Sylvia's Journal

Sita completed her assignment in Sharm el Sheik and is now resting and recuperating in Dahab, another exoctic place that Axel checked out on the web. The place is described as a mix of ” Hippie and Bedouin styles developed over several decades.” He thought that sounded just like our house. She will feel right at home.

I woke up with most of my large muscle groups in pain and a troubled gait that is pointing me back to the physical therapist. It is because I danced last night, quite vigorously. I can’t help myself when I hear the Latin music that our disc-jockey Christian played. During the day Christian unobtrusively cleans our counters and puts our coffee cups away at MSH but in the night he transforms into a great disc jockey. The party came at the end of a long day to celebrate our collective accomplishments, good team work and the talent of a multitude of people.

The streaming in of our Nepali colleagues did not quite work out the way we had hoped. Not so good sound quality compounded Nepali-english accents that are hard to understand under the best of circumstances. The heartwarming stories did not quite make it into the ears of our audience. Thomas and I were disappointed. We could have done an old fashioned powerpoint with us talking and pretty pictures but we had resisted. It had been a gamble that we had lost.

We listened to other presentations, traditional and experiential, that conveyed their messages a bit better. Nevertheless, in the end they all formed a nice coherent whole about empowerment and people moving out of their victim role into that of agents of change (for better health).

The war fuzzy feeling engendered by these accomplishments and all that altruism stood in sharp contrast to an article I read during some down time about China’s stealth invasion of Africa (Fast Company, June issue) in which Richard Behar describes what is generally referred to as the Great Chinese Take Out. Where we are practically hanging ourselves by our rules on how to work with and for the Africans, the Chinese have none of these qualms. We see dirt poor countries that need our help and use one year workplans to do that; they see their own raw resource limitations 50 years hence and poverty as an opportunity to extract riches for mere handouts to a greedy and easy-to-please elite. Our short term but uplifting interventions suddenly seem very naïve. I usually preach a message of hopefulness but reading the article was not good for my soul and usually positive outlook. I finished reading the article about what is going on in Mozambique and then had to put the magazine away. It was time to dance the salsa and forget about these weightier things.

I discovered that Tessa had decided to head back to Canada and her lonely Steve on Wednesday morning. It brought a premature end to the partying as I wanted to see her for dinner one last time. On my way home Tessa informed me that plans had changed as her best friend was in need of her company to help her through a rough spot. This included dinner; I ended up joining Axel and Joe at one of my favorite restaurants in Manchester (Cala’s) where I arrived just in time to finish Joe’s fries and use them to mop up Axel’s plate. A sake-soaked plate of PEI mussels and a third of a sugary dessert completed that meal. It was Joe’s treat.

Yesterday colleagues form around the world streamed into Boston: Peru, Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico, Haiti, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, and Afghanistan. It was like the United Nations at MSH. Nearly everyone came with a powerpoint presentation, as requested, and I got to watch eight of them. I am not used to sit through powerpoints in general and eight was a bit much, even though all of them were excellent and informative.

Today we will stream in colleagues from Nepal, in bits and bytes rather than live, if the technology permits. My young colleague Thomas has done an amazing job setting up all the technology aids so that we will see and hear them, come hell or high water. I am very grateful that he has stuck with it to get this impossible task flawlessly executed because the stories that we are getting from Nepal are heartwarming and worth sharing with a wider audience.

Sita sent word (and pictures) yesterday from Sharm El Sheik. We have put away all soap in the house and are lining up to shake her hand when she comes back, the hand that was shaken by Tony Blair who she scribes in the picture. She is such a hot shit. We, ordinary mortals here at home, are awestricken with our very own Sita rubbing shoulders (and shaking hands) with the high and mighty in exotic places.

After a whole day of powerpoints I was pretty pooped coming home but we had another engagement; to celebrate the graduation of Alan, Edith and John’s son, from Boston University. He is one of the few graduates who leaves school without tens of thousands of dollars of school loan debt because John was faculty at BU. It would nearly be worth switching careers to get that lined up these days. Too late for us.

It was a small gathering en famille with dear friends and we toasted to open roads and possibilities and finished with carrot cake and champagne.

This morning I woke up before the alarm reminded me. It is now fully light at 4:30 AM and I can dress without having to turn on the lights. Summer is just around the corner!

I did not get the potatoes in but noticed I must have overlooked a few last fall when I spent a couple of hours on my hands and knees rooting through the dirt to collect our last harvest. Small potato plants are poking through the garden debris in various places. I did get the many raspberry stalks out that threatened to take over the garden and its immediate vicinity. It seemed wasteful to pull them all up but I have to assert my control.

After Quaker meeting we went to one garden center in Ipswich to pick up our seed potatoes and the geraniums for the Magnuson graves and then to another in Gloucester to get the plants for our window boxes and some vegetables that can be put out already. Tomatoes are not available until after the next something-or-rather-moon. Age old farmers’ wisdom tells us that we have to wait for this moon before we can plant tomatoes. It is hard to believe that frost is still possible, as we are in middle of May, but then again, the old farmers knew best and it has been known to freeze even this late.

Putting the flowers at the Magnuson graves is an annual event that has to take place before Memorial Day of course. We did not get that task finished yesterday as the weather turned cold and rainy in the late afternoon.

We bought the traditional coral and white geraniums that Penny liked so much. We had planted tulips and crocusses last fall but then we forgot to enjoy them this spring. On our way to the airport to Holland, now three weeks ago, I remembered the bulbs and we swung by the cemetery to admire them only to find them post-bloom with shriveled up petals on the ground. We missed it!

