On Impressing Donors

We had a donor come visit us this week and my boss asked me to take him out after work on Friday.  Within five minutes of his arrival at my office, we got reports of American Red Cross's evacuation from their building because of a 4.9 earthquake and shots were fired outside our office gates.  Hahahahaha!

On the Sweetness of I-Told-You-So

Less than two weeks after writing the last post it finally happened!  The imminent disaster I have been warning of like the cast-eyed village seerer suddenly became apparent to all!  The bosses are stricken by the news...those responsible are claiming innocence...and the department that has worked hard, sought my assistance time and again, struggled without a director, came out of the mess looking good.  I am so proud of them!

And me? I am enjoying the relief of finally being vindicated. See?  The world is coming to an end!  Told you!

On Giving Up and Collapsing Bridges

I'm writing this from work. I don't want to be here.  I give up.

Imagine spending 18 months waving a red flag and yelling, "Hey!  You know the bridge we're all trying to build?  I think we're all using different construction plans!"  Imagine going to person after person, from the builder to the architect to the mason and saying, "Show me your plans.  How are you reading them?  That's not the right way to do it - let me show you how," then see everyone go back to the old way of reading the plans.  Imagine going to the biggest boss, who agrees with how you're reading the bridge plans, and telling her "I am really afraid that no one else is reading them this way and we're going to have a huge mess on our hands."  Imagine doing this until you're hoarse from talking, until you're tired of the sound of your own voice.

And still construction on the bridge continues because the foreman was given instructions from big boss to change how he reads the plans but he didn't understand the new way and so could not communicate to others.  And you stand there, watching the disaster unfold.

On the Proper Way to Eat Bread

The supermarket is now baking fresh baguettes.  The ovens are shrewdly located by the deli section as you come into the shop, so the smell of freshly baked bread getstyour salivary glands going before you even have a chance to pick up a cart.  Even if you're just dashing into the shop for toothpaste, are you really going walk by a paper bag of piping hot baguette?  No.  No, you're not.

I usually carry a loaf of bread in my arms as I shop, munching away on the crusty top.  Well-bred people glance my way, appreciating the appeal of crusty, hot bread, but refusing to succumb to such behaviour themselves.  And that's the great thing about being an adult.  You can chose for yourself how you want to behave, rather than having behaviour prescribed for you.

Having said that, my mother, who otherwise demanded proper behaviour from me when I was a child, understood that certain pleasures lie outside of the realm of propriety.  My memories of the car ride home from the supermarket in Brasil were of this: sitting in the back seat, surrounded by paper shopping bags and biting off the top of a hot baguette so I could pull out the soft, fragrant insides.  I'd go as far into the baguette as I could reach or until we got home: which ever came first.  My mum always acted horrified when she caught me, but I knew that she knew that I knew that she didn't blame me and she not-so-secretly was envious.

I got home from the supermarket today with three warm mini baguettes and stood at the kitchen counter, devouring most of one with a ridiculously expensive and delicious piece of soft cheese.  Then I turned my attention to the other two mini baguettes and because I am a grown up and I make my own money and don't have to share my food with anyone, I methodically denuded the baguettes of their crusty bits on the lengthwise folds and happily crunched away at them.

My mum would have yelled at me, but I would know that she knows that I know that she doesn't begrudge me the pleasure.

On Enjoying the Process over the Outcome

I started a little painting a few weeks ago.  It was nice to pull out my paints.  It's been so long that I jumped right into applying paint to the canvas without going through all the prep work that used to be automatic: laying down newspaper, having water and paper towels aplenty, ensuring the wind won't flip something over onto wet paint. My carelessness became apparent when to my dismay, I found myself with yellow paint all over the wooden patio furniture, my shorts, and my hair.  I had fun, nevertheless, putting down the base coats and getting a feel for the thing.

Weeks later, during a particularly mind-numbing workshop I was observing at work, I used some crayons lying on the table to plan the next steps of the painting in my notebook and felt quite pleased with the crayon results.

That weekend, I set up my work space carefully before turning to the canvas, heartened by my crayon plan and inspired by some photos of light and shadow I took in a magical park in France.  But the minute the brush hit the canvas, I cringed.  Not really getting the same effect as I did with the crayons on my notebook.  Yikes.  How to salvage the situation?  Oh, well, I'd begun - no going back.  I worked without much hope of success until I started experimenting a little with dabs of paint.  And began enjoying the technique without the pressure of caring about the result. After a while, there was enough thick paint on the canvas that I couldn't do much else until it all dried.  I packed up my paints and put the canvas aside, no longer sure where I was going with it.

