Sylvia's Journal

Many of my colleagues are at the big HIV/AIDS conference in Washington. Every morning I receive a lot of blog posts in my mail box. Everyone is blogging like crazy. In my mind I imagine the end of the day’s session and everyone running off with their laptops and Pads to blog about what they learned/heard today; only a few bewildered souls standing around wanting to just talk. Ha!

It is good that the conference reports are upbeat because we need upbeatness. I attended a brown bag lunch presentations yesterday. A colleague from Lesotho with whom I have worked earlier in the spring talked about the work we are doing there with orphans and vulnerable children. The work is good and important but also a drop on a hot plate. The numbers of HIV infections among young women is staggering and the number of children left vulnerable to abuse (both physical and socially as they are being cheated out of inheritances) is frightful. Especially if you consider that in about 30 years’ time these children will be governing the country. It brings images from futuristic doomsday movies to mind.

The contrast with my life is beyond description but I will try nevertheless:

I drive home in a car I own that is in good shape because I have money to maintain it. The roads are in fairly good shape and the government has ordered maintenance work on the Tobin Bridge. It creates two daily traffic jams, in and out of Boston, but I can count on the bridge not collapsing under me one day.  I arrive at my beautiful home, inherited from my in-laws, that is situated right next to the ocean and has a small beach that we have mostly to ourselves.

I have a loving husband of more than 30 years, two grown up kids who have work (and cars, and one of them a home) and found good mates. I have one healthy grand child who would not have survived the ordeal of birth if he had lived in the mountains of Lesotho, his mom might not have either.

We pour ourselves some drinks and wander down to the beach where we are the only people. We sit by the water’s edge and talk. We decide it is a good time for a pre-dinner swim and change in our bathing suits; we go back to the beach and discover the water is icy cold. We stand around for a while and then sit down again at the water’s edge and talk some more. Then it is time for dinner, a collaborative efforts (Axel picked the menu and did the shopping, picked the chard out of our garden and I assembled the feta-tomato-pita pizzas). We take our plates outside, pour ourselves a glass of cold white wine and eat while we look at the glistening cove and the flowers that surround us. We talk some more. A few chores later it is time for bed. All is well. I wanted to say ‘we are blessed,’ but that presumes that we deserve to be blessed. But what about all these orphans in Lesotho and their predators?

Monday was recovery day, requiring my presence only at 2 phone meetings. The rest of the day I reconnected with Lobster Cove, its land and its water.

The garden had suffered from the up and down weather and a recent rainstorm had flattened the potato plants which are also infested with white flies. Axel feared that our harvest was going to be poor. I decided to investigate and dug up 3 plants. This produced such an abundance of potatoes, especially small ones that we decided to leave the rest alone and let them small ones mature.

I harvested most of the beets, gold and red, several large and moth-eaten leaves of the Portuguese kale and plucked about a pint of purple beans. Thus our dinner was red, golden, green and purple. Axel added a vase with pastel-colored snap dragons from the garden and our home grown feast was complete! We had this fabulous dinner outside after a quick cooling off in the cove. Things can’t get much better than that (except for the presence of our kids and grandkid).

I learned that while I was away Tessa started her own business. I can’t quite understand how we produced two business owners, but we did. Tessa’s company is called Align Graphic Design, LLC and Sita’s is dpict. I realized that I also have two family members who have ‘domained’ their own name (Tessa and Axel). Tessa’s site is under construction and the other is a little inactive (announcing my return on September 8, 2011).

Although I should be used to this by now, it never ceases to amaze me how one moment Axel and I speak via Skype, thousands of miles apart and then poof, we are in the same place again. Of course the ‘poof’ includes 17 hours in planes (this time the baby was sitting in front of me). Still, thanks to the first (or second?) law of thermodynamics and the Bernoulli principle, we are re-united.

During my lay-over in Amsterdam I bought Axel his favorite Dutch drink: Corenwijn. It comes in a 900 gram stoneware bottle. I tried once to buy him Corenwijn that came in a plastic bottle but it was not what he wanted; and so I added about 1 kg to my already overweight hand luggage. I stayed away from the cheese shop (that would have added a few more kgs) and then filled every empty nook and cranny in my hand luggage with lightweight licorice.

