Sylvia's Journal

The phantom storm was no phantom storm further east. On our way home from Sita and Jim we passed through Worcester which had fresh snow on the ground and the trees. It got even heavier further east.

Back home the storm was in full swing. Axel scraped my car clean, turned it around ready for going to work on Monday morning for an all-day retreat with our learning organization team on how to turn MSH into a learning organization. We had gotten some expert advice from a local consulting firm that has much experience working with organizations like us that are trying to tackle ‘wicked’ problems.

“A wicked problem has no definite formulation of the problem, no clear solutions or end points, no immediate or ultimate test of the solution and problems are intertwined in such a way that any given problem, and its interactions with others, will open doors and windows to still other problems.” (From Michael Quinn Patton, Developmental Evaluation, 2011:253). So there you have it. This is my work.

I decided to work from home the rest of the week to bite through a whole slew of assignments that are all coming close to their deadlines. On Tuesday I made some headway but today I had one telephone call after another, and other unexpected stuff landed on my plate requiring immediate action. I did not get a whole lot closer to my goal today and am exhausted from the efforts to keep my head above the water. No more complaints about not enough work – I am nearly drowning.

I have one more day of work at home to make a dent in the pile that is staring me in the face: leadership strategy setting, a one-day event in DC on Friday where I am supposed to present something meaningful on slides; a trip to Zanzibar, continuous multiple doctors’ visits, coaching, training of trainers of basic wheelchair services, a large global meeting in Uganda and another, as large, in DC 6 weeks away. Plus a few requests that have to do with being auditable, paper trails and such.

In some ways, my daily life is the victory of what the women’s movement worked towards – professional and personal fulfillment, as a worker, wife, mother and grandmother. Last night Axel, Tessa and I watched an extraordinary documentary about the women’s movement, from way back, through its heyday in the 60s and 70s, its downfall during Reagan and Phyllis Schlafly (my Planned Parenthood years). Tessa’s enthusiastic post on facebook made me think that it may have planted a seed that will take the women’s movement out of its hibernation, just waiting for new Glorias and Betties to emerge.

After several trips were planned and then canceled suddenly everything begins to happen at once. My ankle surgery on March 5 turns out to be only 11 days before my first assignment with the new Johns Hopkins project on which we are partner. I left a message with the orthopedic surgeon to find out whether I can even consider traveling. If he OKs it, I will be off to Zanzibar first and then a side trip to Ivory Coast.

I had my pre-op admissions testing today, some tests, and was considered fit for surgery. It got me home early which left me time to do an end-of-day yoga routine, and cook a thick and spicy peanut soup plus read half of Harvard Business Review.

I continue to have conversations with wheelchair experts all over the world. Putting together a training package is my assignment. Yesterday I had a conversation with Nancy who lives in a Somali refugee camp in northeastern Kenya. It is quite amazing that one can have a phone conversation, over Skype, with somebody in this faraway, and often forgotten, corner of the world. Nancy has been training wheelchair providers for many years now and gave me some good ideas on what new trainers have to be able to know and do.

It is very inspiring to see how the wheelchair provider community that stretches from the US to South Africa to Australia, to Japan, Hong Kong and Georgia, has come together to set standards and expand the number of trained service providers. The demand is huge and the work is demanding. Many people I am meeting are volunteers or work with small budgets.

During my commute home I listened to a reporter from Kabul giving an update on the heroic efforts of brave women who are trying, against a thousand odds, to get some legal teeth into the protection of women against their violent society. It is a long battle with women having to water down their demands in exchange for something, which is better than nothing. It was painful to hear the demands of the men they are negotiating with. The things we take for granted.

At home a few raw vegetables were laid out on a cutting board, suggesting I prepare dinner, no husband in sight. I was tired and hungry and cold, after a 10 hour workday full of overlapping meetings and a slow commute home. I felt so very sorry for myself, declined to cut the vegetables (swallowed the giant carrot whole) and angrily emptied a plastic container with leftovers in the microwave, so there!

But then I read an article about the nearly broke fishermen of Gloucester, being flattened by government regulations. I thought about the Afghan women and their battles, the family of an ex-colleague who died unexpectedly and too young, and another ex-colleague who seems to be bearing a cross that gets heavier by the day.

