Sylvia's Journal

Last time I wrote was in May, after a very wet Memorial Day weekend when the mask mandate had been lifted and the people believed the pandemic was behind us. Visions of going back to normal were dangled before our eyes, like Biden’s promise of 4th of July cookouts with friends and families. But the 4th was rained out also, as was the rest of that month here in Massachusetts, while the other side of the country was going up in flames. The backyard barbecues and summer events where people had massed together helped the Delta variant along. If in July its presence was spotty, here in the US, by the end of August it had overrun us.

Now, in October, much has changed, again. Masks are back, some people are angrier, some sicker and some died because they didn’t take COVID seriously or they were infected by people who didn’t. We received our third dose of Pfizer while in most of the developing world most people are still waiting for their first dose. South Africa has gone in and out of lockdowns and in the US everything, including COVID and Trump, are tearing us further apart.

The Taliban overran Afghanistan and lots of people are scrambling, some to get out of Afghanistan and others to help those who did get out to find safety and housing in the US and other nations. Housing, specifically affordable housing, is the big stumbling block here in the US. We live in a neighborhood, town, district, and state where affordable housing is a big issue. People talk about it a lot, in planning board meetings. Affordable housing discussions bring up class thinking, us-them thinking, not-in-my-back-yard (NIMBY) thinking.

The Afghan evacuees are sent to the poorer towns because the housing prices are not as obscene as where we live. They won’t come here unless we invite them. We hope to have at least one person come to our town, as a new member of our family if we can get the paperwork and right procedures followed. A timeline of months stretching out ahead of us, which seems interminable for the bored, lonely and depressed young Afghan woman we are trying to bring here. In attempt to provide small comfort I tell her, via WhatsApp or BOTIM, “you won’t be stuck in this Humanitarian Centre (in Abu Dhabi) forever, use the idle time to learn.

I also have idle time, but it constantly shrinks because I am learning as if my life depended on it (it does not). During the summer I told myself to stop signing up for everything that looks interesting – it worked for a while, but now I am once again signed up, and deeply committed, to (a) become a team coach, (b) immerse myself in Quaker practice, (c) complete my Ubuntu coaching course that I started last spring, and (d) up my coaching skills. One of these (becoming a team coach) will stretch out into 2023, the others will end before the year is over.

All this still leaves plenty of time to read, bake bread, network, exercise and take care of things around the house, the latter now focused on preparing for winter. I do some pro bono work, some locally with one of our town’s volunteer boards and some through EthicalCoach, meeting every other week with two remarkable young people in Tanzania and Malawi. In between I continue to be engaged in a little paid work with a for profit start up that works in global health and two HIV programs in Southern Africa. The balance is just about right.

What has also changed since May is that Sita and family moved out of our rental apartment next door in July when the school year ended. After that we were no longer needed to monitor our sometimes-reluctant granddaughter during her online Kindergarten classes and keep her occupied in between these snippets of time. It was nice to have them close but not in our house. 

In July our first renters moved in for two weeks, followed by a young couple with small kids for another 3 weeks and then an older couple for one week. These rentals took care of the real estate taxes for the rental apartment.  There is no ROI quite yet on the considerable investment made by us and Sita to upgrade the place from a pigsty to a lovely and well appointed ‘cottage.’ Now, for the remainder of the year, we have a couple more renters who are essentially paying for all the things that went wrong lately: minor but expensive glitches in the septic and heating systems. With some luck we come out even, deferring our ROI to the years to come. Having renters next door has been gratifying to all.