Sylvia's Journal

My Afghan/American friend Razia Jan has expanded her Afghan school for girls, graduated the first class, kept a few young women from being married off to men my age, and is now forging forward with a community college aimed at bringing Afghan women into the productive economy. You’d think it would be an obvious calculation: more family income, more employ, more taxes, more development and more happiness. But in Afghanistan nothing is simple.

Beth Murphy produced a new documentary about Razia’s school. It took her 6 years. Once you see it you can see why – it takes a tremendous amount of time to  build the kind of trust that is needed to be able to film very intimate scenes inside the homes of some of the students and teachers. The documentary has been airing on public television. I took advantage of Razia being in the area on one of her many successful fundraising sweeps through the US, by contributing to a fundraiser in Concord (MA). A certain level of contribution allowed me to spend some quality time with Razia jan over dinner and get to watch the documentary in a private screening.

The film gives one perspective: where else does the head teacher have to drink a cup of water from the well every morning to make sure the well is not poisoned? She comments, ‘better just me being poisoned than 400 girls.’ It gives a new meaning to passion and commitment. The constant threats and risks require enormous effort and patience to make sure that the elders in the community play their part in safeguarding the girls and the entire idea of the school.

There is a request for me from my colleagues in Afghanistan to come out and work with midwives. I am of two minds as the news coming out of Afghanistan is not very encouraging. But then again, it never has. I think of Razia jan and her girls, her teachers, and the daily acts of courage they display. They too have a choice. They choose the path less traveled. It is risky, everything in Afghanistan is risky.

It’s that time of the year again. A frost warning is expected any time now and since Axel is going to upstate NY for a week today, this migration could not be postponed. It is a big two-person job.

This morning, after their long summer vacation in the great outdoor of Lobster Cove, our house plants woke up snug and warm inside.

We had to dig the acorns out of their roots, so cleverly hidden by the squirrels. Oh how disappointed they will be when the return later to collect them. We cut off protruding roots, wiped off the dirt, spiderwebs and worms from the bottom of their  pots. Some of our houseplants have been with us since we moved from Senegal to Brooklyn in 1981. They had become small trees. We were unforgiving yesterday when we cut them down to size, and did not, as we used to do, start new plants from the cut off branches. Our house is too small. We are now on a trajectory of shrinking rather than expanding. Off with those branches! Over the edge!

Axel is going to co-facilitate an event with a nonprofit global venture organization that is bringing in all its global partners. It sounds so exciting. I looked at their website and if I was young and open to anything, that’s the team I would join if they’d have me.

I will once again be home alone. This time I don’t think I am going to clean out more closets and cellars, but rather catching up on reading and writing.

A lot has been churning in my head from the readings of Margaret Sanger, watching the movie Snowden – and reading how other companies have been teaching leadership. I keep looking for the essence, the few basic levers that one has put out there for people to learn to press. What are they? I sense that I am engaged in the mental equivalent of the creation of a nest, hollowing out the earth, collecting twigs and grasses to create the perfect place to bring that baby forth.

I have been reading everything I could get my hands on about Margaret Sanger. We named one of our conference rooms after her and I am telling her story in a few weeks to colleagues who don’t or barely know who she was. As one of her biographers wrote, she led 13 lives at the same time. Her birth control  legacy is astonishing; the things young woman now take for granted, such as being able to make choices rather than being shackled to one’s biology, were only known and practiced by a small group of generally well off women, who could get the services they needed.

It was exactly 100 years ago that Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethyl and a young Lithuanian translator, Fania Mindell, opened the first Birth Control Clinic in Brooklyn. Women lined up around the block to get advice on how not to be constantly pregnant. Margaret Sanger’s mother had 18 pregnancies in 25 years and then she died. That 10 of her children survived into adulthood is a miracle.

But the clinic, barely started was raided and its staff prosecuted. Sanger’s life was full of arrests, jail terms, fines, exhortations, yet she continued to provoke in order to test the laws against logic. In the end she won but it took decades.

And then I hear Trump talk about making change and I wonder what he has in mind. His kind of making change is turning a paper dollar bill into 4 quarters. It’s easy, anyone can do it.

But when I study the people who actually changed things, the inventors, the discoverers but especially the activists who got challenged the laws of the land in order to get them scrutinized and overturned, their change was all but small change. They were demonized, pursued, lost things dear to them, sacrificed personal comfort and their family life. Now that is real courage.  We saw the movie about Snowden this weekend and there it was again, this same pattern of giving everything up for this one cause, risking life, liberty and happiness for this one goal.

In my job we teach about leadership with a lower case ‘l’ because it is more accessible to the many whose leadership we need to make the small changes, the incremental changes that can happen in a year, making things better on a small scale; but Sanger, Snowden and so many others are in a different league, their vision is way out there and their courage and perseverance commensurate with it. They have earned the right to be called Leaders rather than leaders.

By the way, don’t forget to register to vote if you are an American citizen!

The Japanese ladies have gone home with plenty of ideas in their heads; Axel and Sita returned from Norway, excited about their first foray into Scandinavia. The wedding set up has been taken down in the Pembroke woods and life is returning to the usual rhythm of fall, with its countless chores and accompanying sense of loss.

While I was alone I went on a fall cleaning spree – removing everything out of one part of the cellar, cleaning the cobwebs and mouse droppings and then being very selective about what to put back. As I get older I am less and less attached to stuff I brought back from my travels, or, to go even further back, from my student years.  Everything was put in bags and sacks and boxes and carted off to Beverly’s Bootstraps thrift store. BB is a great organization that helps people do what their name says.

Some stuff went to MSH, African artifacts I once wanted so badly but which have been relegated to the basement over the years, having lost their initial attraction, accumulating dust and mildew for nothing.

Then came this closet, then that one, then clothes, more kitchen stuff and tchotchkes – oh how liberating this de-acquisitioning.

I was left with two piles of things that will go elsewhere. One bag I filled with my pilot gear. I wrote to the director of the flight center that I was hanging up my pilot headphones – which I actually had done a long time ago, and he figured as much. The bag full of headphones, knee boards, airport maps and Beverly Flight Center T-shirts are for new student pilots who cannot afford all the gear. The other pile consists of various post-orthopedic surgery gear: several boots, slings, and braces – I need to figure out how to get these to my rehab center colleagues elsewhere in the world who have none of this stuff. The clean up of all this was also liberating, the closing of a chapter of my life.

When Axel came back from Norway he found one entire car full of boxes and bags I had not been able to drop off at the donation center. I told him if he was going to take anything out it would have to live in his office. That tempered his drive to salvage stuff and in the end he only took out a few items. I am sure in a month or so they will find their way to Beverly.