Sylvia's Journal

This morning I woke up from a very vivid dream about Hillary Clinton. It is a novel way of getting votes, appearing in people’s dreams like that. I frantically penned down the dream, still half asleep in order to record all the details. And while I was writing I noticed that the carpel tunnel symptoms of numb middle fingers had re-appeared. I also discovered that since my cortisone shot (Depo-Medrol and Lidocaine) in my shoulder, one week ago, I have not woken up one single morning with numb hands and that my shoulder problems have all but disappeared.

And now I am completely awake and even though it is only 6 AM it makes little sense to go back to sleep. The alarm will go off in 30 minutes and I have to pack since we are moving out to drive to Cape Coast, a two hour drive westwards along the coast. This is where we will be for the workshop and stay till next Thursday.

I will post the dream about Hillary as a separate entry so that this one does not get too long. There was much to reflect on from yesterday’s senior alignment meeting.

I have been thinking about the words faith and practice ever since we ended our meeting yesterday. Faith is something that we, in our facilitator team, had to have in each other as we leaped into this senior alignment event together. Our practice yesterday, and hopefully in the week to come, is about congruence and being true to what we teach. Faith and Practice also happens to be the name of the Friends (Quakers) book of discipline which contains descriptions of the Quaker faith understandings and accepted practices. The book includes a set of queries, which are questions designed to help individuals and groups reflect on their faith and faithfulness. The book also contains a set of guides and statements of what is normative, rather than rules.

There are several Faith And Practice books in the Quaker community so it is not like a bible. These books often start with a quote from a Letter from Meeting of Elders at Balby, in Yorkshire, England, 1656: “Dearly beloved Friends, these things we do not lay upon you as a rule or form to walk by, but that all, with a measure of light which is pure and holy, may be guided: and so in the light walking and abiding, these things may be fulfilled in the Spirit, not in the letter; for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.” Although the old English is a bit cumbersome and tedious to read I found it interesting to glimpse into another lifetime, centuries ago, and read about killing letters and a spirit giving life.

I think we all felt some sort of spirit moving in and around us yesterday in the Ghana health Services conference room. We were all moved by it in a way that seemed nearly choreographed. Our time estimates were right on, we started early and were able to add something that we had left out fearing we’d run over. Each facilitator did a piece and handed flawlessly over to the next. Everyone was engaged and excited and you’d think that the facilitator team had been doing this sort of work for years and that it was their own.

In my line of work there is much agonizing about ownership and how to get others to own something you care greatly about. Operationally ownership means that the new owner (of a program, a new initiative) starts paying for it instead of the old owner. Sometimes the illusion of ownership is bought by giving people goodies or money to show up and participate. It seems our leadership program is already fully owned before it has even started. I am trying to figure out how that happened, so quickly; I still feel like we have just arrived.

Cabul and I had dinner at the house of our colleague Adama Kone. Adama and I started at MSH in the same year, 1986 and so we both have a Hitchcock chair with a plaque thanking us for 20 years of service. Adama’s chair was shipped to him in Accra from Boston in a huge DHL box. Mine is in my office in Cambridge. If you come for a visit you might sit in it.

This was another French immersion evening for Cabul. Adama had invited some Senegalese physicians who are off to Niger with him next week on a consultancy.  

 It is unavoidable, when you put a bunch of francophones together, even though they could manage English quite well, that they speak French. So Cabul got busy figuring out what we were talking about based on our hand gestures. French speakers use their hands and arms a lot more than English speakers do. With an occasional translation he managed to follow the rough outline of our all-over-the-map conversations. By simply observing he had a Francophone West Africa experience thrown in for free with his anglophone West Africa trip; a bonus that included great food (cieboudien) and 1 centimeter (in my case) of an excellent Chateau Neuf du Pape from 1995.