Dari, Italian and the Project Lost in Translation!

As part of my responsibilities as the USAID field program officer in Afghanistan, I served as the development advisor to the Coalition Forces that operated in Shindand District. One of my favorite experiences was working with the Civil-Affairs Teams (CAT) of the Italian military. If you were with the Italians on a mission, they were friendly, hospitable and saw you as part of their team, whatever your nationality or background. They valued your input and consulted you on anything related to community relations and development programs. And at the end of the day when we would come back to the base, they invited you for pizza and coffee, "Behzad, you come tonight we eat the pizza and drink the cappuccino" said with the best Italian-English accent!

I met my first Italian CAT leader, Captain Francisco, on the Italian side of Shindand Airbase. We sat down, and he asked if USAID could assist his team with one of the villages that fell in his area of responsibility. I asked the name and he said "Shoorab". I told him that I was familiar with Shoorab. Shoorab was located about 20 minutes to the west of the base, and I had met their main elder, Haji Safdar Khan, and visited the village.

The Captain went on to add that the people of Shoorab needed clean drinking water! And that the Italians had dug three wells in three different parts of the village and so far they had not been successful. I asked why is that? He replied because everywhere they dig the water is salty! I was surprised by what he told me! So I asked him, "you dug three wells in a village called Shoorab and each time the water was salty?" he said "Yes!" I then asked "do you know what Shoorab means?" He replied, "No"! I said, Shoorab means "Salty Water!!". Sometimes the most obvious things in life seems hidden!! As we continued the conversation, I advised the Captain, that first he needed to get was a new interpreter! and after that he needed to stop wasting money digging wells in a place where the problem was so obvious that they named the village after that problem!!!



Once we figured out what was clearly lost in translation, we decided to revisit Shoorab. They told us that their village clean water source was a few kilometers away and they just needed to get it to the village. Using USAID funding and American (New Mexico State University) and Afghan expertise, and local input, a four kilometer pipe scheme was build. The pipe connected to the clean water source and brought the water directly into the village.

Today, hundreds in the village of Shoorab enjoy the flowing clean drinking water.

Shoorab is an example of the lack of communication that can make a seemingly easy project into a complicated one. A simple word that can't be translated can lead to waste of resources, and many unhealthy communities.

As time went on our working relationship with the Italians continued to be well coordinated and productive. As always it ended well as we sat down at the end of the day, talked, laughed, ate our pizza and drank the cappuccino!