Sylvia's Journal

I woke up one minute before my alarm went off at 4:30 which means that my internal clock has been reset. It took 9 days.

I woke up from a dream in which I was relying on accounting information from a certain Mr. Rambutan and had a very quick immersion into project management accounting that I should have had about 20 years ago. All these years I pretended I knew. I actually don’t know a Mr. Rambutan but I got to know a delicious fruit by that name during my last trip in Cambodia. In the dream I was about to be discovered as an accounting fraud and had a great deal of anxiety about that.

The dream was triggered by a telephone board meeting that lasted 2 hours and that was, for a good chunk, about how to present financial data, a conversation that went entirely over my head. I listened in silence to people who teach accounting and financial management to business school students for a living, and yawned a lot in between feeling totally inadequate. Luckily it was a phone meeting and the yawning was not visible to my fellow board members (and I was not the only one silent). There was much else I did not get and I felt like a cheat since I have been on the board for three years and am about to go off it in June, hopefully before they find me out. My particular job, which does not require accounting knowledge, is to get ourselves renewed each year and follow proper elections procedures; this year that includes getting someone elected to replace myself.

Yesterday morning I saw Tessa and Steve off to work, leaving Axel, myself and Chicha behind to do the work of running the household, bringing in the bacon and chasing squirrels. Halfway through the day we took Chicha into town, leashed of course, saying ‘heel’ a hundred times while doling out treats if she complied (it’s all about the treats says Joe who knows a thing or two about dog, and human, nature).

Walking by the mass of ducks was particularly exciting but the leash restrained her. The ducks are in withdrawal after a stern local newspaper article berated townspeople about their feeding behavior and how bad that was for the town, the entire ecosystem of ducks and of course the ducks themselves. The ducks ignored us and stared at the cold water, some of them standing on ice floats. I am glad I am not a duck.

I did more cooking in the afternoon, semi-Indonesian, and alternated it with writing a book chapter assigned to me that has due a date in late April. I have written half of the required pages and I am making good progress. This is a good thing because planned departures are firmed up: to Ethiopia next week, and late in March I will probably make a quick visit to Ghana before dashing off to Zambia, the latter not so firm right now.

I traded the meditative and silent experience of Quaker Meeting for a morning of elaborate cooking that culminated in a brunch for all six of us with quiche, falafel, salmon/spinach pies and an upside down German apple pancake. After having lived in hotels for several weeks I have this urge to cook. In the evening I cooked again something rather convoluted and complex that got even more convoluted and complex when Tessa and Axel started to insert their own directions (too many cooks in the kitchen) and we ended up with a variation on a Mongolian hotpot that will serve us for the rest of the week. There was also a craving for vegetables.

Sita had brought her own, slightly bigger, ukulele, and after brunch we played together and I had a few more lessons. I am starting to remember the one and two finger chords and my playing is beginning to sound like something although the chord transitions leave much to be desired.

It was a gorgeous day and we joined hundreds of other dog owners and dogs on Singing Beach for a long walk; everyone was enjoying the balmy weather with its temperatures in the 40s before it sank down again in the 20s this morning.

I had a long conversation with my sister Ankie who travels a lot, for fun, not for work. She just returned from Mali. I had enjoyed her pictures on facebook – she has seen a part of Mali that I have not yet seen, le pays des Dogons; it is on my wish list but I have never made time for it on my frequent visits to that country. We are planning a trip to China sometime in the near future, with our daughters, girls only.

In the afternoon Jacek came by with a bag full of camellias that grow in his living room/greenhouse that, long ago, was grampie Magnuson’s greenhouse. Aside from camellias, Jacek also always brings along a bag full of stories. Yesterday’s were stories of his grandfather because a book about him will be published soon, in Polish, in Poland. They are stories from another world. It’s actually a miracle that Jacek even exists. His father, a young officer in the Ukrainian czarist army at the time of the Bolshevik revolution, fled over the steppes with a handcar stacked with bags of flour and salt, a more tradable commodity at the time than money. He was also the first pilot to graduate from the Polish pilot academy, flew bombing mission on the Eastern Front and was, 80 years ago, president of LOT Polish Airlines.

Dreams of Cambodian foods, mostly noodle soups, dominated my sleep as if to explain the rumblings in my belly. I may have brought some hitchhikers along.

I am nearly done returning night hours to their proper place in my 24 hour cycle. It seems I am less than two hours off, still enough to wake me up too early on a Saturday morning and make me yawn while our dinner company was still there last night. I think that chased them away just when they were getting into heated discussions about town budgets, advocacy for special needs children and speculation of why we have so many of them in this new generation. I was only thinking of sleep.

But while I was still fully awake we did have a wonderful dinner with Tessa, Steve and the St. Johns, all seated around the big table, with a large pork roast in the middle, accompanied by an enormous pot filled with roasted winter vegetables and warm applesauce with a hint of cinnamon, vanilla and rum. It was the right dinner and the right company against a backdrop of frozen snow and temperatures below pleasant.

