Sylvia's Journal

We finished our last day of Board meetings yesterday at exactly 5:30 PM after another full day of meetings in our plush board room. We ended with a high energy exercise about everything that we knew needed attention and repair. That is now for others to fix and attend to, as we outgoing board members hand over our batons to the newly elected ones.

Part of the reward for doing board work is that you get to eat out in interesting restaurants a lot and have long and leisurely dinners for three nights in a row. We celebrated our accomplishments and the transitions in Virginia’s Kitchen, a lovely restaurant in an old house; we had the upstairs room which looked like a museum, all to ourselves; this time there was no music to compete with.

Over dinner people took turns to speak about what Magid and I had brought to the board. It was incredibly affirming and at times surprising to hear people talk about what I, as an outsider to this academic society, an interloper in my view, had brought to the table. I am, they say here, from the real world, with the emphasis on ‘real.’

I spoke about my introduction to this society now nearly 20 years ago and what a journey it had been and how incredible to have been elected to the Board. Still, despite the fact that I know many people well, it remains an alien culture and I will never speak its language like a native.

The menus in restaurants here are so very different from those in the north. Yesterday’s dishes were variations on fried food encircled by grits and collard greens or sausage and seasfood in a rich soup or sauce. For Axel the combination required an emergency visit to CVS to buy antacids. Lucky for me CVS also sells wine, beer and ice cream – attractive items to put in our oversized and entirely empty refrigerator as we are getting ready for the conference to begin later today.

Axel has learned much about the southern perspective on the civil war. People are still upset and the view is quite different from the one we get up north. Today I am partially off duty: we have to refine out design for the session we are doing on Friday about mind mapping. But most of today we can play untill about 5 PM when the conference starts with much shrieking and hugging and kissing as we see dear friends we have missed for an entire year.

The limbo continues about Afghanistan and I check my mail several times a day in the hope of finally knowing, one way or the other, so I can make plans about the future. But the Afghanistan team has not made its decision yet. And because of that no one is travelling to Kabul on Monday, not Axel, not me. The bad news is that this was about the only window for such a trip; the good news is that I now have a chance to use up some more vacation days that will go ‘poof’ in 2 weeks, weed the garden and eat our first harvest of lettuce.