Learning Dar es Salaam

9 July 2009

I am sitting in George Sempeho’s office at the UN, and we are going through hell just to make a phone call – land line to land line.

I had to take a cab here because no one in Tanzania can make a conference call; the technology doesn’t exist here! (Or so I’ve been told.) And now, even to do something as simple as dialing to Nairobi has taken 15 minutes including two calls to a UNDP help desk. And then the speaker didn’t work so George and I had to put ear to ear to listen to Glenn Denning and Belay so we could discuss the organizational structure of the development team – whether it will be better to create a separate NFP or use an existing structure. TBD soon.

I feel like I need a bit of time to digest what’s going on. Things do take longer than one might expect here. Having to take a taxi several miles across town in sometimes brutal traffic just to make a conference call can really cut into your day. Then there’s UN security. It’s RIDICULOUS! First you go to the checkpoint at the main gate. You show your ID, sign in, they scan you with a body metal/explosives detector, and inspect your purse. Then they pull out another separate book and ask you to register you laptop – signing your name, all the same information from before plus your laptop serial number.

That means either booting up my computer or taking out the battery to find the number in impossibly tiny text beneath it.

Then you go to the building that houses your particular agency (UNDP in my case) where you go through the same process. This time, you give them an ID, which they hold, sign in with the same information in another book, go through a metal detector, have your purse and laptop bag examined and then go in. Two checks? 20 minutes to get in the door with no one else ahead of me and half a dozen security officers hanging out.

But there’s so much more about my daily life in Dar that I haven’t captured yet – like the crow I saw rapping on the glass pane of a shop door in City Centre, the legless man I saw yesterday walking nonchalantly across the street on the palms of his hands, or the smell of open fires on most side streets, fueled by fallen leaves and garbage adding a thick smoky stench to the humid city air.

Recovered Memories from Pemba in 2009

7 July 2009

Today is Saba Saba, the seventh day of the seventh month – a national holiday. I’ve heard different stories about its origin: that It began as a market day, when all the farmers would bring their harvest to the city; or that it celebrates the founding of the TANU party (Tanganyika African National Union). But now there’s a huge national exposition at some kind of conference and exposition center on the way to the airport. So offices and shops are closed.

Nonetheless we are having a meeting at KPMG because the day worked for GS, who is coming back from a trip to Mbola with Klaus Leisinger and the CEO of Novartis. I’m glad we’re not waiting any longer – because I’m anxious to get going on this project.

Funny how fast perspective changes. When I first came to Dar, my hotel, the Palm Beach, seemed so shabby for $100 a night. Yes it has cockroaches, which creep me out completely. And yes, the restaurant is outside (except for breakfast) so at dinner you get eaten alive by sand flies and mosquitos. But the staff is wonderful – really hard working, nice people. Tomorrow I am coaching one of the supervisors here (one of the other guests more or less volunteered me), so that he can achieve his dream to own his own restaurant and hotel someday.

And the other guests are all interesting. A crew filming a feature-length documentary on a floating hospital that’s just being planned on Lake Tanganyika; a crew mostly from Stanford, working on a water engineering and sanitation project (the professor, who just got tenure this year at Stanford, is also a runner and I’m introducing her to people at EI because she is looking for partners for the project and I think she could learn a lot from the MV approach and might have something to offer as well); a woman I met this morning, Kate Ramsey, from Mailman, who is working on a maternal health project and said she would pass along the job description to help me find candidates for the project manager role; and a kind of dotty older woman from the UK who grew up here, moved back to the UK, became a senior government official in education and started a charity to get books to schools and libraries here.

So it’s really beginning to be fun. The sun is very strong so it’s hard to run unless you get up way earlier than I’ve been getting up so far. But I’ll get there eventually. Today I went at 10 am and only made half my quota before I was so hot and dehydrated I headed back to the hotel.

More or Less

I woke up Sunday thinking about David Freelander. No particular reason; I think about him often. One of his paintings holds a prominent place in my apartment. And many of the memories and photos and stories from my twenties and early thirties feature David. The time my mother gave us tickets to a gala opening night at the ballet and David was making me a gown. He never quite finished it. When I went downtown for a fitting he was in a snit, throwing glasses against the wall, so on gala night he had to pin me into it.

We ran into Geraldine Stutz, CEO of Bergdorf Goodman, in the plaza in front of the Metropolitan Opera. She greeted us and, admiring my gown, asked David to call her.

The dress was complicated; David had to back me into a phone booth and unpin me so I could pee. Life was complicated. But that was well before AIDS when everything became terrifying, devastating and complicated – and SAD. It was the mid 1970s, we were just young and beautiful and daring.

Soho was just beginning. People lived in cavernous raw spaces. They installed a few appliances and some basic plumbing fixtures and made art all day, carpentry or waiting tables, cleaning houses or escorting rich people to dinner.

