Day 90 - Hristos a inviat. Adevarat a inviat.

Easter at midnight, Chisinau, Moldova,
by Klearchos Kapoutsis, via Flickr

In 1978, Easter in Romania fell the day before May 1, Labor Day and one of the most significant holidays in communist countries. That coincidence of dates was the only reason it was possible for me to get out of town that weekend to see some of Romania outside of Bucharest or Iasi. I went with friends to Transylvania.

In spite of all the efforts by the Ceaucescus to eliminate the influence of the Romanian church, it was alive and well in the smaller towns. We decided to attend the Easter service at midnight. We weren't able to attend, however, because of the number of people who had already arrived, filled the church, and formed a crowd surrounding the church about 10 people deep by the time we got there. I think we had all assumed the Romanian Orthodox Church was holding on by a thread, given the government's attitude towards it. Wrong!

Rather than get caught up in the crowd, we stayed back and watched as the service unfolded. Part of the Orthodox tradition involved the priest coming outside and walking around the exterior of the building three times. Because there were so many people outside surrounding the church already, he had a very large procession following him. It was a very surprising and impressive scene.

One of my students in Romania asked me if I believed in God and if I was active in a church. The conversation took place as she and I walked outside of the campus, not in a classroom or within earshot of anyone else. I replied that I believed, but that I was not active in any church at that time. I told her that I was raised within a church and that I had attended church regularly when I was in the US. She asked if I thought I would return to attending church in the future. I said that I was certain that I would if I had children because I thought it was important that parents get all the help they can to bring their children to an undertanding of values and morality in order that they learn to make the right choices as adults. This conversation was the first one I can recall where the subject of religion was completely untouched by judgment, preconceived notions, or prejudice. I felt honored that the student had felt comfortable enough to ask me what I believed to be honest questions, in search of my answers to them, not some canned answers from a textbook.

It was a little less surprising to observe the influence of the Orthodox church in Moldova nearly 15 years later.  The Soviet Union had fallen, resulting in the creation of 15 new countries, each of which was finding its own way to the future, without waiting for some other power to tell them what to do.

It wasn't that everyone in Moldova suddenly began going to church or talking about their belief. It was more that what had before been a very private matter no longer needed to be hidden. When Easter arrived in Moldova I noticed that nearly everyone exchanged the greeting "Hristos a inviat" (Christ has risen) and its response "Adevarat a inviat" (he has risen indeed) in all environments, not just within the church, and continued to do so well into the following weeks. The message of Easter wasn't just a one-day observance there. It continued for the 40 days until the observance of Christ's Ascension.

There were so many events in Moldova in particular where the message I recall growing up with in the 1950s about godless Communism was proven to be inaccurate. Maybe the theory of Communism is godless, but the people who had to live under that form of government were not at all godless. Like early Christians, they may not have been able to wear the marks of Christianity openly or act or speak publicly about their faith. But they didn't abandon their faith or the traditions. When the need for circumspection went away, the practices continued openly. But no one seemed to think it required any fanfare.

Each Easter, I miss the experience of being able to continue the observance beyond the church service on Easter Sunday through saying "Hristos a inviat." I can still say it, of course, either in Romanian or English, but I just don't expect anyone to respond without curiosity or concern. Maybe I should try it this year.

Day 86 - Lessons From Church

Messiah Lutheran Church and Preschool
image by Dick Kruse

I am not sure children learn what their parents bring them to church to learn. I think parents expect children will learn about the wonder of the story of Jesus' birth, of the miracles performed by Jesus, of his death on the cross to take away our sins. And while I remember those stories, I also recall not having had enough life experience to know what wonder was. Every day someone - Mom, Dad, teachers, Grandmas - every day someone told me stories that were full of fantasy, of wonder. They were fairy tales, myths, story book tales. I could not distinguish between the truth of Bible stories and the fantasy in fairy tales.

The Christmas story is a good example of how I heard the words without understanding their significance. There were so many new words. Words like "manger." The only context I ever heard that word in was the Christmas story. Jesus was born in a stable and was wrapped in swaddling clothes and put into a manger. I had never heard anything else referred to a a stable, although I knew what a barn was. I didn't know what swaddling clothes were, although I knew what a receiving blanket was. And I had no idea what a manger was. I am sure a Sunday School teacher explained that a stable was like a small barn and a manger was like the feeding trough. But by then, I was so used to the story that the wonder of the details no longer conjured up any wonder. They were already routine.

I didn't undertand the symbolism of Jesus as the Good Shepherd until I lived in Romania where I saw shepherds living among their sheep for weeks or months at a time. It really hit home when we drove around a curve on a highway in Transylvania and had to come to a quick stop because a truck had collided with a flock of sheep that were crossing the road. There were dead sheep all across the road. And the shepherd was sitting on the slope of the hill on the side of the highway, his head hung down in his hands, crying.

