Sylvia's Journal

Four days after getting back we are battling colds and I find myself feeling rather low after the high of Japan. This has something to do with the complex arrangements of accepting assignments here and there with always the chance that things emerge at dates different than planned, having to say no when a yes was desired and not being able to fully support this or that colleague. I suppose it is the life of a consultant, but luckily still one with health insurance.

Listening to the news and watching the news on TV didn’t help lift my spirits but one thing did – an interview in Commonwealth, a State of Massachusetts’ magazine, with the state’s youngest elected mayor. He is 6 months out of college, 22 years old, openly gay and filled with great ideas and earnest plans for one of the poorest and sickest towns in the state. If he is able to do what he has in mind one should be buying real estate there now.

The kid has taken advantage of program designed for poor teenagers to make them more politically savvy. It seems they worked. He found and attended these programs with a dogged perseverance and intentionality where the rest of his cohort was probably on facebook. At fifteen he already knew that if you put a group of people together that wants to change something, they can – a paraphrase of Margaret Mead’s famous quote. His interview is good leadership reading that I plan to use.

We deposited the Japanese good luck head at Tessa and Steve, went for a long walk with the dogs and were treated to Steve’s winter soup and some fancy hard cheeses, Christmas gifts. Axel still hasn’t colored in his good luck head but he is keeping his lucky penny and chance tightly in his pocket. We have good hopes. Some of his good luck rubbed off on me when I managed to get the last non-middle economy comfort seat on the 15 hour flight from Atlanta to Jo’burg. Not everyone would call that luck but I do.

Sita is back from Davos and rubbing elbows with the rich and famous. She claims to be looking really pregnant now. We can’t wait to see her next week when she has a gig in Boston.

We are home again and trying to help our confused bodies figure out whether it is day or night. This made for fitful sleep, waking up every two hours.

We came home to the noxious fumes that are emitted by our current political climate – expected but still repulsive in this election year. There are the irritating statements of the republican candidates to each other and to Obama (the prize goes to the one who compared Obama to the disgraced captain of the Italian cruise ship). Our local daily, which Axel calls The Gloucester Daily Fish Wrapper, opened with the headline “American Dream in Peril: Fast Action Needed.” I suppose all this is still better than Afghanistan but it is only a matter of degrees.

I finished my long overdue reading of Ann Jones’ Winter in Kabul.’ Her experiences in those early post-Taliban years (which now is referred to by some as the good times) match ours, especially the section about education. It is a sad indictment of the judgment of all the experts who have converged onto Afghanistan at such a high cost that, at least in the education sector, things are not a whole lot better than 9 years ago. At least in the health sector there is a little bit more to show for all the effort.

I am now redirecting my gaze to the south, more specifically South Africa, Namibia and Lesotho, where the next assignment will take me 10 days from now.

“My frontier woman!” exclaimed Axel when he came down this morning and saw me stoking a good fire while a snowstorm was raging outside. I had a squirrel pie in the oven, trapped it myself! Actually I don’t like squirrels and prefer pumpkin pie; but what else can you do with such abundance?

This morning is admin morning and so Axel is in charge. Admin is his job in our household. It is not much of a frontier job; rather tedious. There is the refinancing, the upcoming taxes and insurance stuff. Life is so very complicated. The days of squirrel trapping are long gone.

I am happy to announce that I finally won from my sister on WordFeud, in Spanish no less. We are returning to an English board for our next game. Playing in a language you don’t know is rather time consuming. Half of the words I laid out were guesses. Even the Spanish-English dictionary didn’t know them but the WordFeud app accepted the word.

Although I enjoy the intercontinental scrabble games, smartphones have complicated our lives and driven up our phone budget. I called T-Mobile this morning and got a nice lady on the phone to explain to me whether I can play WordFeud when in Japan without incurring enormous charges. We try to understand how the charges work. I am sure that is part of T-Mobile’s strategy: complicate things for the customer so they give up trying to understand and blissfully ignorant rake up enormous charges doing stupid things like playing scrabble on line.

We have to be so informed and conscious of things all the time. It’s a job all by itself to untangle the webs our wallets get caught in.

Sita is heading East, to her annual Davos Summit stomping ground. I asked her if she looked pregnant – yes, she said, it’s pretty obvious now. This may be her last trip for a while. I am glad she is travelling in style, business class. All pregnant women should.

