Sylvia's Journal

A dark dream and dreary images from the Dutch ‘hunger winter’ indicate that there is some anxiety about my upcoming trip to Kabul. You’d think that by now I would be a hardened traveler. I am in some ways and not in others. It may have something to do with my destination and the fact that I have only the vaguest idea what I will be doing in Kabul this time.

Yesterday morning I made no headway with my reference checks in Ethiopia. I suspect they also have a second Easter day, like in Holland, except Ethiopian Christians are of the Orthodox kind and celebrated their Easter this weekend. Monday the 20th may have been a holiday. I am trying again this morning and got up early for that reason. The workday ends there in a few hours.

Tessa and Steve have their first experience of having a sick puppy in the house while needing to go to work. Chicha has pulled a muscle, probably because she did a little too much retrieving with everyone throwing balls and Frisbees for her to catch over the weekend. She spent the day lying on one bed or another looking sad and pathetic. Lucky she has two doting parents and another two doting grandparents. I never think of dogs being sick. No one went for a walk yesterday.

I worked a bit, packed a bit and started some seedlings, hoping that at least something would be ready for planting when I get back. I also cut the potatoes in pieces with a bunch of eyes each and, as per instructions, left them out to dry before planting. I did not check the asparagus progress as I was told a watched asparagus does not grow.

In the evening Axel and I drove to Nuha and her brother who live in a student apartment in Cambridge, he a marketing sophomore at Suffolk, she about to graduate from Boston University with a master’s in public health, this May.

The meal consisted of Saudi comfort food: Makaroni bi Béchamel and something that sounds like Djerish and is like a savory oatmeal porridge. The meal was wedged in between a light but very spiced coffee and dates before and sweetened tea with apple crisp (comfort of the New England type) afterwards. Nuha is trying to learn as many New England dishes as she can before she heads back home in June. Cooking fruit, like apples, is one of the odd American cooking ideas she has now gotten used to.

We watched a series of YouTube videos about an American visiting Saudi Arabia (No Reservations) and heard stories about what Saudis do for fun – camping is one of those things. It can be done with or without all the comforts and distractions of daily life – like here – but without woods and trees it is quite different from what we consider camping over here. We were both invited to experience it first hand – I would be drinking tea and singing with all the other women, sitting around the campfire while Axel and the guys would be preparing a goat dinner and then cruising the sand dunes in powerful vehicles. Good thing they don’t allow alcohol.

I am now at the place where I have to finish current work and prepare for the upcoming trip, my own personal continental divide. It is the moment I start looking ahead and my mind starts to make mental notes on what to buy, and pack, but it also is busy making mental notes of what, amidst the mass of papers and tasks, has to be checked off by tonight.

Needless to say it is a somewhat stressful time and my home office shows it, with stuff on the ground and all horizontal space occupied. I have stopped putting things away, thinking that I will get to it later. But this ‘later’ is getting pushed out further and further. Now I think it will be when I get back from my next trip, sometime early May.

I heard on Friday that I don’t have to take the plane from Dubai to Addis but can travel home as we are not quite ready for the start up of our Ethiopian project. I am happy about this because it means I will be back in time to have some of the asparagus that are beginning to poke through the surface.

Yesterday we had our 24th annual Easter party and one of the biggest spreads in the ages of people that we ever had. If our youngest guest will get as old as the oldest present yesterday, we would cover the period from about 1916 to about 2113 for birth years. This is ‘the present’ that Elize Boulding refers to when she uses the word – a concept of time that makes you realize we have come a long way in the present. It makes me less impatient about things taking time to change.

Today I am checking references in Ethiopia, send in a proposal for the Ghanaian health system to get back in touch with itself and check out the weather in Kabul in addition to lining up doctor’s appointments for when I return. And after that I will haul the suitcase up and cover the remaining empty spot on the floor with clothes, work stuff and gifts that will travel with me to Afghanistan tomorrow night.

