Sylvia's Journal

I have been busy this week adding things to and scratching others off my to do list before my next trip which will take me from Boston westwards to Korea and then Mongolia and then further west to Moscow, Paris, then south to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and then back home.

It took us several weeks to get the itinerary right and within budget limits. This was no small feat and the travel agent and I got very chummy. And then just when we got me routed back via Nairobi and Amsterdam because Air France doesn’t fly daily to and from Kinshasa, our security people put a stop on all Nairobi flights. And so I leave a day earlier than planned which hopefully no one minds.

The Mongolia trip is a repeat of the Philippines sequence of events although I am sure the context is quite different. For one, we will need to work with translators and secondly, I can’t even pronounce the currency. The good thing is that it is Asia which holds the promise of some wicked good and inexpensive massages and having my Filipino toe nails redone.

After Mongolia I have to take a deep breath and plunge into long stretches of flying and waiting: 7 hours to Moscow, 5 hours waiting, 4 hours flying, 8 hours waiting, 7 hours flying and then unknown hours in a car before I can crawl into a real bed, hopefully, in Kinshasa. After that I will request a medal.

Memorial Day came and went. The saturday before did the usual honoring of the ancestors – cleaning the graves, planting geraniums and then a toast and some spilling of some strong liquor – Dutch old genever this time instead of Vodka. We want to create some variety in their afterlife. And as usual the elder Axel and his wife Alice (Axel’s grandparents who I only know from stories) would disapprove, teetotalers as they were. Diane whose house adjoins the cemetery joined us, also as usual, for part of the proceedings and regaled us with stories about some of the people resting alongside Axel’s ancestors who have become mine too, by marriage.

Memorial Day itself is all about rituals as well. The dropping of flowers in the ocean, the march to the cemetery, the speeches and recitings, the taps, the roll call, the high school band and the greetings of people whose names I forget every year. Everyone knows Axel and he knows everyone. He is a local kid and it shows.

The minister gave a nice speech full of metaphors that resonated with me, such as kindling embers. I can’t remember the context but the imagery was wonderful.

Six months after my ankle operation I made my last visit to the orthopedic surgeon. It took me two hours in traffic to arrive at his office. I had an Xray done, waited a bit and then saw him for about 5 minutes. He wiggled my ankle, said ‘congratulations’ and then I was done. For this I sat 2 hours in traffic and the doctor billed 350 dollars. This is what is wrong with the American Healthcare system. If I had been responsible for the whole amount rather than my 15 dollar co-pay, I would have forgone this useless visit.

And so I am now dismissed from his care. I am 75 percent there, he said, with the remaining recovery requiring another 6 months; one year in total, was what I was told when I signed up for the ankle fusion. It’s pretty good right now so another 25% seems like a bonus. If you saw me walking you wouldn’t have guessed I had an operation 6 months ago. It was a good decision.

I am back at work, managing the in-between-trips period to take care of wrapping up the last trip and preparing for the next. The travel is not letting up although I am not complaining – these are interesting assignments that let me be creative and make new connections: another trip with wheelchair service providers, this time to Mongolia, and an effort to get our colleagues in the Democratic Republic of Congo to become a learning organization. Some of this is chartered and some of it unchartered territory – a perfect combination. I have never been to either one of these places and I am looking forward to them. Axel does not and I don’t blame him – it’s a choice between sitting at a desk in Medford and exploring the world for me; for him it is me at home or being by himself. It is an uneven arrangement and will stay that way for a while.

Every year around May 15 I put one year of writing to bed and start a new document, called blog_May 2014-2015. This is a bit like December 31, a time of looking back and reflection. I do re-read some of last year’s writing.

Sita, Jim and Faro are over for our belated annual Easter Party. This is the first time in 30 years that we don’t have a hunt with people combing our land for small brown bags with their name on it and Easter candy inside. My travel schedule got in the way and now the Easter candy is gone. So we have to think of something else. We had some ideas but I was am still in recovery from a long and intense trip and low on energy. We will think about it over the next year, some sort of treasure hunt – holding on to the hunt part but not the part of the bad quality candy.

