Sylvia's Journal

Archive Page 228

Recurrence

Published December 17, 2008 Dreams , Home Leave a Comment

The dream is familiar now, even while I dream I recognize it – I am in a large jumbo jet and the plane rolls to one side and I think ‘this is it, the end!’ And then we land, with a bump. The details are different each time. This miracle landing was in Senegal and Axel and Tessa were with me. The dream kept on going and included scenes about scrambling out, retrieving my luggage and wondering whether my computer had been damaged on impact. And then there were more scenes of me, 27 years younger with baby Sita on my hip – in Africa, calmly looking for the rest of my luggage and Sita saying her first words, ‘Mommy, what is that?” as she pointed at something. I never answered, too stunned that she could say a whole sentence; or was it too stunned from the crash?

There is snow on the ground this morning. Now I understand the man with the snow shovel I nearly bumped into yesterday, outside the store with the cheap overstock where I go to get cheap high end chocolate (for Christmas and also for no reason).

All day yesterday I sat in a windowless room with several of my colleagues to sort out the content of chapters that will combine into an electronic handbook for, as we call them, managers who lead. The intended readership are people who manage health programs, facilities and services that have to produce quality care with (always) scant resources. We are drawing on our collective and somewhat specialized knowledge about what really happens (or does not happen) and what should not (or should) as people manage money, information, people and medicines.

I don’t know if this was a coincidence but it was a very supportive and productive meeting that I associate with working with women. There was the lonely male wandering in and out occasionally and the only male author was not able to attend because he lives in Australia. We made progress and set our deadlines. I have till the 9th of January to fix my outline of the opening chapter.

Lumbering

Published December 16, 2008 Dreams , Home Leave a Comment

We now know that the new fireplace will not be installed before Christmas and so we suddenly have plenty of space for a Christmas tree in the empty living room while we trip over boxes and stuff in the other parts of the house. Tessa is happy, and so is Axel; not about the delayed construction project but about the tree. We will now also have room for all the Christmas tchotckies which we can simply put on the floor, since there is no other furniture in the room.

I tried to do the work of Monday and anticipate the work of the week, as I usually do. It was as if I was wading through molasses. I let my inbox fill up and now there are so many things that need attention that I get overwhelmed. I don’t like the feeling, even if other people say they feel the same way and that it has something to do with Christmas. Maybe. Or maybe it is simply that 2008 stuff has to be completed in 2008 and new stuff for 2009 is already seeking my attention.

I had a dream about a large bus that was already amphibious as it came put-putting to the shore and then took off like a plane to make a loop overhead and continue its journey in the air in the opposite direction. It did not make it and with a big ‘ploof’ fell back in the water and landed on its side. The few people inside scrambled out with big grins on their faces as if it was one big joke. I watched it, not in horror, but it did drain more energy out of me.

Axel’s experience for his last two classes this semester may be similar. He has been glued to his computer screen for whole days on end since he returned from his last week’s Thursday class. It feels as if we are lumbering busses that should simply be riding the streets and not try anything silly like making loop-the-loops.

We tried to be disciplined and have at least some minimum of physical exercise during the day – something that has completely fallen by the wayside despite our good intentions. And so, at noon yesterday, we took the puppy for a walk. When we do that we can’t simply walk with her because we have to train her to heel which can make the walk a little tedious. It took about half the walk before she did what she was supposed to and avoided the choker with the spikes that cut into her throat. I can’t stand the contraption but we have to go by the rules of her mom and dad.

Everyone in the house is now reading the dog whisperer (Cesar Millan – Cesar’s way) a Christmas present from last year that is being rediscovered. Cesar has taught us that we are not ‘on top’ and so the puppy is leading us rather than the other way around. It is not the dog that needs to be trained but us. We learned that we did a lot of things wrong. The new discipline is good preparation for parenthood – a little too late for us but in time for Tessa and Steve – since the same principles apply to little children: when you pay attention to a whining dog or kid, it will whine some more.

