Archive for April, 2008

Addis

Published April 30, 2008 On the road Leave a Comment
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Armed with my last Dutch purchase, vitamins for ‘zakenmensen’ (business people), I arrived in Addis in the dark, after a brief stopover in a very hazy, dusty and sandy Khartoum. Addis is new territory for me. Exactly 29 years ago I missed a chance to go here, from Dakar, and never forgot the disappointment, but here I am, finally.

I was greeted by several signs that either meant ‘Americans welcome’ or ‘we want to to be like America,’ or both. We passed the Denver Café, the Boston Day Spa, a large statue of liberty and something that looked like Starbucks, same typeface and colors, but with a different name. We passed more cafes; this is after all coffee land. From my shaded view through the tinted windows of the Sheraton shuttle I saw a city that looked like a mixture of America, India and Africa: shopping mall ads, beggars in rags and momuments to celebrate the ephemeral African Unity. My co-travellers in the van were sitting with their blackberries in attention, waiting for a signal which they may never get. Communication with the outside world is restricted. My CGNet program does not list Ethiopia. I could have left my Skype headset and cellphone at home. One way or another communications with the homefront will be expensive, a scarce resource.

I am in Addis’ fanciest hotel, according to blog entries in the Virtual Tourist. The concierge and his helpers wear hats, either Fedoras or Bowler hats or, in some cases, one that is a cross between the two. My room was not ready and I was parked in the heavily draped and carpeted lounge where a pianist who looked like Angela Davis played hotel music. A gaggle of young beautiful women was, I imagined, waiting for further instructions from their impresario.

My bathroom has a scale with a paper sheet taped to it with ‘ideal weight’ for ladies on one side and for gents on the other. I am 2 kilos over the top of the ideal range; the result, no doubt, of 3 days of unrestrained consumption in Holland; another objective for the next 9 days to get myself in shape for two more days of unrestrained consumption after landing in Amsterdam on the 9th and before heading back home on the 11th of May.

I had a hard time going to sleep. My room has a door that opens on a small balcony overlooking an idyllic scene of pools and palms, more idyllic at night than in daytime. I slept with the doors open, sung to sleep by crickets, the sound of small waves (the pool?) and the faint barkings of dogs faraway; nothing that told me I was in the middle of a big African city.

Herring and fries

Published April 29, 2008 On the road Leave a Comment
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I woke up from a dream (or dreams) that had my ex in it and various sinister figures with bad intentions. Anxiety dreams perhaps now that I am to throw myself int the arms of Africa again? I am certainly not looking forward to the long trip down south, interrupted in Khartoum before I land in Addis in the evening. It is now 6 AM. This will be a long day.

Our short vacation together in Holland went too fast. Two full unprogrammed days seemed endless, from the distance of time. But once started, they passed by quickly. Although I woke early on Monday morning, Axel did not and so, after breakfast I went back to bed for a bit and then it was suddenly noon. We had set as our destination for the day the center of Haarlem where, as I had assumed, we would find the weekly market with its cheese stalls, warm ‘stroopwafels,’ home-cooked Indonesian food and a place to eat herring or fries (Flamish, not French) in a pointy bag, or both.

We meandered northwest to Haarlem through the tulipfields which are always amazing, no matter how often I have seen then. They grow on the sandy soil right in back of the dunes. Axel noticed that the soil is really sandy, grey-colored like you would find it in the woods on Cape Cod, and that is was therefore no surprise that our tulips in Manchester don’t do so well, as they are planted in very rich dark soil.

The market was not there. Instead there was a midway complete with merry-go-around, bumper cars, shooting galleries and some scary thing with two arms that held people like a giant and took them on a wild right high in the air, upside down and then down again. There was a lot of screaming and it made me dizzy just to look at it. We did find the herring, the fries, and even a large piece of apple pie with whipped cream. It was lunch and part of dinner. We even found edible tulip fields in a pastry shop.

In the evening we drove back to Jan and Louise in Hilversum to pick up Jan’s car which he so generously loaned to Axel for the duration of his stay. The mother of the bride from yesterday’s dream showed up, by chance, and we had another wonderful evening and once again came home late. But not too late for a small glass of California wine with Piet, our host, who we still only see occasionally.

