Day 24 - Meet the New Boss, Not the Same as the Old Boss

I met our new boss today. Yesterday's visit was actually our boss's boss (LTG Caldwell). Our new boss is the Commander of ANATEC (Afghan National Army Training and Education Command), British Brigadier General Patterson. Sorry, but I can't locate a Wikipedia entry for him. The visit was short, but he was very interested in and supportive of NMAA. Lots of good questions that as a group we answered well. I even remarked that these crazy Afghans play way too much cricket and we've taken the initiative to start teaching them baseball.

We really are going to teach them baseball, but we have a much more important sport to teach them first. Yes, you guessed it, Ultimate! Our first session is Sunday afternoon. I've been nominated to cover the rules with them and teach a few throws. I can't decide if I should teach them the full contact rules, or the other more wimpy version. They are quite fast and have a ton of running stamina, so without contact I won't be able to keep up. However, I'll probably opt for the more diplomatic traditional Ultimate rules.

It is a bit of a custom for us to team up with the Turkish mentors and teach the NMAA cadets new sports. They love to compete with us in all manner of activities. One of our previous mentors was a great table tennis player. She beat most all the Afghans and really put it to the Turkish Officers. It was icing on the cake that she was a female Army Officer. I think it secretly humbled both the Afghans and the Turks. It also earned her a great deal of respect in their eyes.

Culturally Afghanistan has a lot of progress to make in terms of women's equality. Many of the senior officers in the ANA that fought with the Russian forces are quite accepting since they had many positive experiences serving with Russian women. The younger generation seems to be warming to the idea too, but there is still a big cultural hurdle. As I mentioned previously, NMAA admits about 10-12 woman in each class, but currently they are all tracked to medical school. They only spend a year at NMAA, then they go to Kabul University for medical school and later serve in the ANA as doctors. The plan is to start including women in a fully equal capacity at NMAA in 2014 starting with the class of 2018. It seems like a long way off to us, but to most Afghans that may be too soon. Time is measured differently here. I've already heard people saying that the first class with women might not be admitted until 2016... I hope that the timing doesn't slip, and that Afghan society will be accepting. The day the first female lieutenant here takes command of an integrated unit will be a watershed event.

We worked out our schedule to review all the CompSci instructors to help evaluate and mentor their tutoring today. Mid-terms wrap up tomorrow and we'll start observations on Saturday. I was told before coming that they were very culturally averse to criticism, but the CompSci department has repeatedly reassured us to be candid and straight forward with our comments. He is committed to improving his faculty and the NMAA cadets' education. It is nice to work with him.

I'm afraid we're starting to overwhelm our poor translator, Mansoor, though. We are now triple teaming him with everything from detailed IT requirements for the new Afghan Defense University, to a database project for the registrar, to all the classroom observations we have planned. He's sticking with us well though, and he and I are still continuing his tutoring on computer networking. We covered the OSI stack and common protocols yesterday. We'll start to dive into some protocols in detail over the next few days.

Tomorrow's another day at NMAA. I'll try and include some pictures in the next post if something interesting comes up.