My Nigerian Sisters

Shortly after the United States invaded Afghanistan, I read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about Zainab Salbi and her organization, Women for Women International (see link to left).

The premise of the organization is simple, but elegant: Women in peaceful, prosperous countries like the United States commit to sponsor women in impoverished, war-torn countries. Women for Women International acts as the go-between, the facilitator, and the engine for societal change.

We, the fortunate ones, are matched with women in countries such as Afghanistan, Serbia, Rwanda, and Nigeria. We send in $27 each month. Women for Women keeps a portion to fund its operations and uses the rest to help our "sisters" re-build their lives. That means learning skills and investing the contributed capital in some form of self-supporting enterprise.

We also exchange letters with our sisters. The point of this exercise is to build a bond that provides psychic and emotional support for both the sponsor and the sponsored. This individual connection of one woman to another adds a dimension of personal involvement that is absent from the disembodied act of writing a check or receiving a bag of rice.

I wanted a sister from Afghanistan. Who wouldn't want to help a woman who was forbidden to feel the sun on her face or even to look out of a clear window? I confess, I was a little disappointed when I was assigned a Nigerian instead. But all it took was reading the description of Nigerian widowhood practices to erase my disappointment completely.

When a woman's husband dies in some parts of Nigeria, she is forced to drink the water used to wash the corpse. This is one of the ways she is expected to prove her innocence regarding her husband's death. Her head is shaved, she is forbidden to bathe, forbidden to change her clothes, forbidden to sleep on a bed, and kept in complete isolation for a year. Often, when she is finally permitted to rejoin the life of the community, she finds that all that belonged to her husband has been absorbed into his family, leaving her and her children with nothing.

My first Nigerian sister was a 62 year old widow with only one surviving child--a grown daughter. Her letters were full of gentle humor and concern for my family. We traded stories. She told me her daughter's fiance had taken ill; I told her that we thought Adam was getting serious with his girl friend. She asked if Bob had had any luck at his fishing. I told her no, but we lived in hope.

My second and third sisters were much younger women. Both had living husbands and housefuls of children. One planted cassava and took her crop to market in a nearby town. She was very proud of selling her harvest in a place with a population of 100,000. She sent a picture of herself in a colorful yellow and red dress, with matching headscarf, hoeing the rows between her plants. I often wonder what sense she made of my having older parents who live on the other side of the country. That came up when I explained that I had been in Florida, caring for my mother after she broke her hip. My sister was circumspect, however. She sent prayers for a speedy recovery and overlooked the fact that I chose to be so far away.

My most recent sister is a Muslim woman. She thinks that she is in her mid-thirties, but she is not sure. She has eight living children and several who have died. Given the number of people in her household, I am reasonably sure that she is not her husband's only wife.

She has a serious, sober face and wears the traditional hejab. A couple of months ago, she sent a picture of herself at her sewing machine. Sewing is how she plans to increase her family's income. She wrote that she was finally receiving treatment for her hypertension--another benefit of my sponsorship.

As I read her letter, I wondered what on earth I could write about to a woman who gets her drinking water from the house next door. It's been almost a year, and I am still wondering. I told her about my work, about my friends, and about our fruit trees. I did not tell her about our recent vacation or about the dog. I couldn't imagine how I would explain the idea of vacation to the sad, somber woman who looked out at me from the picture.

The week before Thanksgiving, I got a letter from Women for Women announcing that Ai Khalid, my Muslim sister, would soon be graduating from the program. I was surprised--and ashamed. My job at Mills was so all-consuming that I didn't write nearly as often as I meant to. I don't think I sent more than a couple of letters in a year's time. It's possible that I sent only one.

My woeful performance with respect to Ai weighs upon me. How hard is it to write a letter? Not hard at all. That's half the promise I made when I signed up to sponsor her.

I wrote the most frequently to my first sister, and my relationship with her was real. I wrote least frequently to this last sister. As a result, I can't really say that we have a relationship at all. She writes formulaic letters to a concept, not to me. All I am to her is a sum of money, and a theory. The money makes a difference in her life, but I, the theory, don't. I have added nothing human to her experience, given her no sense of someone taking time for her, no feeling of someone reaching out to share themselves with her, no assurance that someone far away awaited the news that she, that specific and unique woman named Ai Khalid, was well and moving forward. I wish I had. We are both the poorer for my inattention.

