Sylvia's Journal

Due to a persistent tendinitis in my left shoulder, my (Zoom) violin lessons have been put on hold, just when the book with fiddle tunes from the Portland Collection arrived. I was working hard on two fiddle tunes, a practice now abandoned.  I will exchange one instrument for another, the ukulele, which doesn’t require a working shoulder, but can play fiddle tunes.  The ukulele has been playing second fiddle to the fiddle, and now the roles are reversed, at least for now.

‘At least for now’ is a new qualifier at the end of a phrase. My business had dried up, for now. I am letting my hair grow, for now. My only cardio exercise is on my stationary bike, for now. We don’t go into shops anymore, we don’t travel, for as long as ‘now’ will last. 

As for letting my hair grow, it is not by choice of course. I will have to sit Axel in front of a YouTube video to explain how to do a woman’s haircut. I will do the same for him. We can’t let ourselves go. This is one thing I learned from an British ex submarine commander who told his radio audience how he dealt with lockdowns that could last as long as 90 days – imagine that, under water! His main two lessons for lockdown novices were these: stick to routines (as in ‘get dressed and groom yourself!’) and keep your quarters clean. I am sticking to routines faithfully,  the meditation, the cardio exercise, the writing. House cleaning is not quite a routine yet – partially because we had outsourced house cleaning, and Axel did it in between visits from our cleaning lady. We continue to send her a check, but it’s us doing her cleaning. For now.

Count me the ways in which things are different – a new parlor game.  What was normal or taken for granted is now abnormal, special. What was special is now abnormal or even amoral.  

The new norm(al) is putting a different spin on ideas that were kind of ho-hum before. Like the idea that context matters. It is one of those truisms that someone utters from time to time, and then we continue as if context doesn’t matter. How much context matters is now becoming abundantly clear. As home life and work life merge, context not only matters even more than ever, context is suddenly visible, on our screens. Kids may enter a room where mom or dad is having a serious call. Everyone with a dog and a job is now bringing their pet(s) to work, like it or not. Dogs are probably the only creatures that like the new normal – lots of people home all day long, lots of tail wagging, yeah! Cats probably hate it, all those people underfoot.

Screen time used to be considered bad for kids, now it is imperative for them to have screen time. Not just for continuing their education or letting mom and/or dad work, but also for playdates with friends, and virtual hugs with grandparents who live someplace else.  Our daughter had been able to successfully limit screen time for her 4 and 7 year olds, but that is now out of the window. Who would have thought that screen time is now essential for our sanity, income and staying connected?

And then the devices. It’s no longer a luxury to have at least one per person, and either have a good warranty in case one malfunctions or a tech-savvy person in the house. Without the option of going to an internet café, malfunctions can have serious consequences we could not have imagined even a few months ago. I do wonder how this is going to work in the countries I have worked in where many of the preconditions for quarantine success are absent. Their governments may have been exemplary in their quick response to the threat, but how to implement the social distancing and quarantines is a big question mark – yet our collective success in flattening the curve depends on it, on them, on all of us.

And finally, there is the implication that single people are now on one long, possibly unwanted silent retreat. I had not thought about that until a (single) friend called me and mentioned it. Calling someone who is alone is now good medicine. I am making a list every morning of people to call, to reach out to, so that my call or message can, even if for a brief moment, break their silent retreat. 

I have started to offer complimentary ‘grounding’ sessions for organizations or teams I have worked with in the past. I will expand this shortly and put something on my website for anyone to take advantage of. It will keep me, at least professionally, on my toes.

Yesterday I did such a session with one team from my alma mater, MSH. One of the team members reflected on two things that deeply resonated with me: how we are all connected, across boundaries of any kind, when dealing with a highly contagious disease, and how health and economy are inextricably linked.

Having worked most of my professional life in the global health arena, these two statements are of the ‘duhhhh’ kind, truisms for us global/public health professionals. We know them to be true, and repeated them and over again. We said it in the introductions of books, the first slides of a PowerPoint presentation and opening remarks at conferences and workshops. But, except for the occasional deadly outbreak in a corner of some faraway country or region, for the privilged few (and those with power to act) these statements were just that, words that had been repeated so often that they had no power.

And now, look at us: economies in shambles, people feeling isolated, anxious, and many without any obvious means to support their families now and in the near future.  Employer-based health insurance seemed good enough to all people who had it (except to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and their followers) but that idea together with the belief that sick leave is a luxury, now lie on the garbage heap together with all the used gloves and masks.

In this new world we are living in now, I hope that the idea of interconnectedness (people, animals, economies) is taking on a new meaning and lead to action.