There are other lessons from going to church that I didn't realize until I returned to being a regular church attender. There are four lessons in particular. I learned the value of ritual. I learned the beauty of poetry. I learned about new vocabulary and spelling and syllabification rules. And I learned how to read music.

First, rituals. Rituals permeate church services and the church year. The church calendar begins with Advent which begins in late November or early December. I know the timing of the celebration of Christmas is tied to the pagan traditions of the early church, not to the known or presumed time of year of Jesus' birth. I understand the reasons for observing Christian holidays during the time of pagan holidays was not an attempt to lure the pagans into Christianity; it was to maintain a low profile during the times when being known as a practicing Christian was dangerous. I find it uplifting that the church calendar provides a second opportunity in our twelve-month year to observe a new year, a rebirth, a renewal. And the fact that the new year of the church calendar coincides so closely to the beginning of the season of death - winter - makes the renewal all the more striking.

Rituals also provide something familiar to hold onto, or in my case to come back to. The music of the liturgy had changed a great deal in the nearly 30 years since I had previously attended church regularly. But the order of the service was the same, familiar, something that anchored me.

Second, poetry. All those hymns we sang during Sunday School and in the church service were poetry set to music. Many were translations from German, Luther's native language, which has a different normal word order than does English. In German, the verb is always second in a sentence, but if the verb is a compound verb, such as future or present perfect tenses, the helping verb is in second position with the rest of the verb forced to the end of the sentence. Sometimes the German word order is maintained in the translation, with the result illustrating poetic license. Most hymns rhyme, illustrating the usual form of poetry. Through hymns and the Psalms, and much of the prose in the church service liturgy, I learned there are other ways to use language to express ideas, although no one labeled going to church as a language lesson.

Third, vocabulary, spelling and syllabification rules. Because hymns are poetry in music format, nearly every hymn introduced new vocabulary, without a glossary at the back of the book to explain the meaning. I either had to ask what the words meant or figure it out from context. The words of the hymns appear under the musical staff in the hymnals. Words of more than one syllable are separated into syllables with hyphens between them. This separation of the syllables familiarized me with where words can be broken at the end of a line while writing. The separation into syllables also helped me recognize the many ways sounds in English are represented in letters. The word chorus for example begins with ch but those letters do not represent the same sound as they do at both the beginning and the end of the word church. Reading the words while singing requires my eyes and brain to look ahead of what I am singing in order to know just how to pronounce the next word. I learned to recognize the spelling and pronunciation rules through singing hymns, although no one labeled singing hymns as a vocabulary lesson.

And last, music. I know that the elementary school I attended had one of the most dedicated music teachers, Miss Ingram, who taught us more about music in six years than I think many of my contemporaries learned in 12. I did learn to read music in school, from Miss Ingram and from Mr. Pullicicchio (about whom my dad teased me by calling him Mr. Polly-chicken-toe), but every Sunday I got practical experience through singing the hymns and liturgy. In school, the music we read when we sang was just one melody, just one set of notes on a single musical staff. But in church, the hymns were printed with several lines of melody on two staffs, the treble and bass staffs. So while I could only sing one line of the melody, the soprano melody, I learned to recognize the harmonies corresponding to the alto, tenor and bass parts as well. In church I learned ways to use music to express ideas, although no one labeled going to church as a music lesson.

I enjoyed excellent schools and exceptional teachers in my first 18 years of living. But on my return to regular church going, I came to believe that attending church and Sunday School reinforced what I learned at school, giving me an advantage over my classmates who did not attend church regularly. Lessons in school, practiced in church.

And there are also all the lessons in morality, in ethics, in citizenship, in respecting others that were learned primarily in church. Lessons in church, practiced in school.

Everything is in balance.

Day 79 - Making Mistakes - Deliberately

Image by elycefeliz, via Flickr

From as early an age as I can remember, I didn't have much tolerance for making mistakes. It isn't that I expected others not to make mistakes; I just didn't want to make mistakes myself. I would bring home my test papers, crying the whole way, if the grades on them weren't 100%.  Frankly, 99% didn't feel any better to me than 70%. Anything less than 100% was unacceptable.

The thing about making mistakes is that making them is necessary to learn how to recover from them. I wish I had learned that much earlier.

The first time I made what I knew to be a deliberate mistake, to learn something, was in my first semester of studying German. The approach of the teacher was unusual for the time. Instead of being handed text books on the first day in class, we received no books for the first six weeks. Instead, we listened to our teacher and repeated after her, memorizing conversations which we repeated in pairs around the room. I can still recall some of those sentences, including Ich kann nicht meine Gummischuhe finden. Ach, hier sind sie, hinter der Tür. Translation: I can't find my overshoes. Oh, here there are, behind the door. After six weeks, we received our books. And that's when I discovered I had been using three different words in German, er, sie, and es, for the English word it, but the glossary at the back of the book said er meant he, sie meant she, and only es meant it. I didn't understand how this could be, so on the test where I knew which words to use because I had memorized the conversation, I used es for it in every sentence instead. I knew my chances for getting an explanation were greater if I chose the wrong answers. And it worked.

