Sylvia's Journal

Why did Hillary not wear a scarf, we wondered, at Karzai’s inauguration? When you move around in such high circles everything you do is symbolic. My gut feeling was that not conforming to this ubiquitous local tradition was a signal of one upwomanship: you are adapting to us, not us to you…maybe? And what about the Kashmiri embroidered coat – Kashmir is a flammable thing in these parts of the world. Was there a subtle purpose, like attracting attention to the beauty of the place to remind everyone that we should not destroy it?

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when the scarf issue was raised (I can’t imagine it was not). In Pakistan she wore a scarf and when she visited the Pope some time ago she wore something on her head (but that was as a spouse I believe). What were the pros and cons raised about the scarf wearing? I am always curious about such matters because I cannot imagine that not wearing a scarf was because she was in a hurry and simply forgot.

When Axel and I were at the opening of the 4th International Film Festival in Kabul in July, the female reps from the Goethe Institute did not wear scarves. I was jealous of them as I sat wrapped up in a vent-less and hot auditorium on that day. The scarf-less lady was important because she sat on the front row and was invited to address us. Next to her, also on the front row was another woman, a little younger, who wore a tank top and a short skirt (and no scarf). Remembering how naked I felt all wrapped up in my mid-calf dress, cardigan and headscarf, I wondered whether she felt the glances from people but endured them because of the statement she was making or whether she was simply oblivious.

A young woman who takes pictures for our donor at special events here in Kabul also never wears a scarf. I don’t know her enough to ask her about her reasoning. I did ask my Dutch friend Janneke who is rather casual with her head cover. For her it’s a principled issue. But most of us foreign women do comply with the local culture and cover our head, rain, sun, shine or snow.

It was nice to sleep in this morning. I had expected to be woken up by low flying helicopters but all was quiet, very quiet, in our neighborhood. Once of my staff members called me from the other side of town where there were gun fights, supposedly turf battles between the army and the police, nothing serious, given the rumors of AOG (armed opposition groups) threats that had been circulating.

It was a slow news days on our local TV station, with patriotic shots of bejewelled children in local dress and other traditional scenes filling the time between talk shows in Dari that we couldn’t follow, except for the occasional reference to words I do recognize, such as president, nation, country, and the equivalent of ‘so help me God.’

One of my staff came over to talk about his performance plan and his personal plans over the summer, after which I finished the other performance plans of people who report to me. It is an administrative activity that I have been spared most of my MSH career. In between all this I messed around with printers while the day slipped by and more emails messages slipped in from Boston which had a regular work day.

We had a nice outdoor lunch of leftovers and three kinds of pomegranate juice: made in Cyprus, made in UAE and made in Pakistan. Missing was the ‘made in Afghanistan’ which we think is because of the poppies that are more interesting to cultivate that these fruits. Such a shame.

We were sitting on the terrace soaking up the sun that was shining down from a perfectly blue sky. I would like to believe this to be symbolic for Karzai on his inauguration day – all clear – but I am afraid that the days and months ahead are more about opacity than clarity, no matter how hard Obama and Hillary are pushing.

To avoid a third meal of the same leftovers I had us invited at guesthouse zero that is currently occupied by two Americans, one Nepali and one Dutchman who lives in Namibia. The range of dishes in guesthouse zero is larger and the variety better. They even had pumpkin soup. Their cook makes the best soups and I want him to teach our cook how to make those, and the occasional cookies and pies. We don’t need much in terms of sweets because of the sweetest pomegranates that are abundant at this time of the year, even though they probably come from Pakistan.

In the evening I made Skype calls to KLM to get Axel on a plane with me when we fly from Boston to Amsterdam to Dubai and Kabul in the new year. For an astronomical number of miles and Euros I got him a seat next to me, and both of us confirmed to return on June 10, 2010. We assume that by then the project (and therefore my job) is not quite over and that this will be our second R&R, after our planned 30th wedding anniversary in the place where it all began, Beirut.

We had asked for one butter dish but now we have at least 10 and we are trying to figure out creative uses other than butter or cheese (which we don’t have) for these sturdy glass containers. They are oven proof and so I was thinking of baking, except we have no flour.

