Sylvia's Journal

Sometimes I marvel at the complexity of our work, and the implications of what seem to be very straightforward ideas back home in the US.

Take the branding issue. We want the beneficiaries of our donations to know who paid for them (you, the US taxpayer). This means that there need to be US government stickers on the boxes with medicines that we provide to the NGO clinics in the provinces that are supported with US government funds. That’s part of the deal: we pay and the Afghans get to see our good deeds and be grateful. (Funny, now that I think of it, US arms don’t need stickers or do they?)

But when being associated with America becomes a liability and truck drivers get kidnapped and their loads confiscated, this was no longer a good idea and we needed a waiver. So we got the waiver, which is, by the way, not at all easy to get.

And then there is the branding on the health facilities. It became soon clear that the US flag needed to be removed, no matter how patriotic we felt, from the entrance signs of health clinics.

The services are provided by NGOs, they do this on behalf of the Afghan government – they signed contracts to that effect and it is part of the deal. But in some places, even being associated with the Afghan government became a liability and some of the (mostly local) NGOs were balking at this requirement, stating that they are providing humanitarian rather than government services.

But this is how it works: the NGOs get grants from the US government which are channelled through the Afghan government. The idea is to show that the Afghan government cares for peoples’ health and provides services, however indirectly by way of these NGOs. It’s called government stewardship and contracting out. It’s a model that has worked fairly well in this country.

But enforcement of ‘serving on behalf of the government’ is hard to enforce. First many places are too dangerous to get to and second, if the NGO stopped serving people they would get even madder than they already are. It’s a bit of a pickle.

It gets even more complicated because the prescription pads, registers and other signs in the clinics say nothing about the Afghan government (or US government for that matter) and bear the logos of the NGOS. So should we be replacing all the prescription pads, internal signs, registration books? They should have the government logo on them and be provided by the government, but that is a logistical nightmare of untold proportions – what if they run out of the registration books, then patients don’t get registered and then we won’t know what is really happening on the ground. If you follow this thread for a while it gets hopelessly tangled.

In the end the big idea is that the Afghans will turn away from the insurgents and towards the government. It is of course a hypothesis of major proportions that has so far not been confirmed. So if we wanted to test it, confirm or disconfirm, we should ask the patients exiting the health facility. So let’s assume a fictitious patient leaving the clinic in a district in, say, Ghazni, an increasingly turbulent place. We approach him or her and ask, ‘Who attended to you today?’ How likely is it that they would say, ‘Oh, it was the Afghan government.’

We are all pretty sure that the patient walking out of the clinic would say, it was the doctor (nurse, pharmacist) who attended to my health needs. These patients would have no inkling about the thousands of processes and millions of hours of labor, combined efforts of the US and Afghan governments, that made this encounter with the Afghan health system possible. They would have no idea at all.

I dreamt last night that I lost Axel, in a crowd, couldn’t pick out his blue and black jacket – from then until I woke up I wandered around in my dream world, looking for him – the alarm brought him back to me. Small victories, huge relief.

During the workday I nearly got lost myself in the paper mass that accompanies the annual performance review process. Today the rubber hit the road as I gave my first ‘not met expectations’ judgment, quickly followed by two more. I knew I was going against the grain of this society which prefers politeness over honesty (as I see it) or, as they see it, over directness. What I considered blatant under performance was called ‘met expectations.’ People are hedging their bets. You never know what will happen in the future and so it is better to not make enemies – there are enough of them here already, why risk making more. Your underperforming colleague can one day become your boss.

It is safer to say that a colleague met expectations and so I am finding the term ‘expectations’ rather meaningless; they are all over the map. Except those of my boss who I seemed to have disappointed. I think he expected some magic tricks from me about changing the behaviour of top officials – I am thinking as hard as I can how I can lead horses to water AND make them drink. So far I haven’t come up with anything good. It’s not for lack of trying.

The paperwork and the performance interviews filled another 11 hour workday (but I am done now, with all 27 of them). As a result I have fallen hopelessly behind in processing emails, replying, deleting, reading and whatnot and have reached a point where I am not even trying anymore. Sometimes I am just trying to be too good, too efficient, too organized in a place that is all but that. It is also not something I am being judged on. I am being judged on whether the management and leadership capacity of people at the central and provincial ministry offices has improved. My biggest challenge, aside from doing just that, is figuring out how I could demonstrate that I have been successful, if ever I could.

I felt my frustrations mounting as the hours ticked by and the people wanting things from me (now) kept reminding me. But then, reading the local newspaper on the way home, everything was put right back in its place: ‘girls school bombed, 80% destroyed in Ghazni.’ ‘Governor and police chief in Nuristan not on post of months and selling food donations in the market for cheap, not only depriving the intended beneficiaries of their food but also undercutting farmers trying to sell their stuff at real cost.’ And someone doing work for us has been caught undermining the very ethical behaviour we are trying to model.

Although a war metaphor is not something I like to use, I can’t think of anything else than soldiering on.

