Sylvia's Journal

One comes to New Orleans for the trio of food, drinks and music; this is not usually the kind of vacation I take.  The food part of the trio is always there, the drinks less (I generally don’t do cocktails) and we rarely go out to listen to music back home or on vacation. But here I am getting into this wonderful combination of the three: we eat very well, we try out all sorts of interesting cocktails and we listen to music.

Of course there is music everywhere: on the streets, in restaurants, in historic settings and in clubs or dance halls. We have found our favorite place, Snug Harbor, which is indeed a snug little place with small chairs and tiny round tables and a small stage.

After a fabulous show earlier this week at Snug Harbor of Mahmoud Chouki, we returned to see one member of the Marsalis Family (Delfeayo) with his big band on the tiny stage. It was a most playful and enjoyable show of brass band artistry.

Compared with the soulless and uninspired performance at Preservation Hall (a tourist attraction), this was how music should be played – to the enjoyment of players and listener alike. At the end three high school students from Little Rock were invited onto the stage to join the band and show off their talents with their baritone sax, alto sax and trombone. You could see that this was a rather nerve-wrecking experience for them – they could not yet be playful like the established players.

Delfeayo  and the members of his band showed me how they were mentoring the next generation of great jazz musicians – talking to them with their eyes as jazz players do, and encouraging them to stand up and play their solos. I was very impressed, these kids are talented. I imagined them being big fish in their Little Rock high school, going to swim in the big pond with the real big fish.

There was much joking about the boys’ hometown (‘country boys’) and the clothes they wore (sneakers, one with a hat and dreadlocks and T-shirts).  The band members all wore coats and most of them ties as well.  Still, you could tell there was also great respect. Later one of the players told us that this is now what he lives for – passing the baton and grooming the next generation of great jazz players.

The first snow has just started to fall, on the wintry December 10 day. I was just in time planting 20 tiny Winter Aconaite (Eranthis) bulbs. They look like nothing, little shriveled up dark things that blend in with the debris from frantic squirrel activity over the last few months. As I was digging small holes in different parts of the yard I always found nuts from this or that tree that had already claimed the space. It is rather amazing how the squirrels remember where they put stuff. We would call that smarts, but I am not sure what it means for animals.

I am listening to a book about cephalopods, among them octopus, giant squid and tiny squid. It is a philosophical treatise about consciousness and what the amazing behavior of cephalopods teaches us about consciousness. As with most books I am reading or listening to these days, it is about the brain. But the brain and nervous system of the octopus is, I learn, not in the head but all over the body. In my coaching course the word ‘embodiment’ is often used and I am trying to figure out what that means for us humans – but for the octopus it is clear. The body and brain are one. And maybe we are like that too, as there are neurons (some 500 million) in our gut and (less) in our heart. And neural activity takes of course also place in our small toe.

At work things are quiet – which is always true just before the holidays – but I also have little project work to do and charge much time to overhead. This I don’t like, and I am sure my superiors don’t either, since I am relatively costly. I am using the time for self-care related to my arthritic ankle: cupping, a massage technique that separates the fibers in my traumatized ankle with all its scar tissue, massages and physical therapy. On Fridays this can take up half a day.

I also use my down time to read up on professional literature that I have put aside. As always I am amazed about the knowledge and experience that is constantly being accumulated – but I am also heartened that by the fact that the so-called soft stuff of development is now being acknowledged as important (above and beyond what is usually referred to as ‘technical skills’). I even saw the word ‘co-create’ surface here and there. Now I am in my element – it’s time for me to write about how one can do this. I have some ideas.

On Sunday I passed from 65 to 66. I told Axel we should have taken a ride on Route 66 but it is a bit far from here. Instead he took me on a surprise birthday trip to Portland (Maine) where he had created a feast that went from fabulous lunch to fabulous dinner to fabulous hotel to fabulous breakfast to fabulous lunch before we headed home via Tessa and Steve.

They whipped up a fresh pasta meal for us with leftover sauces from their annual friends dinner where some 18 people come together to enjoy each other and great food. It’s a wonderful ritual that reminds me a bit of our periodic taco nights when we lived in Georgetown (MA) and the guys vied with each other for who could eat the hottest taco – sweat drops running down their foreheads as they pushed beyond limits. Was it fun? For us not engaged in this contest it was great fun to watch the men in their self-imposed suffering.

Back in July I started an experiment related to an auto-immune disease called Hashimoto’s that I inherited from my mother. The disease is common among light skinned and blond haired women of European descent. Mothers pass it on. It was diagnosed rather late in life and rather surprised – I had never heard of the disease and had none of the associated symptoms. I didn’t notice any difference before and after the diagnosis was made and after taking the pills to up the performance of my thyroid.

