Sylvia's Journal

Just to make the next few months a little more interesting, the septic system failed yesterday. Instead of working on his CV Axel had to deal with this emergency. There was the immediate task of getting a ‘honey’ truck to come and pump us, all 4000 gallons of unmentionables. And then there is the rather overwhelming and bigger task to build a new septic system. When you live on ledge like we do, this is not only a complicated engineering challenge but also one with a hefty price tag which requires the kind of loan that our parents could buy an entire house with. So the CV will have to wait a bit and the danger pay will come in handy.

I had my eyes and teeth recertified for duty in Afghanistan – a clean bill of health on that end. It’s the shoulders and the resulting pinched nerves that remain problematic. After my right hand carpal tunnel surgery the hand-doctor predicted that the left hand would want to follow soon. I have arrived at that moment where I wake up each morning with numb fingers but I cannot find a window for surgery between now and my departure for Afghanistan – every day is now spoken for. Doing the hand surgery in Kabul does not seem like a good idea and feels too much like a luxury in a place where surgeons are busy repairing war and landmine victims.

Tessa and Steve returned from the Bannaroo music festival in Manchester, Tennessee, in high spirits but tired from the long drive. Dog Chicha was jumping up and down from excitement to have her parents back and the daily dose of rough-housing that we, aging grandparents, failed to give her.

Sita showed up as well and planted herself at the counter continuing her work of hooking interesting people up with one another to make the world a better place. She continues breathlessly with this mission and is having some successes here and there.

I have been trying to follow Eckart Tolle’s exhortation to stay in the Now but in my dreams I am throwing that advice to the wind. I have Kabul on my mind – all the time. I have another two and a half months ahead of me of being in this in-between place, neither here nor there.

Upon hearing where we are going in the fall people say ‘why would you go to a place where you can get shot, blown up or raped?’ It is getting a little irritating and last night I found myself lashing out to someone who posed that question. What are people thinking? It’s clear that too few good stories make it out of Afghanistan and so I take it this means there is plenty of work for Axel.

I showed Axel the home page of Safi Airways. There is a slideshow of the places that we visited some 30 years ago with the words ‘Adventure in Afghanistan’ superimposed. It’s a bit of a hard sell these days – who wants adventure in Afghanistan? If the country ever gets its act together the tourists would flow in by the thousands – the beauty of the country is phenomenal and the pictures do their magic, even on Axel. Not that we could take a bus or taxi and drive into the countryside for a picnic. Still, in Kabul, all you have to do is step out of the house and smell the roses, pick the grapes from the arbors that are everywhere and look up at the majestic Hindu Kush Mountains. When I was there last they were still snow covered and spectacular.

The month of July is starting to get filled in: Axel will meet me in Dubai on the 11th of July after my stint in Addis and we will go from there to Kabul for an exploratory visit. We will return to Boston just in time for my pre-op (shoulder surgery) tests on July 27th. After that surgery, a family reunion and packing up and handing over the care of the house to Tessa and Steve.

In the meantime I am starting to hand over responsibilities at work and, with regret and disappointment pulled out of the BU course that I love so dearly. I may also need to drop out of the Ghana work that took me so long to get set up and now we are nearly there but I can’t see how to squeeze in a trip to Ghana in between everything else. It proves once more that any change, however much wanted, comes with losses.

Through one of the business school professors I met last week I have chanced upon a woman who is heavily networked into the Afghan journalist community and is sending me several emails each day connecting me to yet another wonderful person. This includes a young (Afghan) journalist who sent me a picture of himself with, of all people, the minister of health who he knows quite well; small world. Everyone has provided us with contact information and a warm welcome. This is the part of the Afghanistan story that people here don’t know about.

Last week Axel went to a session at the conference from an Indian business school professor that was called ‘Taming the Monkey Mind.’ I didn’t know that the frantic mind that hops from one thing to another is indeed the monkey mind. I love the image. My mind was already swaying from tree to tree but now it is even more frantic as any change – even a little – accelerates the monkey’s movement. A big household change like the one coming up for us has much potential for speed and error. Thus, the message is slowing down –not one of my strengths – something to cultivate in the next 3 months.

Yesterday, during and after Quaker Meeting we both tamed the monkey and sat for hours just reading Sunday newspapers from two large cities. I had intended to bring some order in my very messy office but I let it slip – it could wait.