We had Ken and Margaret over for dinner. They came with a delicious Thai take-out dinner that has become somewhat of a ritual. They had escaped from their silent retreat and cell-like accommodation in East Gloucester at an ocean-side Jesuits retreat center with million dollar views. Margaret does this frequently which is probably why she can write these wonderful books about spirituality and leadership. Her last book, The Soul of a Leader has the story of our leadership program in Egypt in it. Margaret and Ken are also Quakers and taught me about the Clearness process many years ago, at Wellesley Meeting House. That is how we got to know them, and their dog Rufus who passed away not so long ago. We still had his purple leash hanging on our hallway radiator. They took it home, as a souvenir. It still smelled like Rufus.

Humbug

Published December 15, 2008 Dreams , Home Leave a Comment

A night full of dreams; about old friends in Holland; someone going back to school to become a doctor; narrow streets and someone explaining why in Holland people have things delivered rather than dragging them home from the mall; a trip to a lush vineyard with an abundance of fruit – full summer, and no one there to eat the fruit. A trip with women who used to be girl scouts who revealed to me that once a girl scout, always a girl scout, entitling you to camp out with the young ones, given one’s own tent, out in the front yard of a hotel – wondering, do I like to sleep in my hotel room or on an air mattress in a tent? And, would there be snakes in the front yard? And then finally coming home to Lobster Cove with our land clearcut from trees and brush and seeded with a rolling lawn onto the water – clean, simple and boring, with the cove turned into a lake. I did not like it.

In between these various chapters of my dream I woke up and then fell asleep again – I am still a little bit on Bangla time. The clear cut land was the last part of the dreams, or possibly the most memorable one. I think it is a reaction to the clutter and complexity of our lives these days. I have been playing with the idea of getting lots of boxes and packing things up and move them out, like books not read, clothes not worn, toys not played with, and pans not used, etc. And to bring these to people who would could or would use them. One of the local aid agencies had its basement flooded and so lost its Christmas toys for poor families. There is plenty of need out there.

But then I don’t act on it because thatwould be another (huge) chore and I already feel overwhelmed with things that need to be done, fixed, completed, read, written or organized. Even having a Christmas tree at this point is too much as it requires thinking of where to put it in our house with the displaced furniture everywhere, boxes, piles of things that cannot be in their ordinary places. We are still waiting for the new fireplace to be delivered (someone made a mistake) and the (de)construction crew to show up. Now, the best place to be is in the empty living room – I love the open space and am not sure I ever want to move things in there again. It brings up memories of apartment/house hunting and standing in the middle of an empty living room and imagining what living there would be like (before the inevitable clutter moves in).

There are many reasons why I don’t like Christmas. One of them is the boxes with Christmas stuff that come up from the basement as soon as the Christmas tree enters the house (which is why I try to postpone that moment as long as I can to the great consternation and frustration of the rest of my family). All the stuff in the boxes needs to be hung or placed on empty spaces, like Axel’s plastic reindeer set with the missing legs that, without its memories of Christmas long ago, is simply ugly; the porcelain elves with their bare bottoms sliding up and down candles, what to do with those when you have no childhood memories that make them attractive?

As always I am struggling through this Christmas season. At Quaker meeting yesterday I listened to people talking about how wonderful this season is and I feel like Scrooge, saying ‘bah, humbug!’ My experience of Christmas in America has always been about shopping, not quite being able to afford it and then paying for the madness during the dark days of January and wondering why I got so carried away. My own Christmas memories are so different – large family meals, a Christmas tree with real candles, red and white, positioned with care in little clip holders so they stand straight and won’t drip their wax on the ground or branches below, and a large bucket with water next to the tree, just in case.

Newspapers show pictures of out-of-luck families that cannot celebrate Christmas because there is no money for gifts (note the ‘because-there-is-no-money-for-gifts). No matter what people tell me, Christmas is about gifts. It’s hard to swim upstream and pretend that Christmas is about grace, love, light, family. I have this terrible urge to escape to a place where Christmas either doesn’t exist or where it is not associated with gifts, as it used to be in Holland (but I suspect that has changed now as well).

