Sylvia's Journal

Archive Page 225

Another world

Published January 14, 2009 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Cambodia

I have no standing with Thai Airways, no access to red carpets and special lines. I am with the rest of the ordinary people, seated in the back of the bus.

There are thousands of other ‘back-of-the-bus’ people surrounding me in the area outside the gates. It feels like a holding pen. Many are young men who are being ferried out of the country, lured to places with work and the promise of money, often in the Arab world. They travel in clusters, staying closely together; many may never have never been outside their small towns or villages. You can read the anxiety from their faces. There are stories, each day, in the newspaper about unscrupulous recruiters and young men just like them who end up in a no man’s land at their destination. The lucky ones get sent back right away; some spent months in a jail to be eventually returned to Bangladesh, having lost whatever sums they paid to get work. If you are poor and illiterate you get screwed – unless you are lucky.

But there are also middle class Bangladeshi families in this crowd, some with American passports who have, I imagine, visited the relatives who stayed behind. They are happy to go home; the kids will go back to their computer games and friends, McDonalds and the order and cleanliness of the US (everything is relative). One family in front of me belongs to this group. The kids are regular American teenagers; they dress and talk like them, part of the global tribe of middle class teenagers, boys and girls alike. Only the mother still wears a sari; she’s the one who is neither here nor there. The father wears a suit and holds all the travel papers in a little sissy bag. He’s the IT professional who made it in the new world. The grandparents stayed behind. They are proud of their son and mystified about what an IT professional does. They have shown off their smart offspring to the neighbors and friends. They have no worries about their old age. There are families like that all around me.

Foreigners are a minority in this departure hall and stick out. One sticks out like a sore thumb: a Chinese business man who sits a few rows away and talks on his cell phone as if he is the only one in this place. His voice is loud and of the in-your-face (ears) kind. He is totally oblivious of how loud he is. I throw him a few glances, a weak and useless hint. He doesn’t read my body language.

The newspaper has an editorial about the road that is closed to women and I learn that the signs have been taken down and the self-appointed women chaser is arrested and his mosque council berated. I’m glad that the publicity worked and outraged others as it did me.

We leave Dhaka late but the nice male flight attendant assures me that I will have plenty of time in Bangkok to make my connection to Cambodia (35 minutes is all you need he tells me – I am glad I have carryon luggage only). A good tailwind comes to the rescue and I ended up having an entire hour. I use it to buy Droste chocolate and a cheap camera since the battery charger of my camera died in Dhaka. I will pretend that the chocolates came all the way from Amsterdam, a gift for my hosts. The ones I had bought in Amsterdam had all been given away in Dhaka.

We are clearly in the China and Japan sphere of influence. The hotel has a Chinese restaurant on the right side of the lobby and a Kobe restaurant on the other side. A confusing shower system comes from Japan. I cannot figure it out. Like so many other Japanese appliances it has lights that flicker and change color but I am clueless about how to take a shower, other than using the handshower that does not seem to be an integral part of the unit but rather an attempt to give us, foreign guests, something that is familiar. jpshwr The minibar has soybean milk, grass jelly drink, Pulpy C (lychee with jelly and fruit) and Tiger beer. The latter I recognize and am grateful for after the dryness of Dhaka. There are also two large tubs with the ramen noodles and small packages with ‘flavorings’ (variations on salt) that you can pour water over and turn into a meal. That was dinner.

I am now exactly 12 hours ahead of my homeland, which makes it easy to determine what time it is here and there. Next stop is breakfast. I hope it is not French, as the name of the hotel suggests (Le President) but more noodly than that.

Solo

Published January 13, 2009 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Bangladesh

In sharp contrast to the day before, yesterday was more of a solo day. It started with breakfast in a restaurant that was deserted except for two chipper waiters, one of them Rosario with the Portuguese roots. I chose the local breakfast, a chili omelet. Nowhere else have I had this cooked just right with exactly the right amount of hot chilies.

While waiting for my order I had time to study the English language newspaper. It was full of encouraging news about the new prime minister and her cabinet which has several women in important roles. One of them will be Hillary’s counterpart. Most of the people I have worked with are happy about Bangladesh’s new leadership, and so this country joins the happy brigade that already has America and Ghana marching behind their inspiring new drummers.