But I settled back into my old ways pretty quickly, again striving for perfect grades. The rewards were  largely symbolic, the honor role, the dean's list, National Honor Society. I'll never know how my life would have turned out without them, so I don't know what advantages came my way as a result.

While at San Francisco State University, my roommate Annie introduced me to the power of deliberate mistakes again. She had completed her Bachelor's degree in elementary education where she met some elementary school teachers in an art class. She told of one of the experienced teachers using a trick she learned from her students when she couldn't get the instructor's attention. She deliberately set out to do something wrong, knowing the instructor would run over to stop her, thus getting her the attention she wanted. Not all the teachers in schools are the ones getting paid to be there.

After graduate school, my next school experience was at Brown Institute in Minneapolis where I spent nine months in a vocational training course in computer programming. Now that was an experience where making deliberate makes really paid off. I watched all my colleagues trying to complete their programming projects without a mistake - the first time.  Not me, not this time. I realized that I would learn more about how to correct mistakes by controlling when I made them. I didn't know going in that I would end up working in a software engineering office in the continuation engineering section - that's the engineering euphemism for the group responsible for fixing bugs. I wanted to be a developer, not a bug fixer. I wanted to write programs that had no bugs in them when I started getting paid to write programs, and that's why I wanted to learn everything I could about how to fix bugs while I was paying to learn.

No one told me I was expected to get top grades. I imposed that on myself. It took a long time for me to figure out just why I might have set those goals for myself. Here is what I think happened.

When I was five years old, my sister was born.  Until then, my brother and I had pretty much all Mom and Dad's spare time. Mom read to us. She helped me write letters to my cousin Lois. Dad took me to baseball and basketball games. Dad took both of us both fishing. We had it pretty good. But when Joan was born, there were too many of us for Dad to take with him. He stopped taking any of us. I was jealous of my sister because she took Dad's attention away from me.

Then there were all the comments about Joan being so cute. I didn't remember anyone saying how cute I was. So if Joan was the cute one, I had to be something else. I had to be the smart one. At least, that's what I think happened.

Day 77 - Another Day in Paradise

Barbados Image by gusdiaz, via Flickr

I’ve lived in some pretty far away places in cultures very different from ours: Iran while the Shah was still in power; Romania while Ceaucescu was still in power; Doha, Qatar in the BAJ days – that’s Before Al Jazeera days. Then there was Abu Dhabi, Yemen, Madagascar, Zambia, and Eritrea. But the worst case of culture shock I ever had was when I served at the post closest to home – Bridgetown, Barbados. I have yet to find any references that acknowledge why. In fact, all the resources I could find about Barbados seem to reinforce all the notions that in fact made my culture shock so strong.  You know, Barbados is part of the British Commonwealth, English is the official language, the natives are friendly. In short, life in Barbados is a series of one day after another in paradise.

That wasn’t my experience. And it took a physical fight between a local employee, Kay, and the wife of one of the Americans to learn why. Let’s look at those three factors – Barbados’ British history, their language, and the friendliness of the natives.

Factor #1: It’s a former British colony, so they are just like us, right? Wrong. Let me count the ways.

First, they drive on the left side of the road. And they stop to have a conversation in the middle of the road if they encounter someone they know coming in a car from the opposite direction.

Second, imagine this scenario: You see a woman walking down the street with a young boy whose shoe laces are loose. Do you a) ignore them, b) get the woman’s attention and point out that the child’s laces are loose, or c) get the woman’s attention and tell her to tie the boy’s shoes. The Bajan answer? C. In Barbados, one gets directly to the point with people one doesn't know, but one beats around the bush with those one knows well.  So we were always behaving too familiarly with people when we first met them by speaking indirectly and then shutting them down once we got to know them by speaking with them directly.

Third, there’s the difference between respecting privacy versus being polite. When the consular section moved into a new building where all office spaces were cubicles, we Americans observed the privacy that the cubicle walls implied by walking past the private spaces contained within them. The Bajans on the other hand invaded our privacy by barging into our cubicles to say Good morning – even if we were holding a meeting or were on the phone at the time.

Factor #2: They speak English there. But I rarely understood them.

When answering the phone in the afternoon, Bajans say, “Hello. Good night.” I felt that they were about to hang up on me, not engage in conversation.

My first day on the job, my new boss asked me to read a telegram reporting on the arrest of an American which was written by one of the local employees. My boss could hardly hide her amusement as I read that the American was arrested for uttering. Uttering what? An obscenity, a threat, a promise? Uttering, it seems, is the verb for passing counterfeit currency.

In addition to using a transitive verb as an intransitive verb, Bajans use nouns as verbs, as in, “Where did you get that bike? Did you thief (pronounced tief) it?” Or “What did you do last weekend?  Just lime around?”

And then there are the words that mean something completely different, like wife. I answered the phone for a single colleague one day. The woman on the other end told me to leave a message that his wife had called. Wife just means a woman with a relationship to a man. Then there is the word deputy or the phrase outside woman both of which mean a woman in a relationship to a man who already has a wife.

