Sylvia's Journal

I am on the road again, after a glorious Indian Summer weeks in Manchester. We were surprised by a visit from Sita, Jim and Faro on Friday night which allowed us to check out his increasing vocabulary. He now copies every word we say. He is retaining some Dutch word, which would probably have been incomprehensible to all but his parents and myself. I taught him about milky tea, een kopje thee, which sounds something like ‘kupatay.’ We know he is speaking Dutch and liking brown bread cubes withh Marmite and milky tea, just like a Dutch kid would.

My sister sent me a wonderful picture book that has all sorts of land- and seascapes, each one having four things in common, not always obviously so: a fakir on a flying carpet, a yellow balloon, a blue delivery truck and an prisoner on the run. Faro is entirely pre-occupied with the blue truck. His boy brain seems to be wired to recognize trucks. I keep telling him the Dutch word for yellow balloon, he recognizes it but speaks about a lello balou-balou. So we have a ways to go. But expanding the Dutch vocabulary in the face of such fast advances in English makes me wonder whether I can keep up with this. I went through this decades ago and gave up. But people tell me not to, this time.

I did not get the chair re-upholstered before my departure but I was able to put most of the chair back together, more or less as it was, without piping here and there. I am pleased with the results, recognizing the flaws that no one else seems to notice. Something stuck from my upholstery education all these years ago.

Sometimes it feels as if I am in one of those road race machines that you find at malls – as soon as you have maneuvered past one set of difficult sections of the road, new and challenging road sections appear on the horizon. The road glides underneath the car and new horizons appear, until the quarter is used up. Such fun!

My quarter is not up for a long while, at least that is the plan. I feel good about the work done in Uganda and South Africa. I worked with two different colleagues, both insightful and very competent individuals, a pleasure to work with. We did well – developed a robust design and then implemented it as planned and produced the outcomes we had intended. While completing the writing tasks for this assignment, I am already looking ahead and designing the next event, and the next, and the next.

The first ‘next’ is a forum about urban youth and reproductive health in developing countries. It is put up by Johns Hopkins and I get to work with one of Sita’s partners. This will be a domestic trip, to Washington D.C. The next ‘next’ is Pakistan, barely three weeks from now. This trip has been postponed more times than I care to remember. When I turned on the news this morning and the earthquake in Pakistan was announced I wondered for a brief moment whether a trip to Pakistan was simply not in the stars. And there are two nexts queuing up after that: Uganda again, maybe, and then Afghanistan in the new year.

I am experiencing my last very frustrating minutes in this country trying to connect on the internet. My attempts are in vain, messing up my schedule for the third time today. Oh the things we take for granted, being ‘on’ all the time. I have much sympathy for my colleagues in various parts of Africa who deal with this every day.

On my way to the airport I will visit an old friend with whom I worked now nearly 20 years ago in what was then a newly free South Africa. We did a lot of reminiscing last week and will continue some more but this time in her new home in the hilly suburbs of Pretoria. And then it is off to Sietske in Aalsmeer and then home. 

I have been in Pretoria for just about 2 days now. It is cool, overcast and windy. It is supposed to be spring and the Jacaranda trees ought to be filling the streets of Pretoria with their purple flowers. But instead they are dry and leafless. The fields between Jo’burg and Pretoria are brown and yellow. Everything screams for rain. This is not the always-blue-skied-and-warm Pretoria I remember.

I have been tying up loose ends, still picking through the mailbox that overflowed during my week off the grid, now nearly a month ago. I am also getting organized for my coaching exam that I hope to do within the next 2 months, in between getting ready for my next assignment that starts on Wednesday.

This morning I watched the news about Kenya. I have stayed many times in the section of Nairobi that is called Westlands. I remember that mall being built. It is exactly the kind of place to go for some distraction after a week of hard work. The scenes, panic and pronouncements by officials make me think about the illusion of security.

Life is not safe. It never was. In the past people succumbed to marauders, pirates, natural disasters, honor and revenge killings, scurvy, microbes, reproductive hazards, arbitrary laws, landlords, and fundamentalists, just to name a few. Now all these things are still happening; they may be called by a different name. Thanks to ‘development’ these may happen to smaller proportions of the population but since there are more of us, the numbers are higher. And in their accounts the media scare us to death.

Experts talk about the lax security at malls and how predictable this was; any place where people gather in great numbers make good targets for spreading mayhem and terror. So we put security guards at entrances – low paid people, with no authority or power, not the kind that could protect me, take on people armed with AK-47s, or fight back. I don’t think I have ever seen a well-fed and muscular security guard on my travels.

At any rate, I don’t think it makes any difference. Security, whether lax, as it is in most places I visit, or strict as I imagined it to have been at the Navy Yard, seems to do little to stave off attacks by individuals determined to cause mayhem and terror. The hotel in Uganda had two bored people sitting by a metal detector. I’d put my stuff into a plastic tub and walked through the detector which would always go off yet no one paid attention. The staff would not even look in my purse and simply move the plastic tub across the little table next to the metal gate. Sometimes they waved me through and I didn’t even have to put anything in the bin or even walk through the metal detector. And so we can go through life scared all the time or live and be lucky enough not to be at the wrong place when disaster strikes.