Sylvia's Journal

One of the best things of my life is that I get to travel to so many different places and move around in so many different social circles. From a religious organization’s local office in the tiny red light district of a small provincial capital in Cambodia, to the fancy and well appointed office of the well dressed chief of the Ethiopian national AIDS commission, to the small open air bar run by a woman who is infected with HIV in rural Ivory Coast.

Or the residence of the Dutch ambassador to NATO, in Brussels, with the porcelain table ware and the silverware with Holland’s official coat of arms on which meals were served; the luxury hotel where Bush stayed when he was in Tanzania with the staff still abuzz about the experience with secret service agents and the slums of Dhaka with dwellings the size of a king size bed and small open spaces that serve as communal kitchens, while open gutters are stagnant with a dangerous looking brew. The list is endless and the contrast between places and lifestyles is huge.

Yesterday I visited two places, geographically near each other that could not be farther apart socially. After work I went with a few colleagues to listen to a presentation by students from various faculties of Boston University about their work in a hard hit community in Dorchester. The initiative came from a medical student who felt that the complex needs of a struggling community should be addressed not in a piecemeal fashion by super specialized experts but in a trans-disciplinary way and that universities have an obligation to bring their collective intellectual powers together to serve real people and help them untangle the complexities of living in a society that doesn’t understand their needs.

Marcel has mobilized students who are on their way to become doctors, educators and lawyers, and approached us about using our leadership development materials in a semester long service learning project. The students got to see how piecemeal expert assistance obfuscates the large systemic issues that keep producing the problems that hold people back. Together with people from the community they looked for ways to improve physical, social and fiscal health of the members of the community.

After getting terribly lost and going from one end of Boston to the other, we finally arrived at the community health center where the health council board was meeting in the basement, finishing its business for the day. Sitting in the back we got to observe a local community in action, or rather its activists, and listened to the reporting on various initiatives; one of them about getting fresh produce into the community through personal initiatives and a farmers’ market that sells shares for weekly baskets of whatever is in season.

Finally it was the students’ turn and each spoke about why he or she was there and how the project has changed their perspective. They were very passionate about the experience and their purpose in life. Several people from the area were present as well and exposed the kind of thinking in communities that are ‘helped’ that is not always visible to the helper, let alone shared with them. Some of the feedback was positive and some negative; it was a refreshing frank and open exchange.

After that I dropped my colleagues off at various places along the way as I made my way back into Boston to the Harvard Club for entrance in an entirely different social circle. Our friend Ellie had received, by way of a birthday present, a dinner with her closest friends at the Harvard Club and Axel and I were invited (but Axel was at his printing class and so I went alone). The group consisted predominantly of real estate people from the Manchester-Hamilton area, most retired just in time before the housing crisis hit, and all quite well off.

I did not get to find out what the few non real estate people were doing for a living, except that there was an opera producer, someone who knows about mushrooms and supports the Rotary’s polio eradication program (and whose father’s name was on a plaque on the wall, a past notable of the Club).

And then there was, Bill, my delightful dinner partner. Bill’s passion and profession is to make women look good. I learned some things from him that I should have learned years ago: even if a dress or skirt is lined one should always wear a slip because (a) if there is a backlit photo made the lining will be transparent (so true as I tucked my lined dress closer around my legs) and (b) the dress or skirt will drape better. I had no idea!

Bill goes around speaking to garden clubs and ‘accessorizes’ (yes, this is a verb) women’s ‘ little black dresses’ with corsages (he is also a florist), jewelry, scarves, belts and whatnot. He got started on this venture after seeing an exhibit about Coco Chanel at the MOMA and concluded that her classic dressing style was timeless and needed a comeback. He was appalled about how badly women were dressing. I also learned that corsages are used to draw attention away from body parts that should not be looked at.

Although he still sells flowers and arrangements from his shop in Salem, he would not be able to sustain this nowadays. Florists are going out of business at an alarming rate because of the competition from supermarkets or home improvement stores (don’t even consider that cheap bouquet at the check out counter!). His accessorizing and speaking tours allow him to go on nice vacations to Europe with his partner (one of the realtors) and be driven around in limos. It is rare that I meet a man whose convoluted career path (he has a degree in ceramics from UNH) resembles that of women. I suspect it stood in sharp contrast to the careers of most men around the table.

I was the first to leave the party, having been up since 4:30 AM. During my drive home, I contemplated these two widely differing social circles that I had looked into as a bystander, belonging to neither, like a social tourist. How boring it would be to be confined to only one circle.