Out of curiosity about all the fuss I watched the Hunger Games on my tiny TV screen. I am not an action movie fan but I can manage on a small screen because the blood and gore is less visible.  After having satisfied my curiosity I switched to Robin Williams with his Weapons of Self Destruction. My neighbor had been watching it and was in stitches for a good part of the trip; it was rather contagious and, as a bonus, it killed the time.

I arrived in Boston with plane loads full of young people who were being whisked off to camps and language schools – it is that time of the year. It is hard to imagine crossing the Atlantic to go to camp. But then again, I flew for 18 hours to facilitate a two-day meeting.

It is summer again. I put my warm sweater, scarf and coat back in the closet to wait for our fall and donned proper summer clothes. It was hot and humid in Lobster Cove. If it wasn’t for the off-shore breeze I would have gone for a swim.

I finished my writing assignment at 5 minutes after 5PM. It was a long haul on a very hot and muggy day. It is the first draft only. I will have another week to write improve on it when I come back from South Africa. That trip starts the day after tomorrow. I have to shift my focus to that assignment and will do so during the very long trip from Boston to Atlanta to Johannesburg.

But first I am going to focus on tomorrow. Tomorrow is July 14 – it will be five years since we fell out of the sky, a black day that was otherwise a New England 10+ day. It was also a Saturday. We now know what will and what will not get better. For me this knowledge (that some things – ankle/arm – won’t get better) is fairly recent– for Axel it is old news (brain/arm). Although we will have to get used to living with some degree of handicap, living at all remains rather miraculous.

We declined to go to the ’14 juillet’ party that we were supposed to attend five years ago. We could just imagine the conversation and didn’t want any part of that. Instead we are going to a ‘diner blanc’ with tons of other people in Gloucester; my first time, Axel’s second. I watched this picture of this event last year, all homesick and wishing I could have been there. Now I will be.

We will join 7 other friends for this fest that was invented some 25 years ago in Paris. It is a sort of pop-up dinner party where everyone is dressed in white and brings in everything that they need for dinner (tables, chairs, plates, silverware, tablecloth, decorations, candles and of course food) and when all is consumed they pack everything up leaving nothing behind.

For the first time in a month we are alone and there are no significant events on the horizon, other than watching Faro grow and one short trip for me. We have the house all to ourselves.

The debris from the party have been cleared away, the bottles and cans recycled and Axel is trying to revive the grass dance floor with an overdose of water. Tessa cleaned the floors before hopping on a plane to Florida for a week with her in-laws.

I am returning to my morning routines, abandoned when Faro announced himself five weeks ago.  This includes meditation, lots of water and a diet that did me much good – better than the take out, the pizza, sausages, ice cream and birthday cake from the last few weeks.

I am also returning to a strict discipline of writing one session a day for an e-learning course on change – the first draft should be done by the end of the week.  It’s a little easier to do this at home than at work because in the office there are so many distractions, other stuff to do.

As part of the writing process I am doing a lot of reflection on my own recent change experiences and am finally able to take some distance, look at myself as an observer. As I write about the stages of change, of grieving and loss I recognize every step of the way. Observed experience makes it easier to write about change.

This morning I organized a demonstration for my colleagues in Arlington and Cambridge of a group facilitation tool that I was introduced to only 10 days ago. It helps people who may or may not be in the same place find meaning in the chaotic events and complexity of our times by thinking better together. I added some complexity on my own by trying to getting colleagues who reside in several Southern African countries in on the demo.  I was only partially successful and learned a lesson or two about working with technology from a distance.

Last year I looked wistfully at pictures of Tessa’s birthday beach party, an annual event, on facebook, while sitting at my little China-made desk in my bedroom of house 33 in Karte seh in Kabul, Afghanistan.

I saw pictures that needed an explanation: people in weird poses on our kitchen floor, everyone with a headset on. Axel explained: this was silent disco; they were dancing to wicked good music. A friend of Tessa and Steve is a sought-after disc jockey on the Boston club scene. He graciously offered to come and DJ at her party last year, bringing lots of headsets so the neighborhood wouldn’t know that a disco party was going on. He did so again this year and I got to be in it rather than looking in from the outside.

