Sylvia's Journal

Just when I was reading about a drug kingpin and Taliban financier who is in a Manhattan jail (probably better than an Afghan one) and reaching the 4 kilometres on the elliptical machine I received a call from Sonia. Sonia was supposed to go to ninth grade in an American girls’ school next fall, something she had arranged on her own.

She had been accepted with a full scholarship and all expenses paid. Steve and I visited Sonia at her uncle’s house, met her mother and grandmother to make sure that Sonia had full family support. I was going to introduce Sonia to the people at the school where Axel teaches to meet other kids who will go to a US high school or college and start the preparations.

I had tried to reach her the last few weeks. She had been with relatives in Ghazni. The relatives got wind of the plans and threatened her father with something akin to ostracism from the family – a death sentence in this culture. And so Sonia will not go to school in America. Afghanistan, once again, shoots itself in the foot as far as I am concerned. I wish my Dari was good enough that I could tell each of her uncles, ‘don’t you understand that Afghanistan’s future lies with its women, young talent like Sonia, spunky, educated, committed and smart?’

Today was my first Thursday off. I didn’t quite know what to do with myself and so I did a bit of everything: knitting, reading, studying Dari, lunch with Sarah from the EU in a pricy French restaurant, and working out.

Axel picked me up and so he met Sarah, who is Italian. We discussed the troubles of the Italian staff from the only trauma hospital in the south. We all think they were framed for an alleged planned attack on Helmand’s governor’s. Sarah knows the war surgeon and wonders where the staff were taken. I can’t help but think that somebody is trying to get money – the Italians are known to have paid hefty ransoms in the past.

After lunch our driver Haji Safar took us to a semi-outdoor furniture market to get the locally produced rope furniture to complete our sitting arrangements in the yard. Except for the glass table tops we are really settled now.

The continuing drama of getting our colleagues to Switzerland is unfolding in ways that are unthinkable anywhere else in the world. I thought the last obstacle was getting out of Kandahar where fighting broke out that killed several people, including a 22 year old girl, staff member of our friend Pia. Our doctor got out unharmed but warned us that his frequent comings and goings through Kandahar airport is being noticed and he has to lie low for a while.

This afternoon I learned that the pair’s troubles weren’t over. The Pakistani police in Islamabad arrested them, asking for security documents, beyond the visa, that they didn’t have (and didn’t need) and so they were taken to the prison. In the meantime the window for picking up their Swiss visa was slowly closing (and with that their entire trip to Geneva) as the clock ticked steadily towards the weekend.

Luckily I didn’t find out until this email arrived: “after 2 hour discussion with police and pay[ing] of some money to police they discharged us and then we went to Swiss embassy and got the visa.”

I am holding my breath as there are so many other things that can go wrong between now and their arrival at the hotel in Geneva – yet, I should have faith as they have already overcome the most amazing obstacles: trips across the border without passports, a denied visa reviewed and re-granted, mayhem in Kandahar, prison in Islamabad.

Nothing is easy in this part of the world, except, as I am learning from reading Gretchen Peters’ Seeds of Terror, laundering drug money and financing the cycle of violence.

Today was jam packed with interesting speakers, lectures, and panels of Afghans and foreigners. We started off with a rather dry subject, Afghan tax law. After the lecture I was happy to know that none of it applied to us; a good thing because somehow the Afghans decided that foreigners who live here at least 150 days or thereabouts, should pay the Afghan government taxes on income earned outside this country.

Axel and my Dari teachers, a man and woman came to explain to us about friendship in the Afghan context; how one makes friends, what kinds of friendships there are and the social rules governing friendships.

A panel of expats, some of whom who had lived here for 20 year, answered several questions we had submitted the previous day. We listened to their joys of living in Afghanistan, their frustrations, how they balance work and play, what they do for play and we learned about their regrets (not spending more time with Afghans in their homes). To my surprise people do mountain bike, hike, go on walks, all things we had not expected possible (they may not be for us). I was inspired by their commitments, their knowledge of the local language, and their insights about how to be a good guest in this country.

A panel of one language teacher, an office manager and two doctors (all Afghans) told us what mistakes foreigners make, and what any foreigner should know and learn about living here. They shared with us what Afghans gossip about when they discuss foreigners, the myths that circulate about us and what they will never tell us directly. The ‘don’t blow your nose in public’ I had already learned after having done so for weeks during a cold in the fall. I also learned it is very impolite to eat an apple without offering people sitting left and right of you a bite, or a piece of any food you may be consuming.

