MAR-A-2
MARCH COMES IN LIKE A LAMB:
EVEN THE SPRING PEEPERS ARE HEARD AROUND
DERWOOD, AS I TRY TO START BACK TO RUNNING AND CLEANING UP DETAILS AT DERWOOD
March 1, 2004
I may have missed a good deal of winter, since it already seems to be backing off in Maryland! I remember too well last year when I had sat through the heavy storms of February and had actually been snowed in for multiple days at a time. When March arrived, I was getting eager to find a cleared space along the roads to run, when an unpleasant surprise of yet another heavy snowfall hit us in the first weeks of March. It had hardly melted back by the time of the St Patrick’s Day 10K, usually the opening run of the year. But, this year, things may be different. I am still getting up way before dawn, trying to extend my time zone accommodation to the Horn of Africa, which gives me a jump on the day in this longitude. As I am often at work much before daylight, and do not know what is happening out doors, but on Friday of this week, I got altogether too much of a chance to see the weather changing. It was actually nearly balmy and has continued so during the subsequent week.
My stroll through Washington on a tight time schedule on a mission that should have been entirely successful turned out to be an utterly futile frustration. I had called and asked about everything I needed to know for a Brazilian visa. For one thing, it has gone up in price to $100 since last I got one. But, this consulate, like all others, is open to serve the eager public—for about three hours a day, if it is not a strange Brazilian holiday you had not previously heard of. I needed a valid passport that would still be good six months after travel to Brazil would be completed, a 2 X 2 black and white passport photo, and a completed visa application along with a letter from a travel agency explaining that I was ticketed for a round trip to Brazil, and had already paid for it so I could not wind up on Brazilian welfare, presumably. I had all the requirements, the directions and the limited times they were open, and having checked all of this in advance, I had hoped to avoid the several swings and misses of consecutive trips that all visa application processes seem to require as they make up new rules of their own convenience and so as to limit the number of visas that they actually issue minimizing their work load.
So, here I was, in prime time, having broken out of a full morning that began for me at four AM since I have been going in early on the Horn of Africa time zone time and I took a number for service to wait until a woman looked at my passport and the visa from. She returned them to me and said I would have to come again with a completed application. What is incomplete about this one? She replied that it was the picture. It is the same picture as is on the passport, so since the passport was issued a few years ago, that meant that the picture was older than six months and she was not about to process any application for which the picture was anything other than fresh. Since incomplete applications may not be left with her, I had to leave and come back with the new portrait. So, the whole excursion that took the centerpiece out of a good day was for naught. It keeps my record intact, however. The simple visa process has never been completed in a single trip, and I had to just wait until they found some reason to have me come back again at a later date, but they would not be issuing any visa to me today, and wanted a few days to think up the next novel series of modifications that would be the requirements on which the application would be refused to be considered on the next expensive and prime time visit.
Futility is not my favorite sport. I then hurried back to the office to interview several students, all of them my “wannabes” who were eager to go with me to Haiti next month, which has exploded as predicted, and American Air has stopped service. So, their alternative, as a group of freshmen is to gather money, to buy medicines, and to go down as though they were on a medical mission with me and set up clinics without a person among them with more experience than a freshman medical student—none of whom have had any pathology course, or encounter with disease, physical diagnosis, or pharmacology, and hand out medicines As they might have done under my supervision and license—but, this time I would be on the far side of the world in Taiwan. That seems unwise. But, they are determined to “go somewhere” during there spring vacation, and one of them is a veteran of the freshman trip to Lingshed, the one who was eager to operate on someone, so they are going to go, and meet with the Kathy Rubio who had invited a “surgical team” headed by me, before Kevin and the others had opted for the Horn of Africa rather than the Central American alternative mission. We will see what happens from this impasse of good intent and lack of any capability, being met with a MAP pack under my name, and distributing medicines with Kathy Rubio in country as the only contact with whom I have any local knowledge. This is like being a British consultant who is “doing cases” under his name as he may be a world away, and his firm keeps on going under his authority without any supervision. Having responsibility without authority is not an enviable situation anywhere along the line.
I met with a young man on Friday who had called me in response to my letter to Bill and Kathy Magee of Operation Smile. Kathy Magee received the letter and forwarded it to Anthony Coppolino, as Bill Magee is in Florida attending a Board of Director’s meeting of the Operation Smile projects, a ten million dollar budget NGO now probably the tenth largest private charitable medical aid group, with offices in each of the 22 countries in which they have missions and a Foundation in most to keep the work sustainable. Anthony was here for a reason; he was interviewing for medical school after three and a half years in the Project Smile office, supervising missions. He had been in Manipal India when both Huda Ayas and Skip Williams had been there on a mission, and he and his bosses in Op Smile among the 55 full time employees are interested in supporting his application to medial school so that he can do what he had been managing for the last several years. WE had a good interview, and then he suggested I come down to Norfolk to talk with the other three people in the Missions office, and we can arrange the Operation Smile as I had suggested to Somaliland and to Ethiopia. He suggests that I come down to stay with Bill and Kathy Magee, and return from the three and a half hour car trip, to arrange all of that before the next series of my trips begins.
