Sylvia's Journal

Many of the very senior people do things that we find inappropriate for people at that level in our world back home: director generals (all medical doctors) who deal with logistics for meetings, acting ministers who correct English. I find myself the de facto secretary of a group that is planning for a, supposedly important, strategic retreat of movers and shakers in the health sector.

I told the chair of the meeting, one of the Director-Generals, that I didn’t want to be the one sending the emails with notes and convening meetings, as that was the ministry’s job. It’s not that I don’t want to do the job but we are trying to stand behind our counterparts in the ministry. More often than not there isn’t anyone to stand behind.

I offered to help him build the skills of the 8 members of his secretariat. One of them speaks some English, the rest don’t. Some of them have computers but not all. A secretariat here is an old fashioned one: filing atom-based rather than byte-based correspondence in old-fashioned binders with marbled covers.

He was grateful for the offer but then reminded me of the realities of the
Afghan job market: anyone who can write, read and speak English and use computers is a hot commodity in the job market. We could bring up the skills of the younger and more promising secretaries but as soon as they’d acquire the coveted skills set they are wanted by the better paying national and international NGOs.

When I was still at headquarters in Cambridge I imagined that all our projects essentially did ‘technical work,’ helping our counterparts in ministries of health all over the world make wise decisions about health policies, data, finances, drugs, etc. But here we are sometimes like a secretary pool or a shopping center that dispenses computers, video cameras, tea cups, meeting room tables, even toilet paper for training rooms (in addition to millions of dollars worth of drugs that are guaranteed to unexpired and unadulterated).

At first I got irritated by these requests. We sometimes refer to this as ‘donor shopping: you try the Americans and if they say no you ask the Europeans, then the Japanese, etc. until someone say, “sure!”

I got spoiled living in the US with new computers every few years, cameras if we need them, good chairs and desks, heat or airco, a cafeteria and vending machines, unlimited supplies of copy paper, pens, pencils, new toner for the copy machines. I never had to imagine doing without all that. But in many parts of the world that is exactly what people have to do without. I can’t remember when I last made a photocopy. It’s good we are so adaptable.

I am a bit wobbly after sharing one bottle of Primitivo with Julie. I am not used to that much wine; but it did taste great.

We rewarded ourselves with the pricey bottle after various meetings that included the ministry’s top leadership and that continued long after working hours, both for her Excellency and her staff and for us.

We ended our day with a lovely dinner with Jan who had been eluding me for months as she works part of the time in Pakistan; we finally were in the same place at the same time.

Last night, Julie gave her five year old son a guided tour of our house/her temporary lodgings, pointing her computer webcam then to this part of our house and then that. Later she repeated the tour with her parents. We’ve never had such a guided tour of our house, and so we felt honored. Axel got to wave to the parentals on camera; I was already asleep.

We are beginning to see our Beirut trip faintly sketched out against the horizon: less than 3 weeks away. The balmy weather of the last few days adds to the ‘lightness of being close to vacation and close to spring.’ The leaf buds on the rose bushes and fruit trees are swelling and some tiny leaves are visible on the honey suckle outside my office. Hawa bahari they call this here.

I still have a hard time adjusting to Sunday being the first day of the week. It is as if my entire being is programmed to experience Sunday as a day of rest and so, the first day of work must therefore be Monday. All of us people from ‘The Other Book’ keep making this mistake, even some who have lived here for awhile.

This Sunday-Rest Day meme has its counterpart on the other side of the week, Thursday. The end of the week on Thursday rather than Friday is easier to handle even though that one too always comes as a surprise. I love these Thursday afternoon because they are usually quiet as the government has closed down for the weekend by about noontime and I get to do my own winding down.

Our office women’s group that I launched a week ago has created a flurry of meetings between women from various departments and even projects in ways I did not see before. I don’t know whether this is a result of my suggestion that they should decide amongst themselves what kind of gift they’d like to receive in recognition for being working women or did I light a fire? I hope it is the latter.

I am seeing some other small changes in the people I work with or those who work for them. It has something to do with being less obsessed with checking off work plan activities and more with acting as coaches and leading from behind. It is less of wanting our counterparts or clients in the ministry to dance to our choreography and more of planting seeds or lighting small fires under people who were otherwise rather passive.

We had not really planned to check the emergency health system quite the way that we did early this morning. An upset stomach turned nasty and at 5 AM Axel was in such a bad shape that a doctor was needed. This was a new experience and one we had not sufficiently researched while he was healthy.

