like this I marvel at the random firing of my neurons. Just to be on the safe side, in case this was a message from yonder, I googled hammour and hammourabi and learned that a hammour is a grouper, a member of the Sea Bass family. I ate hammour a few times during our stay in Dubai.

As for Hammourabi, he’s the one who authored an enlightened legal code (‘Code d’Hammourabi,’ one of the oldest legal texts known to us (1750 BC), carved on a basalt stelae). From Wikipedia I learned that he believed the builder of a house that collapsed on its resident should be put to death; and if the son of the resident was killed the builder’s son should be killed. But if a slave was killed a new slave should simply be provided.

In the end, not being able to find any significant message in my Hammourabi research, I decided it was just my brain getting back into gear for Dari class, later today.

In my Dari class I finally finished the Chinese fairy tale I started reading before our Dubai trip. The good thing about fairy tales is that there is a lot of repetition and so the reading and understanding speeds up as the story unfolds.

The language center is located in a modest building, sparsely lit by single fluorescent light bulbs and barely heated by tiny traditional diesel and wood stoves. This makes reading and focusing increasingly difficult when daylights starts to fade and, with it, the temperature drops. We will have to bring woolen socks and layers of extra clothing now that winter has arrived.

Also at the language center I discovered today that squat toilets are too much of a challenge for my recovering knee. I sometimes wonder how old people and not so old people with bad knees manage these basic routines (even if there was no arthroscopic intervention) in this part of the world. It is probably a lifetime of squatting that makes it possible for them to eat, sleep and do their business at any age without the agony that we joint-challenged westerners have.

We are back in Kabul. We left Dubai in the middle of the night and arrived just in time to see the sugar-like dusting on the mountains in the pink and orange glow of the rising sun. It was beautiful in a way that Dubai can never be beautiful.

It was cold, just above freezing, but I was snug in my thick woolen shawl with which I have to cover myself again.

Having missed the entire night we weren’t worth much and took a long nap while the stoves were being lit to take the chill out of our concrete house, shopping done, and dinner prepared, apple pie – welcome home.

Axel had mixed feelings about going back, mostly because of the unclear job situation.

We spent the evening sorting out the bills for our Dubai adventure. As a reward for this painful process (oh the dinner bills!) we watched one episode of the new modern day Sherlock Holmes while I icepacked my knee and wrist, neither one quite as I want them to be. The doctor said ‘wait and see.’ There is no choice. I will keep on taking the anti-inflammatory and anti pain pills in the hope that the chemicals will speed up the recovery process.

I spent hours today sitting by the window of Axel’s 5th floor hospital room, first while he was in surgery and then during his recovery. The private patient room could as well have been in a luxury hotel; medical tourism indeed. It has an enormous plasma TV screen, a couch that can become a queen size bed in case I want to spend the night here. The headboard of the hospital bed has all the bells and whistles that an Afghan nurse can’t even imagine in his or her wildest dreams.

Seeing Axel lying on a hospital bed in his johnny flooded me with memories from a little over three years ago; a not very pleasant sensation. With a heavy heart I handed him over, early in the morning, to a cheerful multi-national crew. They went to great lengths to put me at ease.

It appears that only those at the top of the pecking order are allowed to individualize their hospital uniform caps – the OR nurse with a colorful geometric pattern and the anesthesiologist with a football (soccer) motif. The Bangladeshi orderlies were all dressed the same, with disposable rather than cotton caps. The Lebanese surgeon wore a disposable paper hairnet which made him hard to recognize.

Just when I was about to start worrying, two and a half hours after I left him in the pre-surgery bay, he was wheeled back in the room, dazed and sore and with an oxygen mask. The nurse handed me a biohazard bag with a small container with what looked like mung beans in soy sauce. They were the offending gall stones in bile.

I took a picture (just in case anyone wanted to see them) and then threw them out in the biohazard waste container. It was pretty gross. Two hours later I fed him cherry jello, apple juice and lukewarm bouillon and myself a lovely zatar (wild thyme), tomato and beet salad with hummus on the side.

At about 4 PM I left him in the care of the Philippina nurse and went to see my surgeon who confirmed that I have indeed a tear in the cartelage of my right knee. As a general surgeon he will fix both my left wrist and my right knee – the reverse of the two operations I have undergone earlier in the last 5 years. I will be on crutches for 10 days which means I will return with them to Afghanistan.

Axel will stay overnight on the suggestion of the physician (but maybe also on the suggestion of the hospital administrator – the place looked decidedly underutilized). After a romantic hospital diner a deux I returned to our apartment to say goodbye to Anne and Chuck and pack up.

Tomorrow we have to change apartments in between Axel’s release from the hospital and my chat with the anesthesiologist, blood work and other surgery prep. Then I will be the patient.

I wrote my entry for today in the plane, high above Iran, going from one world to another. I had much time to read.

After some 300 pages in Obama’s Wars the president still hasn’t made the speech to the American people about the troop commitment to Afghanistan of about a year ago. He is still meeting for hours, and watching military powerpoints. It is fascinating, though utterly confusing, to read about the discussions in the American military-political stratosphere, high above the clouds for someone who is living far below the clouds, with everything above my head opaque.

Over the last year we have been summoned more than once to the embassy compound to hear then this then that strategy, with all the new vocabulary that goes with it. It was always communicated to us, by civilians. With Woodward’s revelations about the skirmishes between the military brass and the Obama entourage I realize that the opaqueness was effective – little did we know.

One sign that the consensus was fragile at best were the frequent changes of what was important. Were we trying to eliminate the Al Qaeda leadership? Defeating or disturbing the Taliban? Which Taliban? There was COIN (Counter Insurgency) combined or not with nation building (no-nos for Obama because it can’t be done anytime fast), then Quick Impact, to be realized according to a sequence of commands: clear, hold, build, transfer.’ I think there was a fifth command but we didn’t have time to learn the words by heart. All I remember was that our part in this strategy concerned the building and transferring.

Sometime in March and April we were all ordered to look at some 80 districts along the ‘ring around Afghanistan’ in an attempt to promote the free movements of goods and help the economy by liberating and securing the districts along this road.

For us that meant assisting the district health officers wherever they existed to better manage health care delivery so that the population would notice that the government cared – a tall order that turned out to be misguided since the government is not only perceived to be corrupt, large parts of it are.

In the end we never got the exact numbers of where to put our efforts and now the districts are out of focus again and many so unsafe we couldn’t even go there if we wanted. Still, a district health assessment, considered urgent some 9 months ago, is close to being commissioned. We are always a running a little behind what Washington orders.

With each new strategy or tactic new words were introduced which made everyone scurry back to their computers to make new powerpoints and present the reality, perceived or for real, using the new words and trying to make them real, precise and practical using new diagrams and new flow charts. Luckily reality is entirely malleable and luckily we have powerpoint and armies of translators (many of them doctors who make better salaries that way) to come up with the right Dari and Pashto words.

The tying up of loose ends today got pushed to the back of the stove as new urgencies showed up on the front. In a truly collaborative and collegial effort we responded to one of our stakeholders’ rather complex request and produced desired plans and then discussed them. It took most of the day and past daylight. I was proud of the team effort.

I cleaned up my office, turned off the lights and left a Ugandan proverb on my desk about vision, for when I return.

I sorted out our pick-up tomorrow morning early to make sure all for four adults and one kid plus various suitcases will fit. Back home I handed out Eid gifts to our guesthouse staff, passed all untouched food to the guards who are having a banquet tonight, finished the mango ice cream myself and now it is time to pack and turning in early. The alarm is set for 4 AM, wheels up scheduled for 7:45. Dubai and my honey, here I come.