Sylvia's Journal

Sita and I left on an early flight to DC to work together at a conference. It is the culminating event, a Share Fair, of the Global Health Knowledge Collaborative, and the Knowledge for Health (K4H) end of project taking stock. I am the MC and Sita is doing the graphic facilitation. We have worked together like this in Burkina, in Afghanistan, at Harvard and now here. Every time we do this we think we could be a family business.

The high of working together on something important and worthwhile was shattered by the Boston Marathon bombs. We were blissfully aware of the tragedy until we received messages that Tessa and Steve were safe. “Safe? What safe?” we wondered. Thanks to smartphones we found out what had happened. Here too things were put on high alert: sirens in the distance and worries about targets over here. Two bombs could mean more bombs – since no one knew who, why. Rumors of a complete downtown Boston shut down, the airport…we could have been stuck there.

We tried to forget and got busy with work, ironing out some last minute glitches which required a long walk to find a Staples (too long a walk that produced more ankle ouch), and then settled down in a tapas bar, waiting for Sita’s co-facilitator Alicia who had missed her early morning flight from a southern city.
And now I cannot sleep as the horror of today plays like a tape in my wide awake head…thinking of the bystanders who stood in the wrong place at the wrong time, the runners who had worked months on getting ready, some also at the wrong place at the wrong time.

M called on Skype from Kabul – to make sure we were OK. Imagine that, living in Kabul and worrying about us. “Your people are not used to that,” she said, “it’s harder.” It’s hard on all of us, knowing that everything can suddenly come to a full stop, just like that. One afternoon you decide to go watch the marathon finish, and then bang! For the rest of us life goes on. I have to get back to bed, there’s work to be done in the morning.

Although domestic travel hardly counts, I am on the road again, a little further south, in Washington DC. It is supposed to be spring here but today was cold and I was glad I wore my Ethiopian leather jacket, good for cold weather on the high plateau, Kabul, Massachusetts and now also DC.

I am being trained with a dozen other colleagues in the art of leading a proposal process. Since I have returned from Afghanistan I was twice put in this role – without the training – and both times the request for proposals was aborted for various reasons. Now that I am learning how I should be playing this role I am glad that happened – I would have gone about my task all the wrong way.

Later this week, on Friday, back in Cambridge, I will be in another training, this time on public speaking, delivered by a firm that does this for a living. A previous training in DC got rave reviews so I signed up. It does require some homework that has to be squished in sometime between now and Friday 9 AM. I am looking forward to the weekend, for some temporary relief – our annual Easter ritual, memories of Beirut, meeting Axel, getting married, Sita on her way, and countless new springs and new beginnings since then – a most memorable time of each year.

With the work done and the weekend ahead, we started our whirlwind tour of a few DC friends we hadn’t seen in a while.  We started on Q street with long time friends over a beef stew, a good glass of wine and catching up on at least five years of stories.

Saturday was reserved for culture. We visited the Saudi exhibit at the Sackler  a much more multicultural view on Saudi Arabia than we are used to.

Next stop was the Roosevelt Memorial park along the river. I didn’t even know it existed and we agreed with our hosts that it was inspiring and breathtakingly beautiful (apparently in any season).

I had insisted on seeing a rather unusual exhibit of objects that couldn’t been with the naked eye. My companions were humoring me and pleasantly surprised. The objects are created from microscopic materials and then painted using paint molecules and the split legs of dead flies. It was only through a powerful microscope that one could see the tailor of Gloucester, a parrot on an eyelash, a bird’s nest, a gilded motorcycle, a dinosaur, Beatrice Potter and more.  He even recreated the building of Lloyd’s of London on a pin’s head.

We then switched friends in another part of town – dinner and drinks and off to bed. Sunday morning was reserved for a visit to the zoo around the corner from their house. It was the first time in decades that I was there. Much had changed since our last visit. It is quite astonishing how much animals and large living spaces could be shoehorned into such a small piece of land. It was a pleasurable walk on a beautiful fall day, except for my crappy ankle which reminded me I need to get another cortisone shot.