The itinerary of stuff

Published April 28, 2008 On the road Leave a Comment
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Sietske and Piet have one of those coffee machines that requires only the pushing of a small foil disc into a slot to produce a steaming cup of coffee in seconds. Drinking too much coffee is very easy this way. Axel reacts badly to too much coffee (caffeine) but loves it too much. Lucky for him I fed the machine red foil discs which, I did not know, are the decaf ones.

I suspect we are both gaining weight. There is simply too much good food to eat. For me this is also about catching up on foods I miss in the USA such as raw herring, licorice and cheese. It is only partially about taste. Eating is a social activity suffused with memories and associations.

My niece Emily is not allowed to engage in this activity but is fed, instead, by a small pump that, over a period of 15 hours pumps about 3000 calories of a nutritious proto-porridge directly into her bloodstream. After the visiting nurse comes in at night to hook her up she walks around with a backpack that hides the large plastic bag and the pump. Only the thin tube that ends in a port below her right shoulder is visible. We were a little hesitant to show up for dinner but our timing was off and so that is exactly when we arrived.

She said she didn’t mind, while her mate Hicham cooked for us, happy to have eating companions. She sat with us at the table, sipping a small cup of bouillon, one thing she can eat in a more traditional way and claimed to enjoy seeing us eat; she even likes to cook for others these days and fantasizes about fresh asparagus and strawberries – but this may not be in the stars for her, at least not this year, she fears. One operation and a dose of good luck is what she needs before she can enjoy the things we take for granted.

I dreamt last night of travel again and of going to Ethiopia. My dreams usually contain very vivid images but this was a dream of a concept, an idea, a feeling rather than a view. The dream may well have been triggered by Emily’s brother Daan who is an artist and has a project, worldtravelcard, that maps the whereabouts of holders of 500 plastic cards he handed out a couple of years ago. The small blue cards look like credit cards. You log onto the site whenever you arrive at a new place with your exclusive card number that is yours as long as you keep the card in your possession. Card ownership is temporary; you are supposed to pass on the card to others who you meet along the way. It is a bit like the audio tapes or books that have numbers on them that hook into a website. You are to give the tapes or book away and the new (temporary) owner is supposed to register the book and then pass it on. This allows you to trace its itinerary. Both are products of our new borderless world but also of the ideal of shared resources; that notion appeals to me. It contrasts starkly with the idea of borderpatrols and fences that scream mine and thine. It is about the itinerary of stuff. Stuff has, of course, always traveled as you can see at flea markets, especially in cosmopolitan centers. But now we can actually follow the journey from place to place and from hand to hand (foot, eye, ear, mouth).

Branches

Published April 27, 2008 Dreams , On the road Leave a Comment
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I was rudely woken up by a coughing fit that jerked me out of a dream in which I was just sprinkling rice on top of a bride. As usual, the dreams were rich and hard to reel back in once fully awake; faint traces of hard work and things not being what they seem to be. I’ll try to remember that.

I have slept, what we call in my native language, a hole into the day. It is noon time on Sunday. For the first time in weeks I have not a care in the world; nothing to complete, nowhere to go. I have not checked my email in nearly 48 hours. It feels wonderfully free. Now, more than 24 hours after our arrival we still haven’t seen our host Piet. He is biking on this gorgeous spring day. We communicate by leaving notes to each other on the kitchen counter.

I am in a house where I have taken many of my MSH colleagues as we travel through Holland to faraway places. It’s a martha steward kind of house, beautifully decorated and everything matches, except when Sietske is away for awhile and Piet lives alone. Sietske would probably not tolerate the dirty coffee cups that are left here and there. But eventually everything is put away again; she has trained him well.

Outside the chickens make lots of noise. Later today I will go for a real egg hunt; fresh eggs for breakfast sounds very appealing. There are also two large pot belly pigs, rabbits, a cat, an a dog found on a highway in France, Trouve, but he is in his native land with Sietske, overseeing the remodeling of the vacation bungalow estate they own near St. Tropez.