Factor #3: The paradise factor.

Everyone thinks living on a tropical island is paradise. But working on a tropical island changes the viewpoint. Just think: 12 hours of daylight, 12 hours of night, every day of the year. Those daylight hours correspond roughly to the hours spent getting ready for work, going to work, being at work, and going home from work. The rest of the time, it’s dark out.

And those friendly natives? To Bajans, there are two kinds of people – people they know and tourists. If the world consisted of just those two categories, the claim that they are friendly would be true. But there are those they don’t know who aren’t tourists, like we were. Anyone in that category gets ignored.

So there I was, with my husband and son, living on a tropical island, where everyone spoke a familiar language that led me to misunderstand about half of what I heard, and where the social conventions made me insult the people I considered my friends by treating them, they thought, as though I didn’t know them at all. And I loved every minute of it – well, once I finally caught on to what was happening.

That fight between Kay and the American woman? It happened when the American woman put her cigarette out in an ashtray she carried and then placed on Kay's desk as she reached for Kay's phone to place a phone call -- all without asking Kay's permission. The American woman was from New York, another place where people have a reputation for being direct with strangers. It as ironic that the incident led to conversation within the embassy about our different cultural perspectives. I wouldn't claim the air was cleared throughout, but the conversation did lead to some of us gaining understanding that then led to enjoying the differences instead of being baffled by them.

Day 76 - Recognizing a Bargain

Iranian house image by HAMED MASOUMI, via Flickr

Learning to bargain was a necessity in the middle east, but it didn't come easily. Initially I found it very distasteful, based on my first impressions from Iran. My introduction to bargaining was seeing a house that Davood, the Iranian husband of one of my teacher colleagues in Tehran, was in the process of negotiating to rent. He brought several of us to look at it because it had an upstairs level he hoped to sub-let to one of us. The house was charming. It sat on a hill with a wonderful view or the surrounding mountains. In spite of the house featuring all that was typical of Iranian homes, it also had some amenities, making it a perfect combination of traditional and modern. But when anyone said anything positive, Davood shushed us so the owners wouldn't hear us. It would make it that much more difficult for him to get the owners to agree to the rent he wanted to pay if they knew how much we all liked it.

I did get many clues on bargaining techniques as I shopped, but I didn't always recognize them. For example, if I tried on a blouse that didn't fit, I would return it to the clerk with the explanation that it was too small. At that point, the clerk would drop the price. Thinking he hadn't understood, I would repeat myself, and the price would come down again. I would end up putting down the blouse and walking out, missing the point altogether. Bargaining in Iran seemed always to involve insulting the seller or the seller's possessions. The seller, in return, then insulted the buyer. And that just wasn't something that was comfortable to me.

Bargaining on the other side of the Gulf was much more agreeable, although it took me awhile to learn the difference. It took a very bad case of bronchitis that had me sent from Doha to Riyadh for me to learn how to be bargain successfully. After two weeks of following the regional medical officer's orders, I had recovered sufficiently to accept the invitation to join David, an American who was in Riyadh to provide training to the staff in the finance office, as he went shopping in the souq. Since the Saudis did not allow women to drive, the embassy had a very large motorpool from which women could order up vehicles for any personal business. So the men would invite a woman along in order to avoid having to pay the nominal amount they would be charged if they used a motorpool vehicle. That was all the invitation meant - a free ride for him if I was also in the car.

David wanted to buy a carpet for a newly renovated bedroom in his home. He knew the size, color, and style of carpet he wanted, so we went off to the souq in search of it. We went to a number of shops, without success. When we finally found a shop where just the carpet he wanted was displayed by the shop keeper, I got my lesson. When David asked the shopkeeper how much he wanted for the carpet, he named a number far above any I could image paying for a carpet.  The carpet was exactly what he wanted - the perfect size - 6 feet by 8 feet, the perfect colors - navy blue and rust, and the perfect design - an elegant city carpet. But the price was high. David's reaction was perfect, too. When the shopkeeper asked him how much he would be willing to pay for the carpet - to get the bargaining going - David responded that he didn't dare say what he had hoped to pay for a carpet because it would be insulting to the shop keeper to think that he would part with such a beautiful carpet for such a small amount. David had told me how much he hoped to pay, so I knew exactly what he meant. But I could never have put it into words so well.

David asked to see another carpet that wouldn't be quite so expensive. The shopkeeper pulled out another with the same colors, but smaller and a tribal design instead of the city design. The price was lower, but still not as low as David had hoped to pay. Again, when the shopkeeper tried to elicit a price from which the bargaining could begin, Daivd replied that he couldn't insult the shopkeeper by admitting how little he thought he could pay for a carpet, especially when it was clear they were all worth much more than he had expected.