The dispatcher, whose English is OK but not enough for emergencies like that, did not have the necessary information, or, if he had, didn’t know it. I called one of my Afghan staff who is a doctor and asked if he knew of a good doctor classmate or friend who could come to the house and administer IV fluids? He counseled me to dress the patient while he’d call the dispatcher and get a car over to take us to the nearest emergency room. I saw Axel cringe. Here hospitals are not really the place to go to when what you need is expert care.

Luck, or rather bad luck had it that just when we arrived at the main road, at 5:30 AM, Parliament, which is in our neighborhood, came back from recess. A long line of cars and police cars with flashing blue lights and tons of heavily armed men guarded all roads within a quarter mile of the parliament buildings.

Even sick people were not let through and we bumped over unpaved back roads to the entrance of the Cure Hospital which I had always supposed what the place for foreigners to go to. But when we arrived the entire hospital was dark and the reception area without any signs of life. There is no such thing as night duty – something we take for granted in the US or Europe.

After some time we spotted a sleeping boy. We woke him but he refused to find us a doctor because we did not have a contract. Phone calls with one of our own doctors made no difference and we hoisted Axel back in the car and drove, once again via bumpy back roads to the next hospital, Istiqlal, which had the lights on and people walking about.

Our driver disappeared inside and came out after about 10 minutes with a doctor on duty. He checked Axel’s vital signs (OK) and ordered an ECG and gave the driver a prescription for various drugs. With IV fluids in third place I decided it was time to call my colleague Steve to get someone who knew about medicine to oversee the treatment plan. And so Steve was awakened and summoned to Axel’s bed.

1 liter of IV fluids later (I always go home when the bottle is empty, quipped Axel, noticeably better) he was released. I asked where to settle the bill but there was no bill; compliments of the government of Afghanistan. This is the irony: the Afghan government is feverishly trying to show its population that ‘government works for them.’ It did for us.

The IV fluids were probably a gift from the Italian government; the medicines were our own to purchase but Steve decided Axel did not need these. Prescribing drugs, preferably antibiotics, is expected from doctors. Steve used all his tact to counter the doctor’s orders, who gave in and cancelled the prescriptions and then asked for a job.

It took us another hour to inch our way back home through the congested back roads. Steve walked ahead of us to a pharmacy to buy a bunch of Oral Rehydration Solution packets (10 cents each) so we could complete the entire treatment of fluid replenishment (3 liters) and keep a small stock for future GI mishaps.

And so, instead of our Saturday plans of shopping and a visit to the bird bazaar I got to contemplate hospital emergency care in Kabul city, something that is badly needed and that we are working on with US taxpayers’ dollars.

It was a balmy spring day in Kabul today. Early in the morning I sat outside on the terrace for the first time in weeks, studying my Dari lessons in the warm late winter sun.

Together with the three current residents of Guesthouse zero we went for our usual Friday outing to Baghe-e-bala. We were once again let into the Bagh-e-bala pleasure palace and climbed to the roof with its great views over the North-eastern part of the city. In the balmy spring weather I could have stayed there for hours – there is so much to see from there.

After our walk we splurged at the Intercon hotel for one of the better lunch buffets in town; pricey here but very reasonable for American standards. We invited our guard and driver to sit down and help themselves. They piled up a mini buffet for the two of them, an amount of food I couldn’t imagine they could eat but they did. We calculated that this meal cost about 20 times what they would spend on a lunch.

After lunch the driver dropped the guys off in Shar-e-nao while I went to Wazir Akbar Khan for my weekly Thai massage. My continuing shoulder problems produce all sort of muscle and tendon compensations that mess up my upper back big time. The weekly massage helps.

Afterwards I joined the men on Chicken Street and found them on the second floor of Hamid’s rug shop amidst piles of the most amazing carpets; Axel busy learning the language of carpets and Peter, a carpet connoisseur, pointing out things that are worth learning.

For now we are just looking and seeing what is there. We think we have all the time in the world.

Back home we found that our new house mate, Julie, had already arrived. She is here for a two week consultancy on strategic leadership communications. The strategic communications part will be the easy part of the assignment, the leadership piece will be harder since things are a little in flux at the top. But at least we have an appointment on Monday with what is currently the leadership, so that is promising.

We are now getting the English language Afghanistan Times delivered at our workplace, one for each guesthouse. The masthead promises ‘eye on the news’ that is ‘truthful, factual and unbiased.’ It is also a source for positive stories about Afghanistan, one of the few in print. That is why we requested a subscription.

Today I started coalition building in our own organization by calling all the female staff (all 14 of the 225 staff in total – a sorry state I hope to change). We are in the process of creating child care on the premises and we brainstormed today, in Dari and English, on how to celebrate International Women’s Day – a day not celebrated at MSH/Afghanistan since 2004.

