Sylvia's Journal

Every piece of paper and plastic file folder in my office is covered with fine black soot. Shuffling papers from one pile to another left me with black hands. At home it is not all that different even though everything looks clean on the surface but the soot is beneath and behind, and in my lungs of course.

Many people had taken the day off, bridging two days off before and two days off following. And so I had time to clean my desk and shuffle papers.

I had several visitors, a consultant from Germany by way of Australia who is here to help with establishing procedures that will rush severely ill children straight to the emergency room. This may sound obvious, but it is not here. The triage system is rudimentary and kids die as a result.

Then there was F, just back from Bangladesh where he got his public health degree. Now he is looking for a job to pay back the debts he engaged for his degree. And finally there was the CEO from an American hospital group that has built, equipped and staffed a district hospital not far from our house.

These contacts lifted my spirits and got me out of my self-pitying mode, showing a little bit of sun behind the grey clouds that have encircled me the last few weeks.
I did miss my Thursday after school class but there too things are lightening up. A new building has been found and the girls are moving in. I fear it is a bit far from our house and so this may make it a little more difficult to teach there after work.

In the evening we met the ambassador from a northern country who happens to be the friend of a fellow Quaker. He told us his story of how he, a small town farm boy, ended up in a top American boys academy, graduated and then made his way into Harvard. Here was, sitting right across the table, someone whose life had been changed by attending an American high school. He offered to talk with N who came to our house the other day and who Axel is helping to get into another, similar, academy.
People may think that getting individual kids out of their milieu of poverty and into learning that opens them to the bigger world is a drop on a hot plate and too slow as a process. But this ambassador is now helping street kids in Afghanistan learn to play the violin and give concerts. One life changed forty years ago is now changing hundreds more. It is a matter of multiplication.