Sylvia's Journal

We are getting one 10+ day after another, as if Mother Nature wants to apologize for the month of June when it was only summer in name. We are spending time at the beach, hanging out with our new neighbors, playing with Chicha, and reading. Axel attempted water color again but that got interrupted, a common occurrence. There is so much to do that it takes a lot of will power to just sit at the beach and relax.

The moment I step inside my office I am confronted with a jumble of stuff that divides roughly into three piles: ship to Kabul, move back into the living room, leave here but consolidate and pack up. In addition, a constant surge of emails from Kabul is spilling into my mailbox. There is no long weekend there; everyone is at work; the new week started on Sunday morning and Alain has arrived. This produces an additional flurry of activities and even more emails. I am not responding to any and tell myself that this is OK because it is Labor Day weekend.

I went to Quaker meeting by myself, in the car rather than on the bike. I suppose I could have tried biking with one arm but decided it would be too risky. Only 8 people showed up and so it was a rather still meeting. At the end I said goodbye to Gabrielle, one of our eldest members. She is getting increasingly frail and when I embraced her so say goodbye I suspected we both knew it might be the last time we see each other.

Gabrielle is from Germany and sometimes reminds me of my mom. She came to the US during the war when she was a young woman. Once or twice we have talked about that time but she mostly keeps that period of her life to herself. She never speaks in meeting because, as she told me once, if she were to speak she could only do it in German and that would be useless. I could not convince her that no one would mind and that I could then practice my German again, but she has remained still, except when she falls asleep; I gently touch her to bring her back.

Tessa, Steve and two of their friends showed up with all the requirements for a cook out on the beach. We have a pit that Axel dug out earlier next to a large granite uprising out of the sand. Over the years it has seen some big fires and it is cracked all over but it remains a great natural cooking place.

A campfire needs an instrument and so I had practiced my ukulele chords in the afternoon and was ready for some singing but no one joined in. I think it is because I play rather haltingly. I need more practice so I can slide from one chord to the next without changing tempo. Still, I can now play the chords of Oh Susanna, Goodbye Ladies and more; and I can certainly accompany myself. I will perfect it in Kabul with my house mate Steve who loves to sing, traveling there not with a banjo but with a ukulele on my back.

Axel and I switched from the outdoor fire to the indoor fire that we now light every evening and sometimes even in the morning. It’s lovely and heats the downstairs in no time thanks to an ingenuous fan system. We will miss it this coming winter.

My knitting and sewing material, plus an exercise ball, some 100 licorice tea bags and a good stash of licorice should be on their way to Dubai right now and onward to Kabul tomorrow, if everything is going to plan. I dropped a full suitcase off at Alain’s house in Belmont. When I turned around heading home I joined the avant-garde of the big Labor Day exodus into vacation lands further north.

The carpal tunnel doctor must have been among these vacationers because when I showed up for the appointment he was not there. This wiped away the fantasy I had nursed to leave for Afghanistan with the next diagnostic step (an EMG) completed. That would have made it possible to have the surgery during my Christmas vacation, if so advised. Scheduling such things during my short leave around Christmas is unlikely. So I will go one step at a time with only one step completed before my departure.

My work these days consists of combing through the draft work plans of my three teams in Kabul. It is detailed work which is not my forte, and thus somewhat stressful. It also requires sitting in front of a computer which is hard on the body, especially the mess of traumatized muscles in my neck and upper back. I finally had to resort to chemicals to manage the discomfort.

I had my second PT appointment and my arm and shoulder feel so limber this morning that I could easily forget to put my sling on. The range of motion is improving rapidly. I can do things I am probably not supposed to do without any discomfort, such as hanging a (small and light) picture on our newly painted living room walls. I do it when Axel is not watching. The urge to move everything back to normalcy and into the empty living room is hard to contain. Now that the hearth is in it feels completed, yet we are still waiting for the cabinet maker to put in the bookshelves that we had forgotten in the original design some 16 years ago. So there will be more sawing and hammering and normalcy will have to wait and my office will remain a storage room.