I sputtered a little when Axel came home but managed to abandon my self pity after counting all my blessings, being spared all these intractable entanglements and great griefs. I ended up having another dinner which was even better than the first, all in good harmony.

I am sitting on the couch with two Karl Weick books next to me. One is called sensemaking in organizations and the other is about managing the unexpected. All Weick’s work is about sensemaking. I pulled them off my book shelf because of a sensemaking experience that I had when listening to the second of the two concerts with the Afghan kids at the New England Conservatory.

One of the pieces on the program was a raga with an American tabla player and a white-haired Indian ustaad (I presumed) who played the sarod.  Somewhat reminiscent of a band I listened to several months ago, I couldn’t figure out when the tuning was done and the music had started. My western frame about music’s beginning and endings, about hand and head movements left me totally senseless.

The American tabla player seemed to be preparing to play, rubbing his hands on his pants, putting a powdery substance on the center of his two drums but then he would lean back and shook his head as if in disapproval of what his colleague on the carpet was doing. Sometimes he seemed to be uttering words which also seemed full of disapproval.  I was utterly lost in trying to make sense because none of my western sense making had prepared me for this. What was going on? Had the raga started, was the ustaad still tuning and the tabla player indicating that the sarod was not tuned? Or was this normal for a raga played with tabla and sarod?

I don’t have such experiences very often and if I do it is usually not in the US. I might have concluded that few situations throw me off these days – me the world traveler. But maybe it means that I am spending too much time on familiar territory.  I haven’t travelled in 2 months.

We did make a small trip on this holiday afternoon (Presidents Day) to Dorchester Avenue to see Tessa and Steve’s new apartment. It is indeed brand new, the appliances still packed in blue plastic sheets, shiny polyurethane floors, freshly painted and water views from two sides through brand new double glazed windows.

Move in day is about 2 weeks from now. We checked out the neighborhood and found a Polish deli within a stone’s throw. It was packed with hundreds of pickle jars, jams and jellies, sausages of any imaginable kind, a large variety of frozen pirogis and blintzes, mushrooms and cards with images of a suffering Christ.

On the suggestion of the real estate broker who rented the apartments, a local gentleman, we ordered one sandwich which fed the four of us, one foot long and not very vegetarian. We bought our dinner there (also not very vegetarian): sauerkraut with smoked bacon and kielbasa and some Polish beers with a name we cannot pronounce. I cooked it all using my grandmother’s cookbook from the early 1900s. I added some spices (juniper, black pepper) that weren’t suggested at that time. It was to die for.

More concerts followed the Afghan-American extravaganza. Friday night the Walker Creek Band from Gloucester celebrated its 30^th anniversary with oldies that connected all the baby-boomers in the room, now balding and grey, with their naughty, wild and irresponsible past. A video played in the back showing the same line up as the one in front of us, just 30 years younger.  So much has happened since to all of us. But one thing had not changed – people danced with the abandon of twenty- and thirty-somethings.I had put on my orthopedic boot which makes for great pivoting and provides some protection. However, it also activates the neural problems in the other foot.  Still I danced, albeit with less abandon.

On Saturday, before going to yet another concert (a snowstorm-delayed performance of local talent singing love songs and reading love letters penned by famous people long gone, and accompanied by desserts), I tried my hand at sushi again, after 7 years or so. We have, not far from us, a fish market that caters to the needs of people who love raw fish, fish eggs, and seaweed.  We also discovered that the short shrimp season is not quite over. Enormous piles of the tiny shrimp were available in five or 10 pound bags. We took some home for lunch and then ate some of them raw and others cooked.

We brought the raw shrimp, the scallop carpaccio and some irregular shaped maki rolls to a friend’s birthday celebration and renewed acquaintances with people only vaguely remembered from earlier meals taken together.

Sunday another snowstorm hit us, one that appeared to hit only the coastal areas. And so we stayed once more in our pajamas all day, watching the snow swirl and drift outside, keeping the home fires burning and working ourselves through the Sunday NYTimes.

This week has been defined by the two concerts I attended of the Afghan Institute of Music (ANIM). Wednesday evening’s concert attracted friends from Maine who drove 4 hours and got their just in time to get a seat and relax. Getting lost in Boston would require either a stiff drink or better, a concert by American and Afghan kids who have a love for music in common.