For the summer plantings we have experimented with something other than geraniums but none do well in the generally poor soil; or Penny protested; so we are back to the coral and white geraniums. We plant them for the whole family, which includes grammy and grampie Magnuson, Ester, Paul and Phil. When the plants are in we have a little ceremony which includes vodka. We toast to them, thank them and pour some vodka on the gravestones. Most of them like(d) vodka. I don’t like it all that much. I just wet my lips.

Joe arrived last night from California. He is here to educate himself at MIT on systems thinking. He will get to play the beer game this week. We prepped him by serving Sita and Axel’s home made beer. It is of a rich dark color and we all agreed that it tastes better than store bought. It is also more affordable.

Joe was last here as the Lobster Cove Calamity Management coordinator in late july 2007. He left early August after having installed the first ramp to allow me easier entry and exit through the front door. Upon leaving he passed the baton to Sita which she held firmly until we were all better. Joe’s last image of us was of me in in a wheelchair and Axel in a hospital bed. We have come a very long way. We already knew this but Joe confirmed it.

Today will be a day for gardening. It is sunny and warm and the whole universe commands ‘Grow!’ Sook told us yesterday that we are too late for potatoes but we found some and Axel will get them. Last summer we got hooked on home-grown potatoes. The store-bought variety only remotely tastes like it. We will also put in the asparagus bed sometime soon, with the help of the Lasmans, experienced (asparagus) growers. If we can get these two things right all we need is the pig and the chicken to complete one of our favorite meals: ham, hard-boiled eggs, potatoes and asparagus (with lots of butter). Tessa grows asparagus in her London backyard but left just at the wrong time and Steve is not paying attention. She will come back to a bed of feathery green plants. What a shame.

I called Holland to see how my niece Emily is faring at the university hospital in Leiden after yet another operation on her insides. It is better that I do not talk with her about asparagus meals because that will not be in the stars for her; a simple meal is still weeks (months?) away.

We celebrated Katie-Blair’s birthday in style with as many of us as could be seated on a table that filled the dining room. There was more asparagus and colorful salads and salmon and potatoes. With only one of us under 30, her son, we talked about what our thoughts were about careers when we were 30 and how far ahead we planned our future then. The group sorted itself along gender lines, mostly, with the women getting used to mothering and having to make adjustments to career plans, if there had been any in the first place and the men making decisions that rippled long into the future, that is the present of now.

If there was such a thing as Quaker Bells, they would be ringing now and it is time to get on the bike and ride to Beverly Farms for the hour of silence that I have missed now for over a month.

I am now waking up with the sun; finally. It was along winter. I was glad to have a day of working at home yesterday; to organize myself, finish unpacking, and putting things away.

At breakfast I read to Axel to children’s book about the discovery of coffee that I bought in Addis (Kaldi and the dancing goats). Reading it aloud to someone else made me realize that it is an odd children’s book with several, unintended no doubt, messages to children like: when you see animals act funny after eating bright red berries, try them yourselves. Or, there are berries that you can pop in your mouth and they alter your mood. Tell your dad and he will agree; and then you can sell the stuff to others and get rich!

We followed Kaldi’s advice and ground the Yirga Chaffe beans for breakfast. The coffee was as good as adverised and everyone drunk too much, whch made us, just like the dancing goats, all energized and hopping around the entire morning. I was very productive as a result.

Tessa called us a few times from the road and is now back in the US although she did not make it home. She and Val decided to try their luck at the Herkimer mines where a particular kind of diamond is found. It is actually not a diamond but a particular kind of quartz which was discovered by quarrymen in the late 1700s. Val sells these at her store in Rockport. They shine and sparkle, hence the name.

The girls planned to sleep in the car, kept warm by their two dogs, since they had not prepared for an overnight. I hope the dogs bodies did the trick because I slept under a puff last night. It is still cold in Manchester and I imagine the nights to be quite cold in Upstate New York.

Sita came back from a trip to the bookstore with several books about Egypt. She is having a hard time deciding where to go after the work is done to see something of the country. The books did not help as they only expanded the range of choices. The heat in Upper Egypt may drive her to Alexandria rather than Aswan and Luxor. She is leaving today.

We are back home after a quick and pleasant flight back to the US. The blooms that we saw in Holland when we arrived two weeks ago are now visible here; we got a double spring.

Axel went to the head doctor, a long overdue visit, at Spaulding Rehabilitation hospital (the official rehab site of the Red Sox it proudly advertises). As it turned out Axel did have some damage on his frontal lobe. The doctor explained that for normal people the neural paths in the frontal lobe are like a 12-lane highway. Axel has about half that number closed off for traffic right now. This explains much. In a perverted kind of way Axel sounded relieved on the phone, after his visit. The problems he has had organizing himself and his forgetfulness aren’t because of old age or something that he could do anything about. The doctor explained that the frontal lobe is like the brain’s control tower. Axel could fly just fine but the control tower was only operating at half its capacity; thus the flow of traffic was not all that well organized with just a few too many glitches.

The problems were indeed caused by the crash which had resulted in a ‘contrecoup;’ the impact had pushed his brain hard against the front of the skull. That was the bad news. The good news is that the damage can be undone through a variety of therapies that will help to recreate the damaged neural pathways. This includes speech therapy and occupational therapy to help with his slightly damaged organizational capacities. We both hope that he will come out of this better than the pre-crash original, with bright newly asphalted neural highways!

Tessa is on her way back from Canada, driving in convoy with her best friend Val who went there to pry her out of her depression (and appeared successful). Tessa needed a little R&R from her friendless existence in London in the parental home. We are looking forward to having her here. We believe that the many gardening chores that come with spring time are just what the doctor prescribed.

And just when Tessa arrives Sita is leaving the homestead again for a trip to Egypt for a piece of work that resulted from her, apparently, excellent performance in Davos, earlier this year. We warned her that it will be hot (we heard from Joan and Morsi that it was 140 degrees Fahrenheit in Aswan where they were a couple of weeks ago).