Sylvia's Journal

So far it has been smooth sailing. The only mishap is a broken nail from picking up my suitcase the wrong way. No lines in Dubai for checking in, a half full plane with empty seats beside us – a good night sleep, no turbulence and a smooth landing ahead of schedule.

We took the bus from Schiphol to the Aalsmeer flower auction, the biggest in the world. Steve had no idea what happens behind the scenes to get flowers from Kenya, Colombia or Israel to our neighborhood florist. Now he knows.

The auction buildings cover acres of space with 1000s of trolleys and hundreds of buyers racing against a clock so everything is bought, bagged and shipped to wherever the buyers are in the shortest amount of time possible. It’s a mindboggling logistics wonder.

Sietske picks us up at the auction and takes us home where Steve is treated to a spectacular breakfast of good Dutch bread, two kinds of cheese, fresh eggs , and thick creamy yogurt. We park Steve in the room where the orphaned ducklings are parked for the night (too cold without a mother duck) so he can rest from the long walk through the auction and a sleepless night in the plane. I take care of other stuff and drinks one cup of coffee after another , produced by Sietske’s fancy espresso machine.

Everything is in full bloom here. The lilacs and wisteria already finished and early summer flowers are out. I can’t wait to see our budding lilacs and that last asparagus.

I thought Sweden had laid claim to the colors blue and yellow – but all the jerseys I see say ‘Boston Marathon 2009.’ I am flying to Amsterdam with many winners, some the world’s best who are going home to Addis or Nairobi, and some who achieved their own personal best. There are a few who wear their medals around their neck, others are still in their running shoes. Many are travelling with proud significant others, including kids, who cheered. I see more women than men who are recognizable as marathon runners, although many others, not in gear, also look trim and fit; this plane load has very few of the usual obese Americans.

Northwest has moved in with Delta – its looks like absorption rather than a merger. I see only Delta uniforms, Delta logos and wonder about the nice Northwest people who used to check me in, serve me – did they simply change uniform or were they laid off?

Axel brings me to Logan and we miss the nice dinner we used to have at terminal E – it was part of the parting, the treat of a last dinner together. At terminal A, Delta’s home, there is no restaurant for people who are not passengers, only one Au Bon Pain. It is dirty and serves nothing of interest to us. Axel is very affected by this change and I see him walk away with droopy shoulders. When he is out of sight and we are done waving goodbye we talk on the phone for awhile longer. He said the goodbye hit him harder this time. We wonder whether it is the missing restaurant. We could arrive earlier and have dinner at one of the airport hotels. Next time.

I am in the Delta lounge, waiting for our call. I am surrounded by suits, a few women, runners, but mostly suits; a man with high blood pressure makes an aggressive call to an underling back wherever his office is to do things the underling finds difficult or uninteresting. The boss is persistent and speaks louder as the clock ticks towards our departure. There is an urgency in his voice (‘I have no time!’). I am glad I don’t work for a company that ends in –ex or –co, even though it might give me business class travel.

Sita is going to Beirut on the 8th of May before going to Amman. That is the day that I am flying over Beirut from Dubai to Amsterdam. It gives me an idea, but how to make it work. I travel on such cheap tickets that any change requires change fees of hundreds of dollars. Still, I am going to explore this. I bet I could fly to Amsterdam and get a miles roundtrip ticket to Beirut and hang out with her for a few days before resuming my trip home, on the hallowed grounds that saw Axel and me turning into a couple, now 30 years ago.

I sleep fitfully in small chunks throughout the flight. I watched the Benjamin Button film without sound because I wanted to sleep. This makes it a very confusing movie – even more so when you miss whole segments while asleep. The only thing I got was that the main character got younger and younger and it had something to do with a clock going backward.