Election Results

Sara and I have been friends since we both moved to San Francisco in the seventies. We shared a couple of houses in different parts of the city before she packed up and headed back East again. She settled into Brooklyn and spent years in an old warehouse full of artists. Then, she decided it was time for a change, so she took a job in Seattle. When the Northwest proved inhospitable, Sara made another transcontinental move. She took a volatile job with a real estate developer in a little town fifty miles up the Hudson from New York City.

From the beginning, she said she made the move because she'd fallen in love with Beacon. She put down roots in record time. She bought an old fixer-upper and dove into the life of the community. It wasn't long before she was a well known arts administrator on Main Street.

That didn't surprise me at all. Sara is outgoing, personable, and she loves to socialize. What did surprise me was that after about a year, she decided to run for City Council in this town of 14,000. Electoral politics wasn't something she'd done before.

Sara didn't win her first election, but she ran well. In the couple of years that followed, she organized house parties for an insurgent congressional candidate, took on the presidency of the Beacon Arts Community Association, and co-chaired the Beacon Comprehensive Plan Committee. Given all of that, to my outsider's eye, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that she would win her district seat. And she did. Earlier this month, she beat each of her two opponents by a margin of two to one.

Talking with her last weekend brought my Emeryville political forays to mind. It also made me think about my brother-in-law, Ciro, who has served multiple terms on the Berkeley Heights School Board, and about the various classmates whose submissions to the Wesleyan alumni news have so often included mention of holding local office.

What is it about small towns that brings out the citizen-politician in so many of us?

It's easy to say that it's all about scale. You can become known in a community of ten, twelve, or fourteen thousand people without much trouble. But I actually think it's more about impact and investment. In a small town, you can make things happen. Nothing is theoretical. It's all real and it's all personal. It's the park that takes the place of the empty lot on the next block; it's the speed bumps that slow down traffic in front of your house.

Thanks to Netflix, Bob and I have been watching the HBO series Deadwood. We're about halfway through season two. The mining camp is on the verge of being annexed to South Dakota. In order to enhance their chances, the unsavory bunch of miscreants who have congregated in the gold fields decide it would be wise to set themselves up as Health Commissioner, Safety Inspector, Medical Examiner, Sheriff, and Mayor.

What the writers have nicely developed is how the pretense gives way to a real, if self-interested, assumption of the roles they've taken on. All of a sudden, often without meaning to, each of those who have assumed a title finds that he is rising to the job. Between bouts of drunkenness, Charlie Utter levies fines for fire hazards. Even he is shocked by his new-found sense of responsibility. Much against his better judgment, Seth Bullock begins to draw up plans for waste disposal.

In small towns like Emeryville, Beacon, Berkeley Heights--even Deadwood--you feel the need as much as you see it. From there it's only a small step to fixing the problem. You might start out thinking someone else should do it, but when no one does, you know you must. Pretty soon, you're one of the city mothers or fathers.

I had my chance at becoming a "city mother" in Emeryville, but I left before that second election--the one I could have won. The scale of Oakland is too much for me. A city of 400,000 is nothing like a town of 7,000. City Council members in Oakland aren't citizen-politicians the way they are in Beacon or Emeryville or Berkeley Heights. They're politicians, purely and absolutely.

In My Back Yard

The wild fires in San Diego last month brought discussion of the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) back to the radio and television news. I listened, nodded gravely, and thought about how nice it would be to have enough money to live at the interface. In thinking that, I imagined that would mean living way out in Marin or somewhere at the top of Grizzly Peak. It meant money, privacy, woodlands all around, and views that people envy. It did not mean a bus stop in the driveway, ten feet of buffer zone between the end of our house and the beginning of the house next door, or two major freeways within 5 minutes drive.

Then I opened the living room curtains this morning just as the golden eagle who works the Sausal Creek watershed glided in to land on a pine tree behind my neighbor's house. "Hey, Bob, get the binoculars, the eagle is on the pine behind John's!" I yelled. Of course, by the time we found the glasses, he or she had taken off again. We'll be ready the next time, though. We've got the camera and the binoculars on the coffee table now.

Last week, we watched "our" eagle riding the thermals above the back yard and being harassed by crows. This week, he or she landed on a tree top less than a block away. What could possibly be more wild than an eagle in the tree tops across the street?