In this and other sessions we were given tips on how to respond to and reciprocate invitations, visits, gifts and etiquette when having or attending a tea party such as where to sit and how to sit, as a woman and as a man. I am glad that I learned that women are not supposed to touch their hearts like men do when greeting because, apparently, only bad (loose?)women do that.

Most amazing were the people in our course. Two young American mothers attended with their 1 month and 3 months old infants, each carefully nursing their babies under an ingenuously designed hooped cloth contraption that allowed the private act of nursing to be done in public. I managed to knit each a pair of baby booties and one also a small hat while listening to the lectures.

I would never have expected that American families would move here with small children, but they do, despite protest from grandparents. Others we met, grandparents themselves, had flown all their offspring, babies and all, into Kabul for Easter vacation. For some people this is as much a family post as any other developing country, and for some of those kids Afghanistan is their first home.

One thing that all the people attending and teaching in this course had in common is their faith – they are part of a Christian community that has been staying here through thick and thin for 40 years. What we consider a long stay (four years) is nothing for them. Their time horizon is long: one gentleman recently left after a 40 year stay.

They lived through the hell of the Mujahedeen fight over Kabul, which totally destroyed the same neighbourhood we are now sharing. They lived through the Taliban with commanders outside their gate to check on the comings and going into their compound. They lived through kidnappings, sudden death, assassinations and much stress – but listening to their stories about being in this country one could only be inspired.

When it comes to faith they are in a way much closer to the Afghans than most other foreigners are as they know and practice what Islam is all about: surrender or submission to God’s will; this maybe why and how they survived, as a tribe, together with all the other tribes here in this wild and beautiful country.

All day I found myself in the presence of pilots, three American pilots who are here with their young families to ferry NGO staff to faraway places to do their good work. So now I can count pilots of another company among my friends which opens the door, quite literally, to fly in another cockpit someday.

They all understood the thrill of flying from Dubai to Kabul in the cockpit. If I am to cash in my present from Axel – a long weekend in Bamiyan in July – it is these guys that will probably take us there.

My colleague AB and I are following an orientation to Afghanistan course, the same Axel was so enthused about several months ago. Today I learned that we should really sleep under a bednet because there is malaria in Kabul, especially near stagnant water. Since we live on River road, the river little more than a trickle and stagnant water on the side, this may be good advice.
The malaria is not of the lethal kind that can kill you but the other kind that doesn’t kill you but that can make you miserable from time to time for the rest of your life.

In the kitchen management course I learned that chlorine kills the bacteria that are in the dust (poo dust she called it) that covers nearly all the food that is produced here, including Afghanistan’s famous dried fruits and nuts. Thus, raisins, nuts should be washed, soaked and then dried again in the oven. This makes the consumption of dried foods a little too cumbersome for my liking. I also learned that chlorine does not kill the worm eggs that hatch into the dreaded long tape worms. So Iodine is now on my shopping list.

I was pleased to learn that we can eat the yummy-looking strawberries that are sold along the road from push carts as long as we let them sit for 20 minutes in water with 5 drops of iodine per liter. That may be worth the effort.

We learned about development philosophy from a compatriot of mine whose family comes from the same town in Holland that was the home of my father’s family for several hundred years. He started his development career as a water engineer in Bangladesh. Battling water (too much of it) is something the Dutch have in common with the Bangladeshis.

We listened to a, somewhat rushed, lecture about the history of Afghanistan, accompanied by slides with neat pictures and too much text. It is time to re-read my smudged and poorly photocopied exemplar of Louis Dupree’s Afghanistan.

Some parts of the program are lectures by expats who have lived here for a long time while other parts are delivered in interview format with an expat, fluent in the local language, asking questions to an Afghan.

And so we had a chance to learn about Islam and family life from the horse’s mouth so to speak. The session about Islam was at times a little awkward when our questions could not be satisfactorily answered with other than the regurgitated answers from mullahs, especially those about sin, forgiveness and the treatment of women.

Religion and tribal customs are so firmly intertwined here that most ordinary people cannot tell them apart, leaving Islam to explain, in very convoluted ways, some of the most striking contradictions, such as why bad things happen to good people (young girls setting themselves on fire to escape abusive husbands their father’s age or small boys being used as playthings by bearded men) and good things happen to bad people (filthy rich drug and/or weapon dealers with much blood on their hands flying first class to Mecca to wash off all their sins).