I am looking out over a large body of water with lots of sailboats. To my left is a huge Japanese cherry tree, the branches bending under a heavy load of pink blossoms. In this time of year Holland is at its best, flowers are everywhere.

Our family reunion took place in a restored barn of an old Dutch farm that lies in the small town of Lage Vuursche in the province of Utrecht. We parked our car outside the tall gates of one of the Queen’s palaces. Later we saw a man on a bicycle carrying a bouquet of flowers. He had a long conversation with the guard, who never took the flowers. We imagined he was arguing that he wanted to deliver the flowers himself to the queen. But she was not home. This is the week of Koninginnedag, April 30, something akin to our national holiday. It is actually her mother’s birthday. The current queen’s birthday is in January which is not a good time, weatherwise, for a party. The queen’s agenda this week is full of appearances to her people in tiny villages is in the far corners of her kingdom; it reeks of something medieval.

Axel will get to witness Koninginnedag. Some of our friends say he should go to Amsterdam, because it is a riot to be there on this day; others say this is exactly the reason why he should stay away as far as he can. When I was a child this day was the most exciting day of the year. There was no school. There were fairs with midways, cotton candy etc. In the morning any organized group in our town got to parade in front of the local notables. You were lucky if you got to parade in front of or in back of one of the local marching bands with their majoretts who twirled batons. I always paraded with the brownies, dressed to the nines in our brown and yellow uniforms, walking in perfect step. We had practiced for months in the woods for this event, left, right, left, right. For awhile my mother had a seat on the town council and she got to stand right next to the major. We have home movies where you see me wave to her, a big happy smile from a kid without front teeth; a stolen wave (not really allowed if you took parading serious). Ah, the power of belonging, importance, and organized togetherness; powerful stuff in a child’ life.

At the reunion we had the five branches of families that came forth from my great-grandparents’ five children. Each branch was identified by a colored ribbon; our’s, the grandchildren and great-grand-children of Ankie, was blue. Each branch had prepared a large poster with pictures that helped us see who fit where and how the small cousins I knew from my childhood had grown to be their parents, now the oldest generation with kids who have kids. The initiative for the event came from one of the oldest members of this tribe who decided they did not want everyone to meet only at funerals.

My greatgrandmother was an accomplished watercolorist and one of her great-grandsons had prepared a slideshow of her work. Lefthanded, she painted with both as, at that time, left handedness was something not acceptable in society and so most were forced to become righthanded, which gave these people two good hands, and a stutter sometimes.

I discovered there were also recordings of my grandmother speaking at some event. Imagine that, oma’s voice on MP3. All who want can get an email with the sound attached. Amazing.

The reunion was completed with the choice between a walk or mini-golf (or midget-golf as it is called in Dutch). Axel and I opted for the walk which turned out a challenge with the uneven terrain and our muscles getting increasingly sore (and now, the next morning we walk like crash victims again). Tea time was also time for farewells, and promises to meet again; this will be, in all likelihood, at a funeral again.

We walked across the main street of the cute village and found another terrace where Ankie, Michiel, Axel and I had a beer before we parted, they to Brussels and we on our way to our friends Jan and Louise who had just one day before become grandparents. We admired the baby pictures, the lovely new house in Hilversum and had a wonderful meal together. Just before we left we got to see pictures of a Philipino wedding in Singapore of a mutual friend. It may explain the dream about brides and rice, as there was another bride that day, the daughter of our friends Liesbeth and Rene. We drove home around 11 PM and tumbled into a deep sleep as soon as we hit the bed, around midnight. Our host was already sleeping.

Stranger at home

Published April 26, 2008 On the road Leave a Comment
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It was nice this time not to have to say goodbye to Axel at Logan airport and to go through security together for a change. It has been nearly two years since we last traveled together to Holland for the Vriesendorp family reunion. Now it is for a reunion of my maternal grandmother’s extended family. It was also nice not to have to worry about touching your neighbor when positioning your head for a try at sleeping. Not that it did any good; I think I slept less than I usually do.

As usual when I fly the Boston-Amsterdam route (or the return), someone else from MSH is in on board. This time it was Matt, on his way to our office in Dar es Salaam.