I had my annual physical and passed it with flying colors, mostly; including the pre-diabetes screening that has become routine because of the increasing prevalence of the illness in the US (that also has touched some of my family members in Holland). Some of the blood values were a little too high or too low, nothing serious I was told until checked again later in June, and we speculated about the influence of my unusual three-week Cambodian diet on the numbers, especially the large quantities of fruit, duck and goat (cut off at the knees).

After nearly two months I am taking to the skies again with Bill today. We plan to fly to Upstate New York’s Ticonderoga via Hartness State and Rutland in Vermont with a stop at Glens Falls. On the return, if the clouds will not allow us to go over the mountains, we will fly south to Williamstown in Western Mass, and then fly straight east to Beverly. Before that I am meeting with my fellow plane owners about not having a plane and money in the bank that is not sufficient to get another one. It’s a dilemma that has no clear solution yet.

I have been up since 3:30 AM, drinking green tea that reminds me of South-East Asia. Getting up that early was not difficult since I went to bed at about 4:30 PM yesterday afternoon with a raging headache and nausea that had plagued me all day, leading to an early dismissal from work. It is not because of the spiders I ate, these have long been removed from my system but because of something else that is out of whack. My annual physical later today may reveal the cause if it is not simply my re-entry into Eastern Standard Time.

I am slowly reducing the 12 hour gap between waking and sleeping in Cambodia and in America, but last night set me back by a few hours. I guess there were just too many adjustments to make: diet, temperature, humidity, work hours and sleep. I hope that my body will store all these adjustments for the future, making next returns a little easier.

Before the headache got so bad that I started to look cross-eyed I was able to put in some early morning quality writing time in the office that was deserted for my first few hours there. But at noon time I was rubbing my forehead so much that I couldn’t type anymore. Without any obligations to others in meetings or scheduled conversations there was nothing to keep me at work and I drove home.

Back in Manchester Axel and I went for a brisk walk to Singing Beach with Chicha leashed on her choke collar (strict instructions from Tessa and Steve). It was a beautiful but very cold day; even the sea water was frozen on the rocks, looking like translucent frosting on cupcakes. The walk interrupted the headache for awhile. It came back when I settled in on the couch to watch a movie, the only thing I felt able to do. Five minutes into the movie I gave up on that as well and retired to bed, to emerge 11 hours later, sans headache, at least for now.

Sita should have arrived back home yesterday from Davos where she rubbed elbows with the high and mighty and drank in some of the doom and gloom by listening to people who are supposedly in the know (or can influence) what will happen to the world economy. Not a pretty picture I gather. I saw some of her amazing artwork and wished I could have only a 10th of her talent.

Yesterday I made a slideshow of the Cambodia trip consisting mostly of pictures. I think that is the only way that I can convey to my colleagues the enthusiasm of this new cohort of facilitators that I left behind in Kampong Cham and Phnom Penh. I cant’ figure out how to upload it here but that was the idea (this is where Tessa’s talents might come in handy).

It has been quiet in the office – many people are travelling and so things are rather low key. This suits me fine as I am trying to get back into the US/East Coast groove.

After work I went to yoga class again, after a hiatus of 3 weeks, and found it rather strenuous. The rotator cuff injury is troubling me more and more which made me a less than stellar participant in many poses that required stretched arms, up, down and sideways. After the accident I never had an MRI done of my right shoulder because just when the doctors thought something was seriously wrong I was suddenly able to lift my arm again and made them think all was well again. What ails me is somewhere in between right and wrong and may well be a small tear that is getting irritated again. One year ago a cortisone shot in the shoulder quieted things down and it has lasted till now. I think I need another one.

Axel too is having a relapse in his arm– as if to remind us that it’s only 18 months since the accident, and what would we expect? We have gotten rather undisciplined about our exercises, me in particular (hence the yoga).

I received a lovely email note from the receptionist in ADRA’s Phnom Penh office to whom I had gifted my Emirates business class toiletry case, full of small (less than 3 oz) tubes of creams and perfumes aside from the obligatory toothbrush and comb. She wrote, “I mostly not often use perfume but now I use it every day since I have gotten from you. It smelled very nice I do like it.” At the end of the message she apologizes for “[…] any mistakes or other tasks that I did not do well.” The entire message signed with a “Miss you.” It melted my heart. Another reason to get back there some day.

Yesterday was my first day back at work in over three weeks. Everyone was busy as usual and I was productive for a good part of the day. But around lunchtime I had to get out into the snowstorm, to wake myself up. The jetlag has manifested itself as a sinus infection that makes the right side of my face tender to the touch and my eyes bloodshot in addition to lots of yawning. Someone asked why I was even at work and I did not have an answer.