Sietske picked me up for a brief layover at her house where everything is in bloom. There are freshly laid eggs from her chicken. While she checks out a Polish couple who are going to clean her house, I get to write my blog and take pictures of the cherry tree in full bloom with petals blowing covering everything like pink snow. Sietske feed the potbelly pigs and alets them loose in the yard. If she gives them enough food they will not uproot the bulbs and perennials. They are like hippos, but not dangerous.

We go for a walk with her old dog Trouve who reminds me of Axel in the way he is distracted by every interesting thing (for the dog it is smells) on his path. It’s a slow walk which gives me extra time to enjoy the flowers, fully leafed out trees and the geese, ducks and other water fowl with their darling babies.

The waiting, for the evening to start, for our driver to come, for getting through the security line, then the check in line, the passport control line, and the last line of getting on the plane, seemed interminable. The plane was full, not one empty seat. It was also full of newly adopted babies and couples experiencing the first stresses of travelling with infants that cry a lot. Nevertheless I managed to sleep the first half of the flight and killed the second half by watching Slumdog Millionaire on the tiny screen in front of me, and being distracted by the excitement of our airplane breakfast.

We had only a couple of hours in Amsterdam; too short to go to the supermarket in the arrival hall and too early on Sunday morning to call people. But there was time to buy cheese and chocolates for back home. I bought Liz the State of Africa to give some historical and political context to her next visits to Africa. All the places we work have their last 60 years explained. The post-colonial history of Africa is confusing, complicated and not very pretty.

I am allowed to bring one guest into the KLM lounge on my Flying Blue Platinum Elite card, the most important benefit of flying this much. This is where I introduced Liz to cheese for breakfast and a café-au-lait that was not as good as our Ethiopian macchiato but much better than the Northwest airplane coffee served on flight 59.

I made my routine ‘I-am-out-of-Africa’ call to Axel as soon as we touched down and cell phones were allowed. He was still in February while I was already in March and assured me that this time he knew I was on the early morning flight and would be there before I walked out into the arrival hall (he was).

En route we befriended an American-Ethiopian with a Red Sox baseball hat, which is how we knew he was going our way. The plane to Boston was half full again and without any adopted babies – the couple with the crying infant and toddler was heading to someplace north of Sioux City on another plane. I imagined the home coming banners, flowers and balloons that would great the little family at the home airport. Such excitement for some, bewilderment for the little kids.

Our plane had a large contingent of women, of all ages, who returned from Tanzania, several of them with henna tattoos on their hands, except the white-haired and osteoporotic grandma sitting by the window. One of them was very sick and needed more than one barf bag. I thought of Liz and her good timing.

The 8 hour flight was interminable – day flights tend to be that way, especially when you are going home. I slept a little, read a little, played solitaire and reviewed comments on the introductory chapter I wrote for another book we are publishing later this year and struggled with comments that I did not agree with. Writing is a very subjective business and it is the last frontier for me for dealing with criticism. It kept me busy reflecting during our long descent into Boston; one way to kill time.

Upon landing a few more lines and more interminable waits (getting off the plane, immigration, luggage and customs) before being reunited with Axel – the best part of the entire trip.

The world economic crisis is showing up in the gloomy graphs on the front of the Dutch newspapers and in the empty plane to Amsterdam with room to spare. I have rarely had an empty seat beside me on my twenty years of Atlantic crossings. My first two flights in 2009 allowed me to sleep, fully extended over 4 seats as if in a bed. This is when a good thing is actually a bad thing.

And so I had a good (half) night sleep, full of dreams. The only one I remember is that I was about to receive a visit from some official who was coming to my house to extend a permit for something that was up for renewal and for which I had to show my continued proficiency. I knew I had to bone up on procedures or rules that contained precise numbers that I had forgotten. Somewhere in my (childhood) room there was a booklet that I needed to review before his arrival; but I couldn’t find it and the search became increasingly frantic. And then the beverage cart came through and released me from my anxiety, offering me watery tea in a Styrofoam cup and a tiny cereal bar that is supposed to taste like apple.