Axel is trying to coach me to be more relaxed and ignore the gift giving but it is hard because all the talk around me is about gifts and the three shopping centers on my way home create enormous traffic jams for the next few weeks at any time of the day. Bah, humbug.

Mechanics, music and Morpheus

Published December 14, 2008 Flying , Home Leave a Comment

Yesterday I was carried by wings, then music and finally by Morpheus. First there was the flying. Weather along our planned route to the south included northern winds gusting from 14 to 28 knots. This is not a huge problem – just hard work – except when the runways are at right angles to the wind and short. This is the case in East Hampton and on Block Island. For a brief moment we contemplated going west to Ticonderoga and fly the length of Lake George. Finally we decided to stick to the initial plan and postpone our decisions to land or not once we were in the vicinity of the airport. We had enough fuel to return without landing.

I took the controls on the way out and Bill was the return pilot. It was a crisp, cold and clear day and you could see for miles. We flew west around Boston and then southwest to Groton and from there crossed the waters to Long Island. On our right was Plum Island which Bill told me we would not want to land, even if we had to. Their website explains why: “We’re proud of our role as America’s first line of defense against foreign animal diseases. We’re equally proud of our safety record. Not once in our nearly 50 years of operation has an animal pathogen escaped from the island.” After reading more I agree with him that a landing in the water would be better. It is the stuff of horror movies.

The airport in East Hampton was deserted except for one jet and a bunch of prop planes. In the summer it gets as busy as Nantucket with jets flying their owners to their summer homes, which we could see from the air with their pools and tennis courts covered for the winter. It is not a place I would want to fly to then. How the jets land on the short runways is a mystery to me. Inside, the tiny terminal looked like an ad from a Better Living magazine, everything painted white, patio furniture, a large flat screen TV with its own channel showing ads for luxury goods; only the fireplace was missing. We paid our fees (it is rare to have to pay fees on small airports like that in the winter), used the facilities, planned our return and headed out again.

On the way back I was a tourist, occasionally doing radio work but mostly taking pictures. We tried to fly straight north to Beverly, requesting permission to fly over Logan but that was denied. Bill has done it once and was anxious to show me, but most of the time air traffic control prefers to have us little guys out of their hair; we are too slow and fly too low. And so we returned west around Boston which allowed for some glorious views east and north, after a brief stop in Taunton.

Seeing the parking lots of the various shopping centers around Boston from the air makes it hard to believe we are in a recession. I think Christmas Shopping has nothing to do with reality and is simply a reflex that has been bred into our genes. And so, even though the North Shore Mall’s parking lot looked entirely full from the air, I could not help myself and went to buy something which took me as long as flying to another state.

Back home I prepared enough of my favorite Dutch winter meal (Boerenkool met worst) for the entire week my. We had an early meal so we could listen to the North Shore Chorus’ annual Christmas concert in Ipswich. It included among others J.S. Bach’s Magnificat in D which is Mary’s prayer – after she learned she was going to have a child that was a little different from others – set to music. It was indeed magnificent. Other pieces were sung by the (rather professional) children’s chorus and made me cry. Some of the tears were from yawning; it was long after my jet lag bedtime and luckily it was a short concert. I was driven home in a semi sleep state and was whisked away on my final journey of the day by Morpheus the moment I put my head on the pillow.

Dread and joy

Published December 13, 2008 Dreams Leave a Comment

In a very vivid dream I was preparing for a prison stay. I had been charged with reckless flying and given a three-month prison sentence. After waking up the feelings stayed with me and remained surprisingly real for some time: dread and despondency with a little bit of anger and ‘this-is-not-fair’ sprinkled over them. In the dream I was trying to find out what my new reality would be like, who would be my ‘watcher’ or ‘handler’ and how I would spend my days. I was told I’d be working in a leather shop and punching out holes in thick leather with a heavy machine. My biggest concern was how to continue blogging. I had asked whether I could take my computer and how internet access was in the prison. Although I never got the answer I had already resigned myself to the fact that I would only be allowed pen and paper and thus would have to interrupt publishing my blog for 3 months. Waking up in my own bed and knowing that downstairs there was a computer that was connected to the internet, was like a gift. Here’s to freedom from prison and want!