Because we had already been in the souq for some time, the call to prayer occurred. Now, in Saudi Arabia, a very conservative Islamic country, when the call to prayer happened, everything shut down. Restaurants could not serve meals during the 20 minutes after the call to prayer. Shops had to close their doors for 20 minutes after all customers had been turned out. But our shopkeeper was determined to make a sale and he wasn't about to let us out of his sight. So instead of turning us out, he whisked us upstairs to another level and then he pulled down all the blinds so that no one outside could see that we were still in the shop. The shopkeeper continued to pull carpets out to show David, always with the colors he wanted, but smaller or in different styles than he wanted. The prices were lower, but David continued to respond with the most appreciative and generous comments about the quality of the carpets in the shop without naming a number.

Kurdish carpet

Twenty minutes after the call to prayer, we were able to go back downstairs. More carpets were pulled out for David to look at. By this time, the shopkeeper had begun to look at me as a potential buyer as well. One of the carpets he pulled out was Kurdish, a modified prayer carpet. It was just 2 feet by 3 feet, considerably smaller than David's target size. It was navy blue, beige, and brown, not the navy blue and rust that David was looking for. But I found it very interesting and I started bargaining, settling on $200.00. The shopkeeper wrapped it up for me and then turned his attention entirely on David. Eventually, he pulled out the very first carpet he had shown us, the one that was perfect. Again, the shopkeeper asked David how much he was prepared to pay for a carpet. Finally David named the price he had told me in the first place he was willing to pay, $100.00. And the shopkeeper agreed, wrapped it up, and handed it to David.

I don't know if I overpaid so much for the Kurdish carpet that the shopkeeper could take a loss on David's carpet, or if he just wanted to make a sale to each of us, no matter the price. It doesn't matter because I learned the essential elements of bargaining that day. The most important element is establishing a positive relationship between seller and buyer. Once the seller and the buyer are comfortable with one another, perhaps even have trust in one another, but certainly like one another, that's when coming to an agreeable price is possible. Agreeing on a price too soon robs both buyer and seller of the opportunity to get to know one another.

And that is my key to recognizing a bargain.

Day 75 - Ramadhan Kareem

The piece below was written as my devotion at a Wednesday evening supper at my church in Arlington, Virginia. The event was at the beginning of Ramadan that year.

Image by jotunbani, via Flickr

Let me begin by explaining why I think sharing a bit of an Islamic tradition is appropriate for this Lutheran congregation at this time and in this place.  And I’ll begin with the traditional greeting for the first day of Ramadhan:  Ramadhan Kareem.  Generous Ramadhan.  

First, some background.  I grew up in the Midwest at a time when it was pretty much filled by people of northern European backgrounds.  The difference between Lutherans and Catholics was the greatest theological division I knew of, although I knew, without understanding, that there were also differences between Norwegian Lutherans, Swedish Lutherans, and German Lutherans.  Both Judaism and Islam were just subjects in world religions courses.  I didn’t know any Jews or Muslims and didn’t really expect I ever would.

Ten years ago, I was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi.  This wasn’t the first time I had lived in a Muslim country; it was the third time.  I had experienced Ramadhan – the month of fasting that is one of the five pillars of Islam  – in both Iran and Qatar.  And I found it to be a frankly incomprehensible holiday that was more easily described as an inconvenience to non-Muslims and an opportunity for Muslims to make excuses for not working.  That is, until one Yemeni woman introduced me to the other side of Ramadhan.  Her name is Huda and she is the wife of one of my employees in Abu Dhabi, Mohammed Mackawee.  

One Ramadhan afternoon, Huda called to tell me that I was not to cook anything for my family that evening.  She planned to share the breaking of the fast meal that she had prepared with us.  Just before sunset that day, she arrived with a half dozen bowls of Yemeni special foods and laid them out on our table for the evening meal.  She explained that Ramadhan is a time to give thanks, to give gifts to the people most important in one’s life, to ask for forgiveness, and to forgive.  And because I had spent an evening talking with her about her concern for her husband’s health and her apprehensions about her upcoming immigration to the United States with her husband, she felt it was important to share a Ramadhan thanksgiving meal with us.  

There was something very special about Huda’s bringing the meal to us instead of just inviting us to join her and Mohammed in their home.  We weren’t invalids, so we didn’t need to have food brought to us.  We were certainly not financially strapped.  And we had often been invited to the homes of other contacts of the Embassy during Ramadhan, so invitations to meals were not special in and of themselves.  But there was a greater generosity involved in delivering the meal to our home.  It was more of a gift without any strings attached.  We didn’t have to get dressed up to go out.  We didn’t have to stand around talking to strangers, trying to think of interesting topics.  And we didn’t have to wait until the most important guest had gone before we could say our own good-byes.  The evening was still ours.

This was the first of many gifts that Huda’s delivery of a Ramadhan iftar meal brought me.

