Thunderbird Student Voices

Guest post by Thunderbird MBA student Emily Eckert, ‘11

Emily is currently working as Reporting Officer Intern for FLAG International in Afghanistan. FLAG is a consulting company that provides technical and management consulting services for companies seeking to generate an above-average return on the capital of their owners and investors.

Like most of the rest of the world – outside of work I’ve been busy watching the World Cup matches. Unfortunately for us, the best games start at 11pm local time! This makes for some very late nights, especially when they go into overtime. But it is a lot of fun watching with co-workers and then we all fall asleep during the 2nd half.

Last weekend, I went to visit the King’s palace just outside of Kabul. It is called Darul Aman Palace and was destroyed during the 30 years of war. In the distance is the queen’s palace and there is supposedly a tunnel connecting the two palaces.

According to the guards that escorted us through the palace, it was designed by a German architect and was modeled after a castle in Germany. The destruction of the palace was absolutely shocking and saddening. There were over 250 rooms, and although everything is gone, you can tell it must have been beautiful during its hey-day. There were bullet holes in the walls and the ceilings were black from fire and explosions. Entire floors and ceilings had collapsed, but we were able to go up to the first floor and walk around a bit. That was a bit nerve-wracking even though the soldiers said it was safe. But obviously, nothing happened and it was cool to get a different view of the palace.

The previous weekend, we went to a dinner in an orchard outside of Kabul. I was mistakenly informed that our hostess was Simi Samar, a women’s rights activist and leader in Afghanistan, but that was not correct. Our hostess was Simi Rahimi, who is also a women’s rights activist, but a slightly younger generation. She grew up with Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns) and her brother wrote a book about women in Afghanistan (The Patience Stone, by Atiq Rahimi – it is fiction but delivers an interesting look into the minds of Afghan women). Khaled Hosseini wrote the introduction to this novel. She is hoping to work with FLAG (organization I am interning with) on using some vacant land she owns to create an agricultural/business training center for women.

My supervisors at work are going to find opportunities for me to travel to other areas of the country which I’m very excited about. Of course, it will be to safe areas, but I will probably get a burqa just in case. Some of the places I may get to go are Bamyan and Panshir.

Work is very busy right now. I have weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, and final reports all due this week. I am also involved in writing proposals for new work, and I’m even bidding on work as the “Business Adviser”. All of these potential projects are for business development – I would be responsible for creating needs assessment surveys, analyzing the results, and developing the training curriculum and content.

Fortunately, some of the previous projects I’ve worked on for FLAG have already taught and prepared me to write a business development curriculum and even write the lesson plans. It’s an interesting experience condensing everything we learn in our first year of business school into a 3-4 week training program. That’s in addition to making sure that individuals with a 6th grade education and who are functionally illiterate can understand and learn the material.

One of the part-owners of the company is in town this week for his quarterly review. He’s a Thunderbird alumnus so I was able to talk about school with him. He also knows one of my former co-workers, which just goes to show how small the international development world really is! There was another T-bird alum in town last week doing a training for us at the Department of Energy, and I think there are a few other T-birds floating around the city.

In my free time, I still mostly hang out with my co-workers but I am meeting other ex-pats as well. I haven’t had a chance yet to meet up with some of the contacts from school and former co-workers, but perhaps this weekend. I really want to go to the fabric market with one of my local friends to buy cloth to make one of the local outfits (tunic and pants) and tunics in general.

At the end of June, we went to UNIQA – the UN guest house which is closing after 28 years. It was a lot of fun and there were a lot of people there! It’s too bad because they had a free gym and swimming pool. All the other gyms and swimming pools charge pretty high rates to use them.

Some of the other local excursions I want to make are to the Babur Gardens, the Women’s Garden, and the old city walls. Also Kabul University has a beautiful campus with lots of green areas and trees. Between local sightseeing and hanging out at the expat-only restaurants/guest houses/bars, that sums up my social activities.

I’ll finally get back to sweltering hot Glendale mid-morning on September 4th. Classes start Sept. 7th and I should be un-jetlagged and ready to go!

(Photos: Top, Emily Eckert. Middle, the Darul Aman Palace, taken by Carl Montgomery. Bottom, the Babur Gardens, taken by Jim Kelly)

Posted: 07|9|10 at 1:30 pm.
Filed under: Internships.
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