Yesterday had two deadlines, a dentist visit and our organization’s holiday party on the menu. The dentist declared me good for another 6 months even though I had not flossed very much. High in the corner of each room a video monitor is mounted that plays, in an endless loop, all the cosmetic services the dentist and his staff can offer you, including some gross before-treatment shots. I suffered through that on my very first visit some years ago and ever since I have asked the staff to turn the thing off. Luckily customer is king and I don’t have to see it again. Much better is the postcard stuck on the wall with the picture of a chicken that says, “Chicken don’t have teeth. Don’t be a chicken.” I used to be one of those children for whom the postcard was designed. Brute force and later narcotics were used to allow the dentist access to my mouth and keep me from losing my teeth. I am OK now with dentists but I remember the agony and struggles each time I see that card.

I completed my assignments before they were due and late afternoon we dressed up to go to the office party that took place in a big chain hotel in Cambridge. Without the few grey haired old-timers like us, the average age at the party would have been 25. I recognized many partners and significant others from facebook profile pictures or photo albums even though they looked more composed and serious than they do on those pictures (often wild poses, of the ‘tongue- out-of-mouth, cross-eyed’ and ‘beer-bottle-in-hand’ variety). I also met the person whose name regularly appears on my facebook page as ‘someone you might also like to become friends with’ Now we will. It was a joyful event with much dancing, too many nice deserts and a champagne toast to everyone’s hard work.

And now it’s time to start planning for a long cross country trip South or West into New York State, depending on the direction of winds and cloud cover, that should keep me, Bill and a friend busy for most of the day.

Frost flowers

Published December 12, 2008 Home Leave a Comment

We have a motion sensor floodlight mounted on the studio across from our bedroom that tends not to work when you need it and it turns on when it rains or when a cat or skunk slips by. It was lighting the driveway all through the night. I know this because I woke up every hour after I had put in my 7 hours of sleep. The rains triggered must have triggered it. This time it also backlit the frost flowers on the windows and so it was a pretty sight until the rains erased them. Now I am worried about the floods that were predicted.

The weather has been atrocious since I have come back. I keep my fingers crossed for Saturday when Bill and I are planning a flight to Long Island and Block Island.

I ended up seeing Axel yesterday – ahead of schedule – because he had not completed his homework and left for class very late. The teacher doesn’t seem to mind him coming in late or at least there appear to be no consequences. We are very different in that respect. I also saw Axel again at about 3 AM when he emerged out of his study in the middle of the night, having worked on his next homework assignment upon returning from class, just when I was starting to wake up hourly. We could actually have a decent conversation in our pre- and post sleep states.

At work I am starting to slug away at accumulated tasks that are now all clamoring for priority attention. Our project ends in about one and a half year so nothing can be postponed anymore. Worse, since we are not ‘burning’ our money at the required rate, we are encouraged to do things now, not later. It is a nice problem to have but it worries the leadership because it looks as if we cannot handle the work. To some degree that is true, we have too many assignments for too few people and we are hiring like crazy (unlike the rest of the American economy where people are laid off). But new hires will not have an easy time to get themselves oriented and slowly slide into the work; besides, they have no guarantees to be employed after July 2010. Actually, that would be true for me as well, according to my contract.

The contours of my spring travel are beginning to appear more clearly on the horizon but scheduling remains somewhat of a challenge; especially since all travel has to be organized around an official evaluation mission by our main client sometime in February that has no firm dates yet. This makes it hard to plan. Usually I have all my trips for the next three months lined up and confirmed by this time in December.