Apparently it required the presence of a ‘Gender Specialist.’ With the gender specialist (my former colleague Miho from Japan) gone, the celebrations stopped. This is a problem with specialization and making the gender awareness a job of a specialist.

Last summer I sat in on a meeting with a bunch of male Anglos (US, Australia and Britain), some of them consultants, some colleagues, as well as some male Afghan colleagues. I was the only woman. No sooner had someone uttered the word gender or all eyes were on me, the assumption that the token woman must therefore be the gender specialist. Don’t get me going on this.

Our ‘MSH/Afghanistan Women Unite!’ meeting, chaired by one of my more promising young female staff, confirmed how badly coalitions are needed. I noticed how powerless the women felt and how unacknowledged and unrecognized. This is the problem with being a victim: you give all your power away.

Although it is generally true that Afghan women got dealt a lousy hand, I do believe that some of the victimization is self imposed: no one took their scarf off in our all-female meeting; no one is stepping out from behind the curtains of the musty light-less women’s dining closet. I don’t hear anyone say: we won’t take this any longer. I am the one saying it, maybe because I can and they feel they cannot.

So today was a first step – I learned some things and they learned some things too. Everyone got a job: looking for images and stories of inspiring Afghan women we can parade in front of our men, a quiz to test our staff’s knowledge about women’s status here in Afghanistan, some poetry from famous female poets, a short video and maybe individual testimonials. We will meet again next week – that’s a least a small victory.

Today we had lunch in local Afghan restaurant while we killed time in between a ministry meeting and our weekly meeting in the US government compound. Between the four of us we ate 2 kilos of the most delicious fried fish, a real treat in this landlocked country. The hot fish was sprinkled with a tasty spice mixture consisting of salt, dried chili pepper, cumin, coriander seeds and the powder made from green (unripe) grapes.

The name of the restaurant is Colbah Arman which our Afghan colleagues translated loosely as ‘the hut where you fulfill your greatest desires.’ Steve and I thought of something else than what our colleagues explained the words meant: a place where you meet with friends and enjoy good conversation and a good meal.

Talking about desire, while removing the pasta making machine from its box, yesterday, the cook and housekeeper must have discovered the instruction booklet that came with it. Its front page features a good looking young women with as her only piece of clothing, if you could call it that, a shawl made out of pasta (presumably created with the past machine) that is fringed at the bottom (something the pasta machine can also do), entirely covering the nakedness of her upper body.

They had stuck the picture up on the wall, as if a pin-up girl, above the knife block and the espresso machine, wedged between the wall and one of the cabinets. Right below it they stuck the two pictures Axel had made of them making the past (fully clothed). When I came home at the end of the day, the picture was still wedged between the wall and the cabinet, but pushed in enough that you couldn’t anymore see her pasta outfit or a hint of what the pasta covered.

Today 21 years ago the Russians left and the day is still celebrated. In fact, it is considered disrespectful I am told if you don’t take the day off. So we closed the office and used up the floating holiday that’s now nailed down to the Russians.

I finally got to do my various projects that have been winking at me for some time now: a new night shirt for Axel and the start of a ‘kameez’ from the beautiful handwoven cotton cloth from Mazar that I found in the furniture store. It’s actually upholstery fabric but I think it can be worn too.

Somehow the ‘day off’ message never reached our household staff and so Amin and Ali showed up as usual. I never see the cook because he arrives after I leave and leaves before I get home.

I took advantage of us being in the same place by teaching him how to use the pasta maker. Ali, our housekeeper also got in on the act and while I gave instructions in Dari, with occasional translation from Ali who is studying English, Axel memorialized our cooking class on his little Flip camera.

When all was done and the pasta drying as little birds nest on a dish towel, we sat together around the TV and watched the video Axel had made: our own authentic Afghan/Italian cooking show. Axel also printed a few action shots on photo paper pasta. It was all very jolly and well documented. But they didn’t take the pictures home or some of the pasta they produced. It’s a split life I guess: there’s home and then those weird foreigners.

Except for reading my emails (but not acting on them) only twice all day, it was more of a holiday than I have had since Christmas. I never left the house and did all the things I have no time for during the work week, and barely during the weekend.

Axel did go out as his SOLA class was not cancelled. He talked about mission and vision using the materials we produced at MSH. Back home he showed me the mindmap he had created of the dreams of the five young men he is teaching on Mondays. It’s all very hopeful – one day these kids will be in charge and that’s a good prospect.

And now, at the closing of this holiday we are eating the homemade pasta with a homemade pasta sauce while watching Miss Marple solving a complex murder mystery.