One disconcerting piece of news was an action by a local Moslem council to close the road, on which its mosque is located, to women. There is a photo with the story that shows an elderly gentleman with a stick. He stands at the entrance to the street and beats every woman who dares to enter. It is a little piece of the middle ages that is preserved in this capital city of a country that has at least 5 women in its top leadership and another 20 or so elected in Parliament. That there isn’t more outrage about this kind of behavior is unimaginable.

In another piece of B-news, a school of girls is exhorting its graduating class to go out into the world and emulate great men. I understand the idea but the wording bothers me. There are so many great women to emulate it is in this part of the world (later in the evening I met a whole roomful).

Yesterday’s program consisted of writing the retreat report and then going over the draft with the key players before finalizing it. I like these zippy assignments: fly in, hold retreat, write report and fly out, all in 3 days.

I had taken public notes on the whiteboard (with permanent marker) and made digital pictures at the end of each session, not having time to type the notes up as I was doing double duty as a facilitator/note taker. From some 40 jpg files I was able to reconstruct the data and surrounded them with a narrative to capture the deliberations. By the end of the day I removed the word Draft from the title page and emailed the report away from my to-do list.

I said goodbye to my new friends at the School and made a last courtesy visit to the Centre and went home to prepare for my evening out with Sayeed and Shika. They brought me along as a mystery guest to the house of their relatives the Khans, old friends of several of us at MSH. I was immediately taken into this noisy and boisterous family gathering that was in honor of Sayeed’s son and his brand-new wife. I had not seen the son since he was a teenager and so did not recognize him. I learned much about the social context of weddings and wondered what it would be like for the young couple to have to appear weeks on end at lunches and dinners until they leave to go back to New York later this month.

Many of the nieces and nephews live part or all of the time in the US. Most of the men appear to be IT professionals while the young women are financial analysts and economists. It is the generation of their mothers that paved the way for this. Those feisty women were the activitist who pushed and pulled, created organizations, convinced donors to give them money and are still busy, now on the world’s stage, to help their sisters along. We talked about what had changed for women in Bangladesh during their lifetime (they are huge) and noted there is still much more to be done (e.g. men with sticks and blocked streets).

I thought about the book The Namesake and it turned out that most had seen the film. It’s the story that some of them have lived as well. It is about loneliness and being an outsider and having kids that become outsiders back in your homeland. Seen against the backdrop of this noisy and happy family gathering I imagined the new bride in her Queens apartment, later this month, solo, while hubby is away all day at work. I heard she has sisters in the US and can only hope that their presence will be enough to stave off the loneliness.

A quality union

Published January 12, 2009 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Bangladesh

I am wearing my Nepali shalwar kameez. It is a little out of fashion here. I am not sure whether this is because it is from another country or whether the shalwar kameez fashion has simply changed everywhere since I bought it four years ago. The hemlines are way up and I feel like an old maid in a calf-length skirt amidst miniskirts. I learned years ago that here, just as in the west, the hemline defines how fashionable you are. At that time I was out of fashion in the opposite direction (I wore a hip-length top when everyone else’s top was down to the calves). I figure one day I will get it just right.

I started the day blowing a fuse in my room and thus had to shower in the dark. But my computer was on another circuit and Axel greeted me enthusiastically via Skype; it was 6:30 AM for me and 7:30 PM on the previous night for him. It was a nice start of the day.

It took us 2 hours to get from my hotel to the retreat place which is not all that far outside Dhaka. Savar used to be a rural area but now textile factories are being built closer and closer and with that populations move. It is semi-urban now and will soon be urban judging from the construction.

When I walked into the room reserved for us it was set up in U-shape with a power point as the central feature. For a moment my heart sunk – it is hard to dismiss the person who was planning to present the first powerpoint. After a brief formal opening I asked permission and forgiveness to dispense with the powerpoints (this is always a gamble) and was met with enthusiastic cheers. And so we dropped all the presentations and followed the day as I had designed it. From then on it was easy to facilitate the group.

