Sylvia's Journal

I spent the entire day at MSH’s Cambridge office. I don’t have my own place anymore so I am like a visitor, occupying an office of someone who is travelling (Alain’s in this case). There are new people already in the office who I don’t know and it feels different already being there. I suspect that some of my colleagues are getting tired of saying goodbye. I have been in the process of leaving since June and it’s high time I get on the plane. My last day in the office will be next Thursday.

The large kale plant I brought from Lobster Cove Gardens was slowly dismantled as one by one people tore leaves off the giant stalk. When I left at the end of the day all that was left was a naked stalk with a few of the most elderly leaves clinging stubbornly to the bottom. I saw people walking around the building waving large kale leaves in my face – clearly no one is planning to make ‘booerenkool’ as they would have taken the whole thing. Some were put in vases and others, I supposes, added to soups and salads. It was nice to see so many people enjoying this bounty.

I received my shiny new computer, bringing the number of new computers  in our household to three. I think Steve also may also have gotten a new computer but that one stays at his workplace.

My new computer is not as small as the previous one which was not as small as its predecessor; slowly the size increases until it won’t fit any longer on the economy class tray table in the plane. Luckily I won’t be travelling as much by plane, and for my next trip I was able to get myself an upgrade for the 17 hour flight from Atlanta. I will have plenty of room.

Changing computers is a lot of work. It is like moving: a good opportunity to get rid of stuff – that’s where most of the effort goes. I also had to train the new computer in recognizing my voice. I stayed up past midnight to move into my new computer, with occasional interruptions, by Skype, from one of my Kabul colleagues who had just started his day. He wasn’t even surprised I responded. It was after all the beginning of the work day for him and I bet he doesn’t have a clock with Boston time on his computer.This morning the roles were reversed when we Skyped again, he at the end of the day, hungry because of Ramadan (called Ramazan in Afghanistan) and me more or less rested after a short night.

All of our coversations are about the workplan for next year, how to make it better, more complete and with clear accountabilities. The end of this annual planning exercise ritual is coming into view. This is ratcheting up the pressure and therefore also the number of conversations we have. Telecommuting to Kabul is a more than fulltime job because of this, with a workday that runs nearly uninterrupted for 24 hours a day.

I am counting the days till my sling can be put in the closet, 4 more. I am religious about my exercises in the hope of a faster recovery. I am using my right arm/hand more and more giving the overtaxed left arm/hand some badly needed respite. My left hand is now in a nearly continuous state of numbness and tingling which I hope (but also doubt) will subside once the sling is off

For the first time in nearly three weeks I am going to the office in Cambridge. There are many things to take care of that can’t be done from home. Even before I leave there is much to do as the series of PT exercises for my shoulder is expanding. The physical therapist is pleased with the progress of my shoulder’s mobility and, as if a reward, added a more daring one to the mix, one that actually brings my arms over my head.

Most of yesterday I combed over hundreds of excel spreadsheet cells, inserting tiny comments here and there in a distant effort to make the plans of my teams more coherent or at least something that I can live with the coming year. I had to ask myself, do I do this because it can be better or am I looking for perfection in a place where that should not be looked for?  I am usually a believer in ‘good enough for now,’ but first I want to make sure it cannot be better.

The tricky thing is, how to convey the questions to my teams in a way that is supportive and not embarrassing, via email. I try to be sensitive but we are spanning eight and a half hours and language barriers, just to mention the most obvious ones. I am glad my Cambridge colleague and suitcase carrier, Alain, is there now to act as a bridge. We will talk later today.

I harvested another two kale plants of gigantic proportions from our garden. The total weight of frozen kale in our freezer is now about six pounds. This does not include the plant I will bring along to Cambridge tomorrow to distribute among garden-less urban dwellers (who also were happy to take the baseball bat sized zucchini and giant patty pan squash of our hands) and the one that is still standing tall in the garden; not a bad investment for the 1.99 four-pack that I put in the ground in May.