We attended a cocktail party with town officials at Woody’s to say goodbye and thank Nina, a member of Axel’s Community Preservation Committee. As chairman of the committee he has benefitted greatly from her contributions. Nina has one rule for committee meetings: at 9 PM she gets up and leaves, saying that a one hour meeting should be a one hour meeting. It has kept everyone on task and left more time for the guys to get a beer afterwards in the local pub.

Axel will soon be leaving this committee as well and he is still looking for a person to take over the chairmanship. Serving on town committees is usually considered a thankless and pain-in-the-neck job; yet there they were last night, all people who do this with (mostly) good humor and much dedication. Community stewardship still exists and I am happy and proud that Axel is one of these stewards.

When we returned home I could stay up just enough to say ‘hi and bye’ to Sita who arrived with Jim for a short night. By now she is at the airport waiting to board her flight to points further west, on her way to China. She will return in 12 days via San Diego, just in time to see me off to points further east. She left us a nice good bye drawing, as she always does; she is, after all, an illustrator.

The banking system works again! After more than four weeks of filing papers, answering questions and waiting for various checks and assessments to be done, we finally signed the papers for a loan. It’s funny how we, who own property that is worth 10 times the size of the loan, are subjected to this sort of scrutiny while risky ventures were cooked up without much of a thought in the bank’s back room.

We now have access to money to pay the bills that are heaping up in direct proportion to the number of workmen in and around the house. The line of credit could have bought us an entire house when we started with home ownership, some 25 years ago. Now it will get us only a septic system and some long overdue maintenance.

Tessa and Steve are beaming – life is good to them: parents who fix up the house with a new septic system, a new coat of paint and a new fireplace and beautiful stone heart, and then leave for Afghanistan for a year.

More doctors’ appointments are filling my days. Yesterday I visited the ear doctor because of another defect that surfaced during my physical, a hearing problem I wasn’t even aware of.  Since there is no obvious cause for it that can be ascertained without cutting, we decided to leave things alone as the hearing is not affecting the quality of my life. Today I am seeing the hand doctor to take a look a my left fingers and hand to figure out what causes the persisted tingling and numbness that wakes me up at night and stops and starts without any pattern. In the meantime I continue my physical therapy, faithfully doing my exercises, to get the right shoulder back to normal functioning; one more week of sling.

The departure for Afghanistan is now like a waxing moon; everyday a little more of the reality of that departure shines in my face. A small suitcase is packed with sewing and knitting materials, an exercise ball and the Dutch goodies my brother brought last month. It will precede me to Afghanistan with my colleague Alain who is leaving tonight for a quick visit. I am also filling up boxes with books I will need and taking them to Cambridge, one by one, for shipment. In the meantime, things in Afghanistan remain in flux and I have to remember that anything I ship out I may never see again. It certainly is one way of getting rid of superfluous (but nice to have) stuff.

I used to work on the Afghanistan project as a short term consultants and occasionally steering things, very lightly, from a distance.  Now I am on the upper deck so to speak and discover the intense back and forth that happens behind the scenes. It is fascinating and intense.

Between my work hours and those of the Kabul team we cover about 19 hours of the 24 available. I am usually at my computer very  early in the morning and stop around dinner time; the Kabul team comes on board just when I go to bed, around 10:30 PM, and quits when I come on again.  I considered for a moment to change my working hours and do a night shift rather than a day shift, to be more in harmony. But missing out on these beautiful days in Lobster Cove to catch up on my sleep would be a shame.

It’s work planning time in Kabul and I am reviewing Excel spreadsheets with lines and XXs. Why we think that long lists of activities in tiny typeface can accurately represent the work we need to do is a mystery; more of a mystery is that we keep using this format despite the stress and despair that usually accompanied work planning.

I solve this problem by always changing the lists into mind maps and I have a nice piece of software that helps me do this (MindManager). This way I can manipulate levels and make sure that the details contribute to the higher level objectives.