New

Published December 11, 2008 Home Leave a Comment

It is hard to get used again to (a) the early commute, (b) the darkness and (c) the cold. But it is nice to be back in the office. This is the good thing of traveling that much: one can enjoy/appreciate people and things anew after each trip – nothing/no one to be taken for granted.

I managed to get through my first day back in the office without even one yawn, as if I had not travelled across 11 time zones. Apparently the 10 hours of sleep on my first night home got me back in the Cambridge groove and helped me hit the ground running. That was a good thing as most of the day was spoken for: a four hour training, designed on a napkin on my tray table between Dhaka and Dubai, of a new batch of program officers, one other meeting and suddenly it was 4 o’clock and time to go home.

I crossed paths with Axel, somewhere along route 128 or 1; he on his way to his Wednesday night class and me going home via the hairdresser. Since he has another class tonight we won’t see each other until Friday morning, if he gets up before I leave for the dentist. If not he will see me, all new and sparkly, with my hair cut and shiny white teeth, on Friday at the end of the morning; a very different appearance from the dazed traveller he picked up at the airport on Tuesday .

At work I handed in my passport for extra pages. After three years of citizenship it is full – this includes the extra pages that had already been added a little over a year ago. I have requested a second passport. According to the official passport website, second passports may be requested by frequent travelers like me. This should reduce both the stress and the cost of obtaining last minute visas like the one for Bangladesh.

My travel schedule for the spring of 2009 is beginning to emerge after several false starts (Ghana, yes then no; Nigeria, yes then no, Pakistan, maybe…). Now it looks like I will be going to Cambodia which is a country I have not yet visited in my 22 years at MSH. I have always been an ‘Africa’ person (if such exists) and only lately been venturing out eastwards. I know very little about the far east and look forward to exploring that part of the world, with my brand new passport in hand.

Interminable

Published December 10, 2008 Home Leave a Comment
Tags: Holland

The video did not work in economy class of the NW plane taking me back to Boston so everyone got a voucher from KLM that was good for all sorts of things: a five minute phone call from Amsterdam to the USA, 2000 frequent flyer miles on KLM or partner airlines or 10 euro off at any of Schiphol’s restaurants or 15 Euro off a tax free purchase on board in addition to 50 euro off a ticket from KLM or NWA. I never knew video was considered that valuable. Something else was not working either which kept us at the gate for nearly two extra hours. That is probably because I text messaged Axel that I would be home soon. Two more messages were sent after that saying that I would be home a little later. What I forgot to include in those messages was that I was on the early morning flight, departing and arriving early in the morning, in a small(er) airplane than the usual wide body ones.

This last plane was empty too; in fact so empty that most passengers could stretch out on three seats. I did not think I needed to sleep after having slept all the way from Dubai to Amsterdam but regretted halfway through the trip that I had not staked out my territory with backpacks and pillows. Those last 8 hours of this 20 hour (in the air) trip were interminable.

Right behind me was a gaggle of teenagers coming back from a trip to Europe, noisily flirting with one another and a bit too peppy for me that early in the morning. One of them was a Moslem girl, wearing the hijaab tightly around her face and hair. In between the giggling and the games, she would occasionally pull out a small booklet with Quran verses, I presumed, to return to God on this holy day.

One of the flight attendant walked around with a Dutch language book in his pocket and after I confirmed that he was indeed learning Dutch we only spoke Dutch together which he managed amazingly well, much like Sita, with a heavy American accent. He said he had been at it for awhile but never got much a chance to practice because these darn Dutch always spoke English back to him. I knew the problem from Tessa’s and Steve’s venture to Holland when all her efforts to practice her Dutch were thwarted by those polyglot Hollanders.

On the row next to me was a Dutch (he)-American (she) couple with a 6 month old baby that did not sleep at all during the entire flight and then fell asleep promptly just before landing. They were on their way to the grandparents in Boston for the holidays. We talked about bilingual kids – their’s will be more Dutch than English because they live in Amsterdam and he is exposed to Dutch speaking children at the crèche which she pronounced like crash. I wondered what her family would think when she talked like that about her child’s crèche/crash. Mom’s Dutch was improving after 6 years in Holland and no longer a secret language; their home language (English) is now speckled with Dutch, much like ours was when the children were small.