I had looked very much forward to the flight because it would be the first time in weeks that I could actually relax and read (for fun) rather than chipping away at my to-do list.

The virtual celebration that I had prepared for the course was well received. The best part was being copied on an email that circulated among the members of the first team that I had called to the front of our imaginary ballroom to accept the imaginary applause from the imaginary audience in honor of their very real accomplishments. Completing such a course for busy professionals is no mean feat. I totally get that. It was no mean feat for us facilitators either.

Yesterday was still a full day of work; cleaning out accumulated emails, responding to forgotten or postoned requests; there was another virtual event to close and one to attend, this time as a participant. OBTS had organized its third webinar, a one hour conversation with Bill Torbert from Boston College. He looks at leadership through a developmental lens which appeals greatly to the developmental psychologist that I am by training. Of the 20 people that attended there were three of us from MSH. I am not sure my colleagues enjoyed it as much as I did but it was worth a try to see if they would.

It is always a strange experience to enter Holland. I speak the language, I carry its nationality but it is not the Holland I left more than 30 years ago. “Count me the ways,” said Axel and I did, in my head. I am more of a stranger in this country of my birth than in my new adopted homeland.

We arrived at an empty house in Aalsmeer; Sietske is in France and Piet was in Amsterdam. The cat was there to greet us. We had some coffee and a few ‘boterhammen met kaas,’ bread with cheese before heading west out in our tiny rented car (a one size upgrade from what I had ordered – my big suitcase barely fit) to the middle of the country and meet the relatives, some I hardly remember, many I never met.

Next

Published April 25, 2008 Dreams , Home Leave a Comment

I woke up early after going to bed late. Closing off our 13-week course took me much longer than I had expected as it took a long time to review everything so that I could write the proper closing comments. I tumbled into bed exhausted next to a similarly exhausted Axel who was already asleep. We made a nice pair.

My dreams wove many of the yesterday’s strands together with so many images that it is hard to catch them all. Something heavy (which looked more like a large piece of building equipment than a plane) falling out of the sky (still, the concern is obvious); leaving my purse on a table at a busy street and running back to get it through very heavy sand, the kind that makes it hard it hard to run in. All sorts of colored skeins of wool tangled together; a picture of someone’s mother with a bite taken out of it. “He didn’t take his malaria medication,” said one of my public health colleagues as if this was totally normal and to be expected – I did find out yesterday that I don’t need malaria medication for Addis. Groups of purple-clad church ladies fainting in clusters along the road and finally a depressed Axel who told me he was sitting on a hill behind the house, right in back of where Scott, another colleague of mine, was sitting working at his computer, putting in numbers.

If I could only get at the whole story from which these snippets are pulled I could probably write a bunch of great and bizarre books. Now it’s more like a powerpoint slideshow with the presenter notes mostly missing.

Axel had his last PT appointment for the trip that causes him much anxiety. He was told to get up every 45 minutes during the plane and walk – of course this means no sleeping. When we get to Holland we have to get in a car pretty quick after our arrival because the family reunion starts at the end of the morning so there will be no time to rest. This probably adds to the anxiety. He also knows none of those people except my brothers and sister.

I made my first visit to the hallowed halls of harvard (medical school first and then the public school). It was a gorgeous day and the crème-de-la-crème of our next generation of doctors, young, eager, smart, well off and in all shades of skin, hair and eye color were sitting in the sun on the quad, or elsewhere outside having lunch. It was a very vibrant place, as universities are supposed to be. Marc and I had lunch and he then showed me around a bit and we talked some more; we still have about 5 more years to catch upon.

I was reminded again of how much I enjoy teaching. The materials I had brought lent themselves well to a class like that. Three of my younger colleagues were able to attend as well and could advise, at the end of the class, a young woman from the British NHS about how to use our materials to start making small changes in the way people work together. It’s a revolutionary idea but at MSH they are doing just that. Granted, we are a bit smaller, but the principles apply just the same.

The work is not quite done today but I hope, sometime later to veer into the vacation lane. Sita will drive us to the airport at the end of the afternoon. I am very happy I am not departing alone this time, and not straight to an assignment. And now the empty suitcase suggests my next activity. How nice it would be, for once, not have a ‘next activity’ for awhile. Hopefully that will be Sunday morning.

