Sylvia's Journal

My army physical therapist was called to go on a trip someplace and so, once again, I skipped my weekly PT session. My PT visits are now so infrequent that I might as well do without them. I have asked my US-based shoulder surgeon to review my Beirut MRI and interpret it, but so far I have not heard a thing and so I muddle along with exercises that may not be the right ones.

It was another beautiful summer day in Kabul. We had breakfast outside and enjoyed watching the roses open up right in front of our eyes. At noon we joined Pia for lunch in the overpriced Lebanese restaurant that was a far cry from our seaside eating experiences in Lebanon: no views (other than barbed wire and blast walls), and no bottle of chilled white wine. The food was good though.

Since the raids on alcohol serving establishments over a week ago it is not so easy to get a glass of something with lunch or dinner. There is no mention anymore of alcohol on the menu, so we asked. Yes, there was wine (red only) and beer and would we mind that it was served in a tea mug? We didn’t but drinking wine that way does take away from the pleasure and I am not sure it is worth the hefty price that alcohol now commands.

We went straight to our Dari classes. They seem to depress Axel these days as he feels he makes little progress and all sorts of unpleasant childhood memories about learning another language are activated. This is too bad as there is no better way to learn Dari than in the circumstances in which we find ourselves – plenty of practice with drivers, cooks, household help and all.

Back home we had a visit from driver Fazle who is also the coach of many of Afghanistan’s soccer teams. A colleague had sent a huge duffel bag full of cleats, shin guards, jerseys, socks, shorts and what not; it is supposed to go to the women’s soccer teams but many of the supplies are rather large for women. He promised he would take everything first to the girls – to take what fits, and only then would he go to the boys. Here, you never know for sure that the girls get served; they are after all second hand citizens. I gave Fazle my camera, saying I expect pictures.

Today we went into Afghanistan. This may sound strange but being in Kabul is not quite being in Afghanistan. Unlike Kabul, not a pretty city, the country side of Afghanistan is stunningly beautiful. The visible traces of violence, and destruction that have marred this magnificent place make your heart ache.

We had been cleared by our security folks to go to Istalef which is about 50 km north of Kabul on the Shamali plain along the road that takes travellers to about one third of all the provinces north of Kabul. It is the road to the Panshir, to the Salang Pass, further north to Mazar-e-Sharif. It is where the Bagram airbase is located. Because of this the Shamali plains are strategic and so there has often been heavy fighting in this area, all through history.

From a distance Istalef looks like a green patch that was slapped against the side of the brown mountains, halfway between the flatland of the plains and the enormous and ragged snow-covered peaks. This makes it look small and insignificant. But it never was, mostly because of its strategic location; you can see far north and south from the village and so everyone wanted it.

Massoud had his headquarters up there some time. There is a French connection (Massoud attended the French Lycee Istiqlal in Kabul and received is first publicity from the French government and press). We passed by the ‘ecole mixte’ and saw many other signs of projects that have a picture of the French flag and Dari translated into French.

We drove up to a place in the shade for our picnic. One of our guards who lives nearby, arrived on his motorcycle with his cousin. They brought a large pot of homemade yogurt, something for which Istalef is well known. The guards bought fresh bread, some of it filled with dal, potato and sweet potato, in the village and everyone shared with everyone.

I had tried to organize our party (several of my male colleagues) to share the task of preparing a picnic but no one had bothered and so everyone ate what I had brought. Axel had to agree that this was a male thing – men have wives who prepare such things, and I happened to be the only wife around.

After our picnic we walked up to the roof of the still bombed out hotel where four years ago Sita and I also had a picnic with our MSH colleagues who then lived here. I am glad that Axel also got to see the place. Now only Tessa hasn’t been here. Come on over Tess!

You need a little bit of imagination to look past the crater, the blackened or collapsed walls and the bricked up windows to see the fantasy place this could be. The roof also serves as a huge terrace with breathtaking views in all directions over the plain, framed by spectacular and high mountains.

Below is we could see a small stream where cars were washed, and children were playing in the water. Yet all around this idyllic scene are the remains of mud-brick houses that were destroyed by aerial attacks and heavy mortar.

The hotel itself has never recovered except for the garden that is lovingly tended by the gardener who lives amidst the debris in a greenhouse made from plastic. His roses could win prizes in garden shows in England.
Other than yogurt, Istalef is also famous for its turquoise and brown pottery.

We spent quite a bit of time walking up and down the main street looking for the perfect pieces of the somewhat brittle pottery. I haggled about the prices in my best Dari and we are now the proud owners of several small and large bowls, including some dishes from which to eat the famous yogurt and a pot in which to make it.

