Sylvia's Journal

All through the night the temperature, projected above my bed, said 18 degrees Fahrenheit, which for me is still -8 Celsius. Getting out of bed is difficult in such temperatures.

Today is a day full of appointments again. I have come to live the last two weeks as if nothing happened six months ago but that illusion is gone now.

Yesterday morning I did, for the first time in nearly 2 weeks, my usual shower exercises and discovered that I had made great progress in the flexibility of my ankle. It must have been all this walking on uneven surfaces which is the equivalent of half an hour physical therapy I suspect.

I received an enthusiastic email from Cabul who managed to get a ticket to one of the soccer games and discovered another Bowdoin alumn, Anne. She was one of the three people I was supposed to meet in Accra, as suggested through my old Caringbridge network. Instead, Cabul met her as we could not find time before I left. He then introduced her and others to his uncle’s sports bar (Livingstone) in Accra where they watched the Patriot’s Game. When it came to sports I was not a great travel companion for him but it sounds like he got himself nicely networked into the young Ghana expat crowd.

Axel and I went to see Fatou in Lynn and got lost more than once on our way there. We finally had to buy a roadmap and, while I was searching for the quickest way to Fatou’s appartment Axel hummed the ditty “Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, you never get out they way you get in.” We wondered about the rest of the rhyme and I found it in Wikipedia: “Ask for water, they give you a gin/ It’s the darndest city I ever been in.”

There we met Fatou’s son Cyril, now in the Air force with two of his Waring classmates, Lilly and Josh, one of the Waring teachers who had had Sita and Tessa in his class and some of Fatou’s dialysis students and colleagues (from the Philippines, from Haiti) We had not seen the Waring folks in years. They have all become travelers it seems. We heard stories about Sikkim, Chile, Kenya, Ghana and Senegal. Only Josh has settled down; as a teacher at Waring. This is something that Sita and Tessa don’t get, this going back to your old school as a teacher. May be for them it is just too dramatic.

Fatou had invited ten people and cooked for 40. She never makes just one dish and so we had and antipasto of tongue, quail eggs, anchovies and vegetables, a Senegalese Cieboudien, a turkey prepared a l’africaine (better than the American Thanksgiving turkeys she asserted) and various sorts of rice plus another set of main dishes with peppers and chicken. I think I may have left something out but I could not possible try everything. We did not finish any of the dishes and all of us were sent home with leftovers, some on the very dishes that we had finally dropped off that had been waiting for their return to Fatou since the ‘summer of African food.” So, we’ll have more African food in the next few days and, once again, dishes to return. But now we know the way to Lynn.

Axel went to see the game with friends and I used the quiet time to bring my email in box back to a manageable size and found all sorts of to-do things that had been in full view or hiding such as scopes of works for assignments over the next few months, conference proposals and trip reports. I also paid some attention to the upcoming OBTS Board elections. As the Chair of the Nominations and Elections Committee I have to present the slate of candidates to the Board very soon, and definitely before I fly to ADRA International HQ early next week in Silver Springs.