The Foreign Service Journal - December 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2017 39 tions on our part. If true, it was a game changer—we could not only finish Kajaki by October, but get that additional power out to homes and businesses at the same time. I immediately called together the USAID and contractor engineering staffs to test the engineering behind what the CEO had told us. Our analysis indicated that his plan was possible but risky—if the security situation prevented DABS linesmen from accessing the entire line, any small flaw in its 200-kilome- ter length could mean failure. Like a lightbulb filament, the line would simply melt and pop when power was increased. We told DABS they had our full support to implement this audacious plan and offered significant amounts of transmission cable we had in stock to assist. The DABS head of operations in the Kandahar region, a savvy engineer named Rasool, explained the plan to us: They would rent additional bucket trucks and deploy double shifts each day of the outage to repair the line. September 2016 was a nerve-wracking month, but the days went more smoothly than expected as the team completed tur- bine installation on schedule and commissioned the new unit. Meanwhile, Afghan linesmen from DABS heroically endured blazing desert heat, kidnappings and double shifts to untangle and repair damaged line bit by bit and, in the worst stretches, replace it with new line. By early October, DABS was nearly ready to begin testing the additional power on the transmission line. We lost a couple of weeks when, in classic Afghan fashion, a village along the line would not grant DABS engineers access without a promise of more power from the dam. Having DABS out front negotiating with their own people was critical, and they successfully reached a compromise. In the end, the project was completed. As the reporting cable stated: “Now that Unit 2 is online, the Kajaki Hydroelectric Power Plant has the capacity to generate 50 megawatts of elec- tricity compared to a previous maximum of 32. Kandahar city presently receives an average of 16-17 megawatts, compared to a low-season average of 9 prior to the installation of Unit 2.” Development works when the host country leads, and we support. Local knowledge holds the key to success, provided we listen closely and can pair it with our technical knowledge. We got the Kajaki project done together, with the Afghans in the lead. Jeremiah Carew is a USAID Foreign Service officer currently posted to Hanoi. He joined the Foreign Service in 2004 and has served in Peru, Uganda and Afghanistan (twice), in addition to assignments in Washington, D.C. He is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Dominican Republic and Ecuador). Which Way Will Bucharest Go? Romania 1991-1994 • By AnthonyM. Kolankiewicz After the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, Washington was not sure which direction Bucharest would go. The first Romanian president after the fall of Nicolas Ceausescu had been educated in Moscow and was pro-Russia by tem- perament and experience. He pressed for a slow, incremental transition toward democratic institutions and a market economy. The weak, fragmented democratic opposition favored a quicker process, but struggled for relevance within a conservative society. I served as a political officer at U.S. Embassy Bucharest from 1991 to 1994, my first overseas assignment as a tenured officer. My responsibilities centered on keeping in touch with the opposition political parties, including the trade union movement. The main trade union in the country was the former com- munist workers’ organization, known by the Romanian acronym CNSLR. I met with its leadership frequently, most of the time on my own but occasionally with the local representative of the Free Trade Unions Institute. The FTUI was the European arm of the AFL-CIO and reported directly to AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, D.C. The CNSLR president, Victor Ciorbea, told me repeatedly dur- ing the first year of my assignment that his goal was to transform the former communist trade union into a credible democratic institution. I was skeptical, since many other former communist organizations in Romania at the time spoke about similarly posi- tive plans but made little real effort to change. Mr. Ciorbea began to implement some of his plans during my second year in Bucharest. I continued to meet with him and his leadership team regularly, but I remained doubtful about his sincerity and whether the CNSLR would or could succeed in transforming itself. Nonetheless, I cross-checked what was hap- pening in the CNSLR with the country’s other trade unions, most of which were loosely associated with the democratic political opposition. Democratic trade union leaders initially shared my skepticism about the CNSLR and its president but, by the end of the second year, they were willing to concede that genuine prog- ress was underway. The third year brought even more progress, and it became evident both from personal observation and through confirma- tion by neutral sources that the CNSLR and its president were following through on promises to transform the organization into a viable, democratically oriented trade union. I became a believer as well, as I recognized just how challenging it was to change the