Sylvia's Journal

A straight flight down from Boston brought us to the South. This is a very different place. All the street names are reminders of the love/hate relationship with Britain. Liberty Street and George (or King) Street are side by side. It’s a very different place from New England: the architecture, the palm trees and the way women are dressed. There is no grunge look here. The southern belles we pass in the evening wear elegant dresses, long and short, with strapless tops if they can. And then there is the drawl; lovely.

We converged from all sides of the US to this place for our 1st board meeting of the year that precedes the annual conference. There are about 20 of us, always some new to the board and some going off, like me. With this last meeting I will have completed my three-year term.

A few others have brought spouses who joined us for this first informal event of our agenda – good food, catching up with news and ‘checking in.’ During the brief pauses of the phenomenal guitar players who augmented the restaurant’s ambiance we took turn talking about what was new, good or bad, since we last saw each other in October. I got to break the news about my wish to move to Afghanistan, which few people understand. For some it is like saying, I have decided to go to the moon. But others get it; that this is a huge and interesting professional challenge.

After dinner we returned to our dormitory. The conference organizers have put us in the nice dorms. I suspect we are in the graduate student dormitory: suites with three rooms, a kitchen, bathroom and small sitting area. We managed to fill up the few horizontal surfaces and the tiny space with our stuff in no time – even though we brought very little stuff with us. It never ceases to amaze me quick we can clutter up a place, any place.

All the suites are located around an open air courtyard that has a picnic table and a sofa and armchairs in it. They are made to look like the real things, but out of colorful plastic – like you would expect in a modern art museum. It rains here a lot and the dark puddles of standing water on the sofa and chair where the cushions would have been attest to this fact. It’s a small design flaw that makes them useless after weeks of rain.

Our dorm looks out over the backside of buildings; a parking place with a bunch of containers which, we discovered, are emptied at about 3 AM by large trucks that make much noise for a long time.