Sylvia's Journal

From a vague recollection of my dreams it seems that my mind is already in Ethiopia. But my body is still very much in Manchester this morning. And so is my suitcase; open, half packed for a high altitude Africa experience that requires thinking, rather than the automatic packing response I have for more tropical climates. My colleague Liz who is already there wrote me that it is chilly and pants and sweaters are in order.

I was going to pack light and hand carry my luggage. But the combination of cool weather clothes, Axel’s order for at least 2 kilos of Yergecheff coffee, plus the prohibition by my physical therapist of having anything heavy compressing my shoulder made me abandon that idea.

Yesterday I spent the entire morning, four long hours, in a small and overheated room listening to one powerpoint after another, a show put on for our evaluators. It was a bit much for me – they didn’t let on but I pitied them since they also had an afternoon like that, and today another whole day. I tried to imagine what it must be like to get 20 years of experience in a particular set of interventions (management and leadership development in developing countries) compressed, distilled to its essence, dumped in one’s lap like that. But they appeared engaged and attentive and asked good questions. The poor things also have to read thousands of pages and travel to Nicaragua, Nigeria and Peru.

I stayed late at work to clean off my desk for the next 2 weeks when I will not be sitting at either my home or office desk and my attention is elsewhere. I drove home following Tessa and Steve in the direction of Manchester by about a half hour and consulted on the phone which route to take – it is nice to have scouts like that. Their advice was good and despite the rush hour I made it home in one hour.

Dinner was ready, cooked by Steve and Tessa, and a harbinger of spring: asparagus (not quite from the US but no longer from far Peru), ham, eggs and boiled potatoes. After dinner I packed half my suitcase and went through my travel prep routines while Axel educated himself on CPA politics and practices and then caught up on a movie that we have been watching in turns to arrive at the place where I left off. We finally watched the ending of the movie together, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, with Ingrid Bergman, and cried over its sappy and beautiful ending.

The movie is about leadership, focused perseverance in particular, but men would call it foolishness and stubbornness. It is based on the life of Gladys Aylward, a missionary in China in the 1930s who became a foot inspector and travelled through the countryside to enforce the new law against the horrendous practice of binding the feet of young girls.

This movie was the second in a row we watched about harmful practices that males have imposed on women in various parts of the world to keep them down. The other was Ousman Sembene’s Mooladé about female genital cutting in Mali; also a story about leadership, courage, perseverance, or, if you are a frightened old man who sees power slipping away but still wants to be right, foolishness. I am grateful for all these courageous women in the world, the known and the unknown heroes who added so much to the wellbeing of us all.

Yesterday was President’s day which is, for reasons I don’t understand, about buying cars. We would have loved to go out and buy a newer car, especially since our two cars combined are a quarter of a century old and have driven half a million miles. But this has to be postponed. Axel is taking the older of the old cars to our guys over in New Hampshire. They get a kick out of keeping old Subarus on the road. We hope there’s still some life left in ours as there is not enough money in the bank to buy another car while keeping an emergency fund for when the unthinkable happens.

Although it was officially a holiday, there was work to be done by both of us. Axel’s was town business; mine was halfway around the globe. First there was a phone conversation with colleagues in Kabul; then one with Bruce from Chicago who is heading to Northern Pakistan to do what I did in Cambodia. And then there was more writing and reading. It was also time to prepare for our talks during the next two days with a team of evaluators who are coming to check out how we have done as a project and make recommendations about more such work, after our project runs out next summer.

I am employed on a 5-year contract that has been renewed four times now since 1986. I can only hope that it will be renewed again in 2010 but there is no guarantee and this contract could be the last. Although we do know that our new administration’s philosophy is favorable to the work we do, we don’t know what it means in terms of money set aside for such work, now that the talk is all about shovel-ready projects and other boosts for our own economy.

I am back at my physical therapist for work on my right shoulder. The Depo-Medrol/Lidocaine shot in my shoulder, last Thursday, has done the trick and reduced the pain but there is work to be done with muscles and tendons around it. Once again I marvel about the intricacies of the muscular-skeletal construction of our bodies and how everything is connected to everything else. Massages and yoga are good and I am encouraged to continue these practices. I checked out a new yoga teacher closer to home and liked her style. It appears she is a follower from the same tribe that produces most of our local yoga teachers.

At Quaker Meeting the idea is to still your mind. I couldn’t for the life of me. It was as if my mind had a life of its own, resisting all attempts to be quiet. I practiced the advice from my meditation tapes and focused on my breathing. But my mind would invent stories, project images that triggered stories and endless to do lists. And when I kept returning to my breathing it tried to intervene physically by making me hot, then tired and then uncomfortable in whatever position I was sitting. While at a cosmic level I was ready to be ‘one with the universe and listen for God’s voice,’ at a cellular level this was being thwarted with a stubbornness that surprised me. Maybe what I was experiencing was the prototype of all good and evil battles that have plagued mankind, at its most personal manifestation.