I am progressing well in my Dari book. I have four more chapters to go which qualifies me for holding all sorts of conversations with Dari speakers about everything but specialized and technical matters. The drivers, guards, cook and housekeeper have stopped talking to me in their broken English. Now I am speaking with them in broken Dari – and we more or less understand each other. There’s nothing like total immersion.

Today I learned the names of the months. They are the names of the zodiac and so the seasons and months are aligned, unlike in our Gregorian calendar. We are now in the year 1389 and in the month of soar which means Taurus and my birthday is in the month of qaos, or Sagittarius. All morning I practiced them with the driver and I think I have mastered them now.

After my Dari class I joined Axel at the Flower Street cafe which was mostly occupied by young foreigners intently gazing at their laptops. The Flower Street Cafe has wireless internet as well as good cappuccino and sandwiches. This attracts a particular crowd that doesn’t include many Afghans.

After lunch we picked up our pretend beer that now tastes as good as the real thing, at the New Rose Supermarket in Shar-e-nao. Next and last stop was Ibrahim’s shop off Chicken Street to buy a wedding present for my nephew and his bride. Coming from Afghanistan what else but a carpet to bring as a gift? Ibrahim took down rug after rug from a pile of the most beautiful things, each more interesting than the previous one.

The beauty of the handicraft that are made in this part of the world never cease to amaze me. Axel and I don’t have exactly the same taste but we finally agreed on a Yomut (or Yamoud) rug that comes from Herat where this particular group of Turkmen settled. Back home we unfolded the rug on our terrace and Axel photographed it from the balcony. We will ask the mother of the groom whether we picked the right thing.

Today was all about alignment, or rather, mis or non alignment. Sometimes, in our eagerness to show results or do something (don’t just sit there but do something) we plough ahead leaving those who we are supposed to bring along, behind, chewing on the goodies (trips, per diem, certificates, uniforms, badges, pins, bags) given to them and eventually forgetting all about what they were supposed to do, or even care about. And then we get upset because they don’t seem to care at all, or don’t have the same excitement that we have for whatever it is we are trying to accomplish.

Lots of stuff that is in development plans ends up this way; it gives development a bad rap. This is particularly true for training. And so today was about figuring out how to get people along; how to pass ownership from us to them. There is a common misconception that you can make someone ‘own’ something. I have never seen it happen. I have gotten very good at spotting when that transfer of ownership doesn’t spontaneously take place.

For me the signals are clear. When something remains ‘unclear’ or feet are dragging, work plan upon work plan, strategy upon strategy is developed, meeting after meeting takes place and nothing significantly changes, it’s sure sign that someone in a position of power hasn’t ‘bought in.’ And nothing is owned without buying it first. And nothing is bought without someone selling.

So that brings us back to selling, which is what we do. We sell expertise, we sell solutions, we sell advice, and sometimes we sell hope and encouragement. It’s a very difficult job under any circumstance. Today was one of those days.

A four-day workweek is a good thing, it is weekend now. I can go home in good conscience now that it seems that our hapless travellers are returning home from Dubai in the early morning hours tomorrow; with, I am told, their suitcases.

The whole day was inside work, that is, the work of managing and leading applied to myself and my team. Some days and weeks are all outside work, when I spent most of my working hours at the ministry. The good thing about inside work is that I don’t need to drive across town and be stuck in traffic; the bad thing is that it doesn’t feel all that productive.

I woke up with a sharp pain in my arm yesterday morning and discovered what looked like a 1 inch cut or narrow blister. I did not remember hurting myself and was puzzled. It may have been a small cut or puncture that I never noticed and got infected. And so I asked one of the myriad of doctors who surround me all day what to do.

I was proud to show that I had put lots of anti biotic cream on the wound and bandaged it. But doctor Steve told me to use the ancient wisdom of what to do with infections: hot compresses. The heat mobilizes the white blood cells to attack the enemy. It is the equivalent of the Afghan National Army squelching internal disturbances; the international military forces would be more like the expensive and not always effective (and addictive) antibiotics.

To my great surprise the wound immediately started to get better, no more itching or tenderness (although it is coming back as Ii write this – hot compresses are needed for a while, the doctor told me).

Our hapless travellers in Dubai have still not come to the end of their agony. We had booked them on the afternoon flight back to Kabul but now their suitcases are lots in the mayhem in Dubai. And so their troubles are not over. I am collecting Dari proverbs with which to soothe them when they come back. A nice meal may also be required. I wonder if they ever want to go to an international conference again.