Another problem I encounter is that work planning terminology is like a local dialect;  people use different words to mean the same thing or, more frequently, they use words without thinking about what they really mean, the most problematic ones being ‘output’ and ‘outcome.’

And then there is the issue of habit. There is a default in planning that is powerful to change: the cut and paste of the previous plan, making it as routine and easy as possible where it should have been a deep conversation that starts with ‘why are we here?’ or ‘what do we want our legacy to be?’ and ends with scrutinizing the activity lines to make sure they get us there.  I am introducing this discipline and am waiting to see the response. I already got one: ‘a fresh new dialog’ that I am bringing to this project. I like the word fresh – stale is not good for the body and soul.

The sling/shelf contraption is doing bad things to my trapezoid muscles and the many smaller muscles in my upper back, neck and shoulders. Things were already a mess before the sling (whiplash from the accident that I doubt will ever go away) but this is not helping. Sitting in front of a computer also doesn’t help and within an hour of the start of my work day my shoulder and back muscles were burning from overuse. I took the sling off and did not put it on all day and requested an emergency massage from Axel (which he expertly delivered). I added to that an expert massage from Abi later in the day that did much to relieve the discomfort.

We made big progress yesterday with several of the things that have been a big headache the last month. The most elderly of our cars, a 13 years old Subaru with 250.000 miles, was certified for another year. It proudly displays its 2010 window sticker.  We had not expected this. It will help with the selling before we go.

Axel completed painting the living room and, after 8 months of camping out, we started to move things back to where they used to be. Normalcy is what I want, I told Axel. I am anxious to move stuff out of my office which has more the look of a storage place than an office.

We made a fire in the new fire place. It was both a test (no smoke came out of unexpected places) and a dream come true – this is what we had in mind when we ordered the new fireplace a year ago. It’s been a lesson in patience. The work is not done yet around the fireplace but that is, at this point, minor change. It was lovely sitting in front of the fire and then being able to simply close the fireplace doors and go to bed. In the past we had to carry smoldering logs through the house and throw them out in the yard and then extinguish the fire by spraying it with a fine mist of water.

And finally, I received my official terms of assignment, my new TOA as it is called in our jargon. The work in Kabul, even from a distance, is ramping up. Because of Ramadan, phone meetings are now late at night rather than early in the morning. My first meeting with my colleague Steve and my boss started at 11 PM and lasted till after midnight. It is good they could not see me yawning as I am still on Ghana time.

The meeting generated many tasks in addition to much learning. It’s tricky to manage 3 teams from 8.5 time zones away but we are all trying. The big complicating factor, especially for work at the central ministry level, is that the dust has not settled from the elections, and may not settle for awhile. This means that we don’t know whether we will be working with the old and familiar cast of characters or an entirely new crew. Still, we have to submit a comprehensive work plan to our funder, the US government, before the end of the month.  Work planning has never been my strength and as an underling my work planning experience at headquarters was not something I relished. But now I am overseeing three large teams and I have to encourage those who find it similarly draining to soldier on.

I like working at home, in charge of my own schedule, and being around Axel.  Best of all, Lobster Cove is beautiful these days. The early fall/late summer days are of the 10+ variety: clear blue skies, perfect temperatures and brilliant colors all around. Although I am anxious to move to Kabul and be with my colleagues, I am acutely aware of this most gorgeous environment I have to leave behind.

Yesterday was my first day at work on my new job. It was an odd sensation because at first sight nothing had changed: Monday is my telecommuting day. But instead of telecommuting to Cambridge, I telecommuted to Kabul.

That this state of affairs was neither here nor there was obvious from my dreams: I was on my way to Baghdad, a long journey by foot with much baggage. Axel and I ended up in a transition place, a camp of sorts. Someone remarked that they smelled an overheating battery and that is when I discovered I did not have my black backpack, the one I usually take to work which has my computer and an extra battery in it. I experienced a sense of loss and tried hard to imagine doing my work without that backpack and its tools inside.

