Day 22 - Too Much To Do

I'm juggling a lot of balls in the air right now, and the lock down days didn't help much. I'm working to share the load with all the new summer mentors that just got here. That'll take most of this week. One new mentor is 1/2 time with the language department. He gets the job of training the language instructors on the new lab. Two others are here for CompSci. We're trying to share the load there also, with one picking up mentoring the database, software engineering, and programming courses, while the other takes on all the IT requirements for the new Air Defense University site. That will free me up to focus on computer architecture, networks, and operating systems.

By now I'm seen as an "old timer," so I end up helping get the new mentors used to the Afghan's ways of approaching problems. I'm not confident I get all the nuances yet, and I probably never will given the short time I'm here. However, the strong Type A, bull in the china shop approach common to most military officers is the exact wrong way to approach problem solving with them. Rather, I've adopted the "perhaps this might be a good approach" technique that ends up with them thinking it was their idea all along. I strive to be an ego minimalist, and it's much better if they get the credit for the idea. It promotes Afghan ownership of the solution and the problem. This is of course a pre-requisite for us reducing and eventually eliminating our support here.

One of our mentors was told a great joke from an Afghan officer today that I have to share...

A suicide bomber tries to blow up a group of kufari. When he tries to detonate the bomb on his body, it fails to go off, so he decides to attack the kufari by hand. Needless to say, they subdue him with force. He wakes up some time later in a clean, well-equipped western hospital being attended to by two beautiful European nurses. He doesn't know what to think in his dis-oriented state, but the first thing that comes to mind is "well, this sucks, where are the other 38?"

I know this joke is a gross mis-representation of the Qur'an (see this and this), but the interesting part to me is that it was told to us in jest by a Muslim Afghan in the spirit of a joke we could share together. This to me says a great deal about the relationships that have been developed here through our 6+ years of work with NMAA. I see it as extremely promising. Maybe someday we'll all get over our differences enough to be able to tell friendly jokes about them with those we are most different from.