Sylvia's Journal

Although I didn’t feel so positive as I headed into town to speak with the HR director, road signs tried to cheer me up that good things were afoot. “French begins with you & it is possible” exclaimed a small hand painted sign tacked to a gnarled tree near the city-central cemetery.

A huge bill board from one of the main cell phone companies promised that the world would be one in 2010 and that it (the company) couldn’t wait. The small soccer ball in the corner indicated that this was only true for soccer lovers. The company operates in many countries so the odds are that ‘it’ will win. And then there was the giant national monument promising Freedom and Justice, the national motto, presumably for all; a lofty ideal that still has a way to go.

All over town there are two sets of political signs, one with the candidate who won, and his running mate, sometimes depicted as very dark skinned and on other signs as very light skinned. I wonder whether that is a printing error or intentional to appeal to all shades of Ghanaians; the party that lost also still has its giant signs up saying that their man is the best. May be he was but he did not win.

We had a long and frank conversation about this senior leadership program that I am trying to get started. There appears to be a reluctance to say no to the donors and their particular agendas. I am not hearing the ‘no thank you’ although I have suggested it as an option. Maybe I will hear it today.

Of course there is also the option of looking at the funding, with all its strings attached, as an opportunity to also get something else done or to re-negotiate the strings (possible, I am told by the donor). Once again, it appears to be a conversation that is not happening – instead I witness meetings in which people don’t really say what they mean, or, to paraphrase Martin Buber, don’t mean what they say. No wonder we are all in trouble.

So I have shifted my framing of what we can offer: a series of conversations rather than a training program, in which we can slowly rebuild the feedback loops that have been severed or missing, and hear the stories from the heart rather than the intellect. I think I can do that and today I will find out whether I’ll get that chance. Or I’ll finally hear the no, and I’ll have peace with that too as it means the timing was not right.

It was clear that my unconscious was not done with the events and insights of the day after I went to sleep. One dream put me in a winter landscape, on slippery ground where my guide plunged a long way down into a stream. He could have been killed but he survived. A wild fox that looked suspiciously like Alison’s corky Abby jumped from tree branch to tree branch overhead like a flying squirrel, it colors brilliant against the white winter landscape. I know that in Native American medicine the squirrel tells something about squirreling away nuts for later; busy now with collecting, safe later during the bleak days of winter. I certainly have been busy collecting impressions this week and have stored them (on this blog and in my mind) for later.

I wrote a message in the guestbook for my friend Susan from Alaska who has just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It is odd to be on the guestbook side of Caringbridge, a site so familiar to me as an author during our first 5 months of recovery. I am glad to know how important these messages are and that we are all given the chance this way to follow her in her journey and cheer her and her family on. This journey will take her to Boston repeatedly I suspect and I hope to see her in person at some point. It does put things in perspective.