Axel and I will fly in the other direction on Sunday, not in style, to Japan for a whirlwind trip that includes teaching two half day classes and two full day classes in between our arrival on Tuesday and our departure on Monday.

Axel is supposed to go touristing even though he said he would come watch me teach – how sweet but how silly. I will put him on the Jacob de Zoet trail in Nagasaki and on a paper trail in Tokyo. I am sure he will amuse himself. We are particularly looking forward to many culinary adventures.

Last night our friend Woody came over with his dog who was like a lost soul, walking frantically to and fro looking for her buddy of 13 years. But her buddy, riddled with cancer, was no longer of this world. Woody described the holistic veterinary practice where she spent her last hour – it made me all teary although I have never had to go through such an experience. There were candles, music and rescue remedy for the dog (I remember this was administered to us after the plane crash) before the final injection.

All of us were very sad. Her very distraught buddy left us with a small puddle on the hallway rug. We forgave her and put the rug in the shower.

This morning there was snow on the ground – not much but enough to cause traffic complications. Knowing that my last meeting of the day would end at 5 PM I happily skipped the early morning rise and left for work after the morning rush instead of before. It is nice not to have to get up and leave in the dark (or worse: snow and dark) – but of course it meant coming home in the dark. It’s going to be dark on one side of the day or the other.

I spent my day completing my Kenya assignment, working on a corporate assignment and some small stuff in between. Adding work up to 8 hours was, once again, a challenge. My departure for Japan next week is a relief and a reprieve from this headache.

Yesterday, a holiday, Axel and I went to the Peabody and Essex Museum in Salem. It was partially a preparation for our trip to Nagasaki next week. We were there to take another look at the artifacts that related to the Dutch trade with Japan, now that we have both read the 1000 autumns of Jacob de Zoet, a sad tale about cultural miscommunications, pride and greed.

The paintings of Decima island in Nagasaki Bay look so much cleaner than life must have been (and was described in the book) in the late 1700s, as do most other paintings of the trading posts in India, China and Indonesia at that time: idealized images of what the westerners wanted these places to look like.

We admired the porcelain ware, much of it commissioned by the Dutch, and the intricate craftsmanship of the Chinese and Japanese artisans who made furniture and household goods for the European and American markets.

We also visited the Shapeshifting exhibit of Native American artistry, old and modern. Its piece de resistance, at least for us, was the thirty or so foot whale hanging from the ceiling made entirely from white plastic chairs.

And all through this, in the background, I play scrabble with my sister in Belgium; she on her iPad and me on my smartphone. She has beaten me royally several times already on an English board, a French board and now we are playing on a Spanish board – a language neither one of us speaks. We are putting down words of which we don’t know the meaning. Playing in a language you don’t know is a lot of work and I am not sure I like it. Next we’ll try Dutch, still a formidable challenge for me.

It was exactly two years ago that Axel introduced his students at SOLA to the power of a vision and the importance of being able to write with power. He did that by comparing Martin Luther King’s speech with that of Karzai’s. The latter was a sorry speech, with no power and no vision. Two years later we can’t even be disappointed – the speech had already predicted that nothing great would come from him.

That was also a period where Axel returned to his teaching roots and realized that teaching is his calling. I had known this all along but the wishes of others sometimes obscure our calling. Luckily it is never too late to respond to the call once we hear it. Axel is researching where to register to get a certificate in teaching English as a second language.

Yesterday I biked to Quaker meeting in bitter cold weather under sunny skies. It’s hard work to bike in the cold but I wouldn’t give it up except for a snow storm. We sat in mostly silence which was even more work than biking. I keep telling myself that I have to take a meditation class, and a yoga class, and this, and that, but nothing comes of it. I have my travels as an excuse but they are not. I feel a bit in limbo.

Ted came by to introduce us to S from Afghanistan. Another remarkable young woman who is studying for her MPH and needs connections I have. She needs an internship to get more hands on experience in maternal and child health, preferably in Kabul before she completes her course work. So that will be the task for today, a holiday to celebrate MLK’s work and words.

I had just started on a rather girly looking sweater for a new born when word (and jpeg) reached us that it is a boy that is in the making, a baby boy Bliss. And so I unraveled the second sweater in as many days.

Sita and Jim will have a baby boy on May 28 if everything goes according to plan. This little boy is lucky to have three sets of eager grandparents awaiting him, a teeny cousin, Nora, a wonderful set of aunties and uncles in close proximity and then of course the best parents he could wish for. Yesterday there were many exclamations all around Massachusetts: “It’s a boy!”