Tessa turned me on to some books written by a pharmacist who also had the disease and made the relief of her and others’ severe symptoms her life’s work. I learned that there are some foods that exacerbated her symptoms. My goal was not to alleviate symptoms, since I had none, but rather to get off the medication. I started a four-month experiment, first by removing gluten from my diet – gluten is a known inflammatory agent.  When tests were done after three months there was no difference from a year earlier – some values had gone up a bit and some down. So much for the gluten, though it has been nice to support Tessa for whom gluten is turning out to be really a bad thing.

Then I started another experiment, with the doctor’s consent, to stop taking the thyroid medicine altogether. Again, I noticed no difference. But when my bloodwork results came in today both my primary physician and endocrinologist told me to immediately get back on those pills; the values were wildly out of range, in the wrong direction.  That ended the four month experiment and I am back where I started.

Now I am starting a new experiment, also to get off medication, this time off the statin I am taking for high cholesterol. With about 17 pounds lost and on a daily exercise regime I am wondering whether I still need the medication. With the doctor’s consent I pushed the pill bottle to the back of the shelf, until early February when bloodwork will tell me whether I can continue without or need to get back.

The last experiment is to get off the Neurontin for my ankle zings and prickles. I have started a treatment of cupping – the creation of space in the mass of scar tissue in my left ankle – a dense mass that my overexcited foot nerves can’t seem to penetrate. The first treatment was encouraging – increased mobility and range of motion, less pain.

I arrived home on a near perfect Indian summer day, but the swimming days were over. This left as the only option the joining of a fitness club to keep up the swimming that had so become a part of my daily routine. I joined the Manchester Athletic Club. Axel is already a member but doesn’t use it much, preferring yoga at the gentler local Yoga studio – no bulky sweating men or women there.

As part of the membership orientation one gets a fully evaluation by a fitness professional. It was fun and very interesting. I had earlier embarked on a significant lifestyle change which I was able to maintain during my travels in West Africa: more exercise, more walking (no elevator use wherever there are elevators) and eating only what I need rather than what I want – at least when in hotels where breakfast buffets were probably responsible for my average weight gain of 5 pounds per trip.

I experienced what people who are exercising regularly have always told me: at first it is a bit of a chore – shall I ride my stationary bike at home or do some I find more enjoyable. Now that has changed – I look forward to the routines and miss it when I cannot.

In less than two weeks I will fly out again. The suitcase remained open and ready – I will be going back to West Africa for my last work trip this year.

Système D stands for débrouillard. There is a long tradition in Africa of people making do with what they have. People have forever been making utilitarian goods out of things we usually discard such as tin cans, rubber tires, CDs and more.

Yet at the same time there is a persistent sense of hopelessness, victim hood and low confidence in the ability of the continent to pull itself out of the morass of poverty, illness and strife.

I see light points everywhere but they don’t seem to add up. There are people I know or have heard of who have been able to harness the innate talent at ingenuity.

My ICRC colleague A. in Bamako changed the outlook and attitude of the rehab center’s welder. He used to sit under a tree waiting for someone to bring him something to weld. When A. Told him “you can make a wheelchair” the welder rolled his eyes. But when A. showed up with a plan and materials he learned how to make a wheelchair. Since then he has made lots of frames. The director of the Centre was so proud of him that he took me over and they posed for a picture. The primitive storage room behind him was full of shiny frames. The director promised he would give him a proper workshop. Now it is a slab of concrete with a corrugated iron roof. No walls, looking more like an oil change station than a manufacturing workshop.

The possibilities are endless but it seems there always needs to be someone else from outside the system who is not paralyzed by the constraints. So too was the man who asked the artisanal shoe and slipper maker, sitting outside the museum on the sidewalk whether he would be interested in learning how to make orthopedic shoes. The shoemaker himself had a disability and could not walk. He said yes and rest is history. He is the only orthopedic shoemaker in the country and now training a young man to take over when he retired in a few years.

It’s been two weeks since we have been back from Maine. I dove back into work after Labor Day, finalizing documents that need to be finished when the main project that has kept me busy closes on September 23.

I facilitated a two weeks virtual seminar on governance, Governing for Good, on LeaderNet,  MSH’s platform for learning and connecting, that closed on Friday. Getting people to post on such seminars is tricky – we don’t quite know why.  With some prodding we ended up hearing from some twenty people (10% of those registered) including two young men from Bhutan which I was thrilled about. They are studying in Thailand. I know their professor who encouraged them. This is really one of the best parts of my job, to establish relationships, even if they are only over the internet, with young people who have little access that all the resources that abound.