David didn’t have a certificate of occupancy for the loft space – the 11th floor of 596 Broadway – he had split with two other people. There weren’t many places to eat downtown. There was Fanelli’s and OG’s where you could get giant cookies in the middle of the night. Then Giorgio Deluca rented a storefront on Prince Street. David and I were on our way to Aggie’s (a great little hangout coffee and lunch bar at the back of a dress shop).

Giorgio called to us as we walked by one late spring morning. We walked in. He was arranging imported Italian delicacies in a new display. His partner – John was his name, I think – was unpacking cookware in the back of the store. They were opening soon. Giorgio gave us tastes of Parmesan Reggiano and bread dipped in fragrant olive oil.

But why, Sunday morning, did I find myself missing him so much. After all these years. I flipped through the movies on TV and happened upon Philadelphia. The scene when Denzel Washington goes to Tom Hanks’ loft and Tom is listening to Maria Callas.

It was the date. Over the years, the date has softened. Less of a stabbing pain, less of a road bump. January 29, 1987. That was the day David died of AIDS. Thirty-five years ago. I have now spent half my life without him. And in those years I have become less manic, less fragile, less creative, less rebellious. I have become less.

I have become more stabile. More docile, more cooperative, more corporate. Still not enough to be reliably corporate. My colleagues wonder nervously what I might say next. I get bored with the language. Sometimes I know all the words in a sentence and still don’t know what the fuck we’re talking about.

So I go backwards in time. Back to when jobs were ways to make money and our art defined us. We took bizarre jobs. David had a gig making those kitschy big-eyed velvet paintings. I measured old tenements as an architect’s assistant. We took risks.

One night I went to see David Ina performance piece. The event was sparsely attended. Just a few arty types in an off-off Broadway black box theater. David’s role was to stand in a heroic warrior pose on a blue lit stage. That’s the only part I remember. David, his tall, sinewy physique perfectly lit to magnify the architecture of his body.

After the performance we went for drinks with his friend GI. GI had a kind of sexual superiority. She worked as a go-go dancer in New Jersey. She wore bright red lipstick and lots of mascara. She had a self-assurance that was beyond my ken. At the time, my day job was working for Novello Music for six dollars an hour. Gi made tons – she would come home with $300 after a 5-hour shift. It was 1979. That was still a lot of money.

I wanted to do that too. I asked about it. David and Gi laughed. I wasn’t exactly the type. Pale blonde, no makeup, baggy clothes. They laughed at me. And that was it. My indignation and the promise of riches drove me. I met Gi for breakfast the next Monday morning and went with her to her agent: Joey M – of Joey M’s Dancers.

I miss myself

A sudden medical scare sent me spinning off into the past, unspooling the visions and variations of my aspirations over decades. Music came first, when my grandparents sent us an upright piano. I must have been three years old. I remember following the piano into the den and coming out when I could play “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

And now, here I am in Paris, where I once spent a year studying music, hanging out at Shakespeare & Co. and experimenting with a diet that comprised two pastries from Le Notre a day and a kilo of carrots. I just wanted to try all the different confections in the display without gaining weight. So the malnutrition shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

There was fruit in my diet too (aside from the artful three raspberries atop a few of the pastries. After bad lessons with the famed music teacher, Nadia Boulanger, I would walk home from Pigalle, stopping on the way for some glace apricots.

Bad days were when she said, “Eh bien, ma petite, play me your cadences on G flat.” That meant the first chord of the cadence, whether the sequence began on the tonic, the dominant or anyplace else, was G flat.

Libby had her lessons before me. Libby was studying at Princeton University, but on a semester abroad, under the rigorous tutelage of Mlle. Boulanger. Her lesson was right before mine. And as I sat in the anteroom, I could hear Nadia coaxing her through her lessons. Libby couldn’t remember her cadences. Mlle Boulanger responded empathically, reassuring her as if she was a precocious five year old.

Then it was my turn.

We began, as always, with the realization of base lines from Duclos. One had to notate the exercises using four clefs. Not the usual base and treble clefs you learn when you first study music (unless you start with the viola or clarinet, maybe). Base, tenor, alto and soprano clefs, the latter three being moveable C-clefs.

Cross your hands and sing the alto voice. It was past 4:00 pm on an early December afternoon. The light was fading. I sat at the piano; Nadia, eyes clouded with cataracts, sat beside me. My penciled notation blurred in the grey blue light. I asked if I could turn on the lamp. “Eh bien ma petite, someday there will be no more electricity,” she remarked.

The lesson went on. I struggled through. There was a section she didn’t like. She asked me to change the tenor voice. I couldn’t see exactly where she meant, but I played the chord she dictated. Still not able to see, I hesitated. Nadia spelled out the next chord, her frustration rising, the darkness closing in and the anxiety. My pencil scrawls blended into the bluish sheen of the manuscript paper. Her voice grew louder. I had stopped trying to see the paper and was merely taking her dictation.

