Sylvia's Journal

My head is spinning this morning with thoughts about getting ready for a month absence. I woke up exactly 12 hours before my plane is supposed to take off from Logan; this is not much time in which to finish packing for two different countries/continents/climates/assignments, hold an hour-long coaching conversation with Oumar in Guinea by phone, have a massage, do all my back ups, and get centered.

Yesterday was my last day in the office for an entire month and was therefore crammed full of meetings. During the periods in between meetings I started to think about cleaning out my corner of the office and my desk with its accumulated stuff from 22 years.

This includes many course binders and small gifts that visitors and returning colleagues have brought me over the years. I do not want to bring those home or to Afghanistan and so I played Santa Claus a little: Karen got the stuffed lemur because she was with the Peace Corps in Madagascar; Erin got the binders from the first training of trainers course that launched me in my current career, more than 20 years ago, because she likes organizational psychology. Meghann got the map of Afghanistan in lapis and other colored stones because she lived there and Nina got the Azerbaijani dolls because she is from that part of the world. There is more, much more, but I had no time to think through who is to get what. The gift has to fit someone.

I had a phone consultation with a tax accountant about what I need to be aware of as we change residence. The MSH office had provided me with IRS informational booklets with such dense legalese that I needed a specialist to understand the key points. I am only slightly wiser now and need another such conversation. At least I now know the questions to ask.

After nearly 11 hours in the office it took me another two to get home. For some reason, when it rains, the traffic gets unhinged. And when it rains for a week the traffic gets unhinged even more. I crawled home at a snail’s pace in the old car with its broken radio and with nothing to nosh on except toothpicks. Being stuck in traffic with someone else, or having something to listen to is manageable; but without that two hours is excruciatingly long and most boring. I called home to whine but was asked to leave a message which does not have the same effect as having Axel’s voice encouraging me by telling me what waiting for me at home. I was also very hungry and my right foot was hurting – it does not like stop-and-go traffic.

In Afghanistan there are traffic jams too but at least I will be chauffeured, always in company. I can practice my Dari on the driver and peek out into the city I am not allowed to walk around in on foot.

Our grand-dog Chicha became very nervous when she saw me haul two large suitcases out of the basement. She is still traumatized about her parents taking off for Tennessee without telling her. She kept looking at me with those sad eyes that only dogs have. But how could I explain that the big green suitcase was for taking winter clothes to Afghanistan via Addis Ababa?

Since the project in Afghanistan officially ends in June 2010, I will not be employed for a year, even though I am hired for a year. Verbally the project has been extended to September, hence the 12 months, but this is not yet formalized with signatures and such. This makes me an employee on TDY (temporary duty) and therefore not eligible for a shipping allowance. Whatever I plan to use in Afghanistan, clothes, hobbies, books, Scrabble, needs to be stuffed in suitcases that we carry along.

I am packing stuff that, if for one reason or another, the place becomes uninhabitable after the elections in August, I would not be too upset about losing yet, paradoxically, is important enough to bring. Still, it’s hard to anticipate what I would want to have with me through the fall.

Yesterday’s fall weather continued throughout the day and the walk with the dog never materialized during the short dry spells between down pours. Nevertheless I made it mostly a vacation day, my last opportunity to use up vacation days that cannot be carried over into the next fiscal year (this is for our own good!).

I spent a few hours sitting on the couch with my back turned to the wet and windy outside, knitting and reading. The book is about the concubine-turned-empress dowager Yeho-Nala in China who ruled from the mid-1800s into 1900. I learned that the famous Boxer Uprising was not rebellion, as portrayed in my school history books, but an attempt to clear the foreigners out of the Middle Kingdom by followers of a martial arts sect (the Righteous Harmonious Fists, nicknamed the Shadow Boxers or Boxers), with the encouragement of the empress dowager. I finally understand this nervousness of the Chinese authorities about the Falun Gong followers. By comparison, Afghanistan’s current troubles seem relatively mild.

I surveyed the garden and noticed that my clever scheme of planting peas next to asparagus did not work. I had reasoned that the asparagus would serve as a trellis but the wind blew them over and the foliage keeps the sun out. Axel will have to do some emergency repair in the next few days, in between his thousand and one things that need to be initiated, finished, handed over, and articulated.

The longest day of the year has passed and we are officially in the summer season. But outside gale winds are howling and the waves in the Cove are whipped up as if we are on the high seas. And then there is the rain, incessant. We can see the grass growing in front of our eyes, and the weeds. The broccoli, peas and tomato plants are knocked over; today is another dismal day.

Dismal too is the dying around us. The father of one of Sita’s classmates died at the age of 58 of a stroke and it made us talk about stress. All day yesterday was about stress-free living. We were actually quite good at it and may have gained a bit more longevity.