Whoever came up with the silent disco idea is a genius. If you take your headset off there is no music. And so you can dance on loud music if you want, alone or with others, and if you want to have a conversation you simply take the headset off. I thought of our conversations yesterday about insights and innovation: someone made an “either/or” into an “and/and.” You can have your cake (loud music) and eat it too (have a conversation), AND all this without pissing off the neighbors.

Axel had been dreading the party a bit – in litigious America having 30 to 40 young people on your property, mix in much beer and stronger stuff that slips in unnoticed, along with random people you don’t know is a risky thing. Besides, his recliner is in the living room. Tessa responded very wisely to these concerns by telling her friends to bring a tent or sleeping bag and stay the night and not allowing strangers to tag along with friends, unless explicit permission was provided by her (in case of new partners).

By looking out of the window I can see, judging from the number of cars still on our property, that many heeded the suggestion of staying for the night. Those who left will miss out on one of the best experiences Lobster Cove can offer: waking up on a sunny Sunday morning and then have Tessa and Steve cook a hearty breakfast and eat it on the beach.

Tessa also had some strong young men take the recliner up to our bedroom. And so we are for the first time in nearly a month sleeping in the same room again. This vacated the living room and made it, with all the other rooms downstairs available for overnighters without a tent: there are couches and Afghan carpets, and, after a brief inspection this morning, there are people using them.

We did not last very long into the night – we are after all more than double the age of most – but we had a great time hanging out around the fire and then dancing with our head phones on. Our daughters have wonderful friends. They are in a stage of life where engagements, weddings and jobs are the subject of most conversations. There were serious talks about getting, having and leaving jobs, or mates for that matter; and wistful conversations about travelling (they had done, or wished they had done).

But they also wanted to know about us, with lots of questions about Axel’s arm in the sling, why the rotator cuff operation, why Afghanistan, the plane crash. Some were actually following my blog and knew a lot about our lives. At times Axel started to talk about something we did, and was greeted with the words, “oh, we know all about that already!” But some things don’t go in the blog and so there remains much to talk about.

It is Sunday morning now and, after a brief inspection of the after-party debris, I went back upstairs to reminisce about my 27^th summer which took place in Beirut, 33 years ago. I realized that some things don’t change. I too was in the middle of a transition then, of both jobs and mates and about to start on the trip of a life time, with Axel, to Afghanistan.

On Saturday morning, at dead low tide, Axel and I walked across the near empty cove to inspect whether the mussels that Roger and Axel had transplanted from Ipswich some two weeks ago, had settled into their new home. We found them happily sticking to rocks and each other. The experiment seems to have been successful and we are proud of our mussel heroes: they are tasked with repopulating the cove with their species. We are ready for phase II – another transplant.

The clear water allowed us to inspect the aquatic life in the cove. We saw new kinds of seaweeds, one that fills like a bladder when under water, with a bubble of air providing a bright contrast at the top of the green slimy thing. It’s everywhere now where three years ago there were none.

A kind of snail shell, maybe another variety of the hermit crab, is also more abundant than before and then there is the invading red algae that are choking some of the other seaweeds in the cove.

We were happy to see two small lobsters poking out from under a rock, menacingly raising their tiny claws up to us in a defensive attack stance. One medium sized crab walked across the bottom with a small squid under its arm – the large eye of the squid looking like a jewel on a white gown.  Unfortunately the crab met another crab without a squid and a deadly attack (for the squid) ensued. I could hear them screaming ‘It’s mine, I found it,” and “I want it and I am bigger than you so I will take it away.”

Hordes of little hermit crabs converged around the fighters. They knew that in the end they would be the winners, catching the shreds from the poor squib that was torn into pieces as each crab was trying to gobble up as much of the squid. Soon there would be nothing left to fight over.  We left the crabs to themselves and headed back to shore for a breakfast of freshly picked Swiss chard mixed in with freshly laid eggs from a nearby chicken farm. Life is good and about to get even better.