For the first time in 5 years these two parties were sitting together around a table, one a famous cholera research center, the other the school of public heallth. We spent the day around 2 challenges; the morning we studied the quality of the MPH program using data in people’s heads as well as formal evaluations; in the afternoon we studied the upcoming ‘marriage’ as one centre moves in with the other by the end of the year by looking at identities and then, in small groups, explore hopes and worries about the union. The union/marriage metaphor was fun to play with (dowries, in-laws) and also because I got to quote Obama often about a more perfect union. The nice thing is that everyone understands this language which is now suffused with hope.

We canceled the dinner in exchange for a lunch at some later point in time because everyone wanted to get on the road. The trip back out also takes hours again. I had a private tour of the trainging and resource center and then we joined the rush hour which we interrupted at ‘Coffee World’ in a crowded Dhaka street for an Americano and more talk about BRAC, facilitation and succession planning (BRAC has now completed that process successfully). By the time our coffee was finished the traffic had eased and we made it to the hotel quickly.

I ordered another Thala in my room which was delivered by Alexander Rosario. I asked the waiter about his rather unBangladeshi name. As it turned out he is from the Portuguese diaspora (way back he indicated by pointing far behind his shoulder). I wonder if this was a group of Inquisition refugees who moved East rather than North to Amsterdam centuries ago. I’d love to know that family’s story.

Runup

Published January 11, 2009 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Bangladesh

Despite taking a double dose of the Ayurvedic sleep medicine it did not deliver on its name (‘I Sleep Soundly) during the final stretch to Dhaka. Aside from the medicine there were the wide seats that practically extended horizontal and several soft pillows, but none of that helped. I think I was beyond tired by then.

As luck had it, the gentleman across the aisle was heading exactly the same way as I was, to BRAC, and a co-conspirator in the sense that he too wants BRAC’s school of public health to be the best that it can be. He is a fellow OD (public admin) person, who flew in from Kenya. He introduced himself by saying, “I think we have a friend in common.” That was Jon.

This coincidence added a new dimension to my preparations for the retreat and I flooded him with questions. He could describe the BRAC side (as opposed to the university side) and clear up some things I did not understand about the financial part of the picture. The best things I retained from our conversation is that things at BRAC evolve rather organically – like stem cells dividing and coming together in clusters that then form a system that performs a particular set of tasks. This appeals greatly to me.

And then everyone around me went to sleep (and I tried). It was another half empty cabin (only the business class) and things were quiet while we overflew the enormous subcontinent. One of the flight attendants was studying safety procedures. I peeked over her shoulder at the questions. The answers were sobering, like: ‘How long do you have before impact after the captain says ‘Brace!”?’ (Answer: half a minute.) I hoped she’d never have to put that knowledge to the test. Knowing is one thing, but acting wisely and according to the lesson plan in an emergency another thing entirely.

Getting through immigration and out of the airport was a cinch with my shiny new virgin passport and its only stamp, good for multiple entries into Bangladesh. There was no waiting for luggage and I hitched a ride that was waiting for my companion to the BRAC Inn where I installed myself for the duration of my short stay in Dhaka.

Around lunchtime I walked over to the school and had a very productive meeting with some of the key actors to whittle the agenda down to two main challenges. Lunch consisted of a glass of coca cola, a white (Western) sandwich and two very spicy fried veggie-curry balls, everything washed away with an authentic Nescafe which always brings back early coffee memories from home (I was blissfully ignorant that Nescafe was actually not really coffee until I was 18).

Back at the hotel I cross checked with my travelling companion whether the new design made sense and then took a badly needed nap. After that more cross checking with Jon (in South Africa) and preparing soome flipcharts.

I was too groggy to eat out and ordered a vegetable Thala (like the Indian Thalis) that was brought to my room. And with that I have come to the end of the runup for tomorrow’s event. The only thing left to do is a warm bath, pack my bag and have a normal night of sleep.

Further east

Published January 10, 2009 On the road Leave a Comment

I lost all track of time of day as I hop scotched in 6-hour flight segments across the globe in an easterly direction, swallowing whole hours at a time. I have to take pills at bedtime but I can’t figure out what is bedtime. This is when you realize that time is an abstract and fluid concept and not the hard and unbending resource I take it for, sometimes obsessively, when I am at home, fixed in one time zone. It’s my second night in a plane. Or is it actually night? Dubai airport is as busy as any downtown at lunch hour, with people from all corners of the world carting their heavy (too heavy) hand luggage around and accumulating ever more ‘Win 1.000.000 (somethings)” filled plastic bags that entice you to buy raffles for a fancy car that you can touch right there in the duty free shopping area – as if there is much duty in this part of the world (no personal income tax and, as advertised, the lowest tax rates in the world).

