Sylvia's Journal

Last night we celebrated with a bunch of friends and colleagues at the relocated Sufi restaurant. We ordered wine which was poured out of teapots – we asked for another pot of red tea when one was gone, and then another. It made the bill rather high, but celebrating survival is priceless.

I am still not recovered from the wedding party now three days ago. This morning, once again, I dragged myself out of bed and onto the elliptical machine. After about 1 km of walking I learned from my Oyster audio book (Mark Kurlansky) that the last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, behaved rather like a Taliban. Having been sent from the Caribbean to New Amsterdam to whip the unruly colonials into shape, he forced people to worship and repent because of their rather loose lifestyles. I could just imagine him – a simpler kind of Taliban, without the AK47s and the HiLux truck, but with the kind of clothing that people wore 350 years ago, a beard and angry eyes, just like the ones that roam around freely over here.

Today was full of tasks that have to be done but that can be a bit tedious after awhile, especially when your eyes begin to cross and your tolerance for imprecision begins to rise. We got two of these tasks at the same time, a once-a-year occurrence: workplanning and quarterly report writing. The latter requires that I read the reports produced by my staff and look them over with a critical eye. One report needed a significant amount of cutting and pasting – but in the process I began to see the coherence of something that doesn’t look very cohering at a first glance. The big question is, “Does it all add up to something meaningful and lasting?” It is THE big question that we have to ask ourselves. Not too often (we would get too discouraged) and not too infrequently (we end up simply doing stuff). It’s a fine balance.

In between these tasks I had to put a derailed train back on its track: a pseudo collaborative piece of work that had gone off the tracks without me knowing it. It involved hearing perceptions from colleagues across the compound that stood diametrically opposed to perceptions I had heard from my own team. The derailment was caused by poor preparations and management with many people playing, unwittingly, a role for which they were not prepared. Everyone wanted to be the one who did right – and if you listened carefully, everyone was right. It is one of life’s dilemmas – perception is reality.

Things got more complicated by an exasperated and uncensored blog entry that showed up in someone’s search and involved one of the actors who played a brief but important role in the drama. As a blogger, and knowing the context in which it spontaneously emerged, I understood where it came from, but I also alerted the author that it was very inappropriate and unprofessional and had to be removed. I had hoped that that would be the end but the blog had been shown and printed to several people and the cat was out of the bag, greatly complicating my task of putting the train back in its place. This, I gather, will take awhile.

I arrived home cross-eyed from tiredness, had myself served a cocktail and dinner, and then managed to write this. But now even the typing gets to be hard. It’s weekend and tomorrow at 11 AM I am going to check out a new massage place. Yeah!