I finished reading (or rather listening to) Bryan Sykes’ book ‘Adam’s Curse,’ and when I returned it to the library I understood dumb male behavior: it’s all because of the degenerating Y chromosome.

Sykes is not only a genetics professor at Oxford University but also a bestselling author. He traced European women back to their first 7 mothers (or aunties) through the study of mitochondrial DNA (The Seven Daughters of Eve). Now he is tracing the journeys of the Y chromosomes and because he is a man himself he can be brutally honest about the sorry state of the sex. In a delightful interview in the New York Times some years ago, he talks about his discoveries about the Y chromosome, which he calls ”a graveyard of rotting genes.”

Since the Y chromosome passes unchanged from one generation to the next – it doesn’t recombine (the mother doesn’t have one) it can never fix its own defects. Moreover, those Y chromosomes that belong to the winners (think force, wealth and many women) get passed on more than those belonging to poor losers. Thus, the survival of the Y chromosome has been directly linked to the kind of aggressive male behavior that has wrought havoc with the world. Hence the title of the book.

Sykes maintains that the world would be better off without males. He thinks it will take another 100 to 200 thousand years for the Y chromosome to completely self destruct. By then we will have figured out how to reproduce without the Y chromosome and every new baby will be a girl.

So now, each time I see men do stupid things (including those in my own household who I love dearly), I feel sorry for them and chalk it up to their defective Y chromosome. And lately I have seen some really stupid male behavior around me, on TV (watch Super Nanny for a few episodes), and in the newspapers.

When Bonnie gave me my haircut yesterday and talked about her abusive husband and son I told her that it is just a matter of time before that line of an obviously very defective Y chromosome will come to the end of the road.

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.

Two things entirely associated with winter entered our lives yesterday, just when the trees have started to blossom in Boston (not in Manchester yet, we are after all a full commute north of Boston).

The first warm thing, which entered gradually, is the 100% lamb’s wool sweater that I knitted from 4 skeins of the 16 that Alison gave me – a treasure she found while cleaning up her parental home. The sweater is much too warm now for the day time temperatures we have; but at the extreme ends of the day it is a welcome extra layer. The pattern comes from a Dutch woman’s magazine (‘Margriet’) that I have kept since November 1981. It is full of handicraft ideas and patterns for women of leisure or those whose babies are napping. Belonging to neither category, I managed to complete the sweater in a fairly short time by simply carrying my knitting along into the various waiting rooms I have been frequenting lately.

The second warm thing is the stove which finally arrived; a late delivery of an August 2008 order (we ordered it during the tax holiday). If the living room had not been partially demolished to accommodate it we might even have forgotten about it.

It is our new green stove that will allow us to burn the enormous amount of wood from the dismantled Norwegian maple and do it even when the wind is blowing – something we were never able to do with the old stove and badly constructed chimney. We will also be able to leave it on when we go to bed because it has doors. With the old stove we had to lug glowing embers through the house and throw them out in the snow and then kill the fire by spraying water over it. This was so messy, annoying and risky that it would sometimes keep us from having a fire at all.

Last night we had a family outing that was the direct result of Sita’s continuously scanning of what’s interesting out there. She discovered that Howard Gardner, The Harvard professor who came up with the idea of multiple intelligences, was speaking at a Montessori school in Boston on the Five Minds of the Future. We all jumped on the opportunity to see a great mind from close up. We converged from our respective workplaces East and South Boston and from North and West of Boston at a restaurant on Boylston Street and from there made our way to the school.

Sita scribed and recorded the presentation, Axel mindmapped, Steve and Tessa were sitting in the back to dash out just before their parking meter would run out and I just sat back and enjoyed the lecture that was like a rich meal put out in front of us, richer than the overpriced pizzas we had eaten around the corner.