First we met with friends from DC who were over on family business, at a small breakfast place in Salem, the kind with low prices, overweight people eating bacon, jovial waitresses, greasy plastic table cloths, and, according to Jerry, excellent home fries. Jerry’s company works in Afghanistan and he will connect Axel to his colleagues in Kabul.

After we said goodbye to our friends we visited the Dutch Seascapes exhibit at the Peabody and Essex Museum. Compared to the dismal weather and the high waves in those pictures, our current weather predicament is minor. We also don’t have the huge towering cliffs, Spanish galleons shooting at us and large scary fish with bulging eyes waiting to devour the shipwrecked.

I am very attentive to gender balance these days and noticed that women were essentially missing from these windows into the 1600s. The only women I saw where fish sellers, washerwomen and a few noble women coming to buy fresh fish. There may have been a few prostitutes but that was hard to tell from the tiny figures that were only marginal to the grand narrative of danger and the insignificance of man: threatening skies, wild seas, sharp rocks, scary fish and big wooden boats with guns.

We walked around a bit longer in rained out Salem, watching musicians trying to stay dry while making the music they were hired to play, presumably to attract and entertain tourists. Staying indoors was better and so we stopped for a late lunch at a wonderful Czech restaurant called Gulu.

Back home we settled in our living room with books, knitting and tea, practicing for our undisturbed (we hope) cozy evenings in Kabul. If our fireplace had worked we would have started a fire – but it is still not assembled. In Kabul we’ll be sitting around a kerosene stove, probably.

Tessa cooked us pancakes for dinner, after which we watched Hercule Poirot, completing an entire stress free day. I think we’ll live a little longer for that.

I have pushed the news of our move to Kabul out via the status and mood feature on facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter and Skype. I don’t think I have to make any other announcements. The reactions are streaming in from my well connected circle of friends. They are mostly positive, with a few people wondering why we would want to exchange the most beautiful place in the world for one that is ugly with poverty, agression, greed and destruction.

Axel and I travelled all over Afghanistan some 30 years ago and know that behind that ugliness is a beautiful country with wonderful people and a fascinating history that goes way back into the deep past. If you don’t believe that Afghanistan is beautiful, check out Safi Airways internet site which tries to attract visitors to ‘Adventure in Afghanistan’ with a slideshow of some of its most breathtaking sites. We are lucky that we have seen those all these years ago and have at least the memories even if we cannot go there this time.

Leaving the MSH mothership, after nearly 22 years, is a complex undertaking. There is equipment to be exchanged for equipment bought under another billing code; there is my home office to be dismantled, while I will need it until the day I get on the plane. This include the DSL line, my office home phone, printer, fax and computer. There is a change in health insurance and a physical that needs to be scheduled, and then there are the things that I need to handover to colleagues, old and new. Sometimes my head is spinning, because I am also still a full time employee with my current job description and assignments, like the trip to Ethiopia next week and the ongoing coaching of teams around the world.

It was with considerable delight that I interrupted my ‘vacation-only-in-name’ to meet with Louise yesterday in Cambridge for lunch. Over chili and mussels with fries we explored our respective fields, more energy fields than professional disciplines, and found considerable overlap in the shape, intent and motivation of our work.

We also, of course, discovered we have connections to the same people, not many, but they form important nodes in our worldwide network of social changers. If displayed graphically, they would now be bold or double-circled. Aside from people we also have connections to places, like Ethiopia and South Africa. And so we exchanged websites and names of other people and groups that are trying to accomplish the same things and, no doubt, contain more connections, new and old. The encounter was just pregnant with possibilities!

After lunch I accompanied Louise to her apartment. We walked past small row houses and tiny urban gardens and through a lovely park. I could tell that the park was the result of the same kind of energy we have in common and that we help to unleash in groups. I could imagine that at some point this park had been ugly and attracted someone with a vision, who could see through the ugliness and saw a small paradise and then got others on board. And now that vision has been realized!

Louise gave me a signed copy of her book Undoing Silence that encourages ordinary people to write compellingly for social change. That’s what she does. Thanks Chuck for making the connection!

You know that your children are all grown up and you have done a good job when they take you out to a nice restaurant and offer you exotic cocktails before choosing from an exquisite menu, and then pay the bill with their own credit cards, not your’s.

The girls and their mates took us out to a restaurant called Tryst, to celebrate a combined mother’s and father’s day. Maybe this is the beginning of a new family ritual called ‘Parents’ Day.’ It’s us who made you parents, they claimed and with that we toasted to each other, life and love with our 6 different and colorful cocktails. There were drinks with lavender, Earl Grey infusion (High Tea Cocktail), Campari, Champagne, pomegranate, honey, egg whites and a James Bond quaff with a long thin lemon twist.