At the end of the afternoon we had invited Robin for tea or a drink. She has lived and worked for four years in Kabul and is well ensconced in an interesting network of Afghan-Americans and people who work in the same ‘industry’ as I do. She is close to one of the senior leaders I will be working with. DJ turned us on to her, his neighbor, via facebook, and so we finally got together after a first introduction by phone some weeks ago.

We discovered that she grew up in Manchester and even lived on the same street that Axel grew up on, just a decade or so later. She was a cub reporter for our very own Manchester Cricket (“only the good news!”) but by that time Axel had left town so he never read her byline as the high school football reporter.

We discovered more connections and a host of new contacts with returned Afghan Americans that she will broker for us. She also gave us some great ideas for what do to for fun on weekends; I hope to report on these in the not so far future. Now there are three families with Afghan connections in tiny Manchester-by-the-Sea, imagine that!

It was hard to ignore all the emails that came in from Kabul where everyone was busy working – they dropped into my inbox with a soft ‘bleep.’ Still, I managed to spend Labor Day more or less labor-free.

It is also hard to ignore the increasingly loud voices that cry out about the election fraud in Afghanistan. Karzai’s legitimacy, if he is elected with a 50% vote, is already compromised and this cannot do much good.  The fraud is blatant in the eyes of us westerners, but learning more and more about Afghanistan’s past, it makes total sense. Why would anyone in his right mind let his opponent win?

I am deeply drawn into Sarah Chayes’ book ‘The Punishment of Virtue’ and have discovered that the quick impact surge of activities in which we are to play a role is not new. A similar quick surge, under another administration and with another cast of character tried the same without success some 7 years ago. Even the name was the same. It makes you wonder about institutional memory.

Still, undaunted, I keep throwing things in the large green suitcase we bought in Dubai; things that I may want to have with me, like sewing patterns (outfits that cover arms and legs), a flashlight, nasal spray, hot and cold packs for the continuing physical therapy, hiking boots….By the time the suitcases will be closed, less than 2 weeks off, I am sure I will remove much again for not being all that important after all. Packing for travel is all about choices.

In the afternoon, as if by design, Tessa and Axel decided it was time to visit the Apple Store, to look, which of course means to buy (such a clever store). We ended up dropping a huge amount of money in Apple’s lap to set up Axel for his stay in Afghanistan and Tessa for her studies. I pouted that I wanted to get a new toy too and pocketed the ‘free’ iPod touch that came with the new computer. Among all its apps it has weather and a compass, handy tools to have in flight just in case I get lost over the woods of Maine. It was one of the arguments I used to appropriate the gadget from Axel. He looked a little disappointed, but hey, he has a much bigger new toy. Tessa kept hers; she is after all paying for her new toy out of her own John Snow earnings.

Having a new electronic toy is always a huge time sink and kept me occupied through the evening. I discovered that I have not maintained my iTunes library very well; my last iPod purchase was a lifetime ago. Still, it was a nice re-introduction to the fabulous music that I have on my computer and can carry around in the palm of my hand as I make my way to Afghanistan.

We are getting one 10+ day after another, as if Mother Nature wants to apologize for the month of June when it was only summer in name. We are spending time at the beach, hanging out with our new neighbors, playing with Chicha, and reading. Axel attempted water color again but that got interrupted, a common occurrence. There is so much to do that it takes a lot of will power to just sit at the beach and relax.

The moment I step inside my office I am confronted with a jumble of stuff that divides roughly into three piles: ship to Kabul, move back into the living room, leave here but consolidate and pack up. In addition, a constant surge of emails from Kabul is spilling into my mailbox. There is no long weekend there; everyone is at work; the new week started on Sunday morning and Alain has arrived. This produces an additional flurry of activities and even more emails. I am not responding to any and tell myself that this is OK because it is Labor Day weekend.

I went to Quaker meeting by myself, in the car rather than on the bike. I suppose I could have tried biking with one arm but decided it would be too risky. Only 8 people showed up and so it was a rather still meeting. At the end I said goodbye to Gabrielle, one of our eldest members. She is getting increasingly frail and when I embraced her so say goodbye I suspected we both knew it might be the last time we see each other.