Our cook is using the bilingual cookbook and the meals are getting more interesting. The act of cooking is also more interesting as the electrician installed new lights that have turned our poorly lit kitchen (we needed a flashlight to check what was cooking in the oven) into something akin to a surgical ward.

We also now have fans to move the air around because we cannot open the (unscreened) doors because of the multitude of flies. We are beginning to wonder whether having a house near a rather polluted trickle of a stream may have been a bad decision. Flies like heat, like the bacteria and the white blood cells that will kill them, hopefully soon.

The first roses are out of the bushes that were planted last October, the first act of fixing our house. Bags of cement are heaped on top of each other by the front gate. This is to ‘sanitize and prettify’ the area in front of our house wall.

It is now a strip of broken tiles, soil and dog poop, probably teeming with fleas and other creatures that accompany the many stray, motherless and unwanted dogs that have selected our wall as their home. They are the kind of dogs that people throw stones at and that would keep me from walking out of our gate, if we would be allowed to do so. They are filthy and make a ruckus day and night. I am not enough of a dog lover to take them on as a project.

Stray dogs like this these are occasionally removed by municipal health officers who give them meat laced with strychnine. One of the provincial health teams that we support in the north had taken this dog problem on as a (minor) public health challenge, mostly because of the dog bites that show up at health facilities.

We always insist that such management and leadership projects produce measurable results. They took pictures of the dead dogs and had a graph showing that the number of patients with dog bites who presented themselves at the hospital had been reduced from 40 to 0 a week. The result was compelling albeit it not one that made a huge public health impact. Still it was good for the kids that would have been bitten.

Our garden furniture arrangement is now complete with glass table tops Axel bought yesterday. I sit outside on the veranda as much as I can: early morning waiting for the car and after I get home – our peaceful existence here stands in such contrast with the recent violence in Kandahar.

I spent this morning in my office attending to supervisory work, the annual performance evaluation process. It is a new task for me who has hardly ever supervised staff. I like it. Unlike many of my colleagues who find the annual performance evaluation process quite annoying, an annual chore, I find it a wonderful opportunity to do the kind of coaching I like to do.

In the afternoon three of us attended the after-action-review of the strategic health retreat at the ministry. I was pleased to hear that people appreciated the design process through its result. It was the same process that they at times had resisted. My next intent is to show people an Open Space event so that they realize we don’t necessarily have to spend 6 months planning a 3 day gathering. I think I have now established enough design credibility that I can take them a little further next time.

Today we briefed our funders about what we did, what we do and what, after our project is over, should be done in the future to make sure that all the efforts take root and planted seeds turn into flowers (not the poppy variety of course). The briefing took a good chunk of the day but was probably worth it as none of us wants things to end when our project is over, some 15 months from now.

Via email I followed the travails of our hapless travellers, still stranded in Dubai. The conference starts tomorrow. When we decided, four months ago, to send two of our provincial health advisors to this conference in Geneva it seemed like a good idea. It was supposed to be a reward but now it seems more like punishment.

We are hearing conflicting stories about the European ash cloud and wonder whether our trip to Holland in three weeks might be in jeopardy. Some pessimists say it can be months before things clear up. It’s hard to imagine as here the skies are blue and full of sun. The baby grapes are no longer the size of a pin point, now easily recognizable as mini grapes, the first roses have budded and the birds are chirping as if their life depends on it.

At the office there are painters everywhere, the entire compound is getting a fresh coat of paint. I found my own small office neatly painted in an off-white colour. All the things on the wall that had finally been nailed in (with the biggest nails) had been taken down and so I am starting all over with requests to hang stuff. When your office is being painted all your furniture and stuff is taken outside where it patiently waits until the paint is dry. Bad luck if it rains!

We are getting more details of the raids on alcohol-serving establishments in Kabul, last week. From the survival guide to Kabul we learned that….”In scenes reminiscent of the Taleban, officers armed with AK47 rifles targeted four well-known nightspots on Monday night and Tuesday morning, calling them ‘centres of immorality.’ The French owner of one of Kabul’s best-known bars was also detained. The waitresses, from an upmarket restaurant popular with diplomats, were forced to undergo intrusive medical tests to ascertain whom they might have been sleeping with, police officials said. Friends said that the women, from Eastern Europe and Central Asia, were still in shock last night.”

I guess we will have to create our own entertainment at home for awhile or eat in some of the local restaurants in our area, something we have wanted to do all along, and have a Fanta or Coke with our meal. We can do that.