Other items that we once requested are streaming into the house in duplicates. We now have two electric kettles and various food processors with all sorts of attachments. A five story shiny Chinese steamer set sits unused on top of a cabinet.

We are trying to get into the mind of the person or people who are doing the purchases. Working in a country and a place where there are so many controls on expenditures, it seems that something has broken loose. Every day when I come home there are new surprises. We are still like the newlyweds who keep getting belated wedding gifts.

Yes, despite all this fancy kitchen equipment the cook still makes essentially the same dishes that he made without it when we started off in our new house. We are going to request some technical assistance from the other guest house cooks: the one who is famous for his pies and the other that makes the best vegetable soup.

Axel has signed up for Dari lessons, every day two hours starting on Sunday. This will facilitate the cook exchange no doubt as well as local shopping if security ever lets him escape the house again.

In the meantime I called in help to deal with the continued fumes in my tiny office. We diagnosed the problem: it was the exhaust fumes that escaped from where the pipe is ill-fitted into a hole in the wall. A traditional Afghan solution was applied: a strip of cloth soaked in salt water was wrapped around the pipe where it goes into the wall. I am told that the salt water keeps the cloth from combusting. This appeared indeed to be true as I observed several hours later when the blue print cloth had turned white, not black. Still, the fumes remained.

As part of the senior leadership team I paid a visit to one of the three director generals where we have placed counterparts. The purpose of these visits it to put expectations on the table and explore where we can be of most help. It was a frank and spirited conversation about what it means to be in charge and holding one’s staff accountable. I have no illusion that such conversations transform the status quo but they do offer opportunities to find small openings or cracks in the walls of old habits.

Afterwards the boss took me and Steve out to a nearby Turkish restaurant where we hatched a plan on how to celebrate the upcoming Eid holiday with our staff. Basically we will provide the money for sheep or catered food and then, I am told, everything else takes care of itself. I am recruiting all expats, permanent and consultants, who will be in country on December 2nd. I am planning something else with the youngest MSH staff member that will entertain us all after the food is eaten (which I am told will be done quickly and quietly).

It is freezing cold in the early morning and evening hours now. When I walked into my diesel-heated office at 7 AM I was instantly nauseous and opened the door to the outside to get rid of the fumes. Unfortunately this also lets in the cold air.

I walked around with a headache and sore throat for most of the day and kept my window and door open. I was told to give it a couple more days for the newness to burn off but I don’t know if I can hang in that long. I am longing to have the stove removed and go back to using a tiny electric heater.

It is sobering to realize that my suffering is minor compared to people who have no heat at all. This includes colleagues who work in the ministry of health and are requesting the purchase of gas stoves because the electrical circuit cannot manage the many electrical heaters people have been bringing in from their homes. I asked what happens if I don’t sign these request forms (one of my new responsibilities is signing such slips of paper). The answer was that I am leaving people out in the cold. So I sign.

We are entering another period of intense speculation and rumors that surround the inauguration. I have never been in a place where there so many rumors and so few ways to check on the veracity of them. There are few newspapers and most I cannot read (yet); our TV provides only news in Dari or Pashto and so we can only guess. But apparently even to those who can understand the language the rumors cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed.

Our security people have decided to close the office on Thursday for all staff. This means working at home. The senior staff have laptops and modems and so they should be able to work from home just fine. Those below them have not.

I am giving our two administrative coordinators homework: they have to study two chapters of the Managers Who Lead book. There was much giggling about such an assignment. To make sure it is taken serious I have put Dr. Ali in charge of checking on the homework, more giggling.

At 5 PM my teacher showed up. By then it was dark and cold and there was no way I was going to have a two hour lesson in my fume-filled office. I was nauseous and tired. We went upstairs in the main building to sit in one of the many offices that have air conditioners mounted on the walls (‘koolers’). These can both heat and cool a room, very efficiently, quietly and without any fumes. Unfortunatelt I cannot have one of these in my office because the electrical circuit cannot carry such a load.

In today’s lesson we covered verbs that start with the letter ‘A,’ about 30 of them. If there was more than one Farsi word for an English word, as was often the case, my teacher would write the additional meanings not between brackets but, as he calls them, between barricades. The many years of conflict run deep here. I don’t think he knows his own country without barricades.

