Sylvia's Journal

I should have enough mustard by now to take care of all the people who, in various ways, have taken care of me over the year. It is a four-step process that takes me usually most of the fall: buying the supplies, soaking the mustard seeds in a secret concoction for flavor and to soften them, the cooking, and canning, and finally the labeling and wrapping. I am done with the first three steps.

I have to start early with this yearly ritual because I usually travel a lot between September and December. This fall is no different although I don’t know exactly where I will be travelling to. I also don’t know yet how I will be able to fit the travel around two major holidays (Thanksgiving and Eid el Adha) and two doctors’ appointments that took me months to make and that I would hate to cancel.

Today I am supposed to hear (as I was last week and the week before that) whether I leave a week from now for Tanzania or not. This decision is based on the number of registrations for our planned course. Our partner in Arusha keeps telling us they don’t know. It’s hard to plan without data. If the trip falls through my itinerary shifts to Afghanistan; and somewhere, before Christmas, is another short trip tucked in to BRAC in Bangladesh. The set up for that was made in May at a breakfast with its founder, during a conference in Washington. I did not think it had come to fruition, but it had; I just didn’t know it until yesterday.

After work, armed with a real map and pretty good driving instructions, I drove without mistakes this time, to Malden to see my colleague Amy-Simone who just had her second baby, Ali (with the emphasis on the second syllable). I told her that in Holland Ali is a girl’s name. That was just what she wanted to hear. Ali is the father’s choice, not hers. Dad is from Mauritania and figures his two sons will grow up as American boys, so to balance things out they should at least be named like Mauritanian boys back home, Mohamed and Ali. Taken together they do carry an association with fighting (or boxing rather).

Ali never opened his eyes during my short visit. He was off duty. I admired his perfection and beauty. He made the most wonderful grimaces while I held him; random firing of facial muscles, I imagined; proof that synaptic connections were made and delicate motor nerves responding. Ali has a complex task ahead, the wiring of his brain. Maybe even twice as complex because of having to deal with two cultures and two languages from the get go. I kissed him good luck and then his mom; I learned from experience that having one child is a hobby, but two is a job.