And so we are settling in for the seemingly long wait of four more months. I am trying to arrange my travel schedule so that late May/early June is stay-at-home time. That may turn out to be a big challenge.

Today I am starting an intense period of travel with a trip to Kenya. In the next three months I will be visiting 8 countries, all in Africa except Japan later this month. It temporarily solves my billing problem, finding enough billing codes to fill 8 hour days.

When on a mission like this I have the luxury of having a code for the entire period plus some spillover for after I am back. And then of course I won’t have to get up at 4:30 to get quickly to Cambridge, ahead of thousands of fellow commuters (although some people would think that is still better than commuting by plane to Africa).

I unraveled the sweater I had nearly completed, only one and a half sleeve left. I decided I didn’t like the product and was probably never going to wear it. This is as incomprehensible to Axel as folding up the 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle and putting it back in the box. But the pleasure of these activities is in the making, not the product itself.

Yesterday we went to see 102 year old uncle Charles who still lives by himself in a trailer park in back of a shopping center. It doesn’t sound very good but he is happy there and has a good support system, and he can walk to McDonalds for a cup of coffee if no one brings one to him.

His trailer is sparsely but sufficiently furnished. There is no clutter. There is just enough of everything for him and for a guest if one were to show up. We returned with the bag of Christmas gifts (a jar of mustard, a bar of chocolate and some tangerines) because such a bag is clutter and not needed. We can re-use it, he could not.

We drove to each of Wareham’s beaches and sat in the car looking at the afternoon sun and the changing colors of impending dusk while Charles was telling us stories – me knitting on the back seat (the knitting undone today).

The Wareham and Onset beaches are stunningly beautiful. We ended our tour with tea and coffee at Dunkin Donuts (we should have gone to McD) and a chocolate donut for Charles. He doesn’t have to worry about gaining weight or cholesterol.

On the way in we drove via New Bedford. We had a plan to go to the Whaling Museum but we left the house too late. All we had time for was lunch. On the way back, too late to come home and prepare dinner, we stopped at Ikea and had a very inexpensive dinner before dragging ourselves through the entire upstairs showroom looking for an elusive cabinet that Axel had set his eyes on.

The last time we were there was a few months after our accident and the image of dragging ourselves on our injured limbs stayed. Once again my limbs are painful and once again I felt unable to complete the circuit, much to Axel’s dismay. I told him he can go as often as he wants by himself when I am travelling – there will be many opportunities in the next few months.

The news from Afghanistan continues to be dismal. On the heels of orphan abuses, reported in the NYT, and today’s deadly explosions in Kandahar came the Sahar Gul story reported by Jon Boone in the Guardian UK. The wicked mother and sister in law have been arrested. It is an archetypal story worthy of the Grimm brothers – though I am not sure there will be a Cinderella ending to this one. And I know that for this and other similar headline grabbing stories countless untold ones remain in dark basements.

The unraveling of the sweater felt a little cathartic.

We welcomed the New Year with a bagpipe serenade. Our friend Steven plays many instruments. He brought two to our house, the sitar and his bagpipe.

The sitar he played indoors, the bagpipe was pulled out at midnight to play Auld Lang Syne. Standing under a crystal clear sky he sent the bagpipe’s haunting tones across Lobster Cove from where they bounced back to where we were standing. A dog barked next door and then fireworks (of the teenage boy variety) started someplace else. We rushed inside as it was very cold.

That was the end of a lovely evening with our musician friends from down the street – wine made by a Manchesterite in Italy, fish soup, Dutch apple pie. Around these delicacies we wove stories about cross cultural music, Quakers and Buddhists and the persistence of religious images that we bring with us from our childhood.

I finished another puzzle, obsessively I might say. There is no one to help, Axel is clueless about puzzles, and the puzzle doesn’t progress unless I do it. It is done now and I can put it back in the box for later, when I retire.

My other new year’s holiday project is the knitting of a sweater from the wool Sita gave me for Christmas. I had to go to the yarn shop for some technical assistance which the knitting guru gladly provided. All the while I am playing scrabble with my sister and niece over the phone. I am doing quite poorly.

I am also doing poorly with my joints and tendons which all seem to be permanently inflamed – this takes some of the fun out of our daily walks with Tessa and her dogs.