Picking up language lessons again – constructions that express probability, possibility or presumption in the past tense…my head is spinning. It is also spinning because I spent the last 3 hours reviewing our last year’s workplan – a level of detail that causes me great stress, but since I have to live with the plan for the next year, I have to bite through the tediousness of it all.

Physical therapy this morning. When I entered the women’s physio room it was very quiet, somber even, where usually I find it filled with laughter, women amongst each other, no fear. The place was filled with women in pain this time – old looking women, probably younger than me, but who had suffered through a lifetime of sorrow and countless pregnancies no doubt. Swollen arms and legs, aching lower backs. A lot of moaning.

I bought Sita some more house-warming curtains, upon request, in the fancy boutique downtown. I also bought myself a beautifully embroidered see-through blouse. Axel was surprised, “you can’t wear that here.” True, but I am not going to spend the rest of my life in Afghanistan – now I am, but not forever (I think now). At some point I expect to be back in a society where I can expose arms, legs, neck, hair. Question: who else is buying all these see-through blouses? For indoor maybe?

How much difference a week makes! Fruits have arrived from the south and the east (Pakistan I suppose). Along the streets there are vendors with their carts full of ripe and juicy mangos, melons, cherries, apricots and other fruits I associate with midsummer.

I slept 12 hours and it still wasn’t enough; I still feel a little shaky. We stayed in our jammies most of the morning, foregoing our usual walk in Bagh-e-bala or elsewhere. It is nice to be home and today I didn’t mind our limited freedom.

I am finishing Malalai Joya’s book (A Woman Among Warlords). I don’t care that much about the book, its writing more than a little akward, but I am in awe of her courage. and wished I could watch the Iron-Jawed Angels movie with her, to show her that she is following in the footsteps of many aunties elsewhere in the world. They all risked life and limb, as Malalai does, fighting for justice.

I wish I knew how to support her. The only way I can think of right now is to help pull the women I meet and work with out of their lethargy and passiveness if they haven’t already done so on their own; to encourage them to change from victim to agent. There is much fear (not unsubstantiated) and becoming a (female) agent in this society is no small matter. But there are already many; if and when they connect they can really be a force for change.

We have a new female staff member, Chris, who is from Australia. She will be the first and only female Program Manager (of seven), so that will make two of us in our weekly meeting of directors and program managers. I told my male colleagues that this is just the beginning and that, before they realized it, we would outnumber them. Ha, the infiltration has begun!

Although it was supposed to be a day of rest I am so far behind in reading my mail that I had to sit at least some time behind the computer, catching up, doing expense reports, reading CVs of people I am supposed to interview and finish the performance reviews that are all behind schedule.

Axel was also working, also in his jammies, and concluded at the end of the day that working is hard work. He got what he wanted, a real job, but now he’s got to do the job.

We had dinner in front of the TV and watched, for a very brief moment, Afghan child idol, an awful show with awful children singing awful songs, before we switched to watching House on Axel’s computer. He downloaded 16 episodes. After watching two House episodes his awfulness started to get at me.

We found our two gates, one for people on foot and the other for cars, to be reinforced with a quarter inch of steel plate. All the guesthouses are fortified like this as well as our office compound entrance gates. It worries me a bit. Is this in reaction to something I should know about? Or an after the fact move (the compound in Kandahar inhabited by contractors was destroyed because a car full of explosive drove through the gate)? Or is it because our operations chief is moving back to the US next month and wants to make sure everything is in order when he leaves? This is how the attacks on our minds are more severe than the real ones. We are separated by ever more steel from Afghan society.

Another piece of steel, in the form of a water tank, was hoisted, we don’t know how, on the roof while we were away. This is to provide a back-up, I suppose, when the summer drought kicks in, as it always does, in a couple of months.

Right now everyone acts as if there is no water problem here. Dusty roads are sprayed with water to keep the dust down; the cook, after he changes from his western clothes into his Afghan outfit at the end of his workday, always washes his car with plenty of water. He rides out of our gate dressed to the nines in a spotless car.

The guards scrub the terrace every morning and afternoon like only Dutch housewives can do better, but in Holland water is never a problem. And then there is the garden: the roses and the grass get a good hosing at least twice a day now that it is getting warmer.

I am sitting on the clean-scrubbed, but dusty again, terrace overlooking our neat suburban garden. The roses past their bloom have been cut, we now have snapdragons and calendulas planted in the open spaces between the roses, the stock is showing its first buds and a few tiny lettuce plants, inherited from the previous occupants of our house, have grown until full heads of lettuce. There is a little tomato volunteer that the gardener is treating like a king(let).

Axel is off to SOLA, refreshed from a long nap. I took a nap too and am trying to catch up on email so that I can make the best use of my one day in the office before I head out again on Friday. This very quick trip to the US was, until last week, considered plan B. It seems plan B is now activated. Plan A, my Afghan colleagues going to the US, appears to have been discarded. Still, I put in one last ditch effort to get my Congressman and Senator involved in the process that was supposed to have provided the two of them with visas to the US. With only 4 workdays left we don’t think there’s much of a chance. Hence the plan B.