That year I began to see the family gatherings at restaurants for iftar meals in a new light.  The concept of Thanksgiving was more apparent.  And I compared the wonder of our single Thanksgiving holiday meal – a time when families gather together, share a meal consisting of traditional food items, combinations of foods that are eaten only on that day each year -- to the 28 days of family gatherings and special meals for Muslims during Ramadhan.  I began to understand that Muslims look forward to Ramadhan with joy, in contrast to the moody and begrudging attitude that many non-Muslims in the Muslim world approach that time of each year.  Where in the past I had dreaded the arrival of Ramadhan, I began instead to look forward to it, to seeing the connections that families and larger communities made with one another not just one day a year, but every day for a month.

The following year, because Huda’s gift had been so striking, I suggested to a group of other employees that we host an iftar meal for all the employees of the embassy and their families.  A group of 8 women, representing nearly as many countries and traditions – both Muslims and Christians – planned and cooked what we could agree on as a “traditional” iftar.  We began by serving dates, nuts, fruit juices and water, the light items full of energy that allow the fast to be broken slowly.  The meal continued with lentil soup, lamb, rice, vegetables, salads, stuffed vegetables, savory vegetable- and meat-filled pastries, and concluded with typical desserts, including ‘oum ‘ali, the richest bread pudding in the world.  And while we all wondered as we laid the table with food whether there would be enough, in the end we were able to serve all the employees and their family members.  We then brought food to the Ambassador and other American employees who were still working in the chancery, those who couldn’t get away from work at sundown to join us.  And there was still enough food for us to bring meals to the Marines on duty as well as to the Emirati police guards outside the Embassy. 

Through the experience of sharing a meal in a multi-national, interdenominational group, I began to see my surroundings – and all the people in them – with new eyes.  While most Christians understand much about Judaism since Christianity is a continuation of the Jewish tradition, we understand little about Islam.  Most Muslims understand much more about Christianity than most Christians understand about Islam for the same reason.  The three Abrahamic monotheistic religions are a continuous tradition.  We each understand a great deal about the tradition on which ours is based.

Huda’s gift continued.  As a result of the experience of sharing a meal, we began discussions that no longer just skimmed the surface of our cultural differences and the religious devotion we each felt to our own traditions.  The same group of 8 women who hosted the first iftar meal at the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi continued meeting weekly and held discussions for the next year in a “Cultural Forum.”  We discussed not just our differences, but also explained to one another the basis for the differences.  Because we had shared in the preparation of an iftar meal, we were able to ask one another the questions we had all been too reticent to ask before.  

Through those discussions, many of the stereotypical opinions I had held about Islam faded away, replaced by explanations.  Through the experience of sharing a meal and the open discussions that followed, I came to admire the devotion and conviction of my Muslim colleagues and found myself seeking the same sense of community for myself.  It was seeking that community that brought me to Faith Lutheran Church.

It is my hope that, by sharing the story of what one generous Muslim woman’s decision to share a Ramadhan meal with me has meant to me, I may encourage others to consider opening a dialog by extending a greeting to a Muslim during this special month.  “Ramadhan kareem” is the typical greeting exchanged during the first few days of Ramadhan.  I encourage you to extend this greeting, “Ramadhan kareem,” during the next week if you see a Muslim woman working in Home Depot or Harris Teeter, places I more often see women wearing hijab to cover their heads than not.  Consider extending the greeting in the next week if you find yourself in line behind a Muslim family at Hechts or Target or Shoppers Food Warehouse, other places I often see Muslim families shopping.  

Day 74 - Mom's Last Gift

Mom and Dad

I am going through Tivo withdrawal. We had Tivo in Virginia to record programs to watch later. In addition, Tivo would record programs similar to ones we had recorded, so we always had something to watch. We also had On Demand so that if we missed recording something, it was still possible to catch up. But here, we have no Tivo, just cable DVR which doesn't record anything unless we request it, and On Demand seems limited to premium channels which we don't subscribe to.

In desperation, I ended up recording a long string of Lifetime movies the other night. The first two had a similar theme. Daughters, estranged from fathers, leave home or are sent away, as adults achieve a level of success bringing with it connections with important and influential men, and then their fathers died. The death of their fathers meant the daughters reluctantly returned to their homes. And in the course of the days that followed, each daughter discovered how she had misjudged her father. In the case of the first, her father's friends showed her all the letters he had written to them about how much he loved her and how he had fallen so short of what he promised her that he didn't dare reach out to her directly, thus bursting her illusion of his abandonment of her. In the case of the second, her mother explained that the letters the daughter had found from her father to "Betty" were in fact letters he wrote to his wife. Betty was his pet name for her. The second daughter's illusion that her father had been conducting an affair behind her mother's back was also shattered.

In both cases, the daughters regretted all the time they had spent despising their fathers. Those two stories reminded me of what I call Mom's last gift to us kids: the gift of getting to know Dad.

As a child, I considered both Mom and Dad quiet and shy, just like me. When I learned about the scale of introversion to extroversion, I pegged both my parents as introverts, although Mom was a little closer to extroversion on that scale. When we went visiting, whether friends or relatives, Mom was the one more likely to talk than Dad. When we visited, Dad described it as going to see people.  That seemed to be enough for him - to see people.