Axel stood up and spoke about compassion, and so I tried that angle for awhile, being compassionate with that frantic and busy part of myself that cannot rest – but I found it was only feeding it, making it more active, as if I was stroking the ego of, well ehh…, my own ego. When the hour was over I realized that my travel and rather hectic life has been undermining my ability to live in the here and now and surrender to a more quiet rhythm in life’s complex score. I am always anticipating, thinking about what needs to be done next, learned, fixed, gathered, followed up, written, packed, acquired, understood or activated. But there is nothing in there about slowing down, closing or silencing.

I bicycled back from Meeting while Axel passed me by in the car. We arrived home at about the same time, had another fishy meal in the absence of Tessa and Steve, and then drove to Salem’s visitor center. Our friend Merrill who is a story teller for the National Park Service, was on stage to tell stories about the underground railway in Essex County. It was a superb performance that has lessons and morals that are just as valid today as they were then, and once again, it was all about compassion. And I realized that the morning’s experience in Quaker Meeting had reminded me that compassion and being hurried cancel each other out. This was confirmed, I learned later from a video on TED about the same topic, by a group of seminary students who were asked to do a sermon about the Good Samaritan. As they hurried from their class to the church, preoccupied with their performance, most did not notice or pay attention to the man doubled over in pain who was sitting in their path to the church.

It is Valentines day, or Valentimes as Sita used to call it and, although overcommercialized here, still a day to express gratitude to certain people. We sent a bouquet of WBUR roses to Tim and Rhonda who live in Orange and were, on that fateful afternoon of July 14, 2007, picking blueberries near the Gardner airport. We owe them much. The flowers are on their way according to Mr. Fedex, but to the wrong address, an apartment just down the street from them. I hope they get to their destination nevertheless.

Axel gave me a cyclamen plant, pink, for love, and it reminded me of both our mothers who managed to keep these plants alive for years on end. I don’t think I have ever gotten one still looking good after two months. Tessa got a mini version, so we can compare notes. The amaryllis is also coming out today in all its pink and red and white colors – as if it was planned that way.

Axel cooked us a steak-au-poivre dinner that included a spectacular flambé of brandy soaked jus with flames spiking high above the stove and smoke that set all the fire alarms off – leaving us cooking in the ice-cold winds that came from open windows and doors on all sides of the house. But the dinner was wonderful in spite of the wind and smoke. I especially liked the sauce that was not only brandy-spiked but also thickened with lots of heavy cream. Axel had tried to copied Jim’s meal from last Saturday – the smoke part was similar but for the rest not quite up to Jim’s standards if I am honest. Practice makes perfect, apparently; Jim has done it before.

The day ended with a delightful movie about a stodgy British shoe manufacturer who changes his line to produce kinky boots for crossdressers against a backdrop of much psychological drama, such as not living up to paternal expectations, and then all ends well.

That ended an intense workday that was, apart from another set of doctors’ tests, mostly filled with writing for a new book that we hope to have in production later this year, about leadership of course.

And now back to planning our flight for today. There are gusty winds all around Beverly. In order to get to the calm areas with clear skies that are further north and west, we’d have to get through the gusts one way or another. I am waiting for advice and instructions from my pilot buddy Bill, while Axel left for a Valentimes massage.

The assistant of the shoulder doctor gave me another shot in the arm to quiet things down. The previous shot did that for over a year. I also need to see the physical therapist again for a refresher on the rubber band exercises. We have decided to put off the MRI, so what happened inside my shoulder remains a mystery for now.

The tooth doctor concluded, in less than a minute time that it was not my tooth that was falling apart but the porcelain crown. It had been drilled through in a previous root canal treatment which had weakened the crown. Eating a piece of licorice was the straw that broke the crown’s back. No emergency, just a costly repair that can wait while I get used to uneven terrain in my mouth.

To my great surprise I received my passport with visa stamp and my e-ticket a full 6 days before my next trip, to Addis Ababa. The March and April trips are still up in the air, with the April one probably sliding into the summer. This is just as well as we are in very drawn out and complicated negotiations with a reluctant partner organization that sees its traditional approach to technical assistant (experts flying in and out) questioned by us at every turn. It seems that they don’t understand what we are putting in place of something they believe has worked just fine. We are missing the words and language to describe what is primarily an experience that needs to be had, or at least observed close up.

One of my former students, newly hired by us, is leading the charge. It is a hugely difficult assignment, conducted mostly by phone and email and a few visits to Washington. She’s doing amazingly well but getting discouraged periodically, until I remind her that she is practicing what we are teaching others and that she is doing the work of managing and leading. She’s working the low-tech high-touch angle with a group that works the other way around.

My colleague in Afghanistan got his abstract for a conference in Washington this spring accepted. They gave him a poster session slot which is a bit of a consolation price, but he is on the program nevertheless. The title of his ‘session’ is Low Tech – High Touch Leadership for Health. I don’t think he has been on an international conference program before and I wonder whether they will fly him all the way to DC for this, but I hope they do. It’s a great experience, like a trip to a restaurant that offers a buffet with all the best dishes of the world.

I woke up empty as opposed to waking up with my writing for the morning already spilling out before I have put my hands on the keyboard. That allowed me to take my time, make coffee, read the newspaper.