Suspended in darkness and despair, I sat and let her berate me. Finally, the lesson was over. As I left the room, Giuseppe, the butler was there to console me. It was part of his job to scrape young musicians off the oriental rug, reassure them and hand them their coats.

Decades have passed. I “retired” from classical music as my interests evolved. I acted, I wrote plays. I wrote articles. I got an MFA in writing. I got a day job. I taught writing in the South Bronx. I got another day job.

Working in a company with a bunch of other people is a lot like putting on a play. I didn’t mind the weekends and the all nighters at the accounting firm where I worked in communications. I liked the people. They weren’t just colleagues; they were friends. Even thirty years later, they’re still dear friends.

And if we weren’t hanging out in the office putting together a huge presentation on a Saturday afternoon, we’d have probably been hanging out in the park together.

September 11

It was just a little warmer that morning 20 years ago. But the same blue sky. I’m flooded with emotions – remembering the horror and fear, the thunderstorm the next night when I found myself standing by the bed screaming, having been awakened by thunder in the middle of the night.

But I also remember how uncomfortable I felt as everyone trotted out the flag and vowed revenge. I had just interviewed a ton of scientists about climate change. The IPCC had just convened and issued its report; the National Science Foundation had just issued a report on global warming. The first sentence referred to clear, compelling evidence of anthropomorphic climate change. But Bush wasn’t interested. He pushed it aside. Then the US pulled out of talks on racism in Durban, South Africa. Israel objected to Palestinians having been invited. They were boycotting. So we were too. (Sounds an awful lot like cancel culture, btw.) The US seemed tone deaf and utterly out of step with science and the rest of the world.

Then came that day. Max, my nephew wasn’t quite two years old. I was out in the garden, so proud of myself for having earned my first chunk of money as a consultant. I think it was $12,000 for 120 hours of work. I felt rich. I was lazing in the garden, doing the crossword puzzle and listening to NPR. When the alert came about a fire at the World Trade Center, I ran inside and turned on the TV. My (at the time) brother was a report for CBS and lived a block from the World Trade Center, so I figured he’d be covering it.

The picture was crazy – someone running with a camera. Rubble and sky and dust and street. I flipped channels to NBC and saw the picture of the first tower on fire. I called my brother’s apartment. My sister-in-law answered. She was terrified. Come uptown now, I suggested. But she said she needed to wait for my brother to call. I hung up and watched the TV. The fire seemed to jump from one tower to the next. How could that happen? They’re not that close to each other…then Janice Huff, the weather person, called her own station. Her voice sounded sleepy, like this was the first sentence she uttered. She told the anchors to look at the tape. It was a second plane.

I called Elizabeth again. She was understandably panicked. What if the buildings fall down? She asked. That’s not going to happen, I said. But still I told her she needed to get out of there and come uptown. She said she couldn’t leave. I had heard that the C train was still running. I’m coming to get you, I told her. I hung up and debated – I could ride my bike or take the train. Train seemed more plausible. I ran to the 86th Street station. There were several of us waiting. The C train came; we got on. We stopped at 81st Street, 72nd Street and then, as we neared 59th Street, the train stopped. No announcement. Just stopped. Minutes went by, and in the lengthening fluorescence I began to think how stupid I had been getting into a train, underground. Only a few months before there had been a sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway. And we knew we were in the middle of a terrorist attack.

Seemed that almost everyone in the train car had some moment of wondering if this we were going to die together. We all began to chat, asking questions about each others’ work and families, about what we had seen on television, about the plans for the day that had just been interrupted.

A woman sitting next to me was from Romania and needed directions to someplace. I don’t remember where. I said I would help her when we got off the train.

An hour and a half went by. Finally the train inched into the 59th Street station and an announcer told us that was it. Trains weren’t going further. Above ground, already there was a silent march of white soot covered people with briefcases walking back uptown. Eyes fixed forward. I tried to call Elizabeth, but I couldn’t get a cell signal. I wasn’t going to be able to get her on foot, so I turned and walked back uptown, this time up the West Drive in Central Park.

What a strangely untouched world in the park. Runners, skaters, bikers, sun dappled trees. How could they? Did they know? Were they oblivious? I walked home and tried calling from a landline, but still couldn’t get through.

I called my brother. He had spoken to Elizabeth. She had gotten out and was on her way to a friend’s house on the Upper East Side. They were ok, Max and Elizabeth. The buildings were gone.

I had to do something. Something to combat terrorism. I needed to bridge gaps in understanding. But I had no skills. No economics, no biochemical engineering. I couldn’t build a water system or an electric grid. I looked on the UN website. No jobs I was qualified for. I began looking for not-for-profits where I could volunteer. I entered my criteria: global, dialogue, empowerment. A few options came up. I wrote them all.

