Sylvia's Journal

The MSH office was originally built as a house for a person with visions of grandeur and a large family. It has a nice garden with a long pergola that will give wonderful shade when the temperature rises and the grapes will practically jump into your mouth. Now it also has its own petrol station, enormous bars to protect the compound from uninvited loaded cars or trucks and several gates, barbed wire, guard houses on the top of a wall and more that I have not explored and probably won’t.

I finally took some pictures of the two houses that make up Guest House Zero where the Tech-Serve project puts up its visitors from abroad. I am staying in the one with the chimney. In between the two houses is a lawn and rose beds. The grass has started to grow and the dandelions are already seeding the lawn.

We eat wonderful meals cooked by an invisible chef who I never see and who leaves the food in the oven for us to serve whenever we are ready. Mirwais and I are the only ones left and we enjoy quiet meals together. Mirwais is an engineer/architect who is checking out the reconstruction of health facilities, something he supervised under the previous project. He is Afghan but has made himself and his family a life in the US a long time ago. He is one of the few beardless Afghans I have met.

It was only yesterday that I discovered the door handle to our hideous bathroom. It consists of a leg kicking a football. Here is the picture. I quickly scanned the rest of the house to see what other surprises there were by way of doorhandles but there were none. I was trying to imagine the thinking process that led to the installation of such a handle. Is the owner of the house a football fan? Was it put in by one of its occupants over the last few years by an MSH colleague or consultant, or the maintenance man?

When you leave your familiar surroundings and go out into the wide world there are so many strange and funny things that you could easily miss if you didn’t look for them. I got more of an appreciation of this when I started traveling with Sita; first to Burkina Faso, in 2001, then to Senegal in 2005 and finally to Dubai and Kabul in 2006. Sita has a third eye for strange, funny or ugly things that, in their ugliness take on a certain beauty. It is the artist’s eye. My family is full of artists with third eyes: Axel’s eye for Beauty, Tessa’s eye for things that are practical and visually pleasing, and then there is Sita’s for the strange, the quirky, the ugly.

I have now developed my own version of Sita’s third eye, and it has made the experience of living in this guest house rather interesting. My house mate Steve left and I moved into the room he vacated. It is the largest room in the house, the size of our Lobster Cove living room and dining room combined. Although it is as ugly as the rest of the house it has a balcony and I can open windows and look out onto the street if I push the white window covers aside. It also has a garish little bedside lamp that has tiny pulsating red and blue lights in the bottom, twirled around fake pink and purple roses encased in the glass base.

I had dinner with one of our students from the BU course in which I actually taught (July 2006) rather than the one where I was listed as faculty but was indisposed (July 2007). Meghann had suggested we have dinner in one of the few restaurants in Kabul that MSH security staff allowed me to go. It is a congenial Tex Mex place owned and run by a woman who, in her day job writes the good stories about interventions that help Afghans to get back on their feet again.

I was taken there in a sturdy SUV with driver and guard. I don’t know if he was armed but imagine he was. It was a little tricky when I left the place a few hours later to find my car and driver/guard combo among the line up of similar cars and grim looking men, in the dark because you are scanning for exactly the kind of people and cars that you imagine your kidnappers would look like. Luckily they recognized me and brought me safely home through the empty and barricaded streets of Kabul.

A war zone it is, especially without the people. The Serena Hotel that was bombed in January and where Sita and stayed two years ago looked liked it was the Pentagon. Whole streets are blocked by large chunks of concrete and barbed wire everywhere. This is the scar tissue of armed conflict. It is what is left after the bombs have exploded and the fear is firmly planted in people’s minds. And then there is the futility of it all; the barricades go up afterwards, like the shoe checks at the airport. The Serena is unlikely to get bombed again and may well be the safest place in Kabul now with all that protection.

Axel and I also have scar tissue. We don’t know exactly what scar tissue looks like but I suspect it is ugly too and looks and acts like those barricades as it obstructs the flow of things. Axel’s scar tissue is more severe and problematic, especially in his hand where the muscles have not worked properly for so long and have shriveled up to make movement very hard and stressful for the remaining muscle strands. I have scar tissue in my foot and try to break it down through exercises but it is slow going.

I am also struggling with some scar tissue in my heart; that too obstructs the flow of something. I once wrote a little poem that came back to me yesterday: The other day I found/this hard spot in my heart/The one called me and mine/That keeps me separate/From the divine. My heart’s scar tissue is about relationships that have been damaged and obstructed flows of communication. It is creating puddles of stagnant water. It stinks.

The workshop started with about 75% of the participants. Maybe some people were disappointed about this but I was happy as it made the room a little less crowded. The reduced number allowed me to re-arrange the program to accommodate for the opening delays and the fact that everything takes much longer than I guessed because of translation. Oh how I wish I could speak the language of Darius!

We are doing the training in the MSH office This means we are completely self-sufficient: above us is the secretariat, all around us are MSH support and technical staff, down the hall is the kitchen that provides us with food and drink, and next door the prayer room so no one has to leave the place. Next week is going to be quite a show, we will have the biggest of MSH’s conference rooms set up in theater style to seat about 50 people and on each side of it a workshop room seating about 25 provincial health authorities, NGO representatives and technical advisers around smaller tables.