Bill Bridges had dedicated his life to helping people navigate transitions, so, in this time of transition, I go to him for advice. Bridges taught me about the neutral zone, the time after the ending and before the beginning. In the circus this is the moment when the aerialist lets go of the trapeze she was on and before she catches the other one. It looks like a free fall and it feels like one but it isn’t. The new trapeze is on its way.

Bridges suggests I think through my transition by focusing on my stuff and what I want to do with it. He calls it ‘Guidance for Moving.’ Even though I don’t have a moving allowance, it’s a good mental exercise and it helped me to interpret my dream. Air shipment is for the important things I will need at my new location immediately. By sea I ship the things I want to take along but that are not as important as those requiring fast transit. I will put in storage all things I don’t want to discard but that I don’t want to use just now. And then there is disposal: the things that it is time to get rid of and leave behind.

In the Cambridge office I already disposed of 22 years of files and papers that I have not looked at in years. It was a little scary but also a relief. With my Cambridge office emptied, someone else moved in and I don’t have an office anymore. This makes my home office the locus of my transition. I get to work from there as much as I want, enjoying my last three weeks of Lobster Cove during one of the most beautiful times of the year. I surely will miss that first sight of Lobster Cove when I get up in the morning, always dazzling, rain or shine.

Yesterday was also my first visit to the physical therapist. She took measures and wrote down numbers and percentages about my range of motion. She commented that it was pretty good and that the incisions had healed very well. I received my first set of instructions: back into the sling (for another 2 weeks) and 4 sets of exercises, with icing in the evening, just before bedtime.

The planned flight to Bar Harbor was cancelled. We were sitting in a trough between two weather systems, one coming up from the south-west and hurricane Bill breathing down our necks from the south-east. When in doubt, you learn in pilot training, don’t go, especially if you have your right arm in a sling. In hindsight we could have gone. Saturday turned out to be a beautiful day. It is only now that the weather has turned: it’s windy and raining.

I used the gained hours of the morning to pack for my trip and clean my office, removing piles of papers from my desk and from the floor. I opened a large suitcase in the guestroom and a smaller one in our bedroom. The guestroom suitcase is slowly being filled with stuff that I want to take to Afghanistan: knitting supplies, sewing supplies, water color supplies, indispensable CVS articles and some of the goodies Reinout brought from Holland.  The small suitcase in the bedroom is for the one week trip to Ghana that starts in a few hours.

Early in the morning, too early for some, the Greek painters showed up with their countless trucks. It was a noisy and boisterous arrival punctuated by the sound of ladders being extended against walls, paint cans being opened, a few fights (in Greek) about things we could not understand and all the other noises that come along with 10 Greek painters.

To make things more interesting, the plasterer also showed up, accompanied by a helper from our contractor (another set of trucks added to the mayhem). As the letters on his truck indicated (‘Ye ole’ English’), he was from England, something that was quite obvious once he opened his mouth. He brought his own tea bags because he doesn’t trust Americans making tea. When he found out I was originally from across the Channel, and after I showed him our tea cosy, he was convinced that I could be trusted with the task.

Tessa called me on the house line to find out whether it was safe to go outside before opening the door of the barn. She had to duck under a ladder and imagine the steps hidden under paint cloth, but she and Chicha could come out. Chicha was in seventh heaven, knowing the painters from their primer days here: 10 hands to throw balls and feed her the leftovers of lunch.

At lunch time Pauline arrived with her three kids and Mayssa, both from work, bringing a delicious Lebanese lunch. Pauline is married to Alberto from Lebanon and Mayssa is Lebanese herself. Two years ago, when Axel was still in the rehab hospital and I in a wheelchair, Pauline and Alberto had brought a complete Lebanese mezze to cheer me up; it did, and I had asked for a repeat, this time with Axel and without Alberto who was, unfortunately, in Lebanon.

Having guests over and seeing small kids discover the beach drew us out of the house from the interminable chores to hang out with them in and around the water. I cheated a bit taking my sling off but it was too hot and sticky to keep it on. We stood in the water until our skin was wrinkled.