The most interesting and pertinent concept at this time is that of ‘One Health.’ It refers to a multisectoral and transdisciplinary approach focused on enabling optimal health outcomes by recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.  From the website of UC Davis, I learned that it was Dr. Calvin Schwabe — an epidemiology professor at the School of Veterinary Medicine — who coined the term “One Medicine” in his book, Veterinary Medicine and Human Health in 1964. 

A further exploration of the website revealed three staggering statements that may have come as a surprise to people only a few months ago. Now, I think most  people will accept them as ‘very likely true’ (rather than fake news): 1 in 6 people in the US alone will become sick from a foodborne illness at an estimated annual cost of $77 billion. Approximate 800 viruses were identified by the USAID-funded PREDICT project that were not previously known to science, and about 1.4 billion people are affected by mosquito-borne diseases each year.  And if you are curious about what else is out there, the One Health Initiative has its own website with a map of the world that tells you.

That everything and everyone is connected to everything and everyone else on this planet is something that chronically underfunded public health organizations have known forever and have tried to convince governments off: it pays to pay attention to public health (including maternal and child health, infectious disease prevention, family planning, etc.) – don’t get me going.

By the way, knowing what we know now, it is appaling to read about the shuttering last year of the PREDICT project by an anti-science, America-first administration. I wonder what the politically risk-averse people or those who thought the project was an expensive luxury (a basic research project) now think about that decision.

Yesterday we went on an outing to Tessa in NH, to get eggs. And so, we broke the seal.  We were careful. Axel pumped gas with gloves on at a roadside country store. I stayed in the car and watched the comings and goings in and out of the store. I noticed very little protection. No masks, no gloves and no 6 feet separation, as if nothing big was happening around them.  Our local newspaper gives us the daily numbers. NH is lagging behind, with only one half of a percent of the confirmed cases in MA and 9 deaths. We now know these numbers mean nothing if people are not tested or believe that they have the flu or allergies, and do not end up in a hospital; they simply get better but will have infected others, unknowingly. It’s like a balloon mortgage – suddenly there is the reckoning (which is by the way the title of another great Superintendent Gamache adventure written by Louise Penny).

It’s strange to go see your kid and not being able to embrace, and everyone with masks on, however cute the fabric. Tessa is using her top of the line sewing machine that makes me green with envy (she has a friend who has a sewing machine store) and is making masks for people out of vacuum cleaner bags and cute materials. While we were there she made Axel one with a bug fabric cover. He liked it better than the one I had made which was of a more subdued light blue fabric.  

We went for a long walk through the backwoods adjacent to their 7-acre land. Spring is not quite there but the woods are waking up. The three dogs were busy chasing anything that was foraging.

After our walk we sat on their deck, two pairs 6 feet apart, drinking G&Ts. Tessa was reluctant to take us into her house but when it started to drizzle it was either ending the visit or sharing the meal of smokehouse meats, beans and rice that we had picked up at a roadside stand on our way to Tessa.

And now we will go back into a 14 day quarantine. No one is visible sick but we play safe. We are learning more and more about this virus that can keep shedding before or after people have been sick. We were after all in contact, albeit from a distance, with Tessa’s husband who is the shopper in their house and has had more exposure in this State where people love their freedom to death.  And so, the seal is back on.

Before COVID19 (BC) my ecological footprint was rather large. Decades ago Tessa gave me a quiz and when I had answered all the questions what emerged is that in order to support my ecological footprint I needed 9 planets. I was chided for that by my daughter.  Now I’d like to believe that sustaining my life style has shrunk to less than one planet. I produce less waste and I am not driving or flying. 

It pains me that I have to throw away the colored plastic bags and elastic bands in which our newspapers are wrapped. Now they go into the toxic waste bag sitting by the front door where they join the junk mail (which seems to have diminished). I used to recycle all that.

But when it comes to food, we use more of what we buy and what we already have. We successfully made our first yogurt from powdered milk, like the olden days in Yemen. This was in the 70s when Sanaa’s ring road consisted of two rutted tracks and a stinking ditch in the middle.  The ditch was used as a garbage dump where people poured their household debris (liquids and solids). Food was bought at small stores, not self-service. There was a counter, a till, and a man who gave you what you wanted, which could only be the things on the shelves behind the counter. Yogurt was not something you bought in a store. You made it.

We follow the good example of our daughters and freeze every part of the vegetables that we don’t use in cooking. We boil the unappealing mess for hours. What’s left is called ‘garbage’ soup, a kind of fragrant compost concoction that turns out to produce the most wonderful broth. I have developed a new appreciation of our daughters who are showing us the way, in anything related to COVID19 and simple living. I suppose this means we did a good job. They now are the generation that (should) lead us – Baby boomers, step aside!