So, I've adjusted my imaginings accordingly. I now realize that this block of Lyman Road, six-tenths of a mile above the Mac Arthur Freeway, in spite of its location on the eastern side of a city of more than 400,000 people, is as much WUI territory as Malibu Canyon.

We can thank the creek that runs down from the hills two blocks over for our golden eagle. It merges into a narrow, but unbroken green belt that winds all the way to Walnut Creek. It's that creek and its watershed that makes this city neighborhood more than just another set of streets. I know, I know...it's the same creek and the same green belt that makes us vulnerable to catastrophes like the 1991 Oakland firestorm. But, for now, the miracle far outweighs the possibility of disaster.

I never imagined that I would live in a place where I could look up from the morning paper and see anything as graceful and free as an eagle circling overhead. It takes my breath away each and every time and gives me reason to say that I am blessed.

Palaver

This is the end of my first week at TransFair. Like all first weeks, it was fraught with thrills, chills, and spills. I've attended bunches of meetings, wrestled with new equipment and software, struggled to remember the names of colleagues, and wondered how on earth I was ever going to get up to speed on a brand new industry. As a result, the word "palaver" has been much on my mind.

Originally, palaver meant a parley between European explorers and representatives of local populations, especially in Africa. Today it means something more like idle or beguiling chatter.

Paul, my boss, is committed to helping me acclimate. I think that's both very humane and very smart. He and I had an hour long meeting on Monday, another on Wednesday, and a lunch on Friday.

I'm touched that he has been so generous with his time. But, being something of a lone wolf, I found having that much of his attention a little unnerving--sometimes it felt like a parley and sometimes it felt like beguiling chatter on both of our parts. At the end of the week, TransFair celebrated its new office space with a "friends and family" potluck. I did my requisite two hours--that's my limit for office parties--and engaged in a fair amount of pleasant, idle chatter.

Monday brings a preparatory phone call for an upcoming meeting of the Fair Trade Labeling Organization Finance Committee. FLO, as it is known, is the international body of fair trade certifiers in each of the world's active countries. That is where the word "palaver" lives up to its original meaning. Each of the in-country organizations, most of the growers, and many of the roasters hold strong opinions about how things should be organized, what is and is not equitable, where the baseline for certification lies, and a host of other issues.

I've only been privy to some of the internal discussions so far and I've read only a few of the background materials, but I can already see how careful and intricate the conversations will have to be. Truly, the meeting for which I will help to prepare on Monday will be palaver, in the classic sense of a parley, a discussion or conference over terms of truce or other matters.

Because I've changed industries so many times, I'm accustomed to not speaking the language of my new workplace. The learning curve is steep, but it is always fascinating. I never approach the fluency of a native speaker, but since I usually don't want to, it is seldom a problem. It's that lone wolf thing again...I'm happy to mingle, but I'm not built for merging.

As I've moved from engineering to law to publishing to policy to higher education and now to a combination of food and international development, I've relied heavily on palaver and parley. The natives speak an unknown dialect. Their customs and rituals are a mystery. I have to discover what their values are and how to acclimate myself to them. It keeps me interested and engaged, and, truth to tell, it keeps me sharp. There is always the possibility that I won't figure it all out in time to be successful.

My record so far has been seven and a half years in one place. I'd like to move it up to ten...I'm getting a little old for exploring and restlessness is beginning to give way to a longing for fixity. I thought and hoped that Mills would be the place I'd settle down. I'm still sad that it wasn't. Will this be the place? Only time will tell.

Halloween

Bob and I live in what was, for most of its existence, a real family neighborhood.

Fact is, until this year, two of the houses nearest to us were owned by the children who grew up in them. Multiple family members live on our block, too. Across the street, we have a neighbor who bought his house in the seventies. Catty corner from us was an old Danish woman who came here as a war bride, raised her children, buried her husband, and refused to leave the house she and that long dead husband built--until her daughters, both now well over sixty, forced her to do so. The Christmas before they made her move, she brought us white camellias from her garden.

For all of these reasons, we expected Halloween would be a big deal. More like the Halloweens of our youth than those of the mixed-use neighborhood in which we used to live.

Our first Halloween in the house was 2000. We saw some kids on the street, but very few ventured up our 20 steps. "We're still pretty new to the neighborhood", we said to ourselves as we wistfully watched the little groups pass us by. "Next year, they won't be afraid to ring the bell."