When I called Axel at 11:30 AM to tell him I had landed I could tell from his surprised voice that he had not consulted the schedule and assumed he was to pick me up at the usual time, late afternoon; so much for traveling with carry-on luggage to allow for a quick exit from the airport. It took me exactly five minutes from the moment I stepped out of the plane to coming through the doors of the arrival hall after which I waited for Axel to drive from Manchester to Logan; still it was a nice reunion which we celebrated over lunch at Sam and Joe’s in Danvers.

Back home I found our living room empty; its contents divided over our bedroom, my office, the cellar and hallways, which makes everything rather full and crowded. Today the livingroom will be deconstructed to accomodate a new fireplace that will allow us to reduce our heating bill and burn up the old Norwegian maple, taken down earlier this year, without having the heat go up the chimney.

It’s good to be back;the best part of travel.

Three in a row

Published December 9, 2008 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Dubai

I was given a tri-fold on expensive paper and with a fancy design that did not quite work. It looked more like a computer punch card. Of course the person who designed this card was probably born long after punch cards disappeared. I was asked to answer the questions and tell the marketing department about the quality of my very short stay in the hotel. It included items such as ‘How would you describe your experience in the elevator while going to your hotel room?’ with two blank lines for my concise answer. I was also asked whether I had noticed a change in the lobby environment between night and day and what my impression was of the scent in the entrance. Nothing was left out, even the art on the room key was pointed out to me; what was my impression? The whole thing was about how the hotel had affected my senses. Business schools and sales gurus have been telling us for years that selling services was all about ‘the experience’ that a company triggers in its customers. It finally trickled down into the evaluation forms (no longer called evaluation forms but comment cards.)

At midnight I was zipped to the airport in a chauffeured limo with the young desk clerk accompanying me in the passenger seat and me sitting in the back. That deserved a big tip of course which comes in handy with the Eid holiday I am sure.

Unlike Terminal 3, the departure hall for all the non-Emirate long haul flights was filled with people, albeit it mostly non-Moslems I suspect. The Moslem world, at least those who can afford to, is staying put and celebrating, especially that late into the night. The flight departed at 2 AM.

Although the plane was not as empty as my flight from Dhaka I did not need to share my row of three seats with anyone else so I stretched out and slept the entire trip (6 hours), waking up somewhere over Eastern Holland when breakfast was served.

One row in back of me were the two Dutch participants who I had met during the conference and who had disappeared on the last day. As it turned out they had, with other visitors from their project, driven all the way to Chittagong, a journey of several thousand kilometers.

Their project trains traditional village doctors in recognizing signs of mental illness and they visited a few en route and opened a training center. She wore two shiny pretend (she hoped) gold bangles that were pressed on to her friends after she had admired them on a newlywed’s arm. She was still annoyed with herself to have made such a stupid remark. You have to watch out what you admire. I think I have made that mistake a few times as well and ended up with stuff I actually did not really like. It is of course a trap set by being dishonest.

And now, onwards to home.

In transit

Published December 8, 2008 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Dubai

I drove to the airport with Lakshmi whose inspired talk about microfinance and health had moved me. We had one last chance to talk about her work and what she was taking back from the conference. She was in the first cohort of students produced by the James P. Grant School of Public Health and is like a calling card for the school. If that is what they produce, then it seems like a good choice if you want to learn about public health leadership – a perfect continuation of the work of the person the school is named after.

At the airport I found out that our plane was two hours late. Grameen has installed free internet kiosks in the departure area for travelers. This helped to kill time. I struck up a conversation with Thierry who sounded like an Englishman but was actually French and an owner of a garment factory that produces high end men’s slacks. I am invited to visit the factory next time I make it to Bangladesh. In return I invited him to the US to find out that Dallas and Hawaii, the only places he knows, are not that representative of the United States. By the time we left we had become good friends and I knew all about his family.