Utterly at ease with his topic and deeply knowledgeable about his field (of cognitive psychology) he spoke, very low key, to an audience of mostly women. He laid out the new mental landscape of the global and digital age that our kids and theirs will have to navigate and what the implications are for education. We learned that the mind of the future is not one but five: a disciplined mind, a synthesizing mind, a creative mind, a respectful mind and an ethical mind. It’s a good thing our minds can grow more of themselves.

Afterwards there was a book singing and Sita lined up for a signature before heading out all the way back to western Massachusetts. I verified that I can get the book on my Kindle and I don’t need the signature so Axel and I left her in the line and drove home.

‘Ah, can you see the Popeye bulge?’ said the physician assistant, after she asked me to make a fist and curl my lower arms up. The diagnosis of a bicep tear was swift and did not even require a doctor (I did get to see him for a minute or so). A Google search showed that it’s a well known phenomenon and not something rare like my ankle. I suppose this is a good thing. People who use bicep curl machines or weights too much have this problem, or snow/skate boarders who have a bad fall, I learn. There’s even a Wikipedia definition of the famous sailorman’s condition. It has nothing to do with spinach.

I ended up spending the entire morning at the gigantic orthopedic-industrial complex. The machines need to be paid for so I had an X-ray – need it or not, this is part of standard operating procedures if you don’t bring one in yourself. For the long overdue MRI that was ordered I need to go to the basement some other time. That way the time spent waiting is spread out a bit more over the week.

The MRI will indicate the direction, shape and size of the tear which will inform the doctor whether it will heal itself or needs a surgical intervention. In either case it is now unlikely that I will be able to row anytime soon, or even this season. I had hoped to be on the water sometime in May. Now I think not.

When I was done at the orthopedic complex (which is located on Orthopedics Drive!), the day was so far advanced that I decided that it was hardly worth it to drive into Cambridge. I returned home and did the rest of my scheduled meetings by phone, interspersed with playing Frisbee with Chicha and cheering on Axel, who was upstairs, doing our taxes.  

This is the name of the USAID procurement that appeared in my dream, not just once but over and over. It was a procurement that combined population and environment; and old combination I remember from the early days of my career, when I was working in UNESCO’s population education program in Dakar. It was a euphemism for family planning, two words we weren’t allowed to utter because of their highly sensitive association with population control (by white folks).

Population education had the same intent, by raising awareness about the relationship between population and environment in a part of the world where the balance was rather fragile. These were the days when the west pointed at environmental degradation in developing countries, especially Africa, and unbridled population growth as the main culprit. There were a few voices that told of the role of the industrialized countries but they were not very popular and rather weak.

Much has changed now, especially in Senegal. When I returned, 10 years after our 1981 departure, signs on public busses exhorted the population to plan their families. When you are in the middle of things 10 years seem like a long time but on a cosmic scale it is nothing of course. Politics (and necessity) can change opinions very quickly.

I hope it was a predictive dream. In August 2010 my employed contract will run out and unless there is another procurement that seeks better leadership of health programs, there is no guarantee for further employment. I have gone through this anxiety now five times, every five years but each time a new procurement (and us winning it) extended my security for another 5 years. It will be interesting to see if and how Hillary will affect my professional, and by extension, my family life.

Yesterday, after the ultrasound, the physical therapist treated my upper arm with low electrical currents that felt like a tiny animal running back and forth over my arm. It’s a mystery to me how all these treatments work. I do understand that they bring blood and therefore nutrition to the damaged cells but the mechanics of that escape me. The healing from the contusion and possible tear is excruciatingly slow. Waking up in the morning feels like a setback of more than a year as everything hurts when I get up and I can barely use my right (and dominant) arm. The hot shower loosens things up a bit and I spent more than the usual time there.

This morning I will see the shoulder doctor again at the enormous orthopedic practice that the local orthopedic competition refers to as the evil empire. I will bring my knitting and my Kindle and settle in for a long wait – if seeing the shoulder doctor there is anything like my previous experience with the ankle doctor from the same empire. This is the blond young doctor who I no longer see due to his hurriedness and my lack of confidence in his diagnostic abilities.