I passed through Holland incognito, apologies, I did not call anyone. I will do that on my way back. I was trying to get into the mood for my next assignment which is a little loose, the final agenda not quite established. It’s a ‘winging it’ sort of assignment I’ve decided when the preparations didn’t quite do the trick.

The plane to Dubai was half full, as the one to Amsterdam was. Still, it was my luck to be in one of the few rows that had three people squeezed together, a huge man in between me and a grandma from Vancouver. He asked for an aisle seat which he got promptly (and to our great delight). His big arms had spilled over our common arm rests; eating our dinner would have been tricky for all three of us.

Grandma Vancouver is visiting her daughter, husband and their two year old child and is excited about having the toddler to herself for two full weeks. I am sure mom is also excited about that. Being in Dubai, in a warm place is a bonus; Vancouver has been unusually wet and snowy this year. It’s a nice winter escape, 68 degrees as we land at about midnight.

The flight to Dhaka was full in economy class and all I could get was business class (sigh!). The best part of this is access to Emirates terminal 3 business class lounge which is a city in itself, serving elaborate meals, cooked freshly by chefs you can see at work behind glass. There is Lebanese mezze, poached and smoked salmon, pastries, finger sandwiches and even a real restaurant to take your plate to, and never a bill presented (and all this in the middle of the night). I had to wait three hours before boarding my flight to Dhaka which is scheduled to leave about 4 AM. I killed the time with a shower, blogging (there’s so much to write about), dinner, reading the New Yorker from cover to cover and watching people. I find it a bit more difficult to make up stories here, especially about the women who are entirely wrapped up, giving me no clues about a possible story.

I am frontloading my blog. I have no idea whether I will have any access to the internet after we take off from Dubai; hence the three entries in 24 hours and then possibly nothing for a while.

Encounters enroute

Published January 10, 2009 On the road 1 Comment

I could spend days at airports, just observing people and then writing about them, making up stories. When I was little my parents told me that I should not make up stories about people based on how they looked or behaved – so when I first started to violate this rule that parent tape went off in my head and I felt guilty. I was travelling at the time with my colleague Michael who was my first mentor in organizational behavior. He died many years ago and my big regret is that I never thanked him for the important role he played in my professional life. We travelled together to Lesotho and spent hours in the Lesotho Sun’s restaurant spinning stories about our fellow hotel guests. We would make up such outrageous stories that we’d have tears running down our cheeks from laughter. It felt so naughty to do that and yet it was so much fun.
Now I am spinning these stories on my own but I am always thinking of Michael when I do this. It’s much more fun to do with someone else. Here are some made up stories about the people who crossed my pass in Schiphol’s KLM lounge.

There is an intriguing couple entering the lounge just in front of me. He’s British, pink skinned and ugly. I rarely use that adjective to describe a person but it fits him. He is in his sixties and has drunk too much all his life (it’s that red dimpled nose and the blotchy face). He’s also been out in the sun most of his life and his skin is wrinkled like a prune. The skin on his face lies in thick folds over his skull, I’ve never quite seen anyone like it, that’s why he features in the first story. She, by contrast, is young, black and beautiful, probably in her late twenties. I wonder, what’s the attraction? A ticket out of poverty? Money? Love? Sex? (The latter is hard to imagine, I shudder). I imagine they met at a bar in some provincial capital in Africa, where there is not much to do other than work, drink and dance (a Bend-in-the-river kind of place). He told her stories about his homeland and she was looking for a way out of early marriage and dreading to become like her unhappy mother. Maybe he deals in diamonds. He’s going to introduce her to his relatives in the UK.

