Sylvia's Journal

We started celebrating our 33rd wedding anniversary on Thursday evening with a surprise ride, at least for Axel, to an unknown destination. I let the GPS do the talking, and so, as we got closer and closer to our destination, first entering Beverly, then Salem, he began to guess. When we stopped in front of the Waterfront Hotel & Suites in Salem the surprise was complete and over.

We checked in and then walked to a restaurant in back of the hotel on Pickering Wharf. We ordered what we wanted without looking at prices, which made the dinner about even with the cost of lodging. The restaurant (‘62’) is an upscale Italian restaurant with a creative bartender, cook and sommelier. The dishes were small and attractively plated. Our desert was accompanied by two tall glasses of Prosecco, compliments of the chef, for our celebration. If my gift to Axel (a night and day out) was transient, his to me was forever, two seaglass earrings from a local artist with small silver dragonflies. From my medicine card days I remember that dragonflies are reminders to tend to oneself. I haven’t done that well lately.

I had taken Friday off so we could sleep in and do whatever we pleased. The weather wasn’t entirely cooperating as we walked in the freezing rain to a longtime favorite restaurant (Reds) for breakfast. The benedict meals we ordered (accompanied by Irish pork and cod cakes) left me without any desire for food until 7:30 PM. We had to buy Tums to help our stomach digest the rather rich fare. At that restaurant one would not know there was an obesity crisis brewing in the US.

We window shopped for a bit which wasn’t all that much fun in sleeting rain and found refuge in one of my favorite yarn stores (Seed Stitch Fine Yarn) where a young mother with her baby, same age as Faro, was tending to her knitting and child, a challenging combination. I bought a knitting bowl, a ceramic pot with a slot of the yarn, to keep it from rolling all over the floor and appeal to cats and babies alike.

Next stop was the Peabody and Essex Museum where we renewed our membership and admired an exhibit about modern Indian art after watching a fascinating video of Nick Cave and his soundsuits dancing on an all white screen, a modern version of African witch doctors.

We ended our 24 hour celebration with a Vietnamese shrimp and noodle meal and watching no less than 3 episodes of MadMen. Today we entered our 34th year of being together, what a ride!

Opa Axel is baby proofing our kitchen. We have one gate (the cheap one) that requires something akin to a PT exercise – leg lifts – if one wants to go to its other side. The gate on the other side of the kitchen has a door which, with some practice, opens easily. It requires a spanner to put in place, a tool easy to loose so we put it in the messy drawer above the gate.

Baby Faro has discovered there is good stuff in the kitchen drawers and would soon have discovered the liquor cabinet if it wasn’t for Axel’s swift response. All morning Opa screwed in plastic devices that have made our life in the kitchen so much more complicated. We can no longer open a cabinet with one hand – it needs two free hands, one to depress a plastic lip and the other to quickly pull the door open. I am not quite used to it yet and somewhat in denial that we have to live with this handicap for years to come.

Faro has discovered clapping his hands, though there is no sound yet, just the motion. He puts them together in a hit-or-miss sort of way whenever one of us starts singing a Dutch children’s song that has a hand clapping suggestion.

He has also discovered pointing, reminding me of Saturday Night Fever. He responds to pa-pa (or daddy) by pointing vaguely in Jim’s direction. He also knows the word plant, both in Dutch and English (like the difference between ant and aunt), and points enthusiastically to the Jade tree as well as other greens nearby. But when you ask where is ma-ma is he comes up short so we have to work on that.

The franticness of last week is over. I arrived back in Boston on Thursday night, returned to Cambridge on Friday where a past CNN reporter and communications director for a congressman coached three of us in public speaking, with or without powerpoint. It was both humbling and eye opening for someone who’s travelled all the way to Japan to do something similar there. Humbling mostly because I learned what I didn’t know I didn’t know. That’s why we promote life-long learning. It had been a good week.

This weekend was our annual Easter or Greek Easter or Pseudo Greek Easter celebration. We pick a random weekend between Easter and Greek Easter and pray for good weather even though we know it is a crapshoot. So we tell people there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing. Our friends know this.

Some 45 people came together, circles of friends which, if not already overlapping, do so by the end of the day. The girls helped out putting together the bunny baskets together. Not baskets really but bags with candy – some leftover Easter candy, some Haloween candy and some generic stuff. The babies got Cheerios.

Then one elderly and one younger bunny hid the loot – with Bunny’s ankle problems the hiding is no longer so sophisticated (as in trees) which some people over a certain age took as an insult (“What? You don’t think we can climb trees anymore?”), while others just noted how times have passed.

Joe had flown in from Sterling Towers West (Alpine, CA) to Sterling Towers East (Lobster Cove), and lend a hand with pulling summer furniture out of storage and setting up the bar – an important support for the traditional Lobster Cove drink (Bloody Mary). Fire places were being stoked inside and out to keep us warm. The fierce wind and dropping temperature mandated this.

Although we are officially ‘in the field’ it isn’t really very ‘fieldy.’ So far I have been far removed from the work in the weeds, for a long time. I have been in central offices, in resorts, in artificial situations, created for conversation. This is important of course, but it isn’t ‘the field.’

And so, finally today, we got into a car and drove to a popular neighborhood of Abidjan, turned off the main road into an unpaved alley and stopped in front of a tiny derelict place. Four large steps up landed us in the headquarters of a tiny NGO that is one of the thousands of ground troops involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS but also helping young women find their voice and their power. We were met by three volunteers while the founder sat on a small chair where he stayed throughout our visit, not taking part in our conversations. He is, I was told, the permanent presence, though I may not have understood this well – I have a different image of founders.

The tour of the premises was short, four of five tiny rooms, loaded with stuff, boxes and what not piled on top of each other. Two ancient computers flickered with spreadsheets, reports to donors in all likelihood, a scanner that didn’t work, an old dusty printer and lots of dossiers. It was all very minimalist and, for us spoiled westerners, not what we would consider a ‘conducive’ work environment. The volunteers who received us, nevertheless, were proud of their premises and the work they do. Hats off to them.

The founder, and anyone else who was not engaged in an activity, were watching a ‘policier’ that had all the ingredients for success: sex, violence, fast cars, strong bad men and cops – probably the same ingredients that make for all the poverty around them, minus the cars and the cops I suspect.

Someone was sent out to get us bottled water and a box of tissues, to wipe the sweat form our brows. And then we started to talk. Hearing their stories, the work they do, the attitudes they change was humbling – they do much with so little. If there is little of the things we generally expect and need in order to do a good job, they do have one thing aplenty: commitment. It drives everything, confirming once more that human energy for something is our most precious resource. In fact, when I asked them about their personal vision, it was the same as their vision for their NGO.