Valentine’s Day is something else here. At Axel’s school the girls celebrate Valentine’s Day together, no boys. Somehow the notion of romantic love and red hearts doesn’t fit with the kind of boy-girl relationships this culture favors.

Still, one of the girls got two chocolates from a boy (giggle, giggle). ‘Chocolate’ here refers to any kind of chewy and non chewy candy. Thus the love-chocolate (real chocolate) relationship is a bit arbitrary and brown (or pink, white) and red don’t necessarly go together on this day. But if he had wanted to, Axel could have bought me a box of fancy chocolates. But instead he made me a card with a tulip motif, taken directly from the rug weaving business. It’s better than chocolates. The day does exist in shops that sell sweets to the foreign and Afghan elite.

During my visit at the ministry on Saturday I spotted Valentine cookies: oreo-type cookies with pink stuff in between and heart-shaped red cut outs in the top cookie. A love cookie so to speak. It felt out of place but my host explained that such habits as Christmas and Valentine’s Day come along with the returning diaspora. And shop keepers like any such new habit that has the potential to augment sales.

Tonight we are celebrating Valentine’s Day with Hameed and Mary at the romantic restaurant called Bella Italia which is situated, not very romantically, behind enormous blast walls on the other side of town. We don’t know either of our Valentine’s Day dates but have heard much (good) about Mary. We know nothing about Hameed other than that we suppose he is Afghan. Mary is bringing him along.

Last night we also went out, to a Korean restaurant, right down the street. We met up with Michael, a British nurse who grew up in a Salvation Army household in Sierra Leone. In the 60s Michael was a nurse to the Saudi king who got shot by his (the king’s) nephew. Michael was an eye witness to this family feud which landed him in a plush Saudi jail. He was treated well and received a daily allowance of Jimmy Walker Red. This was his second stint in jail. When he first arrived he was also put in jail, not quite as nice, because of holding a profession (nursing) associated with women. This created enough cognitive dissonance to overpower his six page royal visa and a royal invitation to nurse the king.

But somehow everything worked out for him and we are lucky to have found him on our path. He has an enormous reservoir of stories which will take many more dinners. Unfortunately for us, Michael is off to another adventure next month that will take him to Saigon. For some people life is never dull. For us it will be a little duller without him.

Saturdays aren’t always days of rest for me because I am here to support the central ministry of health. They work and sometimes call me. This morning I combined a meeting at the ministry of health with a visit to my physical therapist, across the street, and the husband of one of my staff.

Fahima treated me in a room that was not heated. The small ‘country stove’ was lit when we came in but the room never got warm. She reviewed my exercises and established weekly goals. I am working on range of motion and a little bit of strength. She prepared me a schedule for the week – some exercises I have to do every two hours. That is going to require some discipline.

I came in late to an organizing committee for one of the many large ministry-wide conferences that are supposed to happen every year but have slipped a bit since last fall. The committee has been meeting for awhile and so it was hard not to come in and spoil the party with criticism. But I do have lots of questions. I tried to ‘read’ the group, even when they speak in their own language, as not to upset the apple cart, determining where to draw the line between breaking down and building up.

I noticed, whenever the group reverted to Dari, that I can understand significantly more than 3 months ago. Dari is no longer an entirely secret language although I still have a long way to go before I can fully participate in local language discussions.

After our meeting I had an appointment with another senior ministry official who happens to be married to one of my team members. I had requested a meeting so that we could discuss his wife’s professional development and share what opportunities are available. Such topics are private and individual in the US but here they are family affairs. We discussed family and women’s professional development over a wonderful lunch that was cooked in the office on a little petroleum stove behind a screen. How people can cook the most wonderful meals like that remains a mystery to me. I need a fully equipped kitchen to produce a similar meal.

In the meantime word reached me from Holland that the lung condition maybe treatable and may not be as fatal as we thought yesterday. All prayers are much appreciated and we are feeling a little less depressed. It was hard to concentrate on work when you are worried about someone near and dear like that.

In the late afternoon (‘digar’) Axel and I went to our Dari class together. Our classes are separate – we learn in different ways and at different speeds and so we have different teachers.

I added a whole new series of complex constructions to my bag of Dari tricks, all of them requiring a shift in mindset in addition to learning the words. I learned that ‘I forget’ in Dari is ‘something slipped from my memory,’ and ‘I am late’ is ‘lateness came to me.’ The general belief that life happens to you is reflected in such constructions.

I enjoy my classes tremendously and wish I could spend more time on them. But for now 4 hours a week in class is all I can handle, given that homework takes another couple of hours.