In 2001, Halloween came six weeks after the Twin Towers collapsed and two weeks after the anthrax attacks, so we were sad, but not surprised, to see almost no children on the street at all. 2002 brought a slight improvement--maybe a half-dozen masked faces at our door and several collections of costumed kids on the sidewalk. 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006...the numbers improved, but still, the high water mark wasn't more than a score.

We were both more than a little deflated by year after year of empty streets and quiet door bells. We talked about it, but felt it more keenly than we wanted to acknowledge.

It was as if something innocent had been lost, a homely ritual that bound us to this neighborhood as well as to the neighborhoods of our pasts. Once we were the giddy kids running along the darkened streets; now we are the grey-haired ones who answer the door and sprinkle candy into outstretched bags. As we waited in vain, I felt as if we were vastly poorer for not being able to play the part of the "old folks" in the traditions that make a neighborhood. I also felt as if another piece of the fabric that holds us close to one another had been ripped away, leaving us all a little more exposed to the cold.

This year, I only bought two bags of candy. I figured it would be more than enough. After some hesitation, I bought a pumpkin, too. We didn't carve it, but I put an old hat on it and set it up on the retaining wall at the edge of the driveway.

By seven o'clock, we'd had so many groups of dragons, Spidermen, trolls, and ballerinas that all our treats were gone. I had no choice but to turn out the light and close the curtains. At 8 o'clock, one of our neighbor's children braved the darkened stairwell to bang on the door. When Bob opened the door, she demanded, "Do you know who I am?" He passed her test, so she introduced her best friend, Max, to him as well. We gave the two of them some hard candies we had in a bowl on the coffee table. It was all we had left.

The next day, I found myself smiling frequently. The world seemed so much more right. Knowing that fear of poison may mean that the hard candies we gave to our last callers will never be eaten casts a bit of a pall over my sense of well-being, but it is outweighed by the feeling that the Lyman Road has been restored to itself, to what it was meant to be.

I'm not sure exactly why Halloween happened on our block this year. It may be that the transition of the neighborhood from grandparents to young families has finally reached critical mass. It may be that the world situation was just easy enough to ignore this year and not quite easy enough to ignore in years past. Or it may be that the pumpkin with the hat was all that we needed to signal "We're a part of this, too!"

Whatever it was, I'm glad to see that my neighborhood is back to being what it was meant to be: A family neighborhood, a place where people aren't afraid of one another. Somehow, the familiar chorus of "Trick or Treat", my weekly shopping trips to the Farmer's Market, and the new family moving into the long derelict house next store makes it just the tiniest bit easier to face the big issues--global warming, martial law in Pakistan, the continuing war in Iraq....Why is that, I wonder?

Sitting Here in Limbo

What a lovely thing it is to be between jobs.

One is deliciously free of nagging worries about what's happening at the office and marvelously unconcerned about what time it is. Even better, one doesn't have the cloud of financial uncertainty hanging over one's head as one does when truly unemployed. One is confident that the last check from the previous job will be followed by the first check from the new job. If, as they taught us in Catholic school, limbo is a state of natural happiness (as opposed to heavenly bliss), then this must be it.

I can feel the burdens of my last job, Acting VP for Finance and Administration and Treasurer at Mills College, falling away a little more each day. What a pressure cooker that was! My average day was 12 hours and every minute was flat out, pedal to the metal. I did good work--really, really good work--but unlike my last several jobs, at Mills that work all seemed to be invisible to my bosses. Sometimes, it actually seemed as if the more successful I was, the more hemmed in and marginalized I became. I don't think I've ever encountered that before. Have you?

The new job, CFO at TransFair (see links on the left), will have its own pressure cooker qualities, but I think the organization is more functional than Mills. Already, TF has done two very good things--hallmarks, I hope, of its thoughtfulness.

The first was inviting me to the October board meeting. The second was sending me a copy of The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins. The note that came with the book said that they give the book to all new managers. Interesting idea, isn't it? I'm actually finding it a very thoughtful and stimulating read. If you'd like a taste, check out this podcast: http://career-advice.monster.com/new-job-tips/Audio-The-First-90-Days/home.aspx

With only three days of vacation left, I'm trying to make the most of each moment. Lunch with long-lost friends, planned dinners at home with Bob, random wanderings, and golden minutes spent in the back yard watching the birds splash in the bath. Today's big plan: Making an apple pie. Would that I had lifetimes of this kind of unstructured time instead of two short weeks!