At the end of the day we introduced the city kids to how vegetable grow (not in supermarket bins). They loved discovering our garden, eating peas, beans, tomatoes straight from the vine. They delighted in seeing potatoes emerge from the dark soil, like presents in grab bag. We picked a huge patty-pan squash and a zucchini the size of a small baseball bat; Pauline had her arms full with stuff these kids usually don’t care about; now they were fighting for more. They piled into the car holding flowers and with the long Asian green beans dangling from their mouths.

A thick layer of saturated air hangs above the ground, obscuring the cove. Every 15 second the foghorn sounds its mournful warning to ships approaching our coast. It brings back memories to my first stay in this town and house, some 30 years ago. Then the foghorn startled me; now it is one of the most familiar and dearest sounds I can imagine, as it signals home.

I followed the elections in Afghanistan as best as I could on the internet. It was hard to gauge the overall success or failure. The stories put on blogs in and in the media, the photos and the videos were inspiring and heart breaking. Nothing took away from my determination to go there and contribute whatever I can. Axel was not fazed either.

The day started badly and unfolded badly for awhile: first a rear ending, some 15 minutes into my commute, when I stood on the breaks for a truck that swerved for a tractor trailer that pulled on to the highway without much of a stop or concern for the traffic in its lane. This led to a pile up behind me. I was the least impacted and only our car’s brand new bumper was scratched. It was my luck that a Toyota was in back of me, about the same size as our car; the lady in back of me was rear-ended by a large pickup truck that smashed up her entire backside. The two culprits in front of me drove off into the distance without a worry in the world, maybe even oblivious to the mess they had created behind them.

So we sat by the side of the road, exchanging information while the flashing blue lights of the police cruiser made everyone slow down and caused a rubberneck traffic jam on both sides of 128. Not a good start but then again, I was OK and so was my recuperating shoulder, on this first commute in after my surgery.

After a delightful lunch outside with my French speaking colleagues (our monthly dejeuner francais) I was stung by a wasp which produced a pain so piercing I was not able to walk any longer. Debbie, our receptionist, put my foot in a basin with water, then produced ice and about 20 minutes later I could walk again. Now, the next day, it is still hurting and itching a lot.

My departure date to Kabul was changed once again, just when I thought everything was settled. I am now leaving on the 21^stof September, mostly to avoid the slow weeks of Ramadan and the festivities at the end. My new boss insists on me having as much time to recover here and the professional attention of well trained and experienced physical therapists before I transfer to such care in Afghanistan. He has a point and everyone was relieved. Still, as per September 1 I will be considered permanent staff of the Afghanistan project, even though I am still formally based in Cambridge. The latter arrangement will last (even though after September 23 I will be physically in Kabul) until the project extension contracts is signed (October? November?) I am trying to sort out the implications of this organizational arrangement and its effect on my allowances and taxes; this is a bit of a research project.

I attended a few meetings and many more celebrations of birthdays and people departing, all accompanied by cakes and snacks, bringing everyone together; a slow work day one could say, but socially quite nice. I also cleaned out the last pieces of my office so that Joan can now sit at my desk and most of the physical traces of my 22 years of work at MSH headquarters are now gone: thrown out, given away or packed up.

Back at home Axel had blown a fuse, a combination of project management overload (still a result of the brain injury), the consequences of sending out mixed messages to the girls and the oppressing heat. It made me want to delay my return home, a selfish strategy of avoidance rather than rescue.  It was easy to let the celebrations take their course; as a result I left too late to avoid traffic and inched my way home. By the time I got home Axel had cooled off a little. We decided against cooking our own meal and instead drove to Gloucester to have dinner at one of our favorite restaurants there, The Rudder.

That’s when our luck turned. We were seated at the edge of the water, overlooking Gloucester’s inner harbor amidst countless holiday makers who were all vying for a seat on the terrace. Steve and Tessa, also in traffic, also hungry, pulled off for dinner on their way home from Boston. By the time we came home everyone and everything had cooled off and we were able to have a family meeting about supporting one another, chores and cleaning up our communication signals. Just as in Afghanistan, good and bad stuff intermingled to create an intense day for all of us.