Another couple walks in; they are in their late sixties, maybe seventies. He’s rather nondescript but she is a striking presence; maybe because she is very tall, taller than her already tall husband. I guess they come from Minnesota. She wears a man’s shirt several sizes too big and pants that are held with a ropey belt over her hipbones that jut out visibly. She looks fragile and worried; her body looks tired and used up. I wonder what her story is – sick? Dying? I imagine that her husband is taking her on a trip around the world. But she is paying for it because she worked as a lawyer until she got sick and invested her earnings wisely. He was a country doctor but cannot afford the liability insurance anymore and quit; the timing was right and he became her caretaker. Since she is dying they have decided to use up their money in this one final trip with stops in all the places she has dreamed about while she was still healthy and working all the time. I hope they make it and wish them Godspeed. But then I find out they are both members of the Hemlock Society and have a plan in case they survive the trip. This is unlikely since they also have a plan not to. They make a handsome couple, despite her protruding bones.

Across the lounge is another couple that draws my attention. She is talking incessantly and loudly on her cell phone so we can all follow the conversation. This is how I find out she is Dutch. She has a Hermes scarf draped with calculated nonchalance over her shoulders. I can tell from the way she dresses and the blond hair that she spends a fortune on beauty but she can’t hide that she is aging, in her early fifties maybe. I don’t know if her husband is Dutch because he never opens his mouth. He looks like he could be her father but somehow I know he is not. He comes from a long line of patricians, with lots of money and style that doesn’t need to be bought as it comes with the genes. They always travel first class, or business if there is nothing higher. That’s why they are in the lounge. She’s at home here. I wonder again about the attraction (the possibilities are always the same). Something keeps them tied together until death (looking at him this maybe soon). Maybe she is speeding things up by slowly poisoning him, adding one small pill to his already full pillbox, every day. He is too smart for her and has of course noticed it but he keeps quiet because he doesn’t want to make trouble (his kind of people don’t do that). He has been putting the pills in the big spider plant by the window of their (his) old family mansion on a canal in Amsterdam – the plant is slowly dying. He is not surprised of course and she doesn’t notice. He is celebrating another birthday next month. They are travelling to Peru.

A young girl who looks like one of those Eastern European gymnasts who dominate the Olympics sits with an older man. He can’t be her dad because they don’t look at all like each other. And since I don’t expect kidnappers to sit in frequent flyer lounges he must be her gymnastics coach. He has the body of an athlete, well built, muscular with short blond hair, a grown up version of the archetypal Hitler youth, only the red kerchief is missing. I guess they are on their way home from a gymnastic event and she did not do well which is why they are not talking much together. She has disappointed him (and he her I suppose). She knows it and sits with her knees drawn to her chest, listening to the music on her nano, wondering how she is going to handle the disappointment from her mom and dad in Belorus, who have sacrificed everything for her success and will know by tonight that all was for naught. She will pick up the violin next, find a Chinese teacher and try to become a champion that way. Her coach will find another promising young thing and try again.

An older gay couple, Dutch men, sit a little ways off discussing the upcoming retirement of one of them. I imagine that they are struggling with the notion of getting old and no longer being the studs they once were but they are deeply in love, I can tell from the way they smile at each other. They could be holding hands but may be they think they are too old for that. They are off to Venice to celebrate their anniversary. They met there ages ago when they were young and randy.

Axel and I held hands in the restaurant at Logan. I wonder whether we show up in someone else’s fantasy. It’s a nice idea – older couple, deeply in love, saying goodbye for awhile. I like that story, and it’s true.

Reclaiming my doc

Published January 10, 2009 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Holland

Just hours before my departure for Amsterdam I walked into the American Airlines cargo office at Logan and gave the lady at the desk the number that would get me my passport. “Is it a dog?” she asked incredulously, checking off my number on the paper in front of her. “No,” I said, “that would be a spelling error. I am expecting a doc, not a dog, actually a very special document, especially for someone leaving the country in a couple of hours, by plane.”

She returned from the backroom with a large box, the size that tall boots come in. I was starting to get worried, a dog after all? I asked her to unpack my parcel until we got to what I wanted. Inside the big parcel was a smaller parcel and inside that was an envelope – this remained a game of suspense till the very end. Inside the envelope was my passport, the brand new one, with one page-size visa stamp from the embassy of the Bangladesh in Washington. And as some sort of reward for my endurance there was one surprise: it was a stamp for multiple entries, valid until the end of July. I better get myself some more business in Bangladesh.