One option, the one that would change my life, was American Jewish World Services. I sent them an email then walked down to the Red Cross with my neighbor to donate blood.

The lines were long at the Red Cross. I was right ahead of a woman who was there with a few younger people. Strangely familiar woman. Finally, realizing that I was staring, I apologized and said, it’s just that you look so much like Ruth Messenger. Good thing, she said. Because I am.

We laughed. That was it. Eventually someone sent us away. The blood supply wasn’t an issue. There were too many of us and, well, very few injuries. Just death. We walked home.

Curmudgeon POV: First World Annoyances

A random list of aggravations that spoil the ticking of time in pandemic New York.

1. Noisy, incessant helicopters carrying rich tourists to look at Central Park, spoiling the peace of a quiet weekend.

2. Runners and cyclists in the park blaring music instead of wearing headphones.

3. Dogs off leash on the bridle path, where signs are posted indicating that dogs are to be leashed at all times there (not just after 9 am). I love dogs, and they seem to sense it, so as I run by, I’m a target. I’ve been tripped and tackled by playful dogs. The dogs get a pass. They’re dogs. Their owners, not so much. They’re mostly privileged assholes.

4. Electric bikes going way too fast in the park, cyclists going the wrong way or riding in the pedestrian lanes or on the paths. When nine million people share a park, it helps if people respect the rules.

5. Runners jutting out into the bike lanes – which is every bit as dangerous as cyclists on the paths. Don’t do it.

6. People who reject science – refusing to get the SARS-COV2 vaccine because “it’s my body” – especially while reserving the right to tell women what they can and cannot do with their uteri. You allow yourself to become a biohazard, you should be treated as such.

7. Knowing that I’ve become an old curmudgeon, stressed and angry and stewing in my gorgeous oasis of a garden.

Vaccination Bias

I heard from a colleague that the new area of workplace discrimination will be bias against the unvaccinated. Seriously.

I find the notion absurd and even dangerous, as it sets up the idea that any choice, however foolish, should be socially protected. Should I be able to go to work with Ebola? Would you want to sit next to a colleague with a highly communicable deadly disease? Of course not.

Race, gender, sexual orientation, dis/ability: these are immutable facts. They’re core to our being. The choice to expose yourself and, in turn, your neighbors, to a pandemic, is a public act. You become a biohazard.

It’s hard to be patient with conspiracy theorists. I love the idea that Bill Gates is using the vaccine to put microchips into people. Seriously? Who would want a running account of the stream of idiocy that runs through their minds?

In Memorium

We survived COVID. We kept to our running and biking and friendships. I skipped the Tuesday night Zooms because my days at work are filled up with Zoom calls and I didn’t have the patience for the one-at-a-time report-outs that Zoom requires and the inevitable lags and echos that disrupt the normal banter and cross-talk of our F2F conversations.

Finally, only a few weeks ago, we resumed our in person runs in the park. Our first Saturday run and coffee and the first Tuesday night run and pizza (although this time on a Monday night) since the pandemic began. I rarely stay awake past 8:30 and always run in the morning, but I made an exception to celebrate – and did a couple of miles with my running friends.

Jerry was my anchor. A wise, warm and generous man. We talked of business, books, politics and fitness. He had decades of successful entrepreneurial experience, which he shared freely. I could always count on him for wise advice on a knotty work challenge or client issue.

And although I don’t know them as well, his family is every bit as wise and warm as he is.

Not so long ago, I confided in Jerry that I was afraid to ride my bike outside. I want to. I used to love long bike rides, but now I’m afraid of an accident or a fall. No particular reason. Except maybe my Peleton obsession, which began on October 30, 2020, when my new Peleton bike arrived. I’m so strong and fast on the Peleton, but worry about the clipping and unclipping on a bike outdoors. I’m not graceful. What if my feet get stuck? What if I’m on a hill and a pack of racers comes from behind and swells past me?

Jerry said he’d take me on a ride. We’d go up Riverside Drive, across the GW bridge. We had a planned afternoon ride – just in the park on a weekday. I blocked it out on my calendar. But something came up.

Then, the accident. Jerry fell after a 63-mile bike trip, only blocks from his home. Fell. They put him in an induced coma. The Pizza Runners kept in touch with updates. When he gets out of the coma, I think we may have to wait months before going on that bike ride. He’ll need to recover.

Then, this morning I woke up to the devastating note from Ross. He’s not getting out of the coma. Too much bleeding; too much swelling. The brain is such an amazing organ. His especially. So far ranging, so perceptive. Such a truly good person.

Jerry, you brought joy, camaraderie and wisdom to our band of aging runners. Peace be with you and all those who loved you.