Today 30 years ago we tied the knot in Dakar; me sick as a dog, a pregnant dog for that matter. Axel was deeply concerned about my health and minus six months Sita, yet wanting to celebrate. We ended up not attending our own wedding party, with a doctor at my bedside; and so we are having a small party tonight, just for the two of us at the Sufi restaurant in town.

This morning, like a miracle, Axel was downstairs and cooking before six o’clock and before I was dressed and showered. On the dining room table I found pain-au-chocolat and real croissants from the French Bakery, while he was making French toast in the kitchen. There was more: a lovely card as only Axel can create them (it’s from a new series called Afghan Textiles), a large jar of Marmite and a pair of earrings with tiny pearls and turquoise – pearl for our pearl (30 year) anniversary and turquoise because they are from Afghanistan (pearls are not).

Also included in the anniversary package was a trip for two to Bamiyan in July. How we are going to get there is not clear yet because the roads are off limits and the UN flights outrageously expensive. But hopefully by then Axel is earning money too and security might be better (this may be wishful thinking, so let me add, incha’allah).

I, on my side, had not done much about this 30th anniversary because I was too pooped and too busy to plan ahead. And so my present is a trip for two, all expenses paid, to Holland in 3 weeks. Not very original since he already knew about it, but still, a nice gift if I may say so.

Back at work the frenzy continued to get our semi-annual report finished (I am using it partially as a supervision tool which makes it a little more cumbersome and time consuming) and to get our two colleagues out the door to Switzerland now that the visa is granted on the last possible day before travel. It is all very complicated, travel wise, and there is much paperwork to complete, non refundable tickets and all and then we send them off in the hope that the visa is really there. One needs trust in ‘the system’ under such circumstances but in this part of the world there is no such thing.

And then there is the poster presentation these two men have to present in Geneva; but we dropped the ball on that since they weren’t going to go until a few days ago and now everyone discovers that the numbers don’t add up and the statistics source is wrong or incomplete and we are grasping at straws. Sometimes you just have to drop the idea of perfection.

And in the middle of this I received an email from one of actors in this drama who is from Kandahar (and is supposed to fly to Kabul tomorrow and then onwards to Islamabad, Dubai, Doha, Geneva). He wrote: Dear all, from 12 o’clock until now there is heavy fighting and blasts around Kandahar national security headquarter. One heavy blast heard. All Provincial Health Office staff and clients are in the big corridor. Doors and windows are open; until now not any casualty report. Best regards.

Thirty minutes later another report: Dear all, The fighting stopped , 6 wounded transferred to Mirwais Hospital, traffic started again on main roads. The AOG (Armed Opposition Groups, i.e. the bad guys) were located in Girl school and started firing on provincial Security headquarter which is adjacent to this school, the details is not clear. Best regards.

Life resumes, always.

On purpose I had ignored my accumulating work over the weekend and so today I paid the price. It was one breathless long day, from 7:00 AM till 6:30 PM. I had hoped to interrupt my day at noon time and go home for lunch; a habit I have not yet developed even though there is no reason not to (other people do). But I picked the one day that Axel was not home at lunch time.

I am now sitting in my jammies at home; dinner is over, elliptical exercise done, shoulder exercises done, Turkish coffee (3 cups) finished, with knitting on my right side and Hofstede’s Software of the Mind on the other side. There is so much I want to do in the few hours before bedtime that I cram everything together, doing nothing quite the way I want.

I am beginning to wonder if my decision of having a four-day workweek simply means stashing 5 days work into 4 days. I can see how easy it would be to make exceptions and do (first a little, then) some work on my Thursday off.

While I am writing I am also Skyp-chatting with one of my team members who is in Yogyakarta at the moment on a study tour. I encouraged him to see the Borobudur temple that I did not visit when I was there in 1991 because I thought I would be back a few months later with more time. I never did go back. Regrets. What regrets will I leave Afghanistan with?

Saturday is physical therapy day, if I can help it. I showed my PT the diagnostic report from the American University Hospital MRI doc and ask for a translation in plain English. I wanted to know first of all if the report contained good news or bad news.

The good news was that the smaller of the two tears, the infraspinatus, had healed well, which meant that a few exercises were no longer needed. But the larger tear had not healed all that well and inflammation explained my recent problems. This meant new execises.