We have our tickets for Frankfurt on the Safi flight of May 5. We leave at 9 AM from Kabul and will be in Germany early in the afternoon. From there we will take a rented a car to Holland. The only thing that can come between us and this trip is the ash cloud in Europe.

That same ash cloud has become the last and probably final and insurmountable obstacle for my already severely tested Afghan colleagues who simply tried to get to a conference in Geneva. They braved three trips to Islamabad, crossed borders without a passport, an arrest in Islamabad and now this. After all their trials and tribulations they have finally been halted by ash, such bad luck.

Oblivious to Europe’s ashes we spent most of the morning getting the best price for our trip to Holland, still a 2000 dollar price tag, but about 1000 dollars less than what we initially calculated. Although Axel complains about the time it took us to get our fare and reservations, I think it was worth it.

I skipped my usual PT session because I had timed things wrong. I have made an appointment with Leslie, the embedded American Navy PT who will interpret my MRI report from Beirut and maybe fine-tune my exercises. I am in much pain again from an inflammation somewhere in the shoulder joint.

After Dari class we were invited by an Australian couple who are relatively new in town. They brought their 3 year old along who is pining for her playmates in the Solomon Islands from where her mom moved her to join dad in Kabul.

The dad left Holland for Australia when he was very young and remembers the 6 week boat trip as an endless ordeal of 6 weeks of sea sickness. He still speaks some Dutch. He is the second Dutch born Australian I spent time with in the last few days. His wife served us a blueberry Bavaroise on tulip plates and then lent us a spectacular cookbook written by Australian Lebanese on their ancestral cuisine (Lebanese and Syrian).

And now my five day absence from work is over. The email box is full to overflowing and there is much work to do and much to catch up with.

This Friday’s walk took us to the European or British cemetery. It is a small plot in the middle of the city with a high mudwal around it. Inside we found two gentleman who live in a small mudbrick hut amidst tall grasses and weeds, a few trees and a hundred or so head stones, some new and neatly inscribed, some smashed up and some old and unreadable.

Against the southern and northern wall plaques have been put up memorializing the 100s of troops who have died here. One both sides of the cemetery are, chiseled into marble, long list of the names of young men who got killed in Afghanistan in the last 10 years, Italians, Germans, Dutch, Brits, American. On the southern wall there are the remains of headstones from over 150 years ago when Brits were also fighting here and not doing so well. Above each stone, neatly typed out, a story of the fallen hero. Sherlock Holmes’ Watson was injured in that same war.

After our cemetery walk we checked out a new coffee house that claims to be the first and only Starbucks in Afghanistan. Inside the fairly new establishment, the coffee bar part of the compound, we found large bags of Starbucks coffee next to neatly arranged coffee cups and glasses with the logo of Starbucks, printed on paper, cut out and pasted on. It looked very real from a distance. We had cappuccino, latte, espresso and Black forest cake that came from the Serena hotel, an off limits place for us.

Afterwards we drove to the main shopping street in old Kabul and wandered along small stalls watching what ordinary Afghans do when in town, while they watched us as if we came from outer space (not many tourists here). We bought something that looked like a scallion pan cake, deep fried, from a food stall by the side of the road; Axel declined but Steve, Alison (who is here on a mission for a sister project) and I threw all the warning about not eating street food to the wind. So far we are doing OK; we all thought it was well worth the risk.

I bought one ‘seer’ (about 7 kilo) of kapok to fill the pillows that I have made from the embroidered and patchwork textiles that I bought last week off Chicken Street. Today I turned all these into 6 pillows. I am quite pleased with my handiwork.

While stuffing the pillows with the kapok that comes in industrial-size bags I practiced my Dari with the day guard. When I heard something come by the house playing a tune I asked whether it was the ice cream man. It was! I asked the guard whether he liked ice cream (he did) and before I knew it he had gone out and bought Axel and me a partially melted Herat ice cream bar. It seems that the cooling mechanism of the tiny hand-driven ice cream cart was not working all that well and so we had to eat the ice cream as quick as we could.

For dinner Axel prepared an Afghan variant of fajitas and invited 6 people over to eat them with us. The talk of the town was the raid on several of the alcohol-serving restaurants last night. For those who need their beer and wine such raids put a damper on the fun of being in Kabul. We are learning to live quite happily without alcohol but occasional visits to these restaurants have been a treat. It seems some of them are now closed for awhile and also had their alcohol supply confiscated. One can only imagine where that went.