A couple of days later, I bumped into the painting and it was as if I was seeing it for the first time.  And...I kind of liked it.  Looking at it in the morning light today, I was pleased with my progress but identified a few areas I wanted to work on.  I occurred to me that I wasn't sure when I would consider the painting done.  Will I just haul the thing out every couple of months and dab here and there, changing the feel and direction of the thing as it morphs from dappled sunlight to, say, post-apocalyptic dawn?  Or will I leave it as is, enjoy what I like about it, and allow myself to contemplate the areas "to work on" as mysterious possibilities?

On Getting Sloppy

I am updating my resume. 

This is always a chore and something I kick myself for not doing periodically.  Each time I am left having to think back on what has been remotely noteworthy in the past 12 months of work. 

It’s a bit depressing.

But hey, my system at least means that resume updates are correlated with upcoming change, which can be exciting.  Even when I had to leave Papua New Guinea prematurely, the chagrin of leaving was tempered by the excitement of unknown possibilities lying beyond those resume updates and job applications.

I look at resumes all the time – reviewing them for friends, when recruiting at work – so it was a bit of a shock to start working on mine this morning and come up short.  What goes in a resume?  My responsibilities?  Or what I’ve accomplished (cringe)?  How does this work, again?

My resume was first created centuries ago and has been updated and tweaked over the years but never really overhauled.  I looked at it with new eyes and realized it represented all the things I stand against in health communication:

·         it’s chock-a-block with jargon,

·         it’s wordy,

·         it’s tidy but doesn’t draw the eye to key areas, and

·         there are no hooks to keep the reader interested in reading on. 

How did I get to the point where the document that is supposed to reflect my career is so out of line with the principals of my work?  Yuck.  Makes me wonder what other parts of my life I’ve gotten sloppy with. 

On the Most Disorienting Place I've Known

Last, Vanessa, Emily, Gillian, and I took off to Curacao.  It's one of three islands in the Netherlands Antilles (along with Aruba and Bonaire) about 35 miles off the coast of Venezuela.  Picture a former slave trade hub on an island once inhabited by Arawaks, then colonized by the Netherlands and spitting distance from South America.  Yeah - that's a tough image to conjure up, isn't it?

World travellers that we are, it wasn't until we arrived in Willemstad airport that it occurred to us to ask each other what the local currency was (Netherlands Antilles Gilder) or the local language.  During our flight from Haiti, our flight attendants spoke to passengers in what at first would sound like French or Spanish then: gibberish.  I even heard a word or two of Portuguese in the mix.  Turns out the language is Papimento.  And everyone in Curacao, our taxi driver told us, speaks Papimento, Dutch, Spanish, and English.  After a while, I stopped trying to identify what language the words I recognized were in and just accepted that my brain understood the cost of the fare and that a particular advert was promoting BBQ chicken.  

We arrived at night and drove from the airport through Willemstad to our hotel.  The lights of the town center were charming and held a promise of afternoon strolls through cobbled streets.  And then we saw it: a cinema!! With multiple films showing!  Including.....Footloose!!!!  Too good to be true.  

Our hotel, the Kura Hulanda, was set up like a village with cobbled stone walks, courtyards, gardens, fountains, a town square, fountains, and lovely displays of ancient astronomy tools from telescopes to celestial disks. Emily and I had a room off a courtyard with a four poster bed and footed free-standing bathtub.  There were two pools, one snaking around a leafy courtyard and the other - the eco pool - was a series of pools and waterfalls ringed by rocks.  We were delighted.

Some of the buildings in the Kura Hulanda Hotel

Lots of random sculptures around the hotel

For celestial observation?

Emily blown away by the waterfront of Willemstad

 We stretched our legs, drank lots of coffee, marveled at the large Dutch people that worked in the cafes, went diving, drove around the flat/shrubby island, crashed the Maritime Museum art opening, and generally had a good time.  And guess what?  I won a roundtrip ticket from Haiti to Curacao on the flight back home!

Eclectic bar we heard about 

Dominoes, beer, and speed Scrabble after a day of wandering

Fishalicious: the restaurant that redeemed all others that we tried. 