We are appreciative of all the free art forms that are now offered to anyone with a computer, electricity and good bandwidth: the museum tours, the concerts, the audiobooks from businesses that used to sell these same wares. We watched a wonderful play from the London Theatre with James Corden.  Our Quaker community organized a poetry reading via Zoom that moved us deeply. It’s funny how the always underfunded art community is coming to our rescue, to keep us, grounded and sane. If people didn’t already know this (and supported the arts), I believe this is now abundantly clear. It will be interesting to see if the debt will be repaid PC (post-COVID19).

Now we have two storms going on – a Nor’eastern, luckily without snow but not the kind of weather for a walk. And then there is the COVID-19 storm that is raging everywhere and in particular inside our government. The reports from Washington are dismal. I can only hope that now many more people regret who they voted for in 2016 and that they vote for someone else in November. I also hope that all the states organize themselves well for mail-in-voting.

In our small Cape Ann community some residents are calling for closing the bridges so no more viruses can get in. Maybe we are in for some stricter rules about movement, like in Spain, Italy and France, where you have to ask permission to get out or in and get a sturdy fine if you do not play by the rules.

My friends S+P who are in France, where they have a small resort, are not allowed to drive through Belgium to get home to the Netherlands – the roads are physically blocked for all traffic except those with the right ‘attestation,’ or trucks. If it comes to that here in our country of rugged individualists there will be trouble. In that case I can only hope that the folks who bristle at the constraints on their freedom see someone suffer nearby, and finally get it.

And so, in the midst of those two storms I try to stick to my routine. If I am successful I have a Routini when the cocktail hour arrives – it’s a nice break from the stresses and screen time of the day. For cocktails there is now a choice of three types of Martinis (in addition to the real ones). In the beginning, when we were still making fun of quarantining, the joke went around of the Quarantini, made with a dash of Purell. No longer a joke my favorite is now the Routini. It is made with Flexibility, an ingredient we are stockpiling now, has some Comfort (not the Southern kind), a dash of Gratefulness & Appreciation, and something to absorb whatever negative thoughts passed my mind. And then there is the weekly Zoomtini where we hang out with friends, it’s a BYOB event at our virtual house.

When one of our sons-in-law first came to our house and saw the inside of our refrigerator he commented on what he saw: ‘it’s all condiments!’ This particular son-in-law did not like condiments – never had mustard or catchup on his hotdog or hamburger, hated the idea of relish and such. He has changed over the years, partially because I make lots of mustard at Christmas time for family and friends. He has received those for decades and I have seen him put the mustard on something.

I thought about this when I opened our refrigerator this morning: he would sure have exclaimed that it contained nothing but condiments. And he would have been right, it’s now mostly populated mostly by condiments, pickles, relishes, simmering sauces, chutneys, glazes, mayonnaise and a few poorly looking vegetables.

We are trying not to go to the store as we have successfully kept the outside world out and are infection free. We plan to stay so. Not knowing where the virus is hanging out, we prefer to stay put where we are.

As a result we are slowly depleting our supplies of fresh food. At first, we planned our meals using an app in which we store our favorite recipes. It has a meal planning calendar and generates a shopping list.  But some of our favorite meals (like Sag Paneer) have ingredients that are no longer in the house. At first, we did go to a store (over a week ago), then we sent out an order for pickup (6 days ago) and now we have abandoned the meal planner altogether because it forces us to go get the needed stuff from outside and with it comes a complicated disinfecting routine.  We will just look at what is in the pantry and what’s in the refrigerator/freezer. Then it will be mix and match. We should be good for awhile longer.

I have solved the milk problem by ordering a large can of Nido, Nestle’s milk powder that is ubiquitous in developing countries. Axel was surprised (why didn’t you get something that is local, cheaper and doesn’t need shipping?). I must admit it was an entirely irrational buy, driven by emotions and associations. As soon as I saw the image of the product, my mind was flooded with images of that can on my kitchen counter in  Yemen, Lebanon, Senegal. And with those images came all these memories of those adventures. Good old times!

Replenishing our dwindling egg supply is more of a problem because our local hatchery owners are infected. They have a refrigerator outside the chicken barn where you can help yourself and leave the money. But the refrigerator is closed now, no more fresh eggs. And so, we hope that we can drive to Tessa and Steve who live in New Hampshire. They have chickens and thus eggs. It may be a nice outing for this weekend – that is, if such is still allowed. Watching Spain and Italy and France, that freedom may soon be gone too. We wonder how such limitations will go over in New Hampshire, a state that has as its motto ‘Live Free or Die!’ This now means something entirely different than it did before.

A month ago, the fault lines between the have and have-nots were already beginning to show and this produced a highly infectious cocktail: people who do not have a doctor because they don’t have health insurance or who have a job without benefits, gig workers, they all kept working – we will never know how many infections were passed on like that. 