The plane was nearly empty because of Eid el Adha, the big Moslem holiday that commemorates the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son as an act of obedience to God. Everyone who returned to his or her family for the festivities had already done so; it’s not like Thanksgiving with much last minute travel. In Dubai people have been holidaying since December 2, when I passed through on my way to Dhaka. Then it was the UAE’s national holiday. Work here will not resume until the 14th, which makes this a 12-day holiday; a good time to travel through here.

On the plane from Dhaka to Dubai I sat next to a family of 5 from Myanmar that was part of a group of 7 other families being resettled from a refugee camp in Bangladesh where they had lived for the last 17 years. The father’s English was good enough to make it possible to have a conversation. I had so many questions. All the fathers in the group carried a large plastic bag that had IOM (International Organization for Migration) stamped on it in three languages. Presumably it contained their migration papers and what looked like X-rays, I suppose to show they are free of TB, much like what I remember carrying with me when I entered the USA as an immigrant, exactly 27 years ago.

The father had escaped as a 13 year old boy from Myanmar with his family in a boat and landed in one of the many refugee camps in Bangladesh – maybe the one where Sayeed’s company runs soap, biogas or other factories on behalf of various agencies that serve the enormous refugee population, camps holding as many as 30.000 people. I asked him what life was like in the camp. He said it was boring as they were not allowed to work for an income, some inane rule that serves some purpose I cannot imagine. Sayeed had mentioned this too.

The families are being resettled in Manchester UK and he enthusiastically talked about Manchester United; needless to say, he was a big football (soccer) fan. Apparently that was one thing they did do in the camps. He also started learning English some 2 years ago, when his resettlement was decided. It took that long to get to this moment. He had clearly been prepared for the flight because he knew to ask for baby food, diapers, blankets, bottles, etc. He traveled with his wife and three children, a boy of 1 who looked like he was six months, a boy of 5 who looked like he was three and a girl of 8 who looked like she was five. “No more,” he said with a big grin, “family planning.” Sadly the grandparents were left behind in the camp. I have a feeling they’ll stay there until they die. I imagined the heart wrenching farewells.

Emirates takes good care of its smallest passengers. A flight attendant went around taking polaroid pictures of the children and their families. She also doled out many presents, coloring books, color pencils, adorable stuffed animal hand puppets and all sorts of goodies for the adults as well (toothpaste sets, razor sets, playing cards). The refugee family took everything with some reluctance and then wanted to return everything to the crew after we landed. In the end they left everything on their chairs when they exited the plane. I could not imagine why but maybe it is like too much food for someone who has been starving.

And then, shifting gears, I arrived back at the brand new Terminal 3 of Dubai airport that is made for the kind of traffic one expects for the Olympics. On the first day of Eid it was deserted with lots of bored people sitting at various help desks sending phone messages to, presumably, other bored people elsewhere in the terminal or city.

One is welcomed by two very odd life sized puppets of women that I cannot figure out. At first I thought they had large bandaids in front of their noses and mouths and it was some sort of advertisement. Upon closer examination these appeared to be the metal contraptions that some women wear. I remember seeing a few older women with these when I traveled through here a month ago. I wasn’t sure then and still are not sure exactly what the purpose is of those things, if not some sort of silencer of women’s voices; or is it to keep the sand from entering mouth or nose? dubaigirl11 dubaigirl21

A short drive took me to the Meridien airport hotel in Dubai where I was upgraded to superdeluxe status with bowing people as if I was royalty: fruit platters, an enormous room and an entire espresso machine, invitations to free alcohol and finger foods later this afternoon (unless I want to have the 120 dollar late nigh bubbly dinner with unlimited drinks and fancy buffet – I declined). Instead I treated myself to a mini mezze, corona and umm ali desert while watching Al Gore updating his incovenient truth with the latest scientifc discoveries – in a constant repeating loop, I suppose to make sure I get the gloomy message and jump into action.

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