Over time Mom's confidence grow. It's not that I noticed it, but Mom completed five assignments in an autobiography class and shared them with us. In one of them, she described reaching the conclusion that she should volunteer to teach Sunday School. When she told her parents, her father's reaction was "what makes you think you can do that?" Maybe the question wasn't as full of cynicism as I took it to mean when I read Mom's assignment. But it seemed Mom understood it that way as well. Of course, I always assumed Mom could do anything. Through reading her assignments, I  grew to appreciate what changes she went through as she grew in her own ways while we kids grew up.

Mom was the spokesperson for Dad. I can recall many conversations that began "your father isn't very happy about. . . " Dad never told us; Mom spoke for him. And there were many times when Mom told us something about Dad's health that came with the warning, "Dad didn't want me to tell you because he doesn't want you to worry."

When Mom died, Dad no longer had a translator. He had to tell us himself how he felt. He had to tell us his news himself. He had to tell us himself what he wanted or needed us to do. And in the course of those conversations, we all got to know him a little more.

I recall when Dad called me just to talk. I connected with Mom through email, but that option didn't work for Dad. Eventually he said he had something to tell me, that he had a date. It felt like a good friend sharing his news with me and that felt wonderful. That date was with Dolores and therefore the beginning of her becoming an important part of Dad's life, and ours.

Dad had a much younger special friend, Amalia, from Romania. He and Mom met her at a Sons of Norway meeting in Fargo when she attended with her Norwegian language professor from Concordia. He told me that when he met her, he decided to be the friend for her he hoped I had found in Romania while I was there. Amalia graduated from Concordia and with a lot of help from Dad made her way to Seattle for an internship year. The following year, Dad called to ask me to help Amalia get settled in Virginia as she had received a full scholarship for a masters degree program at Georgetown University. Since he rarely asked for help, and in this case the request was even rarer because Mom was still alive, yet Dad made the phone call. I was happy to do what I could. In the first few months after Mom died, Dad came to visit us in Virginia. For the first time, he was more a guest than Dad. Dad used to find things in the house that needed to be fixed and he'd get busy fixing them. But Dad the guest let us take him around town to see the sights. He came to attend Amalia's graduation, and together the three of us attended a Sons of Norway meeting. Years later as we kids moved him from his apartment to the nursing home, we found documents indicating how much more help Dad gave Amalia than we had known. How would have learned this wonderful fact about our father if he still had Mom as his translator?

Even now when Dad's short-term memory is weak, we have been able to get to know more about him as questions about his childhood (we should have asked them years ago) are now some of the only ones that he can answer. Even what he tells us about what I think are his dreams - he is always traveling these days, at least in his mind - gives us some glimpses of what is important to him.

Thanks, Mom.

Day 73 - Alex's Rehabilitation

Alex and I are getting very familiar with the physical therapy needed after total knee replacement and the process of recovery. His first two surgeries were in Virginia where his recovery involved climbing lots of stairs as the bedrooms were on the top of three floors, the dining room on the middle floor, and the TV on the bottom one. As a result, I don't recall him getting around so much in the earliest days of his rehabilitation. When his physical therapist came to see him in Virginia, he would head upstairs to the bedroom where Alex spent more time resting than he thought he needed, but probably not as much as he should have, and the two of them worked on the exercises together. When the therapist left, Alex did the exercises on his own. I don't know what exercises he did then because he didn't need my help.

This time, however, is very different. Because of the extent of the repair needed to the knee, Alex is not supposed to lift his leg at all. But he still needs to strengthen the muscles in his leg. That means that each of the exercises his therapist here has given him require that I help. I lift his leg so that he can get strength back as he lowers his leg down to the bed. With a pillow under his knee, I raise the lower part of his leg to extend the knee joint and he lowers his heel down to the bed, to regain flexibility in the joint. With his leg flat against the bed, he extends his foot to point his toes and then bends his foot back toward his knee and I give his foot just a little extra push to stretch out his calf muscles. My arms are getting a pretty good workout as well. And I know that he is doing all of his exercises every day because I'm doing them, too.

toddler image by glenmcbethlaw, via Flickr

In contrast to our Virginia home, the whole house here is on one level, and that means Alex is almost unstoppable when he gets up to move around. Observing Alex getting around with his walker is good practice for when our grandson becomes mobile. I can just see the little guy in one of those wheeled chairs with the round tray in front and attention-grabbing colorful plastic thingies (that's a Geordie word, the equivalent to thingamabob) that rotate or make noise that allow pre-toddlers to get around before they can walk. Alex's walker makes about the same noise as he rolls it along the hard wood floors. So long as I hear a steady noise from it, I know he is making good progress. If I hear the noise start and stop, I worry.