Now a new fault line is emerging, separating the caring from the scammers. I know that there are more caring people than scammers, but the scammers are flooding the stage as there are more opportunities than ever before to separate people from their money. They are pretending to be Medicare and asking for personal information (I had such a call and reported it immediately, though it took me a bit to realize it). They have a range of possibilities to talk anxious, weary and fearful people into doing things that will cost them. 

Scammers also now have a large pool of unemployed people to recruit from and to do their bidding, make the scam calls. I am sure there are now many people who cannot be picky about paid work however unethical.  I don’t think the friendly lady who makes the scam call will partake in the financial windfall if the call is successful.

Scammers are also finding ways to get in the way of the people who care, or worse, right into their faces. Zoom has a series of actions in their COVID-19 resource center to avoid getting ‘zoom-bombed.’  It’s a new term I just learned from my daughter. I witnessed such a Zoom bomb yesterday during a DEVEX webinar with African leaders speaking about matters of importance to funders and members of the American NGO community. Within minutes of the start of the webinar the chat and Q+A boxes were flooded with hateful racist vitriol of an intensity that harkened back to the slavery days. It was so distracting that it kept me from writing questions and comments or reading those from other listeners. Eventually the organizers pushed the infiltrators out, but the text of their writing stayed and each time you opened the chat or Q+A box the words were there, right in front of you.

There were already a lot of angry people in the US who felt left out, I imagine that the ranks of those have swelled, especially when people find out who gets the government checks and who does not. Exceptions to the government handouts are emerging and the process of getting the check are confusing and complicated, especially to people who don’t usually file a tax return because their income is so low. Apparently now, in order to get the check, they need to do so. Imagine how that is going to work.  What a contradiction: government promising swift action!

For those of us who are in place of privilege, at first there was some elation about the new normal: finally, you can bring your dog to work, kids happy to see more of mom, no need to commute, no need to dress up, etc. 

But now, the grimness of what we are in the middle of, is coming into full view, especially with what is happening in Africa and Asia. If the US is predicting about 200,000 more death, that is 198,000 more than we already have, then what about Africa, where the number of infected people is only now becoming visible?

I am coaching someone who lives in an African country that is now in total lockdown. No doubt, more of such drastic measures will be taken across the continent. Public and private transportation has come to a halt. If you are delivering critical services (which my coachee’s project does – serving people with HIV) you need forms that allow you to be on the road. That process may have been fairly easy to implement in France (just download a form, print it and fill it in).

Those who have a computer, a printer and an internet connection at home, may be able to handle this.  As I follow the thread of consequences of the lockdowns in Africa I fear people whose lives depend on consistent delivery of drugs, for whatever condition, will either not be able to come to the place where they get their drugs, or the drugs won’t make it to those places as the entire supply chain is compromised. 

Here in the US we are given numbers and graphs that count only COVID19 deaths, which are still relatively minor compared to other causes of death. I fear that these other causes of death, especially in the underserved countries of the world, will start to rise astronomically as basic services become less and less accessible due to missing drugs, equipment, sick service providers and a lack of transport options.

The coronavirus has changed my perspective on the other scary viruses that have surfaced in recent years, infections that now seem so much easier to prevent: you won’t get infected with HIV if you don’t have unprotected sex; you won’t get Ebola if you don’t touch a sick person’s body fluids. These behavior changes now seems so much easier to manage, even though we didn’t think so at the time.

Through my volunteer work with EthicalCoach I am drawn into the world of team coaching. Although intellectually I do understand the distinctions between training, process facilitation, teambuilding, team mentoring and team coaching, listening to very experienced team coaches I am (virtually) hanging out with these days recognize I have much to learn from doing it (the team coaching).

This morning we had a team coach community meeting with some 44 people attending from, among others, South Africa, UK, Holland and the US. Through this forum I am meeting, albeit virtually, several Dutch coaches – a very active European coaching club I didn’t know existed.

It was only a month ago I was talking with a team in a nearby municipal government about engaging with team coaching – I was so excited about this. It would have been my first chance at real team coaching, with the possibility of doing this virtually or face to face. 

Before I became a free agent, I had considered building up a local coaching business that would focus on helping municipal governments (paid or volunteer staff) be better at what they do, deal better with conflict, tensions, and improving their listening and inquiry skills.  Government dynamics are actually quite similar around the world. In most places I have worked with public officials I have seen very little real listening and a lot of exhortations (telling, advice giving, an addiction to being right). A few of my former colleagues have landed in local government positions (state and town) and have told me the dynamics are not all that different from the dynamics of local government in Nigeria for example.

But, among all the other things it has done, the coronavirus has also upended my adventure into the new territory of team coaching. Budgets are being redone. Whatever small budget there was is now redeployed to deal with more urgent stuff.  

I do think there is now a need, may be more than ever, for coaching, and team coaching in particular, to become a critical service that needs to stay open for business.