On Blogging or not Blogging

Hi there.  It's been a while since my last entry.  Makes me feel guilty because there's no point in having a blog if you don't write anything and because blog-worthy things have happened since August.  Wonderful things, like having a blast celebrating Gunner's wedding in Philadelphia with old friends from boarding school.  Not-so-wonderful things like finding out through our internal jobs announcement that my boss is leaving Haiti in February - a year earlier than I had anticipated.  And bizarre things, like musing about what an earthquake in DC would be like an hour before feeling one in DC.  But I'm having a crisis of blog.  Not sure what it's raison d'etre is.  If my blog is struggling to understand it's role in the world, this doesn't bode we for me...

Nevermind.  Let's keep calm and carry on.

Philadelphia in August 

Greg, Josh, Gunner, and Brad

Laura, post-earthquake

On Stubbornness and Self-Deception

I like walking.  When I lived in Washington DC, I considered myself to be a Walker.  I walked 35 minutes to and from work each day.  An hour and a half- long walk to a museum or a pub on the weekend didn’t faze me.  I imagined I could walk foreeeeever.

                When I moved to PNG, I thought not being able to walk outside would be a difficult change for me.  When I say you can’t walk in PNG (or in Haiti), I don’t mean this in the way that some might say that “you really need a car to get around in the suburbs.”  I mean it generally is not advisable to step out of your car unless you are parking in a compound with armed guards.  I can count on one hand the number of times I walked outside from one place to another during my time in PNG.  And I didn’t miss it, which is strange.  I suppose if Port Moresby had wide sidewalks, shops, shaded walkways, or anything inviting to investigate by foot, I might have wished to have been able to walk.  I remember a field visit to a nearby province known for the moderate temperament of the locals and the relatively low crime.  I was allowed to walk down a hill from my guest house to the police commissariat, where we were having a training.  It was exhilarating!  I couldn’t wipe the grin from my face for the full 10 minute walk.  Of course, the very first day, two armed men robbed the bank across the street from our training site with several shots fired.  And that was the end of that in terms of walking.

                A couple of weeks ago, I returned to DC for the first time in a couple of years.  I have lived there on and off for four years and was eager to walk.  Two things became apparent rather quickly:  In the years since I lived there, I haven’t magically grown up and acquired the ability to wear heels all day  - I’ve just been wearing heels in places where the farthest I walk is to and from my car.  Oh – and rain coats and umbrellas?  Foreign objects.  I’m never under the open sky!

                But undeterred, I set about walking through DC as I did when I lived there.  One day, I walked to a coffee shop and then to another coffee shop.  Sidewalks, blue skies, trees….so exhilarating!  I walked to the National Gallery of Art (East) and then (West) and then to Penn Quarter for lunch and then through Chinatown to look at shops and then…

…my feet hurt.  My legs ached.  I wanted to sit down.  I wanted to sit for a loooong while.  And yet I had planned to walk across town to Dupont Circle – another 50 minutes or so.  But the thought of that was shockingly unappealing.  Where’s the metro?  By the end of the day, when I got back to Maggie and Jason’s house, I all but collapsed into their arm chair by the front door.

“I was just about to walk Fossil around the block,” Jason said, putting on Fossil’s leash.  “Want to come?”  I took a deep breath and hauled myself out of the sofa.   “Sure,” I said, trying not to wince as I put my shoes back on.  Because I love walking, right?  I’m a Walker.

                

On the Awkwardness of Company

While I was in transit at the Miami airport on my way to DC, I stopped for a beer.  Across the bar from me were a couple of guys in their early 20s.  It was a square bar and they were sitting on adjacent sides, several seats down from each other.  I didn’t realize they were travelling together until one guy got up to show the other guy something.  Strange that they were sitting so far apart, each staring fixedly at his own phone.  Then I realized all at once that they were colleagues travelling together, experiencing that awkwardness of sharing taxis, adjacent airplane seats, and dinner tables, but not friends.  A third guy (also staring at his phone) eventually showed up to fill the gap between the other two.

Watching them made me remember what it was like to travel to tiny Midwest towns with colleagues I had nothing in common with during my first post-college job doing environmental site assessments.  The worst was the end of the day when we’d all meet up in the lobby to get dinner together at some chain restaurant, if we were lucky enough to find one within a 20 minute drive.  After spending all day sweating in some field somewhere together, most of us had nothing left to say.  So we’d either order one more beer than we really wanted, or get Geoff to tell that story he loves about giving CPR to a guy who had a heart attack in the emptiness of Wyoming.

I was willing to bet that the guys at the bar were probably on Facebook, finding it easier to connect to people far away than with the ones sitting two stools down.