We played with our grand-dog and walked her to town and back. When I go into the barn where she lives with Tessa and Steve, I find her splayed on the bed with this sad look on her face that seems to ask, ‘when are my mommy and daddy coming back?” We are not doing quite as much of the roughhousing that she is used to with Steve. She lets me know this by putting a plastic bone in front of me and pretending to snarl, and then picking up the bone in the hope I chase her. We did this a few times around the kitchen. She’s like a toddler who wants the same activity over and over, while we tire or bore quickly.

In the evening we were invited to a salon-soiree or soiree-salon – a dress up event with intellectuals who radiate around Diane and Curt, many with connections to Harvard. I have never been to such an event and learned that the idea is to connect with interesting people and hear them talk about something they are doing. I was glad that I did not have to stand up and talk because I am in between doing interesting work and more focused on the mundane things such as, when can I come on home leave and how much vacation will I have. I think I can be much more coherent a year from now when the project is about the end and I should have something accomplished.

Back home we watched television programs about television programs, a closed loop of informationals that tell us we can no longer watch TV on our analog sets – this is abundantly clear as there is nothing else. A grainy picture with the vague outline of a man says “If this is what you see you have the wrong TV.”

This transition from analog to digital has been in the works for a long time but the country was not ready in February so the deadline got postponed to June 12. Apparently, still, some 10% of the population (predominantly poor, rural, old, minorities in particular) was caught by surprise. We watch in astonishment the army of TV advisors who march into people’s homes and explain what just happened to incredulous and ill-informed people – some in shock (‘what? we have to get 4 new TVs?”). I imagine the landfills in this country filling up with old sets once people get out of denial; some of these sets maybe quite new, sold not long ago (a steal!) by unscrupulous salesmen to clueless folks.

Yesterday started with a one-hour long interview over the phone with colleagues in Kabul. They asked questions about intent and then contrasted those with the realities on the ground. It was good I knew these realities because otherwise it would have been pretty difficult to respond to their queries (“given that x and y, how would you go about z?”). Much of the issues raised are familiar to me in other settings as well and are typical of our third party work (getting paid by one to benefit another) where it is not unusual to find beneficiaries bristle at the conditions and strings attached to the aid given to them.

After that a quick visit to the nurse practitioner to talk about the hot flashes that now drench me several times a day and interrupt my sleep big time. The breast lumps, diagnosed so far as trauma-related, kept her from prescribing hormone replacement therapy. Instead we will experiment with a combination of herbal supplements (evening primrose oil and black cohosh) and a low dose anti-depressant to deal with the sleeping. When I called our local health food store to inquire about the brands (I was to get the European, not the American brands) I was greeted with ‘oh, hot flashes huh?’ It must be big business now with millions of baby boom women consumed by these flashes. Now my daily pill requirements are starting to look like those of very old people; pill boxes filled with a variety of pills in all sorts of shapes and colors!

Nuha arrived for a last goodbye before she flies home to Riyadh next week. It was her fourth and last visit to Lobster Cove which she had not seen in full spring bloom yet. Her last visit was when there was snow on the ground. Now she has seen Lobster Cove in every season. Her brother Youssouf joined us for a lunch en plein air.

He brought his brand new camera which was put to good use right away. In Gloucester we visited the Fishermen’s Memorial which stands on a boulevard that is lined with hundreds of American flags. When, years from now, they will show these pictures to their friends, it will not be difficult to guess in which country they were taken.

Nuha and her brother are both outdoors enthusiasts and we talked about the Appalachian Mountain Club and its great lodges and trails in the White Mountains. They might try to squeeze in a hike in the White Mountains before Nuha flies home.

Since I still don’t know whether Axel and I will get on a plane to Kabul a week from Monday (and me from there to Addis at the end of the month) I used the rest of the afternoon to get myself organized for all these trips, the first one starting today to Charleston for our annual Organization Behavior Teaching Conference and the board meeting that precedes it.

If I think about how much I will be away this summer and how badly the garden already needs attention (weeding, fertilizer) I get a little overwhelmed and wished I could use up my vacation days that will go ‘poof’ on June 30th. But I am programmed otherwise.

The trip I hoped to make to Kabul with Axel, in just over a week, seems more and more unlikely and the limbo continues. I try not to get too upset about this, although I am disappointed. I have stopped to look too far ahead (since there is nothing to see) and instead am focusing on the work of now. It makes me forget the disappointment as it connects me to exciting projects and wonderful people around the world.

