September 10th, 2024
Dear friends,
The newsletter you are reading here is already a few days old. Due to the move of the homepage and the newsletter mailing from Wix.com to Siteground, the mailing has been slightly delayed. The date above shows when the text was written.
I’ve been in Kabul for a good week now. The sky is blue during the day. It’s over 30 degrees. A gentle breeze blows in the afternoon. Actually ideal. But there’s a lot of pollen in the late summer air and I’m allergic to it. The air isn’t clean in any other way either. If you look up, the sky is blue. If you look horizontally into the distance, you can see the stink that hangs over everything. Anyway, I often have to sneeze and cough. My nose is blocked. Many Afghans are no better off. I also have to fight diabetes and take blood tests in the morning and evening. They’re always too high, even though I’m more careful with my diet than ever before.
I don’t care about anything when the alarm clock nudges me into the day this morning. I am dazed. I carry out all my tasks automatically – as if controlled from outside. The day is gone. No one can save it for me. Now Ajmal and Bahruddin are coming too. They attended classes in Bini Hissar yesterday afternoon and again this morning at six o’clock. They want to report on that. That too! My head needs a rest. But they come to me with Bini Hissar. But as a boss, you can’t avoid it: “All right, at half past eight.”
At half past eight, Ajmal and Bahruddin join me on the veranda. Hamid joins them. Then Naqib, the head manager of OFARIN, arrives. I brace myself for the predictable unpleasantness from Bini Hissar. Bilal and Naqib are the trainers there, the supervisors of the lessons. Anne Marie and I think they are both lazy. In Bini Hissar, too many of the pupils are usually absent, and the trainers find hair-raising reasons for this. The students‘ performance is rarely satisfactory.
Ajmal and Bahruddin start: Student attendance was high. They are impressed by the students‘ performance. If Bahruddin and Ajmal don’t like something, they say so. But they only praise. What happened?
My colleagues explain to me that seminars were held for the local trainers while I was away. The trainers had been trained like teachers to give lessons themselves. Apparently, the trainers now know much better what the teachers they supervise have to do. At some point, we had also outlined the trainers‘ tasks in a paper. The contents of this summary also found their way into the seminars. The lessons had improved significantly. Trainers, teachers and students have more fun at work. Bahruddin and Ajmal report that the seminars have brought clear progress for the trainers, and not only in Bini Hissar.
Teaching was my personal territory. I know a lot about planting nut trees and also about the work of our midwives. After all, I am responsible. But these projects were created by Afghan colleagues. They came up with everything, discussed it with those affected and then implemented it with brilliant success.
But I personally imported OFARIN’s school lessons. I had written the textbooks in English or German and watched carefully as my colleagues translated my texts into the local languages. I turned the whole lesson around several times. At last, it was good enough for many students to really learn and master the material. I designed seminars to prepare the teachers for the lessons. It was all successful and good.
But now my colleagues had designed and conducted seminars for trainers on their own initiative. The lessons have obviously become even better. Bilal and Naqib are not lazy. They just didn’t know well enough what they had to do as trainers. They were afraid when visitors came from headquarters. Afghan colleagues set up their own seminar in my personal domain. As development workers, we like to think that we foreigners have to make improvements. But only when Afghans improve projects on their own initiative, they master them themselves.
What I am most pleased about is that cooperation in the teaching sector is now based even more on mutual trust. We had thought that the trainers Bilal and Naqib would have to be forced to work more efficiently with threats of pay cuts or even dismissals. Our colleagues‘ trainer seminars have now shown that Naqib and Bilal only needed to be better prepared for their tasks. We can do without threats and coercion. They wouldn’t have helped anyway. Naqib and Bilal are keen to help improve the lessons. We just had to show them how to do it.
Spot checks and recalculations are essential when it comes to money. But when it comes to interpersonal cooperation, e.g. improving teaching, it should be assumed that everyone has the same goal. Then threats and punishments are out of the question. Then, everyone works without fear but with more joy and success.
OFARIN’s diverse program, which takes place in different parts of the country, only works on the basis of mutual trust. As soon as superiors control employees, they show that they do not trust them. The employees protest against this breach of trust by looking for ways and means to undermine the controls. More and more manpower and intelligence is then wasted in a petty war to improve or undermine controls.
I still have to sniffle and cough. But the fifteen minutes of reporting on the lessons in Bini Hissar made my day. Working at OFARIN is fun.
Yours sincerely,
Peter Schwittek.