This morning I followed Faro to the beach. It is one of his favorite places when he comes to see us. He is like an ant, circling back and forth, stopping from time to time to pick up a rock. Having only two hands is a dilemma. You can see his little brain work hard when he spots an interesting stone among the thousands available to him. Both his hands are full, so one has to let go of its stone in order to make place for the new one. He could go on for hours like that. This is indeed the perfect young explorer’s beach. His beachcombing (for rocks only, seaweed and sea gulls are briefly observed but of less interest at the moment) is interrupted by his parents’ ritual trip to the Atomic Café in Beverly for their daily latte. Faro has accepted this as part of life – going to get papa’s latte – he comments matter of factly, as if he was the indulgent parent.

He is now wearing his mom’s sneakers, the first real sneakers I bought when she was 2 years old and getting used to living in Brooklyn. I remember buying the tiny blue sneakers at Zayre’s, a chain that no longer exists. I don’t think they cost more than 5 dollars and here they are, still serviceable after 30 years. Now that is quality. He also wears the Abdou Diouf tee-shirt that Sita received in Senegal after the longtime president Senghor made way for his successor Abdou Diouf in 1981. The tee-shirt no longer has its vivid Senegalese colors and the photo is a bit greyed out but the material is in good shape after all these years.

I hardly had time to get back on my feet. Monday saw me work half the day to take care of unexpected and urgent business. It was supposed to be a vacation day as I stand to lose many days by June 30 if I don’t use them. I am trying to do this since April but have not been very successful.

We drove back from Western Massachusetts later Monday after a lovely lunch with Sita and Jim. We drove home in two cars, picking up one that Sita had used. Making the trip back home from Western Massachusetts is no fun on your own, except when you have a good book to listen to. Axel did but I did not. Our ride home was badly timed. Axel took a better route, while I ended up in the worst traffic jam only 20 miles from home which took me one hour and a half to complete. I tried to not let it affect my mood.

On Tuesday we had planned to work in the garden, trimming bushes and planting seeds. But the long list of ‘to dos’ and the relentless stream of emails that demanded instant responses kept me inside. Worse, they produced so much tension, all in my shoulders, that I called up my masseuse, for an immediate and long appointment. She kneaded the knots out of my upper back and got me to breathe freely again.

Back at home we had our first (of many) asparagus meals: eggs, ham, potatoes and asparagus dribbled with butter – a near daily treat for about one month.

I joined Axel in his weekly meditation class in Gloucester. It seemed like a good idea to focus a bit on stilling the mind after all the franticness. It helped and eased the way into a good night sleep before going on another trip that got inserted at the last minute.

I am now in Washington for a couple of days. Here as in Massachusetts there is much pollen in the air and it interfered with my smooth adjustment to East Coast time. Axel is struggling with an inner ear infection and bad allergies and I just plain got sick from whatever. I hope it is the 24 hour kind of malaise and that by the time I get back to Manchester, all will be well.

It took us 11 hours, rather than the 9 hours the GPS promised us, to get from Boston to DC, from winter to spring, from work and chores to vacation.

Axel did most of the driving. I am good for getting us into and out of cities but can’t handle the long monotony of turnpikes – I would fall asleep. We shortened the time by listening to what our friend Edith calls ‘a cozy mystery’ but there were too many names and characters to remember so I cannot retell the story. For the ride back we have a Christmas Blizzard by Garrison Keillor and Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger, each about 6 or 7 hours of narration. We will have to choose.

Wednesday was a workday, but an easy one – mostly hanging out with colleagues from our projects in Africa and Asia – some people I knew well and others that required introductions.

Thursday was the first vacation day which I started with a sleep-in till 12:30 PM – I don’t think I have slept that long in a decade. We spent a good chunk of the afternoon in the metro going to and from Alexandria’s torpedo factory where our friend Ruth has a gallery of fiber and glass art.

It is warm and balmy here – people wear summer clothes – the kind I only wear on trips abroad it seems. If only this weather would stay, and not get hotter, DC would be a fine place to live.