While the PT was attending to me all the other ladies in the room were watching our every movement with great interest. You could see them wonder, who is this blue-eyed foreign lady and why is she here. They asked questions about me, which, unbeknown to them I could follow. I told my PT that she should warn the Afghan patients that I could actually understand their questions.

After PT I scheduled my weekly Thai oil massage which was as good as ever, worth every penny of the 40 dollars and the 5 dollar tip.

I asked the driver and guard whether we could get me some traditional roper furniture. This led to a wild goose hunt from east to west and north to south; we covered most of Kabul in search of the outdoor rope-chair set. It’s the concept, Axel explained later; they simply cannot understand why a foreigner would want traditional rope furniture (‘farnichar’ in Dari) when shiny Pakistani or Chinese furniture can be had.

Strange enough Chinese (read imported) stands for high quality even though, by our standards, it is far from high quality. I was taken to a showroom of fancy (read: cheap) imported ‘farnichar’ even though I thought I had explained I wanted none of it. They kept showing me beds yet I had indicated, I thought, that I didn’t want a bed. My limited Dari was clearly an impediment to expeditious shopping.

After two hours we gave up. I went home, prepared for my Dari class, had two hours of Dari during which I learned more prepositions, and then we went back home for a brief interlude before heading out again for dinner at the Washington Post house where our friend Robin is staying. Around the dinner table we had many nationalities: Japanese, Afghan, American, Canadian, German, Dutch, Spanish, French and Italian, even though there were only 8 people present. Except for Axel, Sabina and Robin, everyone else had at least 2 nationalities.

In an effort to save some of my enormous stash of accumulated vacation days from going ‘poof’ I have decided to join my sister’s family on a boat ride in Holland on May 8 to celebrate the wedding of my nephew Da(a)n and his Scottish bride Jane. Although we haven’t been able to find a reasonable fare, the boss has signed off on my leave request and our fantasies about the trip are dancing far ahead of us.

After some calculations I realized that I stood to lose 28 days (7 weeks of vacation) if I didn’t find a way to use these days. A 5 days trip to Holland and taking Thursdays off from now till the end of June will help a bit but I will still lose days unless a special permission is granted to me to carry more days over the Fiscal Year line than the max (30). This may require an Act of God, I don’t know; maybe a few prayers will help.

I also learned that I cannot be in the US for more than 27 days until the end of September. This has something to do with taxes, as per the advice of a specialist in these matters. So we are counting a lot these days.

For our Friday walk we went to Babur’s garden, a spectacular restoration compliments of Aga Khan. Inside the 7 meter walled garden Afghans can pretend it is peaceful here and enjoy the beautifully landscaped garden with their families, sitting on carpets, cooking whole meals in the ubiquitous little pressure cookers. This is the promise of Afghanistan, if only…(sigh).

After our walk we accompanied Steve on his weekly Chicken Street walk and was drawn to the store of Mr. Happy (Khoshal) who has enormous stash of embroidered pieces from all over Central Asia. Sozani is the local name for embroidery.

It is the Uzbek needlework that I am most enchanted with although, really, everything is vibrant, beautiful, and very very dirty.

I am dipping all the pieces I bought in a bucket with Woolite. I don’t know if that is sacrilege but how else do I get the stains from cooking, eating, living out of these textiles? The first change of water was black, or red if the embroidery was that color.

I have some fantasy of using the pieces in my sewing projects but one has to be practical – they need to be washed sometimes.

Today we learned from the organization that warns us through multiple daily email messages about adverse events in the provinces and in the capital, that a rehearsal of ‘in extremis’ support involving elements from the international military (IMF) as well as the Afghan national security forces (ANSF) was going to take place at the main UN compound earlier this morning.

We were told that this would in all likelihood include several vehicles (‘and other associated gadgets’). The warning continued that, if one was to venture near the UNICA compound (strongly discouraged), one would also see ‘men with grimacing faces and overt displays of various types of weaponry.’ The message concluded with the advise ‘to postpone any intended squash matches.’ Darn!

Of course people play squash here; and cricket (the national cricket team qualified for the Asian Cricket Council), and volleyball, and soccer and tennis. Today our drivers, guards and some of the TB doctors, dressed in blue and white jerseys leftover from World TB Day, played a tournament right outside my office while I was doing a (required) quiz about procurement integrity and struggling with Adobe on how to sign my certificate (I passed) electronically.