Yesterday was a day filled with sadness – some of it highlighting the plight of our sisters worldwide. First there was the anniversary of the plane crash that ended the lives of our three young colleagues Carmen, Cristi and Amy in the snowy mountains of Afghanistan on February 3, 2005. They are still very much missed and we are reminded of them frequently through the pictures on the walls of our office – pictures of and by them, taken in the days before they died.

Another young colleague was induced to deliver her stillborn baby at 24 weeks and became a mother and not a mother at the same moment. It broke my heart – this baby was so much wanted.

And finally, to complete this trio of women’s grief and bad luck, my hairdresser Bonnie poured her heart out about a husband turned mean and callous for the love of a younger woman – behavior so bad and verbally so abusive that I wished I could knock him around the room and give him a piece of my mind. It was little comfort to her that I had an experience somewhat like that (not as callous and mean and there were no children involved) when I had been replaced, early on in my first marriage, by a young blond Swedish interloper some 30 years ago. I told her I now look back on that as one of the best things that ever happened to me as it led me to my own Swede (Axel). But at first it was indeed a dark experience with so much crying that there was no water left in me – Bonnie is in that place right now. What makes the situation particularly sad is that, edged on by his dad, the teenage son is joining the chorus of abuse without realizing what this does to his and his mom’s psyche. Not surprisingly he is derailing at school; a stepsister/daughter, already derailed, unfit to care for her two little boys, is perpetuating a generational drama that keeps re-inventing itself.

I lifted myself out of this morass of anger and sadness by practicing E7 on my ukulele which Sita said was nice (it is) and accompanying myself as I sung Amazing Grace, hoping that everything will turn out OK for the grieving moms around me.

What was I thinking when I assumed that my first full day at home would be a normal workday? With a 12 hour jet leg I was hardly able to concentrate and do work-work (as opposed to self-care work). I wandered out of Abi’s massage studio with massage brain as Axel calls it, rather unfocused. Finding Axel in the coffee shop next door was a significant victory.

By then it was nearly lunch hour and going out for lunch seemed the right thing to do. We drove slowly through a picture perfect winter wonderland and under bright blue skies to Ipswich, congratulating ourselves on living in such a beautiful place. I traded in the noodle soups of the last few weeks for a steaming bowl of chowder but I am still drinking buckets of tea.

Lunch made us forget that Axel had an early afternoon appointment with the brain injury specialist in Boston. Forgetting things is, apparently, quite common for people who have been whacked on the head. He called, apologized and was rescheduled. We are, once again, grateful that Axel is only forgetting things, nothing worse (like some of the patients he sits with in the waiting room).

After lunch it was naptime – something I am not all that good at usually but this time it was easy. I had planned to go for a long walk on the beautiful and balmy winter day but the waking up from my two-hour nap time took too long and then it was dark again.

Sita gave me a ukulele for Christmas. The instrument was waiting for me when I got home, all tuned and ready to play. And so the most strenuous thing I did yesterday was to practice A, C and F chords. I can now strum ‘This old man,’ ‘Amazing Grace,’ and a few other tunes. All I need is a campfire and some people to sing along. I can’t wait for it to be summer.

For the last leg of this interminable trip my luck turned and I flew back on a plane with every other seat empty. It departed on time and the bad weather I had seen approaching while still in the terminal moved out of the way without disturbing us.

I finished the Pol Pot book and then spread out over three seats and fell into a deep sleep of total exhaustion, filled with images of the damage he’d one. When I woke up I felt like a zombie, as if I had been a victim myself.

My entrance into the US wasn’t so great after this magnificent trip. The immigration official treated me as if I had done something wrong with a long list of questions barked out in staccato. It showed how easy it is to intimidate people when you are in uniform.

When I called Axel on touchdown to tell him that I would be out in less than 10 minutes because I had no checked baggage I discovered that he hadn’t even left Manchester. I was indeed out in 10 minutes and after having been on the road for 36 hours that final wait for Axel to arrive was the worst of the entire trip, partially because it was laced with disappointment and anger. Not a very good reunion after an absence of 3 weeks. I pouted most of the way home in between dozing off a few times. By the time I came home the pout was over and all (nearly) forgotten.

Tessa and Steve had left me Rangoon crab to welcome me home – a delicacy from another part of Asia. And then I unpacked the presents which included two ceramic lobsters given to me by the team in Kampong Cham, for Axel, for our house on Lobster Cove. I had discovered these nailed to the doors of traditional houses, off the main road to Kampong Cham. They hold incense sticks or flowers. I never had time to go to the market and find them and then did not need to as they were given to me as a gift.

And that was that. For today Axel has arranged a massage at 10. Not by a blind person and not quite so inexpensive. Still, a massage is exactly what the doctor prescribed and it makes up for the not so great homecoming.