Sylvia's Journal

I am off to the airport in about 30 minutes. I am dreading the trip. I have chosen to arrive at the airport much more than 2 hours before departure, so it still is the middle of the night. I hope this gets me to the front of the lines that will form around each corner. I am very risk averse today although one could argue that this attitude is irrelevant when in Haiti.

I am more anxious these days about flying than I used to be, even more anxious than my first few flights after the crash, last fall and earlier this year to Kenya, Ghana, and Tanzania. The anxiety comes from the near fatal departure out of Kabul airport on April 10, a memorable date, nearly as memorable as July 14. I’ve had enough of these experiences for a lifetime but I know they are unequally distributed among people. The dread (and anticipation) of air travel hassles combine with this (mild) flying anxiety. Flying back to Boston with me this morning is Malcolm who used to work at MSH. He flies even more than I do, and really doesn’t like flying. Our profession requires being in the air a lot. This means we have to trust all the people that were/are involved in keeping the machine in good shape and in the air. Maybe this is no different than the trust mothers put in hospitals and health providers to keep their children from dying. There we are part of the people who are being trusted.

So we talked about air crashes last night over dinner, the things we are afraid of, until Jon, our third companion, an early member of the MSH family, got us back on track with some more entertaining stories that illustrate how the good life gets to those who already were having the good life in the first place. Jon is retired and knows something about the good life, on the Bahamas where he lives when he is not travelling to dirt-poor countries. Of course the good life is a little diminished when you have hurricane Bertha travelling in your neighborhood.

Yesterday was my last workday here. In the morning I walked over to the neighboring hotel, El Rancho, which has seen better times but continues to present a fancy façade to the world. I came in through the back and saw the part that is not usually presented to the public. We get to stay in the nicer hotel but at lunch time I discovered that the cook is pretty good, more imaginative than ours.

I arrived early at the conference room and watched several different hotel staff each do their particular part of the set up. There was the flipchart and easel lady, the sound man who I sent away since we did not need him. A young woman was responsible for table cloths, cups and glasses. Only the three places at one end of the O-shaped room setup got glasses and small water bottles. Then there was a young man who did the floral pieces. This included ingenuously decorating the potted palms with hibiscus flowers. He also placed lovely small bouquets on each of the tables. I should not forget the toilet paper (and paper towel and soap) man who should have been followed by the carpenter so that you could actually close the door to the toilet while you did your business, but the latter did not come. The coffee man (or woman) did not show up so we finally got it ourselves at about 10:30 when we discovered that the coffee had been ready for hours and was lukewarm by then. Later there was food, again in abundance, making the break look and feel like a full meal.

I had proposed that the full day teambuilding be reduced to half a day. It was about right. We did not start until an hour after official starting time because only one car was able to ferry people from the office to the hotel. No one seemed to mind very much. And from then on everything moved very fast to the final debrief with the MSH in-country chief and the meal with Jon and Malcolm, one full of stories, the other recovering from a migraine, quiet, and maybe also, like me, in dreadful anticipation of today’s main activity to get back to our favorite place in the world: home.