Another day spent in meetings. The early morning one to make sure the project’s senior leadership team is re-aligned now that the boss is back. Then over to the ministry to make sure the high level health retreat planned for early February will be more productive than the one last year and finally a conversation with our European Commission counterpart about centralized and decentralized support to the government for contracting out health care services to NGOs. Add to this another three and a half hours of sitting in traffic and it all adds up to a full day.

The meeting at the ministry took place in the office of someone else because the reserved conference room was in use. While we were discussing our agenda, the room’s official resident was doing his business with people coming and going as if we weren’t there. I was trying to imagine a similar scenario back home and could not. But here, stranger things happen.

We were not allowed to take the car into the street with the huge concrete blast walls that were taken down just before the Indian embassy bombing and put up right after. The EC compound is in that neighborhood, away from the bustling traffic. We left our computer bags in the car and walked, armed with cell phones and note pads, along lonely store fronts, now cut off from customers, and bombed-out buildings until we arrived at the heavily fortified EC entrance staffed with Nepali gurkas who give me a big smile when I put my hands together and said ‘namaste.’

Opposite an army of people from USAID involved with the NGO contracting stands a lonely but feisty Italian woman who is, more or less by herself, the EC health unit. We went to see here to find out what her view is about host country contracting, which means transferring money directly from the American (or European) taxpayer to the Afghan government. The EC has decided not to, after three audits that showed only minor improvement towards compliance with EU standards. There are many other philosophical and practical differences with the EC, one of them being that USAID represent a single country and the EC a whole bunch.

Steve came back from his R&R in Myanmar and arrived at an empty guesthouse zero. We invited him to have dinner with us in our house 33 that he had not seen yet. He brought a big copper platter from his guesthouse that he is willing to part with until he leaves Afghanistan next year. Now I can put my coffee cup down on the kelim (also Steve’s) without risk of tipping it over.

The boss is back from Pakistan. He interviewed a Pakistani candidate for a position we are recruiting for. The gentleman asked about security in Kabul. This seems funny to me. In Peshawar bombs go off nearly every day. And after each bomb there are people wounded and dead. Afghans are picked up off the street by Pakistani security forces as potential security risks. For my Afghan boss whose family lives there, a trip home is not as joyful as it should be.

We are gearing up for the inauguration of the new old president later this week. There are many expectations and worries about the new cabinet. If the minister of health changes we need to start all over again building relationships, establishing trust and getting feet in the door. This could set us back months. On the other hand, if the minister stays there is still the possibility of an internal (re)shuffling of the top ranks below him.

There is frost on the lawn in the morning and the frozen grapes are falling of the arbor to the great delight of the pigeons, sparrows and office cats (there is more than one I discovered). The roses are still blooming but there are no more new buds and the remaining blooms are turning brown at the edges.

The last bukhari stoves are being installed. I got one this morning. Apparently on its first day of service these stoves give off quite a smell and fill up the room with smoke. I did not notice this until someone entered my office and I noticed the cloud of white smoke that escaped. No wonder my throat was hurting. The rest of the day I let the cold winter air come in to dissipate the fumes and smoke. I hope the adjustments the stove and I have to make to one another will only last this one day. It is still warm enough during the day to have the door open.

Axel had another conference in Dari with the cook and housekeeper about doing laundry and preparing another meal. We are discovering that the cook essentially knows three dishes which he prepares over and over with only the slightest variation. We have asked for Qabuli pilau, a famous Afghan rice dish with raisons and carrot strips.

More items from our wish list are being ticked off: shower curtains installed, pink hand towels (we asked for dishtowels but must have gotten the translation wrong). We also have huge fire extinguisher hanging by a thread, quite literally, off the wall, at a height that makes it impossible for me to use because of my injured arm/shoulder. I’d have to get a chair, drag it up the stairs and then remove the extinguisher from its hook if ever one of our bukhari stoves burst into flames. Axel is checking out the German stove company’s website as I write this to learn more about how to prevent this from happening.