I received the most encouraging news from my team in Cambodia which has managed to get government health facilities to make special efforts to reach out to youth, with a focus on reproductive health. The 26 or so government officials who are the first to participate in the leadership program were rather skeptical at first. Others were also skeptical about them and had their doubts that anything would change. The health facility managers set what seemed fairly un-ambitious goals for their teams – but it seems they have been surprising everyone, including themselves, and surpassed these goals.

The senior leadership work in Ghana that appeared to be stuck for the longest time in the initial planning phase has come unstuck. Now it requires the alignment of schedules and a dates. And that’s where I bump into my uncertain future.

Another piece of work like it, concerning senior professionals as well, is in the planning stages for Central America. I am helping my colleague Diane design a process for getting senior leaders focused, moving and more confident in their ability to function well as a team and fulfill their oversight role for major investments in health programs. She will do the actual facilitation since I am not a fluent Spanish speaker, but we fantasize about doing it together. Given all the scheduling challenges, this is highly unlikely.

Last night we attended the annual meeting of the Manchester Historical Society. The average age of its members is probably about 65. Although on the young side of the median, with enough grey hair, we blend in nicely. There is always wine and an impressive buffet of finger food before we start with business. This helps with the socializing although I always manage to introduce myself to someone with a mouth full.

The business of the Society is conducted in no time adhering to the letter rather than the spirit of parliamentary procedures. This makes the business meeting a breeze. The last piece of business is always a motion to ratify any errors and omissions of the executive board, which we gladly did.

The highlight of the annual meeting is always a speaker with something interesting to tell us about the place we live. This year it was a gentleman who had written a book about Cape Ann. He told us many great stories, accompanied by slides, of the famous people who resided here, their houses, their houseguests and friends, and their writings about and paintings of Manchester, Essex, Rockport or Gloucester.

Everything is covered with a thin layer of pollen. We are in the midst of allergy season. My reaction to this is, I believe, intense tiredness; so much that I can’t keep my eyes open much beyond 8:30 PM. An allergic reaction to spring is a new experience for me. Now I can be more sympathetic to Axel who has been suffering for years.

I interrupted my workday yesterday with a visit to the ankle doctor. He had requested a CAT scan before I saw him. The scan did not provide any more meaningful information, nor did the doctor or his assistant. I think that the only thing my visit did was to help reduce payments for the hospital’s expensive machinery or, if it was already paid for, increase its profits.

That visit was definitely not a good use of our expensive health care system and insurance monies. When the doctor suggested that I go for other tests, or even come back in a year, I declined. The ankle is what it is and no miracle will fix it – the doctor said so himself. So why bother. But I am relieved that surgery was not suggested as an option.

There is no movement on the travel front except that everyone on this side of the Atlantic is now committed to the dates for our trip to Ethiopia. Since the phones were down or not working on the other side, in Addis, we don’t have any indication that ducks are lined up over there. No more news on Afghanistan either, except that, thanks to the US postal service tracking system, I know that the Afghan embassy in DC received Axel’s visa application. Limbo thus continues.

The various future scenarios produce an active dream life but there is not much I can remember when I wake up except the ‘active’ part. These scenarios aren’t just about where in the world I might be, from mid-June on but also about which body parts will be in what state of repair.

There are various scenarios about where I will be in a few weeks and months. The only things I know for sure are that this week I am at work, mostly in Cambridge, every day and that next week I will be in Charleston, South Carolina. What happens after that is murky at best.

We sent Axel’s passport off to the embassy of Afghanistan in DC for a visa, just in case I am offered the job there. If that scenario were to unfold I would need to decide quickly whether to accept or decline. This requires that Axel consents to the move. Going to Kabul first to see for himself will help him decide whether it is a move that has potential for him too. If I don’t get the offer things will be simple: we all stay home. But current reality is one in which no decisions have been made and we are in limbo; no particular scenario activated just yet.

Late June, early July a trip to Ethiopia is on the books, though not confirmed yet. Buying a ticket for this requires confirmation of the Ethiopian dates and the Kabul trip. Everyone is trying. At least I own two passports, allowing me to get two visas at the same time.

A few things are given and unalterable at this point. In late July I am teaching at the BU School of Public Health and my shoulder operation is scheduled for the first week of August. August is also election month in Afghanistan and all travel is banned. Somewhere in there is also a family reunion, a visit from my brother and nephew and the finest summer days at Lobster Cove.

Future scenarios for my physical health include at least one that seems likely: my right arm in a sling through most of August and part of September. I fantasize about having my left carpal tunnel symptoms alleviated by the same operation that did wonders on the right side – but there are no windows for that to happen. And this morning I will find out what’s up with the right ankle from the super orthopede at B&W.