Packed with ice around my ankle our friends delivered us to the last stop in Bethesda which included a Louisiana brunch with crayfish, crab cakes, beignets and a sauce called entouffee, washed down with chicoree coffee – a brunch that would see us through the rest of our day.

We took the metro to our last destination, National Airport, for our flight back to Boston where it was a few degrees colder and a little closer to winter. We agreed that DC was indeed a great place to visit, not just because of our friends but also the sheer number of interesting places and events that are going on all over town, free or otherwise.

I had gotten up at 3 AM to get a 6 AM flight to Washington for a two day meeting. I could have gone the night before but with the baby coming, any moment now, I decided to keep my time in DC to the absolute minimum. Any other time I would have taken advantage of seeing friends (yes you Larry) and indulge in the luxuries of the wonderful Westin hotel; but not now.

As a result of my early rise this morning I started fading rapidly at 8:30 PM while still in the company of a young Indian colleague who I had gotten to know in Kabul, with his wife and darling little girl who just turned 2 and was born while we were still in Kabul.

I had knitted her a little bunny made from authentic Afghan goat hair – sturdy and a little scratchy. I was touched to see her holding the bunny close to her heart. Two years of wear and tear had softened it a bit but it was every bit as solid as the day it was finished. I can just imagine this bunny making it into the next generation. Wouldn’t that be nice?

All during the day I luxuriated into the kind of intellectual exercise – discussing junior and senior leadership programs – that we had very little time for when I was still in Afghanistan – but that I now remember as being among the more fun HQ activities. How one forgets.

During the breaks I had wanted to socialize, swing by offices of colleagues I hadn’t seen in a long time but a deadline for a proposal draft review trumped that until the end of the workday. I had been able to complete the review during the breaks and so was able to join a few colleagues for a drink after work, and then dinner with my Indian colleague and his wife and daughter.

After dinner we went for a stroll through the neighborhood. I had forgotten what a summer evening in the city was like. Everyone was out, young and old, enjoying the green spaces from benches that were everywhere, even though we were in the middle of a high rise neighborhood. I counted once more my blessings of being in a peaceful place; no guns, blast walls or well-funded evil empires.

Axel called to say there had been no action on the baby front and so I hope to squeeze in another day with my Washington colleagues before heading home tomorrow evening; then baby Bliss can come.

Back in the hotel I realized I had gotten an upgrade (I prefer to get these on flights) with all sorts of luxuries I didn’t need, such as an all-in-one printer/copier/scanner and a gadget to help me relax, offering choices between the sound of rain, a summer evening, rainforest, a waterfall, ocean and heartbeat. The latter was a little creepy.   I choose ‘ocean’ so I could pretend to be in Lobster Cove but it was an ocean sounds that was not from here, more Caribbean than Massachusetts Bay. It also got to be old quickly as the loop was very short, with the same seagulls flying by my bed over and over again.

I had until yesterday always associated Vertigo with Hitchcock but from now on it will be associated with my four day trip to deliver a presentation at a conference in Washington that nearly didn’t happen and 5 hours in the emergency room of George Washington University Hospital.

The vertigo had started small, brief episodes before I got off the plane on Saturday morning, a few more that day, a few more on Sunday, all short and fleeting. But then, at the end of the morning session of the big conference that celebrated the end of the project I have been working on for all these years, the episode did not stop. I became like a drunk: unable to walk with the room spinning around me and then my stomach started to heave. Two colleagues got me to the bathroom, just in time; after that I had to have a plastic bag/waste basket next to me at all time.

For a while it was touch-and-go: will she present, will she not. My colleagues were ready to whisk me away to the emergency room but I resisted. After all I had travelled 36 hours to make that presentation. In the end the presentation became a team effort: the Afghan representative of the ministry of health and one of my Boston based colleagues prepared themselves for taking over. We ended up each doing a piece. We took longer than planned, there were fewer people than we had expected and there were essentially no questions but we delivered the message that some good stuff is happening in Afghanistan.