TRY TO RE-START THE RUNNING NOW THAT THE
WINTER
HAS ABATED IN MARYLAND
It was over quickly, going from sub-freezing temperatures with ice and snow still stacked around, to a balmy weekend with kids in shorts and shirtless running on the bike paths. I went to Derwood first to go through the grueling process of unstacking the dust-covered file cases and boxes in the storage rooms that have been open to the construction as the doors had been taken down and before they had been replaced. I knew from my very organized method of filing away things that would be needed where I might find them, but the lectures I have been requested to give in Taiwan and in Tahoe are buried under all the stuff that is stacked on them, from my careful packing job on the Fourth of July last year for a full week, then have been messed up badly with layers of the stacks pushed over to get access to the replaced windows and light switches and other items that will still have to be redone in the guest bedroom/office upstairs now tightly packed with stuff. Since I needed the materials in order to carry out the already advertised subjects of the lectures, I had no choice but to plow through all the overlying and cough-producing dust and to unearth the file cases which have had to be re-stacked to get at the slides an supporting materials. I finally did get that done, with a lot of effort and got some of the files restacked before closing up the doors.
I had also seen in the attic that large stacks of things had been pushed over, including magazines, like the half century of National Geographics that I had been saving, and in the corridor that I had maintained now obliterated by junk, I saw that there were catalogs, maps and brochures of far away countries that I had always accumulated when I could only read about, and not get up and go there. I thought the dumpster is still here, and it will take more than a month to unearth the stuff in the attic in the future, so I should clear at least a path for access for when electricity returns to illuminate that part to be started on the major cleanup, so I carted out the stuff I could access and tossed it in the dumpster. There were Nikon boxes for the camera system and the lenses of the gift I had got Michael for graduation from JMU and all the stuff that is saved from the packaging materials of big-ticket items that might need these boxes to get re-packaged if any were ever to be returned. I threw out all that I could reach, since it is better not to sift too finely through such a mess, and to thin it down since it is bound to proliferate again in the future.
Then, I went for a run---the first one, really, since my departure to Africa. I had gone with Joe the morning of my takeoff on Feb 1, and had gone on to try a few runs with the test Reebok “Pumps” in the desert outside the Maansoor Hotel in Hargeisa, but the shoes had plagued my lateral malleoli to bloody blisters, so I reported this malfunction and the test department advised me to return the shoes with the report. So, I have been sedentary for the interval, and it is taking a real toll on starting up again. I took off on a run to Aspen Hill along the Needwood Bike Trail, and could hardly believe the slow pace and shuffle. I continued a good steady run, but it was so slow that I covered the eight mile round trip in 94 minutes—a new record in the wrong direction for me! I saw the Lake Needwood ice was still intact, but the puddles alongside the trail held spring peepers that were emerging to declare their existence to a coming spring. Last year at this same time we had another month of winter, so these early “gun-jumpers” may find themselves rather rigid frozen cadavers shortly. The geese are flying low overhead from Needwood ice to the grass fields on which these lazy non-migrant residents have been feeding. It is such a glorious day that people are appearing on bicycles and going about in shorts and tee shirts—the kind of reprieve I remember on the arrival of spring in Michigan when my mother used to say the first snow-cleared dry patch of sidewalk would be bounced upon by girls skipping rope. Albeit, it was two months later there than here!
But, it is a pretty day and the Leap Day we started early by having Joe and I run from 6:30 AM when the Audi dashboard thermometer registered 24 * to the time I went to church when it showed 57*. The kids of high school age at church had been fasting for the weekend, and as they did so, they made a display of stick figures representing the 29,000 kids who die each day somewhere on earth because of malnutrition. I was really touched by their efforts and mad e a comment that most Americans have never seen anyone starve to death, and I was grateful for both their hunger and the artistic efforts of these kids to draw these portraits and to think about those kids in other parts of the world. Having just returned from one of those afflicted parts of the world, I had perhaps a “quarter page” experience of some of those, and I was going to furnish them with photographs and stories about the people they are intending to help. I told them about the Student International Health Group at McLean High School that had gathered up some contributions to help these people, which we had distributed where it would do the most good.
I also drove the Sporty Audi to Joe’s hose for the second time today to pick up the Girl Scout cookies I had ordered through Maria, whom I came to check on since she was febrile earlier, a day after her birthday on Friday. So, March is coming in like a lamb, with a lot of things scheduled for the first week of this month that will include some finalizing in the walk through at Derwood, some financing of the renovation process, and a visit from California and Iowa that I would like to host at Derwood, but that it is just a little early to do it all right now, and will have to await the completion of the Guest Rooms and the new Kitchen, which is being delivered on the same day as the arrivals, so it will have to be the next time, when the furniture is in and the house is nearing some form of completion that will allow me to play host. In that interval, I have three major trips: Tahoe/Taiwan, Amazon, and South Africa before returning in just enough time to perhaps visit Michigan and to run at least once spring race (if I can return to running form), and then to attend the GWU Medical School graduation to “hood” at least a few of my protégés.
Thereafter the news is that I am accepted in the ELDP program (Executive Leadership Doctoral Program) and a period of residence in the Ashburn campus starts in mid-June. I will have to be here for some of the course work and “cohort-building” so that I may have to curtail a number of the other repeated trips I had done before, such as the consistent leading of the Himalayan treks for which a dozen of my own GWU students have been eager to sign up since I had been reported to be leading them. I will make at least one short trip, perhaps the one to Norfolk to set up the Op Smile Mission to The Horn of Africa, and will try to arrange that for as soon as it can be done with the idea of having the “wannabes” try to accompany me on such a trip to substitute for the screening clinics I will not be running in the Himalayas. By the summer time, when I should be home on a more consistent basis, I should have “home to come home to” and will start on the very daunting task of clearing the storage rooms to be renovated and the attic to be overhauled—a full dumpster load of past due cleanup which I will call the one grand “Spring Cleaning “ of Derwood at re-settling time!