Last night we partook in one America’s oldest democratic processes, Manchester’s Annual Town Meeting. Our current process emerged out what was initially a matter of the church, with matters of town and church one and the same. The church elders, supposedly wise and god-fearing men, would create the agenda and then vote on it. Although greed and aberrations like the witch trials did happen, by and large these meetings were aimed at securing the ‘common wealth.’ With families intermarrying (as one can see from the gravestones) interests were intertwined and what was good for these men was supposed to be good for all. It was a paternalistic and patronizing system that survived for a very long time (and sometimes I think it is still there).

Somewhere between then and now towns and churches separated and the business of running the town became a secular affair. Still, our annual town meeting still starts with an invocation, a request to God to bless our decision making process. After 1876 the first edition of Robert’s Rules of Order appeared which are now standard practice. But they are not Roberta’s Rules of order and they have a certain cerebral masculinity about them. The process is stilted and allows for serial monologues and very little evidence of people listening to each other – rather people waiting in line to say their mostly well prepared speeches. It’s is funny that I can only remember the more spontaneous comments by the women in the assembly – but all comments, whether applauded or not, tend to fall like lead balloons in a sandbox – and there they stay. There is no dialogue as messy exchanges are taboo in a process that is based on Order.

And so I marvel and wonder about this particular New England democratic process where people vote on what is brought to the table by a fraction of the audience. They are the ones who have done the homework and are well versed in the issues. We are asked to validate what they put before us and our ‘aye’ is a vote of trust. But sometimes trust gets dented a bit and then things are not so smooth anymore and implementing the idea of self government is no longer easy.

Now we have oldtimers who want to preserve the town of old and the wealthy newcomers who have bought the multi million mansions built by the rubber and train barons of the 1900s, or tore them down and built McMansions. Interests are widely divergent, proposals are full of emotion, opinions are presented as facts, and figures are interpreted in ways that suit the cause pursued. You can do anything with numbers I learned a long time ago. We couldn’t possible get through the agenda in one night.

I suspect that most minds already made up beforehand. The real work of course, as in democratic government anywhere, is done long before the actual voting takes place. So in some way this town meeting provides the illusion of participation but it is a very superficial kind of participation, mine included – I got a lot of knitting done.

Axel is more involved and attended meetings beforehand; he writes letters in the local paper and huddles with others about how to deal with the tension between short term wishes and long term debt. The numbers are staggering, I think, for a small town.

The most controversial items were related to the donation of forty+ acres of land; a big chunk of ledge land that has, as per stipulation in the gift, to be converted into playing fields that will cost us 5 million dollars to be paid off over the next 15 years with money that will come partially from our own wallet. For this purpose we increased the Conservation Preservation Act (CPA) tax to 3% something that Axel tried to get passed more than a decade ago. At that time the voters grudgingly accepted one half percent; now, with the gift and field dangling in front of us, the 3% proposal was given a resounding ‘aye’ without any discussion. It seemed that the whole town came out to vote on this; it kept us busy till nearly 11 PM. We will miss tonight’s continuation of the town meeting but attendance will probably drop off a lot as the controversial issues have been decided or moved to the ballot later in May.

I arrived in a cold Boston and was picked up by our friend Edward who now has a livery service. His car has neon lighting under the dashboard and in the cupholder (why?) and one can change the color from pink, to purple, blue, red, yellow and white (why?). The heated seat was nice as I was thoroughly chilled from my few minutes waiting at the curb. I choose the color blue for the lighting to stay with the theme of ‘cold.’

Axel was still in Toronto where he attended the annual meeting of Sita’s Valueweb. We were both invited but I choose the Philippines instead. As a result Axel drove to and from Toronto on his own – returning late Saturday evening, leaving me the day to unpack and settle into normal again.

Sita flew in from Toronto in the afternoon and was picked up by Jim and Faro who then headed to Lobster Cove and stayed the night. Faro was sick for the very first time in his young life (just after I noticed that this kid had never been sick). He seemed not perturbed by it while his parents were.

Faro has learned to say van Gogh the Dutch way with the scratchy ‘g’ that Americans can’t really handle. He responds to the question ‘who is your favorite painter?’ with the correct pronunciation, not the American ‘Van Goh.’ Sita and Jim are determined to have him sufficiently fluent in Dutch to play with his second cousins when we all get together 2 years from now to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Faro’s over-opa ‘Plop.’