Sylvia's Journal

It was pitch black when I woke up this morning – the one hour forward is actually a setback because I am getting up and leaving home in the dark again, but not for long.

Kristen and I flew back from DC in a very full plane that was one in a series of continuous departures from the crowded USAID terminal; as if everyone wanted to get out of DC. Back home I found Tessa and Steve busy packing for their trip to Steve’s family up north in Canada; the dog restless, knowing something was afoot. Axel was chairing his town committee at the town hall, doing community preservation business. The house was empty.

The trip to DC was, except for the travel part, very enjoyable. I like traveling with my younger colleagues and hear about the courses they take and the learning they do. I also like to hear about their families. Their parents are about my age and it is interesting to hear perceptions about parents from our daughters’ cohort. We also talked a lot about group dynamics, my favorite organizational studies topic. And so the trip was more fun than I had anticipated.

The half day workshop had been advertised as a ‘Health Systems Strengthening Roundtable’ in the international health community that resides in and around Washington. One participant came all the way from Richmond. We had exactly the number of participants that could be seated around the very large conference table, representing various organizations that we sometimes compete with for government grants or contracts, and sometimes collaborate with. A few colleagues from our organization’s offices and projects in DC attended as well; people I only knew by name, or not at all.

The design for the workshop, not quite tested in that specific form, worked nicely as each part built on the previous piece and was introduced, as if scripted, by a pertinent question from our audience.

A friend of Tessa, just out of college and job-hunting in the field of international health, happened to be in DC. I had invited her to attend as it would give her a much better overview of what we do than me talking to her for an hour. I was not sure I would recognize her as I had not seen her in 15 years – from 8 to 23 makes a big difference. But I did; her face exactly as I remembered her as a bright-eyed 2nd grader.

After the workshop our new Washington-based colleague La Rue joined us for lunch. La Rue and I are travelling together to Ghana in 2 weeks and we have communicated so far entirely by email and phone so it was time to meet in person. I spent much of our lunchtime listening spellbound to her stories about her family which, in structure and age, matches mine: 1 older sister, 2 older brothers, 1 younger brother, and both of us born in the early 50s. We also had been in a house-on-fire early in our life. But there the resemblance ended; I grew up in a Holland that was on the rebound after the war and with university-educated parents; she grew up in the Appalachian Mountains in Southern Indiana in a small house without indoor plumbing.

Her stories could fill a book; not one she would write as it is not all that happy, especially the current chapter. It is about the kidnapping of her demented father, and a marriage that was tricked on him by a woman in her 70s who is after his assets. She has a daughter in the same business and they have gotten themselves quite wealthy over the years, with many houses signed over by husbands now dead.

La Rue and her siblings have been in court several times but the laws don’t protect them or their father as marriage is quite sacrosanct and the law, rightly so, protects women from men, not the other way around. I thought this was a good thing and suppose it mostly is, but not in this case. The children have to visit their father under police escort and at least half of his estate will go to the new wife.

Aging women as predators, I never would have thought that possible; according to la Rue, it is unfortunately quite common as they discovered during their research and days in court. And the hunting grounds are wide open and filled with a wide choice of juicy victims: wealthy baby-boomers who have lost touch with their children while they amassed their riches, sliding into dementia with no one to protect them. I am happy that this is a problem we won’t have.