Birds that sing

Published April 24, 2008 Dreams , Home Leave a Comment

More dreams, sweet ones, about a trip (not surprising) but not the kind of trip I take in real life. There was something about listening to a bird and wanting a young girl to save the song in her auditory memory. I wanted her to be able to listen through my head and hear what I heard. There was also a big house with many places to sleep and a photo of the Harry Potter variety, in which people move. I showed, to women in light blue burqas, a picture of women in light blue burqas, singing and laughing. It was contagious and we all broke out in song and laughter. I recognize some elements of the dream but not all. It was a nice dream and it made me start the day full of energy and hope for a good outcome. One of these good outcomes would be the class I will teach today at Harvard’s School of Public Health on the invitation of my former colleague Marc. I love to teach and I am looking forward to it. I will be trying out some materials that we have developed for measuring the results of our leadership interventions. Some of our younger staff are coming along to the class (young girls listening to what I hear in my head?).

We received an excited email from Morsi and Joan from Egypt about the continuing ripples of their leadership interventions that started 6 years ago. Later I heard from my friend Margaret Benefiel that the Egypt story is featured in her second book that will come out later this year. Margaret and here husband Ken came for dinner, which they do periodically when Margaret is on her writing retreat in Gloucester and Ken comes for a sort of conjugal visit. They always bring a bag full of great Thai food. We ate outside by the cove, for the first time since we started hibernating last fall. It was a glorious evening, marred only by the first mosquito and a few no-see-ums that pestered us towards the end of the meal. Their dog Rufus got to lick the plates afterwards.

Another highlight was Prateek’s visit to MSH. Prateek was one of our students in the first leadership course we did with Boston University in 2006. He is part of an extraordinary group of mostly young people, who we have stayed in touch with and whose public health careers are starting to take off. Meghann, who I saw in Kabul, is part of that group and so is Tae who I will see next week in Addis, and Chaltone who I saw in Tanzania. We sat around the table and ate pizza while we listened to Prateek’s stories about getting public health interventions launched in Cambodia. I see how he is leading, despite his young age and short career. It is exciting to follow his journey and that of the others.

In the background are two virtual events that I facilitate as part of a team. Both are coming to an end today. Participants are starting to comment on the impact of the experience on them. That too is gratifying and makes it worth all the time and headaches that have gone into designing and executing the events. Later today I will prepare a big virtual celebration, which I found out years ago, you can actually do, as if you were all together in a fancy ballroom in a hotel. Your imagination just has to work a little harder, but it can be done.

Snippets

Published April 23, 2008 Home Leave a Comment

Last night was full of dreams again. But when I woke up, just minutes before the alarm went off, the dreams popped like soap bubbles. I tried grasping at them for awhile but my mind could not retrieve the images; all I could register were some vague feelings that, much like the film of soap that remains after the bubble pops, have little to do with the shape and colors of the real thing.

Last night I went to bed after a long non stop workday that started at about 5 in the morning and finished at 9:30 at night. It is the mixed blessing of those virtual events. I used to say what a wonderful invention it was because you could be a facilitator in your pijamas. It is great to do if there is nothing else going on and the image of me sitting in my pijamas gives it an aura of leisure. But now, with a full plate during the day, getting ready to leave for a trip, the virtual events end up being relegated to the evening, while our participants in Africa, Asia and the Middle East are asleep and I can prepare the ‘classroom’ for the next day without anyone looking in. Both events have three days to go and then I will go myself, taking a break from this extreme multi-tasking. The trip allows for a few days of rest in Holland and then the focus shifts to Ethiopia.

After work I drove to Beverly, had dinner in the parking lot of the supermarket and had my hair cut by Bonny. I was reminded of the haircuts she gave Axel and me, a few months after the crash, while we were sitting outside looking out over the cove. I am sure that the hair snipped off then is now serving as bedding for baby birds, squirrels or chipmunks with animal mothers vowing never to do without this new luxury.