And with that the adventure ended and I learned once more, as if I don’t already know this, that miracles do happen and whatever you name that benevolent power that exists in the universe, it is looking after me.

Getting my passport was the high point of a long day of preparing for what looked like a trip with all sorts of possible surprises. I had decided to pack light, in case I would be sent back to Dubai, and carry hand luggage only, even though this is a most likely going to be a three-week trip. That way I would not need to worry about checked luggage. Besides, I was not sure what might happen in Dubai with a terminal change in the middle of the night. There were simply too many plane changes for luggage to get lost. Furthermore, I will travel via Bangkok and I remember the airport chaos there a month ago – I am not sure how stable the place is now but I figured that with hand luggage only I could be nimble and respond quickly to last minute changes and other surprises.

Thus the packing became a little more complicated than usual, which is done mostly on automatic pilot. Now I had to decide which of my usual creature comforts to leave behind. It took me a good part of the day to make those decisions, in between other tasks that had to be completed.

Late in the afternoon, while the temperature was dipping far below freezing, we went for a walk with Chicha using the choker collar with the torture spikes because otherwise Tessa and Steve would get mad at us for messing up their dog training routine. It remains painful to watch the dog practically choking itself and making awful guttural sounds. The poor thing just can’t help herself – there are too many squirrels to chase; it’s in her genes. We’re probably doing the routine all wrong, telling her to heel when the choker hurts most – she probably figures that ‘heel’ is something better not done since it is associated with pain. We are not dog people and have no idea how dogs think and we don’t seem to get any wiser. Axel wants to take the whole family to a Petco dog training session so we are all on the same wavelength – sort of like family therapy instead of individual therapy, for the dog as well as the humans.

Axel drove me to the airport and after the passport was reclaimed we celebrated the miracle in the nice restaurant by the security lines of terminal E. It has become a bit of a routine to have a meal there before I board the plane so I can start sleeping right away. Next to us were three Russians drinking hard liquor as if there was no tomorrow. I am glad I was not on their plane.

The plane was only half full; nevertheless I did not sleep much, despite the meditation tapes; when the soft voice would come on after a long silence it would jerk me out of semi-consciousness and ended up having the opposite of its intended effect. We arrived early because of a strong tailwind and then waited 40 minutes for a gate to open up. I walked straight to the humongous new KLM lounge, took a shower and loaded up on good coffee and ‘broodjes met kaas.’ And now I am waiting for the signal to board the plane to Dubai, one I have now taken 3 times in the last two months, as if I have a real estate business there.

Silent flight

Published January 9, 2009 Home Leave a Comment

I waited too long to write after waking up and so lost much of the detail from the vivid dreams. The parents of my friend Sietske showed up even though her dad is no longer with us. He was last night, the setting was Cambodia, which looked heavenly. I had to prepare for two sports events, one was swimming and the other rowing and I was having a hard time preparing for both and then finding the stuff I needed for competing (like a swimsuit and a boat). It was one of those dreams where things don’t come together.

I hardly needed a dream to tell me that I am not ready for this trip. I am leaving tonight and the passport/visa issue has still not been resolved. I am now trying to work magic on the arrival side. My Bangla friend and colleague Sayeed wrote me an email with the words: ‘send me your arrival information.’ That was all. The barebones email comforted me, he wants information. I gave it to him.

Unlike my previous trips through Dubai that always included a stay at an obscenely luxurious hotel, this time I fly right through, with only a couple of hours in the middle of the night during which I have to change terminals. I will be travelling for about 24 hour straight to arrive in the morning in Dhaka. I am sending some prayers into the universe for upgrades in the hope that someone in NWA, KLM and Emirates is listening.

Yesterday was a day of nonstop meetings because nothing could be postponed anymore. Everything that had been postponed had landed on yesterday’s calendar. There are nonstop demands on my brain’s left hemisphere; the neurons charged with understanding, categorizing, framing, planning, evaluating, judging, conceptualizing, and deducting are over stimulated leaving the right side of my brain literally at a loss for words and unable to compete. It is only in my dream states that it gets some words in edgewise.