Anyone with a bit of an Afghan connection seemed to be there, in the basement of the New England Conservatory. We sat around tables while the orchestra members sat on chairs or on carpets on a podium in their midst. The American kids were dressed in orchestra black and grey while the Afghan kids were dressed in colorful and/or embroidered tunics and dresses, the girls with scarves in the colors of the Afghan flag (black, red and green).

One of the many highlights was the adaptation of Ravel’s Bolero for Indo-Afghan instruments. Extraordinary! Our friends from Maine, also SOLA parents, joined us for an after-concert dinner at Ariana, sampling mantu, aushak, burani, kaddo, dupiazza and qabuli rice. They stayed overnight at our house before making the long trek home on Thursday.

Once I realized that the Wednesday concert was only an appetizer for a longer concert the next day, I showed up again. The Thursday concert was less colorfull (dress-wise only) and showcased more individual talent. It ended with a joyful singalong featuring Bob Marley and an old eastern European kletzmer song that I remember from my girl scout days. Funny that that was the song the Afghan kids taught their American counterparts. It shows that music knows, although sometimes composed and used for nationalistic and ideological purposes, can be a joyful medium for bringing together people who are ignorant of such roots and simply enjoy the act of singing and listening.

We hunkered down while blizzard Nemo (2013) was roaring outside, sweeping the cove into a frenzy of large swells and waves that rolled in like thunder and broke over the granite wall onto the street.  Inside we were enjoying the company of Sita and Jim and little Faro, sitting by the fire, stoking it up just in case the power would go off. It never did, nor did the internet connection go down. Thus we were able to document the course of the blizzard through facebook postings.

Steve was told to show up for work and was then turned back when the mayor of Boston put a driving ban in place: one year in prison or 500 dollars. Imagine that. Apparently some people were stopped and sent home but no one was sent to prison. Our governor referred to those as knuckleheads). All the while Tessa was frolicking around in Los Angeles. A fortuitous departure the day before the storm allowed her to use her free ticket that would have gone ‘poof’ after March 1.

If we were in danger because of the storm, Tessa was in a place terrorized by a rogue police officer who had gone off the rails. The whole affair seems to put into question the main story line of the pro-gun lobby that it is the bad people who use their guns on innocent people.  I presume the policeman was once considered a good person and given training and access to guns, just like the mujahideen in Afghanistan who we gave Stinger missiles (and now we are considering a similar move in Syria).

I never got dressed on that blizzard day and decided it was a good day for a 1500 piece puzzle. Sita and Jim helped and we completed it in no time. Encouraged by the success I started another puzzle but I couldn’t convince anyone to join me. Alone I cannot finish a puzzle between meals and so it takes over the dining room table forcing us to take our meals in front of the TV. Tonight I decided to put the thing back in its box even though I did not quite complete the (all black) edges.

Over the weekend we were supposed to assist Sita in a series of networking sessions at Harvard’s Social Enterprise Conference. Sita barters her services in exchange for connections and access to even better connections.  The snowstorm cancelled the first day of the conference and Sita’s crew of scribes and facilitators were not able to make it into Boston and so she mobilized her parents. It was fun working with her again and watching her scribe the two keynote speakers.

I read the entire New York Times book review from last Sunday. It is rare that I do so. I read the review of the book The Insurgents by Fred Kaplan about the …plot to change the American way of war. The illustration features Petraeus against a backdrop of warriors. I share a common ancestry (Dutch) with the man but that is about the only thing, plus maybe the ‘hutspot’ and small talk we shared on one 3rd of October at the Dutch embassy in Kabul.

He was the reason why, in our work in Kabul, we suddenly had to insert COIN in all our writings and reasonings of our, American-financed, health project. But then, one day, we didn’t have to use COIN anymore. The book review told me that …’the counterinsurgency cult was more than a fad (…) but much less than a revolution.’ All of this a reminder that things look so very different and compelling, inevitable even, when you are down in the weeds in the valley instead of high up in the clouds.

I also learned from the review that the army is trying to become a learning organization. Just like MSH. We advocate the military’s After Action Reviews as a learning organization’s tool, which it is for folks in the weeds, but not for the Gods on the Olympus. The lesson I retain is that we should focus on how people in organizations can learn new tactics quickly, rather than sweeping changes in operating systems – where do we see this happening after all? It’s about mental maps and agility, about the dynamics among the powerful, more than getting things right each time, every time, a mantra of efficiency specialists that makes me cringe.