Sylvia's Journal

I am woken up this morning by the street sounds of Washington that come in through my open balcony door. It is one of the hotel’s features that is listed under the rubrique ‘guestrooms’ on its website (door and windows that open). I am imagining that litigation about people having thrown themselves out of hotel windows has made such a feature rare in big chain hotels.

I made coffee in the small coffee maker (also advertised) and despite using only half of the recommended amount of water it comes out the color of tea. I enhanced the coffee sensation with a stick of instant coffee brought back from Holland; emergency rations that live permanently in my travel gear.

Yesterday morning we had a strategy breakfast with the MSH troops, rehearsing elevator speak messages and looking out for good partners and good people and then we swarmed into the various enormous ballrooms to do our good works. Kristen and I ran a three-hour workshop on leading for results. We had a full house, some 50 fifty people, and took them onto a journey mimicking the way we work with groups out in the field. We had people in the room from all over Africa, Nepal, Guyana and the Middle East with Americans in the minority. As it happened, we had many people from countries where we have teams on the ground. It was wonderful to make all these new connections. My big regret is that we did not get an attendance list so we can stay in touch. In the end many people rushed off to the various other activities programmed or lunch. It is a packed program and there is a huge social networking component to it that Facebook and LinkedIn could not compete with.

The opening session of the conference took place in Geneva and Washington at the same time; two gigantic screens connecting us with one another. This year is the 30th anniversary of the Alma Ata Declaration that focused attention of the public health community on primary health care, away from hospitals in the capital cities (tertiary care). In the past 30 years a whole new crop of public health professionals has grown up taking this for granted. The conference theme this year is Community Health and a stock taking of sorts. It was interesting to hear the giants from the field share their insights although I would have liked to hear them address the young professionals who will have to carry the torch. There was something slightly contradictory about the theme and the process: impressive talking heads, the experts, talking to a crowd that represented an enormous reservoir of expertise. Yet, by the very act of talking to them rather than listening and learning from them, the espoused message about empowerment was not practiced by these very well intentioned and expert advocates of Lao Tsu’s exhortation: ‘start where the people are.’ There was no way of knowing ‘where those in the audience were.’

I ran into Iain and his wife who is from Finland and whose name has so many vowels in such odd places that it took me years to get them in the right quantity and in the right place. Out of laziness most of us refer to her as RLKA. She pointed me to an exhibit about the treasures from Afghanistan at the National Gallery they had just returned from. It is a magnificent display of the various cultural streams that ran through Afghanistan (Bactria) at the time of Alexander the Great, before and after. I did not need much exhortation and played hookey from the conference; I felt I had put in enough hours for the day.

The exhibit was indeed magnificent. I was lucky to share the space with a small group that clearly consisted of insiders and hoverered around the edges to catch some of the stories that accompanied nearly every piece in the display. It made me realize how much of such exhibits is hidden from us ordinary visitors. There were stories of heroism about hiding treasures in vaults and smuggling them away from fanatic Taliban and there were stories about great stupidity, of not recognizing that, as the slogan at the door says ‘A nation stays alive when its culture stays alive.’

One particular piece caught my eye. It was a Greek inscription on a fragment of a funerary monument found at Ai Khanum in what is now Northern Afghanistan. It read: “as a child learn good manners; as a young man learn to control your passions; in middle age be just; in old age give good advice; then die, without regrets.” I learned that this came from a wandering Greek philosopher who was intrigued by eastern religions and had made it to Bactria in the 3rd century BC. The exhortation was one of several maxims for moral behavior said to have been presented to Apollo at his sancturay in Delphi by the 7 Sages of Ancient Greece. These sages knew something that is still current and relevant today and resonated stronlgy with me as I am now in this phase that is about giving good advice.

I met Larry in the Kogod courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery/Museum of Americann Folk Art that is housed in the restored Patent office. The restoration story itself is worth going there; the place beautiful in an eery sort of way.

We ended up in Adams Morgan in a restaurant where Amy met us and talked and talked and talked over elegantly served fish and soft shell crab dishes.

When I arrived back at the hotel my right foot was in bad shape from what I call ‘museumwalking’ and required a long soak in the bathtub. It was an early night for a change.