Sylvia's Journal

I returned home from Ethiopia on Sunday. On Monday Axel came back from his two week Europe trip, a week’s conference in Munich and a week of visiting relatives and friends in Holland. I had hoped to return via Holland and share in the fun but the business class trip was expensive enough as it was going straight through Frankfurt both ways. We talked on Skype while we were both in Germany, a separation of about 200 miles.

While Holland and Germany were far advanced in Spring, coming home to bare trees and even still some piles of dirty snow was discouraging. But the sun of the last few days has awakened everything and everybody, and so there is hope. A few asparagus tips are visible. We will eat our own asparagus next week!

I had hoped to take it easy and rest on Monday but such was not the case; several tasks had lined up to keep me busy and Monday became a regular workday. I am lucky in the sense that there are many assignments stacked in front of me, no dull moments or times without work, stretching into September, with a few occasions to catch my breath: a week in June when my sister visits, a week after Sita gives birth in August and two weeks in Maine at the end of August and the first week of September. It’s strange to think that far ahead to the end of the summer when we have just barely entered into spring.

When I left Ethiopia the earthquake hit in Kathmandu. I got in touch with my friends, wide and far, who are connected to my experiences in Nepal. All are safe but some have lost much. Not able to do much other than giving money, I support ICA-Nepal in their courageous efforts to alleviate suffering and contribute what they can. My thoughts and prayers are with all of the people of Nepal.

Such catastrophes put things in perspectives, including my occasional sighs about my recovering left shoulder which is till immobilized in a sling until May 8 (although I am cheating a bit).

Ethiopia is in mourning because of the killing of Ethiopians in Libya and South Africa. For three days music and dance is banned. This also means the music I play in the conference room, just as I was having fun with my Congolese music and seeing the reaction from the DRC team. We had proposed an outing to a cultural restaurant with all our participants but now I don’t think it makes much sense. Most of our participants don’t seem to care much about the Ethiopian food, they’d go for the dancers and music. We were also told to stay in the hotel because of large scale manifestations not far from our hotel. I was seeing them on TV, which goes to show that lots can go on around you without you even knowing it.

Watching TV, which I rarely do had at home, is truly soul sucking with disasters, man-made and other all around us, both on this continent and adjacent continents.

We are entering day 3 of what we call module I of the senior leadership program. We have teams from Chad, Madagascar, Togo, Burundi, Niger and the DRC. Each team is made up differently and some are more homogeneous than others (as in only men). We are getting to know people and learning their ways. The facilitators from ICRC are becoming good friends and everyone is learning.

We are up against cultural, economic, political forces that can be hard to understand by people who don’t know these countries, yet I see small sparks of hope and possibilities in some people. I am fanning these sparks like crazy.

Our teaching team is small so the work is intense. We are trying to be receptive and adaptive, which makes for long days, stretching in the night, especially when the internet works and our inboxes deliver more tasks as the next assignments are stacking up like planes on a runway ready for takeoff.

Axel is having a wonderful time in Holland, eating white asparagus and enjoying the bulbs and, hopefully, getting a boost of his Dutch, as there is nothing like total immersion. He is doing the rounds of family and friends, with the latest spotting of him in Amsterdam.

I am counting the weeks, three done, three more to go before I can drop the sling. I have started physical therapy. Given the tenodesis, a new word I learned which meant my biceps got essentially cut off the bone, repaired and re-attached, my PT treatment is conservative with the biceps part the most delicate of the repaired tendons. I am leaving tomorrow for Ethiopia with instructions for 3 exercises that require very little movement and all of it passive. It is a bit scary.

Axel left on Monday for Munich and this left me on my own. I can do pretty much everything except drying myself with a towel (I dry in my bathrobe) and making the bed. I will find my bed just as I left it tomorrow when I return on the 26^th.

I worked mostly from home this week, which was nice since driving an hour into Boston with one arm in a sling is not ideal. Only on Wednesday did I drive in because of a face to face meeting I didn’t want to postpone.