After watching a video of an inspiring leadership program in Egypt that Joan and Morsi launched some 6 years ago we engaged the group in a visioning session that had to break through rigid mental models steeped in current reality problems, abstract language and a focus on action rather than results. This is the contradiction: people are urged to act but then all they can think of is action verbs without any of them being anchored in the end result that the action is supposed to produce. It took some effort to get them down to thinking in pictures and it was a bit of a stretch for my co-facilitators. We switched back and forth between Dari and English and ended up facilitating as a trio. It feels OK, my gut tells me; it is the only honest source of feedback I have because I am unlikely to be criticized. This is a problem I share with top leaders when I am out in the field: severed feedback loops. I have cultivated my gut to compensate for this paucity of information through more direct channels.

Lunch was served in boxes from Kabul’s fast food chain called Chief Burger. It contained a hamburger, fries and a coke. What gives it away as Afghan fast food is the flat bread. It was only halfway through my hamburger that I discovered that the Afghan flat bread was wrapped around kebabs. The first bite brought back memories of the trip Axel and I took around Afghanistan in the fall of 1978. We traveled on a budget of just dollars a day and this is what we ate, pretty much all the time. The only thing missing is the small tray with the three spices: powder made of ground grapes, chili pepper and salt. Taste and smell evoke instant memories of this magical trip along the hippy trail that bonded us together for the rest of our life.

In the afternoon we had strayed so much from the program that it was no use trying to catch up. Instead I used the dynamics in the room to illustrate some facilitation do’s and dont’s; like how to recognize and then deal with energy dips; how to respond to the incessant requests for explanations about how scanning is different from monitoring and evaluation (it turned out the Dari translators used the same word) and the most engaging ways to handle the reporting out by small groups.

The first day ended on a high note and was closed by the DG of Provincial Public Health exhorting everyone to write down every word I say. I’ll try not to make that happen. Here too I am amazed again how new and novel adult education methodology is. Everyone knows the theory but translating it into action does not happen. It is no wonder training has gotten such a bad rap; and it is no wonder that people believe training workshops are not complete without ice-breakers; of course, something’s got to break the ice, since powerpoint slides don’t.

We are all early risers in this place. The built-in alarm is the generator if you manage to sleep through the morning prayers that precede the generator. The call to prayer is coming from a distance, not like the one in Wazir Khan where it would practically levitate me out of my bed.

Breakfast is informal, help-yourself style, with many choices: cold cereal, yogurt, juices, eggs, Afghan flat bread and Western brown bread, even home-made breakfast bars and a large choice of local jams and honey. The car arrived promptly at 7:10 – as I was told. It announced itself with the chirping of a bird, which I learn quickly, is the doorbell. We piled in the car and drove the 100 meters to the heavily guarded compound. It does look indeed like we are in a war zone. But inside is a lovely courtyard with blossoming trees and a light veil of green hanging over the branches and bushes. If I ignore the barbed wire rolled on top of the walls I can imagine the lovely gardens and freedom of movement I remember from the Kabul I first encountered 30 years ago.

The morning was spent aligning expectations and greeting old friends and settling in my temporary office. Iain who was supposed to be living in Spain with his wife Riitta-Liisa, is here while she is in Nepal. And the story of Paul and Laurence is a bit like that too. These people are never home, or else everywhere is their home. Paul is Flemish and he has invited me to meet other Lowlanders at his guesthouse on Thursday. I will be halfway through my stay in Kabul by then.

Over lunch I met with the project staff who will be playing a key role in the workshop and beyond as the project is thinking about the sustainability of all its initiatives. We sat around the table and talked so that I could learn about their challenges and realities and they about how people deal with such challenges (some the same, some different) elsewhere. Three of the staff members of the Capacity Building group will be the facilitators for the next few days; the others will participate and become the facilitators in the next round of workshops, 5 days from now, when the provincial people arrive and we’ll do a twofer.

We had a working lunch which showed that the Afghan staff has taken over some bad American habits. Everyone is working very hard and long hours in an environment that is always full of surprises.

The rest of the day went faster and faster, or rather, tomorrow came closer and closer, faster and faster. It was truly a flying start but everyone is cool about it and so am I; after all, the Afghan staff will do the bulk of the stand up facilitation; in fact I would not be surprised if much of it will happen in one or the other of the local languages.

I received my security briefing, more of the dos and don’ts I can now practically recite, from Baba Jan, MSH’s Security Director. I learned from the book Window on Afghanistan that is written by my colleague Fred Hartman and his wife Mary that Baba Jan used to be Ahmad Shah Massoud’s field commander. The briefing occurred in triangular fashion through one other man who speaks English. It is odd to be in conversation with someone on your right when the meaning of what is being said comes from your left; the dilemma is where to fix your eyes? Baba Jan has never spoken in English to me, and I never in Dari to him. My hunch is that he understands English better than I Dari. I first met him in 2002 and the re-acquaintance was not lost in translation.

I arrived home parched despite drinking at least a liter of water and many cups of green tea. There is not one drop of humidity in the air. It is the kind of dry air that provokes the most awful cough attacks. The late afternoon sun lit the bathroom perfectly and I took the picture I promised yesterday. The fixtures are Afghan-de-luxe; there are gold-colored knobs and covers and matching sets of water cup and tooth bush holders, soap dishes, towel racks, etc which have lost some of their former glory or functionality. But the toilet works, there is running water for now and the shower is hot and wonderful.

Dinner with Mirwas and Steve was much nicer than sitting alone in a hotel restaurant. There was much talk about leadership. It is a never ending topic for inquiry, challenge and surprise. After that I willed myself to complete the support materials for tomorrow’s facilitators. It truly was a heroic act of willpower to overcome the heavy pull of my bed. That willpower is now gone and there is no more resistance possible.