I have to talk back to that part of myself now and then and say ‘shut uphhhh.’ That is one good thing about flying for so long –I get to use my meditation tapes which consist of hours and hours of silence. I usually fall asleep in the middle of that silence.

The day ended with a nice Mexican dinner in the next town over with Axel, Steve and Tessa. While eating hot armadillo eggs we listened to Tessa’s enthusiastic account of her interview at Suffolk’s art school. She’s determined to get that BA within the next 2 years. We think that it is a good idea.

Visafaith

Published January 8, 2009 Home Leave a Comment

Every time one glitch is ironed out another pops up for this trip to Bangladesh and Cambodia – it is going to require a tour de force or miracle to get the passport with the Bangla visa to me before I leave on Friday. Right now it is at the embassy in DC and apparently today is a holiday and they are closed. My departure, tomorrow night, thus becomes an act of faith that everything will work out in the end. According to a Nigerian saying ‘everything will work out in the end. If things haven’t worked out yet it means you haven’t come to the end yet.’ The end will be when I stand at the immigration counter at the airport in Bangladesh and a uniformed man tells me I can or cannot step into the country. In the latter scenario Emirates will have to take me back to Dubai and I can finally see the camel races or the shopping mall with the ski slope. But I will miss the event for which I travelled to Bangladesh. That would be very unfortunate.

I worked from home yesterday because of the ice, sleet and rain. The winter weather advisory was stated strongly enough to keep me (but not Tessa and Steve) from driving to work. In the end it wasn’t as bad but I was happy to skip one commute on slippery roads. It seems I have another chance at slippery roads (an ice rink I am told), today. But since it is my last day of work I have to drive in.

All through the day I ‘attended’ meetings by phone that I should have attended in person. I walked around the house with the phone clipped to my belt and my headgear in place. It’s a more productive way of attending meetings because you can multitask without anyone knowing. During my last such meeting of the day I prepared a great lasagna.

Last night Axel was elected to chair a town committee he has been a member of, after something of a quiet palace revolution that built up to this event over a couple of weeks. I saw many of my theories and beliefs about leadership acted out up close, and it was fascinating to watch from the sidelines. This new leadership role is one that suits Axel like a glove and even before he was elected he was already busy mobilizing and aligning the dormant energies in our town around issues of preservation of the town’s cultural, architectural and natural patrimony.

Distraught for naught

Published January 7, 2009 Home Leave a Comment

“Oh,” said the perky radiology technician only minutes after the ultrasound was completed, “it’s just a cyst. It will go away by itself. These things come and go, not a big deal.” She surprised me with her big smile and confident tone just when I expected a stern but compassionate looking specialist to come into the ultrasound room and give me the bad news. It took me the rest of the day to unwind from being taut like a compressed spring for two long weeks. You don’t know how (up)tight you are until you can relax. I had snapped earlier at Axel like an angry turtle for not being ready to go, a full hour before we had to leave for the hospital; he could see the tension and worry while I pretended everything was just fine.

I remember from our Beirut days how we were always on high alert for bombs, explosions, kidnapping and such. We were in a permanent state of adrenaline overdose. The permanence makes that you stop noticing. Until one night when we walked back from a midnight movie in safe and quiet The Hague and a car backfired and the adrenaline surged back in; then we realized the difference. I can relax again but getting back to that state was not that easy.

I arrived, still in a daze, back at work at noontime and was immediately drawn into a meeting about a project we are part of that operates in two of Pakistan’s more complex places to work: the Free State of Jammu and Kashmir and the much larger North Western Frontier Province. The project is part of ongoing post-earthquake emergency aid. The conversation was about ownership and leadership and how to get this when much of the aid is brought in and spent by outsiders.

There was no breathing space between this and the next meeting and so I remained in my daze, trying to concentrate on what was being said while holding an internal dialogue with myself about what was going on in my life.

And somewhere in the backdrop where pieces of conversation about my upcoming trip (this Friday) eastward and schedules being changed (someone forgot that Chinese New Year is being celebrated in Phnom Phen), only one of the two visas stamped in my passport and still no itinerary. So now there is this big mess of feelings, relief, anxiety, worry, anticipation, excitement, sadness that have glommed together like that most disgusting ball of spent chewing gum that teenage Sita built over many years and that she hid somewhere in our house.

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