After delivering my chapter by email to the author and editor of the Third Culture Kids book, I had myself dropped off at the ministry to attend a few meetings with government officials. I wanted to hear the same thing as our consultant about their expectations for his work. Aligning language, strategies, work plans, units, divisions, and expectations is probably the central part of my job here. It wasn’t in my job description but after 8 weeks that’s what it appears to be. It requires a lot of listening and a lot of questions.

In the middle of one of these meetings our consultant, unknowingly to himself, was smearing his forehead and face with blue ink from a leaky pen. Once alerted to this he tried to rub the ink from his forehead and cheek which made it worse. We continued the conversation as if nothing had happened until I couldn’t stand it any longer. Maybe that’s one of the differences between men and women. I remember my mother spitting on her finger and then rubbing whatever dirt was on our faces.

Spit cleaning didn’t seem quite the proper thing to do so I filled my tea cup with hot water, dipped tissues in it and walked around to the other side of the table to rub his forehead and cheeks clean. Someone donated a small piece of hotel soap because the ink wasn’t coming off. All through this the meeting continued, with questions and answers across the table; our consultant didn’t miss a beat.

Towards the end of our last meeting Axel called from the project car parked outside the ministry. He had come to pick me up to attend the opening of a new Japanese restaurant and gallery space. It took our driver a long time to find it but we knew we were in the neighborhood when we found several other cars with foreigners driving around with the same invitation in their hands.

The galleries were still being installed in a beautiful old house that had been destined to be wrecked and replaced by one of the new hideously extravagant mansions that dot the Afghan urban landscape.

Various craft organizations were settling in just in time to present the foreigners with an unusual and spectacular array of Christmas gifts. A fashion group was selling spectacular one-of-kind- woolen and silk women’s apparel, hardly anything below 100 dollars (Zarif Design). An interior design cooperative, boumi, had already completed its display of beautiful textiles made into curtains, table cloths, pillow covers and napkins that would not be out of place on Fifth Avenue in New York. A third was still hanging its Islamic illuminations, oil paintings and water colors from teachers and students from the Herat School of Art, priced between 100 and 1500 dollars.

Downstairs, next to the Japanese restaurant a craft cooperative was selling various brightly colored bags, clothes and tables full of small teddy bears in white, blue, red and yellow burqas and other traditional Afghan outfits. The carpet place was still unpacking its new and old carpets of spectacular designs and colors.

On the ground floor the Japanese owner, relocating from Bamiyan now that her hotel there has closed for the winter, had put out several Japanese dishes, including sushi rolls so we could sample her new restaurant’s offerings. She is a friend of a former colleague, also from Japan, who had alerted me to the opening in an email sent from Ethiopia.

Hours later, back at home, over a second, non-Japanese dinner, we discussed the impossible US mission in Afghanistan with our housemate. Axel quoted several passages, one even more depressing than the previous one from Ahmad Rashid’s latest book Descent into Chaos. It makes you wonder whether we can do anything good here. I left the dining room table to watch House in Farsi with all exposed female flesh fuzzed out by moving rectangles.

We skipped the weekly walk around the Habibia high school in order to meet with Pia and Margaret at the Kabul coffee house on the other side of town. The place reminded both of us of the Green Street hotel that we stayed in 31 years ago. If it was the same, they had gotten rid of the marihuana plants in front of the rooms.

We had real lattes and chocolate croissants, sitting outside on the terrace in the warm sun as if it was early September rather than the middle of November. Margaret helped Axel network into another community of expats with more names and places for his increasingly crowded mindmap.

At noontime we made our way to the apartment of our administrative coordinator, her husband and their two young sons. The husband is very senior in the ministry of health but you wouldn’t be able to tell from their very simple living arrangement – a fifth floor walk up in a rundown apartment complex that is only stone’s throw away from the US embassy compound.

We found our hostess in a glittery red shalwar kameez, as if dressed for a wedding, on her haunches in the kitchen, cooking a meal on the floor as I have seen people cooking at their village homes in Bangladesh and Nepal. It is amazing what wonderful meals emerge out of such kitchens. We were received in the salon with western furniture before taking our places in the dining room Afghan style with mattresses lining the wall and a plastic table cloth on the carpet that served as our table.