Gabrielle is from Germany and sometimes reminds me of my mom. She came to the US during the war when she was a young woman. Once or twice we have talked about that time but she mostly keeps that period of her life to herself. She never speaks in meeting because, as she told me once, if she were to speak she could only do it in German and that would be useless. I could not convince her that no one would mind and that I could then practice my German again, but she has remained still, except when she falls asleep; I gently touch her to bring her back.

Tessa, Steve and two of their friends showed up with all the requirements for a cook out on the beach. We have a pit that Axel dug out earlier next to a large granite uprising out of the sand. Over the years it has seen some big fires and it is cracked all over but it remains a great natural cooking place.

A campfire needs an instrument and so I had practiced my ukulele chords in the afternoon and was ready for some singing but no one joined in. I think it is because I play rather haltingly. I need more practice so I can slide from one chord to the next without changing tempo. Still, I can now play the chords of Oh Susanna, Goodbye Ladies and more; and I can certainly accompany myself. I will perfect it in Kabul with my house mate Steve who loves to sing, traveling there not with a banjo but with a ukulele on my back.

Axel and I switched from the outdoor fire to the indoor fire that we now light every evening and sometimes even in the morning. It’s lovely and heats the downstairs in no time thanks to an ingenuous fan system. We will miss it this coming winter.

My knitting and sewing material, plus an exercise ball, some 100 licorice tea bags and a good stash of licorice should be on their way to Dubai right now and onward to Kabul tomorrow, if everything is going to plan. I dropped a full suitcase off at Alain’s house in Belmont. When I turned around heading home I joined the avant-garde of the big Labor Day exodus into vacation lands further north.

The carpal tunnel doctor must have been among these vacationers because when I showed up for the appointment he was not there. This wiped away the fantasy I had nursed to leave for Afghanistan with the next diagnostic step (an EMG) completed. That would have made it possible to have the surgery during my Christmas vacation, if so advised. Scheduling such things during my short leave around Christmas is unlikely. So I will go one step at a time with only one step completed before my departure.

My work these days consists of combing through the draft work plans of my three teams in Kabul. It is detailed work which is not my forte, and thus somewhat stressful. It also requires sitting in front of a computer which is hard on the body, especially the mess of traumatized muscles in my neck and upper back. I finally had to resort to chemicals to manage the discomfort.

I had my second PT appointment and my arm and shoulder feel so limber this morning that I could easily forget to put my sling on. The range of motion is improving rapidly. I can do things I am probably not supposed to do without any discomfort, such as hanging a (small and light) picture on our newly painted living room walls. I do it when Axel is not watching. The urge to move everything back to normalcy and into the empty living room is hard to contain. Now that the hearth is in it feels completed, yet we are still waiting for the cabinet maker to put in the bookshelves that we had forgotten in the original design some 16 years ago. So there will be more sawing and hammering and normalcy will have to wait and my office will remain a storage room.

We attended a cocktail party with town officials at Woody’s to say goodbye and thank Nina, a member of Axel’s Community Preservation Committee. As chairman of the committee he has benefitted greatly from her contributions. Nina has one rule for committee meetings: at 9 PM she gets up and leaves, saying that a one hour meeting should be a one hour meeting. It has kept everyone on task and left more time for the guys to get a beer afterwards in the local pub.

Axel will soon be leaving this committee as well and he is still looking for a person to take over the chairmanship. Serving on town committees is usually considered a thankless and pain-in-the-neck job; yet there they were last night, all people who do this with (mostly) good humor and much dedication. Community stewardship still exists and I am happy and proud that Axel is one of these stewards.

When we returned home I could stay up just enough to say ‘hi and bye’ to Sita who arrived with Jim for a short night. By now she is at the airport waiting to board her flight to points further west, on her way to China. She will return in 12 days via San Diego, just in time to see me off to points further east. She left us a nice good bye drawing, as she always does; she is, after all, an illustrator.

The banking system works again! After more than four weeks of filing papers, answering questions and waiting for various checks and assessments to be done, we finally signed the papers for a loan. It’s funny how we, who own property that is worth 10 times the size of the loan, are subjected to this sort of scrutiny while risky ventures were cooked up without much of a thought in the bank’s back room.

