Sylvia's Journal

The days just before a trip out, especially a month long trip that includes assignments in three different countries, is like white water rafting, the exciting part of it. I do remember the still eddies on the side but they now are nowhere to be found. I make long days, leaving the house at 5:30 and returning more than 12 hours later. This will continue for a while.

We can now both be found at MSH – Axel talking with the Nigeria folks and I with the South Africa folks – we are both excited about our assignments that are complex and challenging – we like it that way.

Last night Sita took us out to an Afghan restaurant in Cambridge. It was one of her many Christmas presents. She was in Cambridge to work with Harvard on a design for some event that needs her expertise – not just her scribing expertise but also her increasingly deep knowledge of how groups can best come to good and joint decisions that are intended to make the world a better place. After all these years it looks like her and my mission in life are closing in on each other.

This was the first time we ate in an Afghan restaurant that was not in Afghanistan. We now know all the dishes and could compare them to those we had often, either in the MSH office kitchen or in our own guesthouse kitchen. We also noticed how the dishes were Americanized and concluded that this was not an improvement. For one the servings were much too large and so we returned with a doggie bag that was sufficient to provide several meals in the coming days.

The other part of Americanization was of course the wall covered with wine racks and the hard liquoir cabinet. One does what one has to do. We ordered a beer, mom and dad only, as Sita is a very disciplined expectant mom who doesn’t drink any alcohol and stays away from runny cheeses. We are very proud of her.

I am sitting in the orange room with its Chinese brocade curtains, next to the lime green room with its thousands of instruments, which is next to the pink-walled dining room which is next to the mustard green hallway and the turquoise kitchen. Oh and we slept in green-blue room next to the pink bathroom. And we admired the pistachio baby room that is starting to get ready to receive the little tyke a few months hence.

We are at Sita and Jim’s house in Easthampton – a riot of colors, instruments and things that once were part of our households (in Senegal, in New York, in New York, in West Newbury, in Manchester and in Kabul) – a museum of eclectic living one could call it.

After taking a walk with one daughter and our two granddogs in Ravenswood park, we headed west to be with the other daughter, now 6 months pregnant. We are beginning to ease into our new role as grandparents – I already love it.

The end of the week was marked by a series of intense conversations, some that left me deflated and discouraged and other that lifted me up and gave me hope. It is amazing how radically one’s outlook can change through words strung together in conversation – head down after one and head up after the other.

These talks are all related, in one way or another, to our pre-retirement future; a still very long way forward that is entirely uncharted. This stands in sharp contrast to our lives pre-Afghanistan, when the path was rather straight.

After a yummy Japanese dinner with more sushi than was good for us, in busy downtown Northampton, we delivered the paper goods Axel acquired in Japan, cluttering our daughtes’ houses up and uncluttering ours. I also delivered the first of many knitted baby clothes.

The first grade luck ticket Axel got in Japan has done its work already. Axel and I will both be leaving for Africa next Saturday, he via Amsterdam to Abuja and I via Atlanta () to Jo’burg. Axel has been hired by my organization to help one project write its final report. At one point I had considered applying for a job there. Now Axel can check the place out for himself. We did take note of all the security notices about Nigeria – nothing new after Afghanistan, but disturbing nevertheless. Al Quaeda, in one form or another, is everywhere. Killing the boss of a network doesn’t kill the network, nor does it gets at any of the conditions that feed it.

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).