Sylvia's Journal

I started the day with a long conversation with Dr. Ali who is my counterpart in Kabul’s MSH office. Trying to find out what happens in far flung areas, after a training is done, takes a lot of patience and time; email helps, without it I would be entirely in the dark. Every few months I put together a newsletter to connect all these rookie and master leadership trainers with one another and highlight the many accomplishments. It is a lot of work but one of my favorite tasks. After sending out emails to teams to tell me what is happening in their neck of the wood, the daily checking of emails is exciting. Now I don’t mind getting floods of emails. As I pull all these disparate stories together and weave them into the newsletter I see the same thing, over and over again: I don’t know exactly what they do but the results that are reported by each person or team are so consistent that it seems not to matter much. There is a core piece that everyone gets and that produces the transformations we hope for.

After the phone call it was nonstop meetings until it was time to go home. The last ‘meeting’ was a celebration, or rather a farewell to a colleague who is moving to another department. He is going into another orbit, even though it is only one flight of stairs up. By attending that party I ensured myself a place in a traffic jam home, because by that time everyone else in Boston was also going home. Halfway through the stop-and-go ride I pulled over and wandered around a store to wait out the jam and give my right ankle a rest from the repetitious movements between brake and accelerator. Although I walk and look like a person with two healthy ankles, this experience shows that the right one is not OK.

All this made for a very long day that started at 5:30 AM and saw me home at 7 PM. Tessa came home even later and with both our men gone we slumped over the kitchen counter, punched in a few numbers in the microwave and converted two mismatched frozen meals into dinner.

I surfed Facebook for a couple of hours so see how my colleague Michael is faring in Afghanistan, check out his pictures and those of others who went on trips and discovered that one of our students from the BU summer course already got a job managing a clinic in Uganda. With a great sense of satisfaction I went to bed. In many small ways, things are rippling softly in the right direction.