When I came home I found Axel busy with his (and Sita’s) beer project, now in its final stage of bottling. It is a lot of work, as is the whole process. But judging from his mood I could tell that he enjoyed it and is looking forward to the first tasting.

Footprint

Published April 22, 2008 Home Leave a Comment

The countdown to my next departure has started and with it the long list of things to be completed. This includes two sets of virtual facilitation responsibilities, one of which is shared with two other people and thus requires phonecalls, drafts and approvals. Another is teaching a class at Harvard’s School of Public Health which was cooked up when I met Marc in Dar es Salaam, two months ago. April the 24th seemed far away in the future then but now, with only two days to go, this proposal requires some serious attention.

It is Earth day today and I learned to my great dismay that I am a very bad person in the book of conservers. I lead a wasteful life (commuting by car and plane and being a private pilot for fun) that produces about 54 tons of carbon dioxide and very little to offset it. In my dreams last night I was rowing, using my own energy to propel myself, but it did not count for much in the Earth Day Carbon Footprint calculator.

I did try out my new Alden shell yesterday. I wore Axel’s olive green wellies so that I did not have to get my feet wet before stepping into the boat. Compared to the dory or the kayaks this new boat is fast: it takes me about 10 seconds to cross the cove at mid-tide. The real rowing will have to happen out on the bay. A flat sea is preferable over the usually choppy waters so I may need to wait until after this trip. In the meantime Axel insists on re-doing the woodwork (seat, oars, footrest) with real marine-grade varnish, brightwork, so that the boat looks presentable again. He is also making a case for waxing the fiberglass with something that keeps it from deteriorating in the sunlight. Of course all these chemicals will probably cancel out whatever ecological benefit this boat will bring to this household.

We ended Boston’s Marathon day with a dinner at Edith’s to celebrate the marathon victors. Edith has run the marathon some ten years ago and knows, deep in her cells, what such a last minute sprint means that brought Ethiopia’s fastest woman runner first to the finish line. I celebrated the Kenyan and Ehtiopian victories by sending congratulatory emails to my Ethiopian and Kenyan friends, one a namesake of the men’s race winner. I marvel at how one part of Africa can so dominate long distance running. But nothing beats the Japanese in the over 70 category. Imagine that, running after 70, after flying halfway around the world. It must be the noodle diet.

Beach

Published April 21, 2008 Home Leave a Comment

It is nice when you have an illustrator in the family because the notes you find in the morning on the counter are so much fun. Sita returned from a week in New York, finished off with a weekend in Northampton while we were on the Cape.

Yesterday morning was another glorious day in North Truro. We went for a walk along the beach in Wellfleet, Atlantic side, where a 19th century shipwreck had washed up on the shore in a January storm. It was our first serious walk on a sandy beach since July. Before then we had taken such walks for granted but now we realize they are hard on the body; sturdy shoes helped and we kept the walk short, much too short as far as Abby was concerned. We also wanted to be back before a memorial service, set up on top of the dune, would start so we did not have to walk across the aisle in the middle of the service. On the beach below several shrines were set up for the fallen friend. We could tell from the items in the shrine that he was a surfer, a pirate, liked roses and used lipbalm. By the time we had climbed back onto the dune the parking lot had flled up with a large crowd of mourners.

We went to the Lighthouse café in Wellfleet to have a second, more substantive breakfast and then parted ways. On the long way home Axel finally succumbed to the allergy medication, taken as a preventive measure for dealing with seasonal and animal-induced allergies. He drifted in and out of sleep while I kept myself awake listening to Cervantes’ storytelling about chivalry and damsels in distress, some 400 years ago in Spain (we women have come a long way!). In the background was the loud and rythmic humming of the wind streaming by the boat on our carroof.

Although I would have loved to put the boat into the water, the low tide and choppy ocean conspired against me. I also have to solve the issue of how to get into the boat without getting my feet wet as we have no nice dock like the rowing club has. And the water is still very cold

I prepared dinner while on the phone with Ankie from Brussels, catching up on the things not written in my blog. We will be seeing each other soon and often, as distances do not seem to matter much these days. We will meet at a reunion of my maternal grandmother’s family on Saturday in a place in Holland that is full of childhood memories.

April 2008
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