It has been a lovely week, weatherwise and the earth around our house is breathing green after the long white winter. The little colored perching birds are flocking to the feeders with the nettle seeds that the squirrels don’t like. They, in their turn, are frantically digging up the yard for the nuts they hid in the fall. There are little holes everywhere.

Axel is having a good time in Munich, not surprising since he is in good company and in beerland, but most of all among kindred spirits from the Valueweb, a group that Sita has been very active for years. There is perfect harmony in this undertaking: Axel leading Sita into the new world of graphic scribing and then facilitating, and then Sita bring Axel back into that world.

And while I am leading a senior leadership program for 6 teams from, respectively, Chad, Niger, Madagascar, Burundi, Togo and DRC, laying the rails in front of the moving train (and all of this with one hand), Axel will enjoy the company of my Dutch relatives and our friends, crisscrossing Holland next week when the work in Munich is done.

Thirty-five years ago, Axel and I stood in the town hall of Dakar before an important looking municipal official with a big orange sash. Couple number 4 out of 16, he soon pronounced us husband and wife, with a check mark in the box ‘option monogamique’ on our now yellowed marriage certificate. It was hand typed, with some letters not as clear as others and, of course, two stamps, a tax stamp and a rubber stamp.

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Sita was in my belly, a third of the way towards babyhood, and I was sick most of the time; so sick that we did not attend our wedding party and our best man and woman standing in as the bride and groom. The next morning they came to tell us all about the party and brought what was left over of the traditional French profiterole wedding cake with the plastic bride and groom still standing tall. They have moved around the world with us and are languishing somewhere in a junk drawer, most of their paint peeled..

I think we have made up for the missed party by having, every spring, a gathering of friends to celebrate the new beginnings and promises that come with spring, as well as our falling in love (37 years ago in Beirut) and our marriage (35 years ago in Dakar).

I had worried about being slapped on the shoulder and hugged and squeezed with people avoiding the arm in the sling, not realizing that the surgery was on the shoulder and thus the body part to be left alone. Tessa had pinned the blossom of a hydrangea on my shoulder, a trick that work fairly well when people arrived. They gingerly avoided pressing down on the flower, and thus my shoulder. But by the time of goodbyes, with the flower rather flat and tired, the tight hugs returned and I cringed a bit when people approached me with arms wide.

Axel had invited some 100 people, some I didn’t really know as he is the one with the social life while I am travelling around the world. Sometimes I had to have one guest introduce me to another. And then there is a hard core of friends who have been coming for decades. I looked at pictures of previous gatherings and noticed the people who are no longer with us and how we are aging together. Some of the kids from then are now coming with their own kids. This included Faro of course who had a ball, sneaking jelly beans and other candy that he usually doesn’t get at home.

We were blessed with great weather, albeit a bit windy, and most of the remaining snow disappeared. More sun and less snow predicted for today.

The operation is fading into the background, and the recovery visible on the horizon: next week I start with physical therapy, on May 8 I can permanently remove the sling and all its Velcro attachments that attach to everything. In mid-June I can start to lift more than a cup of coffee with my left arm. It is now a rare occasion that I look for pain relief; the only pill I take is a little yellow pill with a tiny heart embossed on it, a low dose aspirin to prevent blot clots, till May 6

We had a quick escapade to New York City on Wednesday and returned on Thursday. It is a lot of driving, all of which Axel had to do, for a very short visit. The occasion was an award bestowed by the St. Paul School’s Alumni Association on two of its members. One we knew well and was the reason we drove to New York, Ted Achilles who founded the School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA) where Axel and I were volunteer teachers while we lived in Kabul. We saw some of our students and the entire Achilles clan which had flown in from all corners of the US to see Baba Ted honored.

After the festivities we joined Axel’s cousins for a meal in the West Village and then taxied to their home in Brooklyn. It is there that I realized that couch surfing two weeks post-op is not a good idea. Not only did I go to bed much too late, but sleeping on couch pillows on the ground turned out to be nearly impossible, considering that I have to sleep with my sling on.