We now have access to money to pay the bills that are heaping up in direct proportion to the number of workmen in and around the house. The line of credit could have bought us an entire house when we started with home ownership, some 25 years ago. Now it will get us only a septic system and some long overdue maintenance.

Tessa and Steve are beaming – life is good to them: parents who fix up the house with a new septic system, a new coat of paint and a new fireplace and beautiful stone heart, and then leave for Afghanistan for a year.

More doctors’ appointments are filling my days. Yesterday I visited the ear doctor because of another defect that surfaced during my physical, a hearing problem I wasn’t even aware of.  Since there is no obvious cause for it that can be ascertained without cutting, we decided to leave things alone as the hearing is not affecting the quality of my life. Today I am seeing the hand doctor to take a look a my left fingers and hand to figure out what causes the persisted tingling and numbness that wakes me up at night and stops and starts without any pattern. In the meantime I continue my physical therapy, faithfully doing my exercises, to get the right shoulder back to normal functioning; one more week of sling.

The departure for Afghanistan is now like a waxing moon; everyday a little more of the reality of that departure shines in my face. A small suitcase is packed with sewing and knitting materials, an exercise ball and the Dutch goodies my brother brought last month. It will precede me to Afghanistan with my colleague Alain who is leaving tonight for a quick visit. I am also filling up boxes with books I will need and taking them to Cambridge, one by one, for shipment. In the meantime, things in Afghanistan remain in flux and I have to remember that anything I ship out I may never see again. It certainly is one way of getting rid of superfluous (but nice to have) stuff.

I used to work on the Afghanistan project as a short term consultants and occasionally steering things, very lightly, from a distance.  Now I am on the upper deck so to speak and discover the intense back and forth that happens behind the scenes. It is fascinating and intense.

Between my work hours and those of the Kabul team we cover about 19 hours of the 24 available. I am usually at my computer very  early in the morning and stop around dinner time; the Kabul team comes on board just when I go to bed, around 10:30 PM, and quits when I come on again.  I considered for a moment to change my working hours and do a night shift rather than a day shift, to be more in harmony. But missing out on these beautiful days in Lobster Cove to catch up on my sleep would be a shame.

It’s work planning time in Kabul and I am reviewing Excel spreadsheets with lines and XXs. Why we think that long lists of activities in tiny typeface can accurately represent the work we need to do is a mystery; more of a mystery is that we keep using this format despite the stress and despair that usually accompanied work planning.

I solve this problem by always changing the lists into mind maps and I have a nice piece of software that helps me do this (MindManager). This way I can manipulate levels and make sure that the details contribute to the higher level objectives.

Another problem I encounter is that work planning terminology is like a local dialect;  people use different words to mean the same thing or, more frequently, they use words without thinking about what they really mean, the most problematic ones being ‘output’ and ‘outcome.’

And then there is the issue of habit. There is a default in planning that is powerful to change: the cut and paste of the previous plan, making it as routine and easy as possible where it should have been a deep conversation that starts with ‘why are we here?’ or ‘what do we want our legacy to be?’ and ends with scrutinizing the activity lines to make sure they get us there.  I am introducing this discipline and am waiting to see the response. I already got one: ‘a fresh new dialog’ that I am bringing to this project. I like the word fresh – stale is not good for the body and soul.

The sling/shelf contraption is doing bad things to my trapezoid muscles and the many smaller muscles in my upper back, neck and shoulders. Things were already a mess before the sling (whiplash from the accident that I doubt will ever go away) but this is not helping. Sitting in front of a computer also doesn’t help and within an hour of the start of my work day my shoulder and back muscles were burning from overuse. I took the sling off and did not put it on all day and requested an emergency massage from Axel (which he expertly delivered). I added to that an expert massage from Abi later in the day that did much to relieve the discomfort.

We made big progress yesterday with several of the things that have been a big headache the last month. The most elderly of our cars, a 13 years old Subaru with 250.000 miles, was certified for another year. It proudly displays its 2010 window sticker.  We had not expected this. It will help with the selling before we go.