After pulling some handles here and there we received word from the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through their Kabul mission that the decision to deny a visa to my two colleagues (to attend a conference in Geneva) was being revisited. After three phone calls from various officials we finally got the word: the visa is granted and they should go back to Islamabad to pick it up. Those who have followed this drama, unfolding over several months with what we thought was the final (and maddening) denouement in Islamabad two weeks ago, can appreciate this new outcome.

The world does run on relationships, which comes right after oil, weapons and drugs I believe. It is once more a reminder that the switch is at the top and if you can make a connection with ‘up there’ everything becomes possible.

It is funny that for some of my Afghan colleagues who are several rungs below me in the hierarchy, I am their switch. This is a new experience and I am starting to learn to recognize when I have a switch-seeker at my door. The higher you climb the easier it is to see the possibilities, and then grant or deny access to them.

Axel, Steve and I went to a lecture by our ex colleague Paul F who shared the findings of his research into the barely examined assumption that development projects will stabilize Afghanistan. It is the basis for policy decisions with enormous consequences.

This was not the first investigation into ‘aid effectiveness’ that I had heard about but this one included the military. Not surprisingly, given that aid was all thrown together into one basket, some of it was appreciated and some of it was useless.

Some of the very large development projects are actually contributing to the destabilization and undermining of the central government because of the opportunities for large scale fraud and corruption that they offer. The amounts of money that are sloshing around in these projects is obscene given that your average Afghan farmer (not a poppy farmer) makes about 300 dollars a year.

The competition that is generated to get a chunk of the pie sometimes turns deadly because settling of accounts is easy here where you can buy your way in and out of anything, including murder and justice.

The military, even in a relatively safe and stable province like Balkh, continues to be an irritant to the general population: the convoys that mess up already congested traffic and jeopardizes anyone in close proximity (we can attest to this from our experience in Kabul), the ignorance about cultural norms, language, the rapid turnover and lack of institutional memory and the easy money that is available to buy the peace here and there with all the perverse incentives that it sets up.

AFP reports in our local newspaper that US Special Forces blast heavy metal, country and rock music from an armored vehicle wired up to speakers that are so powerful that the sound can be heard two kilometers away whenever insurgents open fire. Somehow the military has convinced itself that his will force the hapless locals to choose between the Taliban and the Americans.

What are they thinking? The only people whose hearts and minds are won by the music are the American soldiers themselves who had a blast (pardon the pun) putting the play list together; everyone else is covering their ears and running for cover hating these heathen Americans more with every song.

What was the most worrisome information I got from the lecture was the size of the pot of money that is available to the military to ‘win hearts and minds.’ The Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) has increased its budget from 0 to 1.6 billion dollars in 7 years, leaving all the other so-called development partners way behind in the dust. The distortion that this money influx creates is grotesque.

I had always wondered about what people were thinking about this ‘winning hearts and minds,’ once it was done. What then? Could you lose hearts and minds easily after winning them? One researcher who looked into this found, no surprise, that you cannot stockpile goodwill. When the money dries up, people get upset again – there goes your hard-won heart and mind. Oops.

It seems ages ago that I got up this morning. More than 12 hours later I arrived home to see my honey sitting on the terrace, with glasses of a certain type ready for the cocktail hour. That was a nice reception for a tired worker.

I tried to fall back into my routine but I don’t have the email under control and the computer is still not entirely recovered and there is so much to do, and so many dilemmas that require much thinking.

For example, how can we support prison health if the condition attached to US government funds is that they can’t benefit terrorists? But the terrorists should be in the prisons. Carrying the reasoning through the Afghans should let the terrorists go so we can help the Afghan government provide basic health services to prisoners.

Distinguishing between bad prisoners and the very bad (terrorists) is not that easy in this country. These are the kind of practical dilemmas that our lawmakers may not have thought about.

In the meantime, Karzai is playing noisily with firecrackers on TV and on the front pages of local newspapers. He uses every opportunity to accuse foreigners of messing with his country: they (we) are responsible for botched elections, for invading Afghanistan with ulterior motives (of course), mishandling the millions of dollars that are streaming into this country (I might add, streaming out as well) and ‘mistakenly’ killing civilians (note the quotation marks).

What if we just all walked away? I mean, all of us.