And then I was taken to the hospital where I had a cat scan (everything OK), blood tests (everything OK), and EKG (OK) and the final conclusion, luckily, of benign locational vertigo. A little after 10 PM I was sent home with antivertigo medicine and the OK from the doctor to board the plane to Dubai tonight. My colleagues wanted to keep me in DC, in a Holiday Inn near the office but that was not at all in my plans. I am happy to go home; a home that I learned just now had been bombed again and had a plane crash. Vertigo seems like a minor irritation in comparison.

Full with the joy of seeing friends and colleagues who I have worked with for many years, decades in some case; of seeing colleagues from Nepal. We started something there in 2006 and it is still going strong – leaders are popping up everywhere.

Full of pride in seeing Flore from Cote d’Ivoire. She was an administrative assistant, underemployed like Marzila in Kabul. I convinced the rest of her male team that we needed women on the facilitator team. Some protested (I have heard this too often: she is too young, the older men won’t accept her in an authority role). But they did and now she is here in Washington for the first time in her life. We hugged. I could have cried.

I could have cried and was filled with sadness upon hearing about the earthquake from my Haitian colleagues, the sadness of Sandra who lost her husband, her life partner, her best friend. Many are still living in tents, afraid to enter even their undamaged home. It takes courage they say. For now it is too scary, because of the continuing and unexpected aftershocks. The earth, it seems, is not done yet. What a frightening thought.

Full of the stuffiness that comes from being in a windowless hotel basement room for an entire day watching rehearsals of powerpoint presentations and doing my own.

Too full with stories to be able to stick to the 30 minutes allowed (but how does one tell about Afghanistan in 30 minutes?).

A city full of beaming students and their parents as they walk, some in their graduation gowns, others with just the tassled hat on, or simply carrying the thing in a plastic bag) on their way to the enormous GWU graduation set-up in the middle of the Mall.

Meals full of calories but so very yummy.

Full of energy after a good night. Now it is morning here in DC and evening in Kabul. The real reason for why I am here starts today. Rehearsal time is over. Curtain opens in a couple of hours.

Full of pearls; wearing my mother’s and grandmother’s pearls for the occasion. I so rarely dress up these days. This seemed like a good time.

Full of gladness that I am not leaving for Dubai tonight.

For 16 hours I was high up in the sky, oblivious to the worries of the world, ensconced in my business class pod. Things turned out all right and it was my lucky day after all. I fell asleep, which is very easy to do in the pod because the seat flattens entirely, as soon as we were up in the air and woke up as we approached the North American coast. Sixteen hours in that business class pod is easy flying; I could have gone on for another 16 hours. But in coach it is an endless trip, I have done it too.

I entered the US with a simple swipe of my passport in a kiosk. I got my clearance for the Global Entry System just when my continuous travel stopped, last winter. It’s very satisfying to bypass the long lines. The swift entry and not having any checked luggage, made it possible to catch the plane to DC that left 25 minutes after I exited the plane that had taken me from Dubai.

I was taken to a very fancy hotel, Monaco, which is located straight across the National Portrait Gallery. I learned that the hotel used to be the Tariff Building and was the first significant federal building constructed after the US Capitol and the White House. The design is based on an Italian Renaissance Palazzo. I feel kind of royal, first the B-class and now this. I am travelling in style.

I threw myself Washington like a true tourist, starting with a walk down to the Mall. I chose my lunch spot carefully: in the National Gallery’s statue garden. I had it with a glass of white wine in a plastic cup, just like that, in the open, while watching a steady stream of obese tourists waddle by and trying to look at the exposed flesh with the eyes of an Afghan and I marvel about this place where everything is possible that is so frowned upon back home.

I visited the National Gallery and then made a brief pilgrimage to see Amelia’s shiny red Lockheed Vega in the overcrowded Air & Space Museum. I had watched the movie about her on the plane and felt compelled to pay my respect.