We have much to be grateful about. Axel gave a solemn little speech about how many good things had been triggered by our accident, and how we appreciate and admire our own kids and their mates. We calculated that these ‘mates’ have now been in the family for 12 and 5 years respectively; they are nearly old married couples!

I am still trying to use up my vacation that I stand to lose in a couple of weeks but it’s only a half-hearted attempt as there is much that needs attention before I leave for Addis next week. This upcoming trip will be an entire month because our postponed visit to Kabul starts as soon as I leave Addis. Axel and I will meet up in the fancy hotel in Dubai on July 12th. MSH has offered to pay Axel’s reconnaissance trip for which I am very grateful.

After much deliberation we decided to accept the job offer now, ahead of time, rather than wait for the visit to Kabul in mid July. I was tired of being in this holding pattern and the MSH administrators are pleased that they can now start doing the paperwork to formally submit me as the selected candidate to the people who pay our bills in Kabul.

We have started to sort out things about the house (Tessa and Steve will move in), who will pay for what, health insurance, and the dismantling of my home office. Each topic explodes into a thousand big and small tasks. I haven’t figured out how to address these in a systematic fashion. I have several small notebooks on my desk with thoughts about things to bring, resolve, ask about, etc.

Today will be another half work-half vacation day that includes a lunch in Cambridge with Louise, someone I have to meet, according to my friend and ex-colleague Chuck. He claims we are kindred spirits, so I am looking forward to meeting her.

I went to the office in the afternoon and am already beginning to feel like a stranger. Life there has continued just fine without me and it is a humbling reminder that none of us are indispensable. I reviewed the tasks that are on my plate with a colleague to see who could take them over. This is never easy because people are already very busy. Still, others happily take over tasks that interest them; none of the things I am handing over are dull or boring.

I spent a couple of hours with colleagues to hand over my teaching load for the summer institute course that we do with Boston University. It is with great regret I do this because I love teaching this class. I have developed wonderful friendships with students as a result. We stay in touch through email and facebook and I follow them as they move along their career path, some in far places, others nearby.

Going away is a good time to bring to closure anything that has been dragging along. This I am doing as well. The remaining time before push off to Kabul has been pretty much booked now, including a few more trips to complete the handovers: Ethiopia next week and Ghana at the end of August.

Last night I sat down at my computer to update my calendar in Outlook. I put in my next trips. When I came to the end of August I put in ‘depart for Kabul.’ It asked for an end date. That is when it hit me – with one date I essentially wiped out the rest of my calendar for the near future – everything got bolded after August 31 and anything that was on my calendar after that has become irrelevant to my new life.

I thought of my friend Susan who has, as the doctors told her, entered the last quarter of her homebound journey – the cancer has spread and is beyond control. Although I am sure she is not sitting in front of her computer and updating her calendar – I imagine that she too has a different outlook on time, calendars and what was written on them; for her, commitments and other dates to show up someplace for something are now irrelevant. My experience last night gave me a teeny taste of that.

In Afghanistan I will not be using my Outlook calendar because somehow it is not set up as a meeting management tool in the office. Things happen the old-fashioned way: you walk over to someone or you call them on a cell phone to set up the appointments. Sometime you even write a letter. Imagine that!

It will be quite a change from our full Outlook calendars and cluttered appointment book that sits on the counter under the telephone in the kitchen. It occurred to me that our lives will be so much simpler: eat-work-eat-work-eat-play-sleep except on Fridays when it will be eat-play-eat-play-eat-play-sleep.

Just to make the next few months a little more interesting, the septic system failed yesterday. Instead of working on his CV Axel had to deal with this emergency. There was the immediate task of getting a ‘honey’ truck to come and pump us, all 4000 gallons of unmentionables. And then there is the rather overwhelming and bigger task to build a new septic system. When you live on ledge like we do, this is not only a complicated engineering challenge but also one with a hefty price tag which requires the kind of loan that our parents could buy an entire house with. So the CV will have to wait a bit and the danger pay will come in handy.

I had my eyes and teeth recertified for duty in Afghanistan – a clean bill of health on that end. It’s the shoulders and the resulting pinched nerves that remain problematic. After my right hand carpal tunnel surgery the hand-doctor predicted that the left hand would want to follow soon. I have arrived at that moment where I wake up each morning with numb fingers but I cannot find a window for surgery between now and my departure for Afghanistan – every day is now spoken for. Doing the hand surgery in Kabul does not seem like a good idea and feels too much like a luxury in a place where surgeons are busy repairing war and landmine victims.

Tessa and Steve returned from the Bannaroo music festival in Manchester, Tennessee, in high spirits but tired from the long drive. Dog Chicha was jumping up and down from excitement to have her parents back and the daily dose of rough-housing that we, aging grandparents, failed to give her.

Sita showed up as well and planted herself at the counter continuing her work of hooking interesting people up with one another to make the world a better place. She continues breathlessly with this mission and is having some successes here and there.