I did not have to rush out into the dark to beat the traffic, even though it is a Thursday, because I am seeing the shoulder doctor in the middle of this morning. I took the awkward timeslot from the hard-to-get-an-appointment-with-doctor because I am travelling again next Wednesday. I hope to get another shot of the miracle drug that will temporarily fix the rotator cuff problem like it did a year ago. I am not ready for anything more intrusive than that but I need something to stave off the possibility of a frozen shoulder.

Waking up empty is something that Rumi described in a poem that I happen to have stored on my computer:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

It is quite fitting that I take my cue for starting the day from a 13th-century Persian poet. I am busy learning his language from CDs as I commute in and out of Cambridge. If he lived now I could ask him in his own language whether he wants a glass of tea or I could ask him where the main road is in Balkh, his alleged birthplace, in what is now Afghanistan.

I want to learn the language of Darius (Dari) because I want to express myself a little bit more when I am next in Afghanistan. How close the Farsi I am learning is to the Dari that my hosts in Kabul speak is anyone’s guess. I am negotiating with an Afghan woman who lives in Boston to help me sort that out but we can’t seem to get the timing of our lessons right, at least not before I leave again.

So, taking Rumi’s advice, I think I will strum a little on my ukulele and practice some new chords before I kneel and kiss the ground.

I am reading HBR to find out how management is reinventing itself while waiting for my computer to self check and restart. I am underwhelmed with the so-called ‘new thinking’ of a famous management guru. It is hard to overwhelm me this early in the morning. It’s not even 4:30 AM yet (but by the time I am writing this it will be). In a week I am leaving again on a trip and even that does not overwhelm me.

After a mildly productive day at work I left early to go to the dentist and have my tooth looked at, the one that has lost three chips over the last few days. It is falling apart, finally. It is the one that is mostly filling, stemming from my childhood days when the dentist’s philosophy was to remove as much as possible from healthy teeth as a preventive measure.

But I never made it to the dentist because I had a flat tire. I don’t know if it was simply punctured by a nail or other sharp object or someone slashed it. I will find out later today when I pick it up again. I had slipped into a rare free parking space in Cambridge, along the side of the street next to my office. The prize was mine because I had arrived so early. Did I upset anyone?

AAA came to the rescue although not right away, so I missed my dental appointment slot. I could, of course, have changed the tire myself but I was glad I did not, watching the mechanic zip one tire off and the other on in just a couple of minutes with his power tools. I would have had to work with tools from the stone ages, practically hand-hewn, that would have required a lot of force.

I arrived home early and hungry with no one there to feed me. I just ate stuff standing in front of the refrigerator and our ‘carbohydrates’ cabinet (as Alistair once called it trying to figure out the organizing principle behind its contents). I ended with something that actually needed cooking, a soft boiled egg just when Axel returned. He scraped together his own meal while I took a bath. I had a fantasy of going to bed before 7 PM or watch a movie. We did the latter and watched the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency movie. I think it will be one of my favorite movies, not the least because of the great singing and the wonderful lilting Southern African talk.

I woke up one minute before my alarm went off at 4:30 which means that my internal clock has been reset. It took 9 days.

I woke up from a dream in which I was relying on accounting information from a certain Mr. Rambutan and had a very quick immersion into project management accounting that I should have had about 20 years ago. All these years I pretended I knew. I actually don’t know a Mr. Rambutan but I got to know a delicious fruit by that name during my last trip in Cambodia. In the dream I was about to be discovered as an accounting fraud and had a great deal of anxiety about that.

The dream was triggered by a telephone board meeting that lasted 2 hours and that was, for a good chunk, about how to present financial data, a conversation that went entirely over my head. I listened in silence to people who teach accounting and financial management to business school students for a living, and yawned a lot in between feeling totally inadequate. Luckily it was a phone meeting and the yawning was not visible to my fellow board members (and I was not the only one silent). There was much else I did not get and I felt like a cheat since I have been on the board for three years and am about to go off it in June, hopefully before they find me out. My particular job, which does not require accounting knowledge, is to get ourselves renewed each year and follow proper elections procedures; this year that includes getting someone elected to replace myself.

Yesterday morning I saw Tessa and Steve off to work, leaving Axel, myself and Chicha behind to do the work of running the household, bringing in the bacon and chasing squirrels. Halfway through the day we took Chicha into town, leashed of course, saying ‘heel’ a hundred times while doling out treats if she complied (it’s all about the treats says Joe who knows a thing or two about dog, and human, nature).

Walking by the mass of ducks was particularly exciting but the leash restrained her. The ducks are in withdrawal after a stern local newspaper article berated townspeople about their feeding behavior and how bad that was for the town, the entire ecosystem of ducks and of course the ducks themselves. The ducks ignored us and stared at the cold water, some of them standing on ice floats. I am glad I am not a duck.

I did more cooking in the afternoon, semi-Indonesian, and alternated it with writing a book chapter assigned to me that has due a date in late April. I have written half of the required pages and I am making good progress. This is a good thing because planned departures are firmed up: to Ethiopia next week, and late in March I will probably make a quick visit to Ghana before dashing off to Zambia, the latter not so firm right now.