My connection with the Naresuan University in Thailand is fascinating. It started with a simple query we received. I followed up and before I knew it I was an associate or adjunct professor with my own email address at this faraway university. Since then I have befriended the director of a new international health systems management program (Masters and PhD) and his mentor, advisor to the Dean and ex Deputy Minister of Health of Thailand.  Since teaching is really my vocation and passion, I am thrilled at these new connections.

I am preparing for a trip under a new contract with ICRC, that allows me to keep working with ICRC colleagues and their rehab center counterparts in Mali and Niger. The trip is supposed to start a week from Monday, if the paperwork gets taken care of. It has been a bit stressful since getting visas for these two countries takes a bit of time. I may not get my passport back until the day I leave.

I have also entered, after hours, into the last three months of getting certified as a Conversational Intelligence™ certified coach. This too is connecting me with people all over the world who have, if not similar professions, at least a passion for helping people find their strengths.  Although the program is a bit pricy I decided to go for it, as I am seeing potentially the end of my long run at MSH, if no other source of funding comes through.  I will move into coaching as a profession rather than as a hobby.

Aside from the reading and doing nothing I actually had one particular goal I had set for myself. It was to finish writing the children’s book (it needed only a closing page) about a retired school bus that goes to Africa. It’s a project that I started with Sita nearly a decade ago. The story had already written itself in my head and Sita would illustrate it. She gave me two books about writing and illustrating children’s stories one Christmas as well as a watercolor pencil set and note book to make the thumbnail sketches.

Fulfilling a promise to myself I did finish the first book, and then I was on a roll. The early mornings in the cottage we rent are full of inspiration, especially when I am the only one up and the sun comes in over the water and through the pine trees.

The next books, which I had not even planned on, tumbled out of my head onto the screen without any effort. And so I wrote book number two, three and four. Now it is a series. In book one the school bus is retired and rather than ending up on the scrap heap, is sold to an outfit in Africa. I had seen old American school busses in West Africa which had inspired me to write the story. I had always wondered how these busses got there.

In book two the school bus takes children on a field trip to the source of a big river. My inspiration for this was my own field trip into the Guinean Highlands – the Fouta Djallon – where I saw the initial trickle that eventually becomes the Niger River. This river baffled explorers for the longest time because it flows away, eastwards, from the Atlantic and into the desert (where there was once a big lake).  It goes underground in the desert and make a big  turn south eastwards near Timbuktu. From there, having lost much water, it flows towards the Bay of Benin, collecting water from tributaries and forming the Niger Delta. This was a deadly place for many explorers when the cause of malaria was not known.

In book three the bus gets sold to a person associated with a district hospital. The bus serves both as an ambulance, carrying a very sick woman to the regional hospital, and taking fieldworkers on a vaccination campaign. In the final book, when the bus breaks down a few too many times, it is retired again. The bus finds its final resting place (not a grave) on a hill overlooking the Atlantic. In my mind this is the place where the French garrison is stationed just north of Dakar on Cape Vert, a  place off limits to normal mortals like me but not to an imaginary school bus. The bus is converted into a home for an old lady who paints during the day, inspired by the ocean and the creatures around her. This is where Maine has slipped in, and Faro’s experience of nature and Axel’s art.

I tested the first two stories on Faro. He liked it. Kids of 5 who are about to go to real school tend to be fascinated with school busses, as I was when first coming to the US. This confirmed to me that the book may be for the 5 to 7 age group.

Sita explained to me that illustrating a children’s book is not entirely the same as scribing a conference about such lofty things as public health, environmental issues, early childhood development or topics for graduate students. She asked me to make the thumbnails so she knows what images are in my mind. This made me think I should take a drawing course. The images I drew were awful; I can’t even draw the school bus. And so I started to describe the scenes while wondering how to perfect my drawing skills in another way.

Two of the five remaining days we are spending further north. We drove to Trention (ME) and found a no frills motel. We got the room right next to the Coca Cola machine, as Axel feared, across from the Trenton airport and right on the main thoroughfare that leads to Mt Desert Island, just outside Bar Harbor’s pricey reach.

We are going to visit the author of The House at Lobster Cove. The book describes the man, George Nixon Black, and the house (‘Kragsyde’) he built across our cove. The house was demolished in 1929. It is a place of some importance to us because it is where Axel’s grandparents met. He was the gardener and she was the maid.

We are spending the night here in Trenton so that we can catch the early morning ferry from Bass Harbor to Swan’s Island. It is the only way to reach the island. It took us more than three hours (slow lane) to get to Trenton. The ferry leaves at 9AM, hence the need for a night’s lodging a little closer.

The author and her husband have built a replica of the house, using the original plans. They did this over a period of 20 years, stone by stone, with their own hands, on Swan’s island. And so we will see what the place where Axel’s grandparents met looked like.