Sylvia's Journal

I used Saturday evening and Sunday morning to catch up on my two Coursera courses – took the midterm for Model Thinking and read up on course materials for Organizational Analysis.  The readings are interesting: the Cuban Missile crisis and case studies about school reform, all as backdrops for interpreting what happens in organizations.

After one last interview I drove to the Jo’burg airport, dropped off the rental car and boarded the small turbo prop that took me and 20 other people to Maseru.

A miscommunication left me stranded at the Maseru airport with an Anglican priest who had flown in from Cape Town. His standby phone, all that was left after his pad and computer had been stolen in Cape Town, was out of battery power and so he didn’t have the number of his ride which, may be also a miscommunication, had not shown up either.

After everyone was gone the airport was being locked up – ours was the last flight in. The airport staff told us the entrance gate to the airport would be closing.  They gave us a ride and dropped us off on the public side of the gate where we waited until my taxi arrived.  What would have been a pain in the neck, the long wait, gave rise to an interesting conversation with the gentleman who had worked for Desmond Tutu in the 80s and 90s and was there when Mandela was released.  I offered him a ride to the church’s guesthouse and got to listen to more stories.

At the hotel I was greeted by colleagues and a cold Maluti draft. It is now summer here too – a jump from two weeks ago; there appears to be no spring, from winter straight into summer.

And now I am back in the lesotho Sun’s standard room (all rooms are exactly the same), this time a few floors above the casino. It is Sunday and the place is filled with people hoping to get rich (and probably knowing they won’t).

The first email I read was about a South African colleague who had delivered her baby prematurely after an exhausting trip back from the US, and the sad postscript that the baby had died due to fluid in his lungs. A little boy named Adrian, like my dad. So intensely sad.