Axel completed painting the living room and, after 8 months of camping out, we started to move things back to where they used to be. Normalcy is what I want, I told Axel. I am anxious to move stuff out of my office which has more the look of a storage place than an office.

We made a fire in the new fire place. It was both a test (no smoke came out of unexpected places) and a dream come true – this is what we had in mind when we ordered the new fireplace a year ago. It’s been a lesson in patience. The work is not done yet around the fireplace but that is, at this point, minor change. It was lovely sitting in front of the fire and then being able to simply close the fireplace doors and go to bed. In the past we had to carry smoldering logs through the house and throw them out in the yard and then extinguish the fire by spraying it with a fine mist of water.

And finally, I received my official terms of assignment, my new TOA as it is called in our jargon. The work in Kabul, even from a distance, is ramping up. Because of Ramadan, phone meetings are now late at night rather than early in the morning. My first meeting with my colleague Steve and my boss started at 11 PM and lasted till after midnight. It is good they could not see me yawning as I am still on Ghana time.

The meeting generated many tasks in addition to much learning. It’s tricky to manage 3 teams from 8.5 time zones away but we are all trying. The big complicating factor, especially for work at the central ministry level, is that the dust has not settled from the elections, and may not settle for awhile. This means that we don’t know whether we will be working with the old and familiar cast of characters or an entirely new crew. Still, we have to submit a comprehensive work plan to our funder, the US government, before the end of the month.  Work planning has never been my strength and as an underling my work planning experience at headquarters was not something I relished. But now I am overseeing three large teams and I have to encourage those who find it similarly draining to soldier on.

I like working at home, in charge of my own schedule, and being around Axel.  Best of all, Lobster Cove is beautiful these days. The early fall/late summer days are of the 10+ variety: clear blue skies, perfect temperatures and brilliant colors all around. Although I am anxious to move to Kabul and be with my colleagues, I am acutely aware of this most gorgeous environment I have to leave behind.

Yesterday was my first day at work on my new job. It was an odd sensation because at first sight nothing had changed: Monday is my telecommuting day. But instead of telecommuting to Cambridge, I telecommuted to Kabul.

That this state of affairs was neither here nor there was obvious from my dreams: I was on my way to Baghdad, a long journey by foot with much baggage. Axel and I ended up in a transition place, a camp of sorts. Someone remarked that they smelled an overheating battery and that is when I discovered I did not have my black backpack, the one I usually take to work which has my computer and an extra battery in it. I experienced a sense of loss and tried hard to imagine doing my work without that backpack and its tools inside.

Bill Bridges had dedicated his life to helping people navigate transitions, so, in this time of transition, I go to him for advice. Bridges taught me about the neutral zone, the time after the ending and before the beginning. In the circus this is the moment when the aerialist lets go of the trapeze she was on and before she catches the other one. It looks like a free fall and it feels like one but it isn’t. The new trapeze is on its way.

Bridges suggests I think through my transition by focusing on my stuff and what I want to do with it. He calls it ‘Guidance for Moving.’ Even though I don’t have a moving allowance, it’s a good mental exercise and it helped me to interpret my dream. Air shipment is for the important things I will need at my new location immediately. By sea I ship the things I want to take along but that are not as important as those requiring fast transit. I will put in storage all things I don’t want to discard but that I don’t want to use just now. And then there is disposal: the things that it is time to get rid of and leave behind.

In the Cambridge office I already disposed of 22 years of files and papers that I have not looked at in years. It was a little scary but also a relief. With my Cambridge office emptied, someone else moved in and I don’t have an office anymore. This makes my home office the locus of my transition. I get to work from there as much as I want, enjoying my last three weeks of Lobster Cove during one of the most beautiful times of the year. I surely will miss that first sight of Lobster Cove when I get up in the morning, always dazzling, rain or shine.

Yesterday was also my first visit to the physical therapist. She took measures and wrote down numbers and percentages about my range of motion. She commented that it was pretty good and that the incisions had healed very well. I received my first set of instructions: back into the sling (for another 2 weeks) and 4 sets of exercises, with icing in the evening, just before bedtime.