Axel drove me in to work yesterday morning. He had an appointment with the brain injury doctor. The visit was a routine check up and things are going in the right direction. But I did notice he forgot his wallet as we got into the car and is easily distracted when he remembers things he should have done/taken and did not – mostly small things, usually with little or no consequence, that show that his executive function is not quite where it needs to be. In spite of this handicap he appears to be handling the complex and complicated job of chair of the town’s community preservation committee remarkably well. But then again, if you work in town you can pretty much leave your wallet at home.

At work there was one more all-morning meeting with our evaluators, this time less powerpoints and more conversation that showed our virtual capacity building portfolio. I have seen it expanding over the years, seen colleagues learn their way into this, including myself in the area of virtual facilitation, and realized as I listened to their presentations that we have come a long way and have much to be proud of.

At lunch time Morsi, Jennifer and I took our intern Nuha out to lunch to celebrate her last day with us, or maybe it is ‘mourn’ her last day. Nuha and I have gotten quite close since we met less than a year ago in the BU course, she a student, and I the professor. We have introduced each other to our respective worlds, hers a world populated by women in a desert kingdom, mine a New England one that includes a lush Lobster Cove, trips in small planes and eating apples straight from the tree.

Nuha showed us pictures of camping out in the Riyadh desert with her female relatives, including a video of singing around a campfire. I have an open invitation to visit her when she is back in Riyadh and participate in such an event. It looks like fun but definitely would require some intense work on my Arabic before I go as it will be a total immersion experience.

The tent is not like what I thought hearing the word; in her world a tent is a like a huge Bedouin tent, permanently set up in the sand on the outskirts of the city, that you can rent if you don’t have your own, and all you do in it is sleep as the days are too hot to be inside and the evenings too cold (close to zero Celsius) and so you sit outside around a fire – it is the desert after all.

I have nearly finished working through my 10 Pimsleur Persian lessons during my commute to work and decided to check with my Afghan colleague Saeed whether I am actually learning something that people in Kabul can understand. He told me that people would notice that I spoke the language of Iran rather than Afghanistan but they would understand me. The problem is that I would not understand much of what they would be saying to me as the words are quite different. I now imagine that the difference is something like between Portuguese and Spanish, where the Portuguese can understand the Spanish speakers but not the other way around. Thus, getting an Afghan tutor is becoming more important now to help me make the adjustments in my newly acquired vocabulary.

And now I am in Amsterdam, waiting for my next departure, just a couple of hours away, first to Khartoum and then Addis.

Worst it is, indeed. Although the flight is not full I am seated in a middle seat of three. Luckily I am separating a couple and end up with the aisle seat after all; so much for having platinum status. Yet the flight attendants keep coming by to see how the couple is doing (“you are travelling a lot with us!” she exclaims to the reunited couple, and asks if they are seated right, and I wonder ‘What about me?’ but then I remember I am a code share guest, a NW frequent traveler albeit on a KLM plane).

There appears to be a new subservience from the staff to the frequent flyers and I wonder whether directives have come down from the top to treat the most frequent flyers extra special, what with the economic downturn, you don’t want to lose those.

The seats seem a little closer each trip I take. Now even my small computer no longer fits on the tray table once the gentleman in front of me reclines. I try to type in a rather contorted way for awhile and finally ask him to un-recline. He is nice and sits straight.

I read more about the Khmer Rouge and thank my lucky star for having been born half a world away. The book gives me a new perspective on sitting in a crammed space and I realize it is not so bad after all.

I am no longer grimy because I took a shower, washed my hair and put on clean clothes for the last leg of my trip. After 14 hours in the sky and 8 hours of waiting in various airports I needed that.

The last 7 hours seem not so bad anymore. This assumes that we will depart on schedule – not entirely to be taken for granted as I look at the snow flurries and dark clouds hanging over the polder and moving in fast with heavy winds.

Now it’s time for some phone calls and then back in line.