On my way back to the hotel I passed by the Canadian embassy, marvelling again at the absence of any visible form of protection, except for some low fences one could jump over in a second. It made me want to scream at all the warmongers in Afghanistan, ‘don’t you see what you could get, how lovely and peaceful Afghanistan could be if you could just stop worrying about your own wellbeing and interest and start looking after the good of the country?’

Back at the hotel I ‘rested my eyes’ as Axel calls it until the phone brought me back from a bottomless sleep. Kathy from the reception rang to tell me the provincial health director of Bamiyan Province had showed up. He has been all over the US on a trip paid for by the State Department and we were able to keep him here three more days to participate in our conference. I am paying his bill, hence the call.

I am happy about his presence at the conference on Monday. It will keep me honest. When people ask me about ‘country-owned’ and ‘government-led’ I can call on him.

It also meant that I had an Afghan dinner date and the food was going to be Afghan. Our Sikh taxi driver took us far outside the city; I was ready to turn back and then there it was, a place along a major road, strip mall style. I don’t think I would have ever gone in by myself as it didn’t look very attractive on the outside. It was Afghan all right, very Afghan. A wedding was going on inside. It is as if I was back in Kabul except the men and women mingled freely and most women were not covering themselves as they would in the home country.

The food and the service was excellent and stood in some contrast to the rather run down surrounding. I could tell that my Afghan friend was enjoying the food he has missed for 3 weeks. I watched him observe with curiosity his Americanized country men and women as he ate his warm Afghan naan, sipped his green tea and dug into his qabuli rice. It was royal treatment of a different kind.

My attendance at the GHC conference was very short. Everything was just warming up when I left. Still I got to listen to some very creative and inspiring speakers who use various internet and mobile technologies to promote or protect health. This is how I learned that of South Africa’s 45 million people 43 million have access to a mobile phone. I also heard the terribly sad story about how mothers in Nigeria who bought teething syrup laced with anti-freeze fluid unwittingly killed their babies. On the other hand, amazingly creative experiments are going on in Ghana to outsmart the makers and sellers of drugs that either don’t work or that kill. Listening to these stories makes you realize that we have, collectively, the ingenuity to constantly outsmart each other, for good and for evil.

The best part of the conference is the exhibit hall. If you like candy, pens, stress balls, pins you can stuff your pockets full, with or without listening to sales pitches. Some connections with global health are tenuous – there are travel agents and Toyota land cruiser salesmen.

The Gapminder people were there with their amazing displays of world population data. They demonstrated an electronic table top game that tested your demographic data knowledge for the countries of the world as if you were playing blackjack or poker, with chips and all.

But the best exhibit was from the condom people who took up an entire wall. There was a lube tasting bar, condom pin making, an informative video about condom making and testing (like filling them up with 32 liters of water – why that much, one wonders) – a manikin dressed in an outfit entirely made up of condoms, African cloth baggies to hide your condoms in and more. The playfulness is exactly what they want as total strangers strike up conversations about topics that are usually taboo. The money for these displays and this creativity comes from the UN, not the US government – not a surprise.

I arrived early at the airport. My taxi driver came from Ethiopia but seemed not very eager to talk about his country that I am to visit soon. He left 24 years ago when it was not such a nice place. At the airport I was served my order of pretzels by other Ethiopians, recent émigrés who were more enthusiastic about their country. The cost of a few pretzel sticks, a mustard dip and a pint of water would have provided an entire feast for countless people in their homeland.

I was early enough to catch the 3:30 flight but, despite my 425 dollar ticket I was not allowed on unless I paid a penalty for 50 dollars – which I stubbornly refused ‘out of principle’ only to punish myself with a considerably longer wait at the busy airport.

I arrived home to find the entire family, including Sita and Jim around the table and everyone commenting on the bug Sita had brought home from her travels. Since she looked a bit wilted we looked ORS up on Google and prepared the proven practice of home-made oral rehydration solution for her. Just before going to bed we watched a documentary about the Taliban nightmare in Pakistan; not surprisingly it produced some bad dreams.