On our way back we shopped at one of the international supermarkets which is already selling christmas stuff (Rudolph ears and battery-operated nose), right next to the Fourth of July supplies.

The rest of this rest day was spent finishing writing my chapter for the Third Culture Kids book in order to meet the November 15 dropdeadline. We celebrated the accomplishment of this and other good things with colleagues and friends from guesthouse zero in a Thai restaurant. It was filled with the fumes but not the heat of diesel stoves, a minor annoyance for which we compensated with a real Heineken and wine and some good hot food.

I could use another weekend day but I have meetings all day at the ministry tomorrow, which means the weekend is already over.

Today was full of meetings, exchanging information, seeking new information, channeling information to our new consultant, finishing our strategy paper on how we plan to support the government in handling the H1N1 emergency and getting ready for the boss to come back on Sunday.

Another week rushed by and our trip to the US in December is already appearing on the horizon. I have now been here 7 weeks but it feels like several months. I have come a long way since I got off the plane, both in my understanding of my job and my understanding of the language. We have also come a long way in terms of our living situation. Not even one week in the house we now have even such luxuries as toilet roll holders and shelves to put our toothpaste on.

The cook prepared meals that have to last us over the weekend and we have to do our own dishes (oh no!) but it also means no Afghan men walking around the house on plastic slippers for the next two days.

I ended the 110-plus hour workweek with a two hour Dari lesson during which my teacher drilled me about body parts, government units and roles, office equipment and taught me a new batch of verbs. I learned how to say that I voted for Obama and that I am happy he is our president. My teacher is too and still receives emails asking for campaign contributions. I also learned how to ask him whether he voted for Karzai (he didn’t).

There are more interesting things I am learning about Afghanistan through its language. For example, the word for dancing and playing is the same and swimming is literally playing with water. The word for marker (regular marker or highlighter) is ‘toosh’ which reminded me of Sita’s Brooklyn babysitter Goldie who also taught me the word toosh , meaning something quite different. I am having much fun with learning this language and am much encouraged by the enthusiastic response from drivers and guards. They are now no longer trying their English on me but rather rattle along, way too fast, in their native language.

Axel is also learning Dari rapidly, but more the kinds of words that have to do with household items. He has armed himself with a dictionary for relief workers that is full of the most interesting phrases and carries around a piece of paper with the cook’s handwritten words for various foot items in indecipherable script. We are all learning as fast as we can.

I am trying to sort out how the Influenza A(H1N1) epidemic is being ‘coordinated.’ I have never heard the word used as much. Today I tried to map the various committees and coordinating bodies that exist to make sure that everyone is doing their job of handling the epidemic. But sometimes it seems that everyone is busy with the same things: writing guidelines, planning, developing protocols and telling others what to do. Does it all add up is the question.

A quick scan produced at least 2 official national coordinating bodies at a supra-ministerial level, a number of projects (Canadians, UN, German) and within the ministry itself a central command and control committee, a technical committee and a response committee. I am not counting UNICEF and WHO who are also probably doing stuff related to the influenza outbreak.

Interestingly the more technical the committee is, the higher its chair; the more general its coordinating function the lower its chair in the ministry’s hierarchy. May be this is still all part of the mindset that I am battling everywhere that considers technical expertise more important than good management and leadership skills, and thus part of the mandate of senior leaders.

Today we had our first staff development event, entirely ran by Dr. Ali, in Dari. Although we planned the session together, I understood enough Dari to see where he improvised and took an unplanned turn. Not that it mattered. The session was a great success judging from the energy and body language. We had people from the drug management unit, the monitoring and evaluation unit, finance, HR, and the two capacity building teams, central and provincial – 18 people in all. At the end everyone indicated that the one and a half hours we have reserved for this once a month was not enough: they demanded half a day twice a month. I take that as a good sign and a confirmation of how hungry everyone is for developing themselves further.

And now we are waiting for our new house mate before heading out to dinner on the other side of town to meet a friend of a friend, and see where that leads. I am happy to report that the salt and pepper shakers were retrieved by the cook this morning, appearing miraculously from somewhere outside where they had apparently spent the night.