Tired and a little irritable, we drove to New Haven the next morning to see a brilliant Whistler etching exhibit at the Yale Art Museum and then onward to Boston where we cashed in a gift certificate Sita and Jim gave us at Christmas for a delightful meal at a fancy restaurant (Troquet) on the Commons. Troquet, according to Sita who did the research, is, known for its excellent wine and wine pairings. I was happy with the 2 oz portions of wine which made it possible for me to partake in tasting some of their amazing wines to accompany the creative and delicious meal we were served. This ended our quick NYC trip and started the celebrations of our 35^th wedding anniversary (April 12, 1980) in which we will engage for the next few days.

The melting of the many feet of snow produces a kind of archeological dig. Newspapers wrapped ineffectively in blue or orange plastic surface with the dates of this or that snowstorm. Our neighbor’s exclaimed, “oh, that’s where our garbage can went!” It’s rather ugly, these debris from life before the snowstorms; each layer darkened by soot and black particles and then covered over by a new layer of white which then also became black.

Our garlic patch and our asparagus patch are finally free from snow and ice. The corner where Axel buried pots of tulips, to force to bloom in March, is now snow free. We hope to find them and bring them in the house. Still a large part of the yard has up to one foot of snow remaining. There are flattened remnants of early bulbs which came out too early and never got their coloring they were supposed to have.

I have started week two of my recovery. The last days have been hard, still too painful to get comfortable, rarely painful enough for the narcotics, and sleep constantly interrupted by a wrong move or pain breaking through. I tried twice to sleep in our bed, feeling lonely in my recliner, but both times I returned, frustrated, to my chair. I looked through my diary to read about my last experience of recovering from rotator cuff surgery, in August 2009. Then, I learned, I had made the transition back to my bed in a week; not this time.

Axel has been cooking as if he had been auditioning for a chef’s position. He has prepared the most wonderful meals, but I have little appetite and by the time the meal appears I am exhausted and ready to go to bed. He has been a great caretaker and I am like a toddler, saying, I can do this myself! This morning I showered and dressed on my own, a major milestone in my recovery.

I read in Wired magazine that boredom can be a good trigger for creative ideas. I have been bored but not felt very creative. My boredom and antsy-ness is relieved by my iPad, but it is temporary. After a while anything on a tablet or phone gets to be boring, even FB with its constant renewal of content. I must have seen all the videos posted or reposted over the last 3 days, most hardly worth my attention. And then, when I read in the same Wired the heartbreaking stories of the workers who produce our gadgets in China, I feel really annoyed about being bored and grasping for these tainted gadgets.

The real highlights of the last three days, aside from Axel’s exquisite meals, have been our walks; getting out and confirming that spring is coming makes me happy.

It is day 5 post-op. I am down to one pill a day, a low dose aspirin that keeps my blood from clotting. I have to take it till sometime in May, when I will also have shed the sling and there will be no obvious outward sign of my operation. I have showered and stopped icing. Progress, in other words. I can make my own breakfast and dress myself although the latter is still a little challenging.

I started to work a bit yesterday although it drained me and required a two hour nap. Take it easy, say people, but if you don’t, like I did, no one stops you. Once people know you have started to read email, all bets are off. Today I have my first phone-in meeting and some tasks to do that have a deadline of tomorrow, rotator cuff surgery or not. They are important tasks because they are about budgets. I want to be in that conversation as my ability to be billable full time is on the line.

I have been eyeing my knitting basket with the half-made finger puppets. Luckily I am missing critical colors of wool, otherwise I would have tried. I am anxious to find out whether I can knit with one arm at a 90 degree angle in a sling. My calculations say that I should be able to.

Axel has been a great caretaker, as always, stoking up the fire next to my recovery couch, cooking healthy meals and managing the pills in the early post op days; there were many and all at different times of the day. When it is bedtime, still early for me, he packs me in my recliner which we moved up to the bedroom. We call it my business class seat. If I could travel in that seat I could circle the world with ease. I am asking for a business class seat for my trip to Addis in two and a half week and hope the doctor will write exactly the right sentences so that our corporate benefits manager will give the thumbs up.