One comparison with a toddler that doesn't work quite so well, however, is that toddlers try to do what they haven't been able to do yet while Alex needs to refrain from trying to do everything he used to be able to do until his knee allows him to bend down again.  He is so stubborn that he refuses to ask for help. Even when I offer help, he doesn't wait for me. And he just can't give up his compulsion to clean up every surface in sight. My explanation - which he hears as an excuse - is that I can't be everywhere at the same time doing both what I need to do and what he wants me to do. Something just has to wait. Alex is determined that it not be what he wants, so in the absence of my doing the laundry or the dishes or picking up a glass from the coffee table in front of the TV just as soon as I have finished drinking from it, he does those things. Occasionally he will apologize that he can't do something for me, like carry my dinner plate to the table, when I never expected him to do that in the first place. He has never made me feel that he does things for me because I am incapable of doing them for myself. He does things for me because he wants to; it's his job, he says.

Today is his ninth day at home after the surgery so he has begun to venture out without the walker. Even with a cane, I consider that his stealth mode. Unless he starts dragging his leg behind him, I can't hear him moving around. It is a good thing that I am usually in the same place for most of the day - at my computer for the eight hours I work Mondays through Fridays and then still in the same place while I complete my day's project. I don't want to round a corner and run into him, something that is entirely possible since he is in places I don't think he should be going yet, like the laundry and the garage.

Yesterday he went to the back yard and saw someone working on the neighbor's yard. He asked the guy if the lady next door was OK because he hadn't seen her for a few days. The guy said she was fine, but she was in the house recuperating from knee replacement surgery. And wouldn't you know it, Alex told him to tell her that if she needs anything, she should just call him.

Day 72 - Spy Story - Part III

Image by vpickering, via Flickr

When I lived in Romania, I knew that I was being followed wherever I went. In Romania, there was no such thing as a coincidence.

For example, everywhere I went in Iasi or Bucharest, whether on foot, on the tram, or by train, I would see the same bearded guy. Initially I didn't think much of it until I heard from my students how unusual it was for anyone to travel between Iasi and Bucharest as often as I did. The guy wasn't in any of my classes, but I assumed he was a student.

Before I went to Romania, I hasn't realized how rare English language books would be. I had brought a few paperbacks with me and in desperation I took those order forms for more paperbacks from the back of all of them and I ordered every one of them. I didn't know how long it would be before I could buy more. One of those books was The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski. All the books I ordered were delivered via unclassified pouch to the embassy in Bucharest where I picked them up when I traveled there. Except The Painted Bird. That one was dropped off on the floor in the hallway outside my apartment one evening while I was in the apartment. There was no note with it to explain who brought it. I was the only American in Iasi. Someone knew where I lived, but I had no idea who.

I also would get phone calls from people who just wanted to speak English. Phone lines were rare. Once a line was put in, the number stayed with the house or apartment. That meant that anyone who ever had the phone number of the American lecturer in the past had my phone number. So they called even though I has no idea who they were.

Because I was there on a Fulbright grant, it is very likely that the Romanian government had a file on me, built from whatever all those people who followed me thought they learned. My apartment was broken into while I was in France on vacation at Christmas and half of anything of value was stolen. Half, not all. And that itself was significant because I had put two cartons of cigarettes in the freezer and two cartons in my underwear drawer. One carton from each location was taken. The thief took one of my two bottles of vodka, one of my two bottles of gin, and one of my two very large bottles of soy sauce which I had had to store with the liquor because the bottles were too large to put into the kitchen cupboard. I would have given anything to see the thief's face as he opened that bottle for a swig. It was also very likely that bugging devices were left in my apartment. For me, it was all a game because I really didn't see how following me would be of any use to the Romanian government.

But then I joined the State Department. So I knew there was a possibility that the information the Romanians had gathered could be useful to some intelligence service. But the real link was only recently revealed.

Kendall Myers, the area studies director while I was in German language training, was a spy for the Cubans. In 2009, he and his wife were arrested and they are now in prison. Details of their recruitment available in a variety of sources are contradictory, but it appears the Cubans recruited both Myers from South Dakota where they had moved when his wife's employment as a member of the staff of Senator Abourezk ended when he chose not to run again. In fact, it was the Cubans who convinced Kendall to try to get work with either the CIA or State. He had worked at the Foreign Service Institute on a temporary basis before, so he returned to State in 1980.

Remember, I accepted a book from Kendall before I went off to Stuttgart. It never occurred to me that there might be something in that book to track me. I'll never know if all those coincidences in Germany had anything to do with Kendall Meyers. But learning that he was a spy provides a possible explanation. At a minimum, it makes a good story, right?

Day 71 - Spy Story - Part II

spy vs spy image by tr.robinson, via Flickr

Today's piece is more about coincidences than spying. But some don't believe in coincidences. Do you?

One evening, I went to an art exhibit opening on behalf of the Consul General. The art was all from eastern Europe, and the Consul General knew I had been in Romania, so he gave me his invitation. While there, I met a woman from Yugoslavia who told me her son was going to a party later that week at the home of a British artist who lived in Stuttgart. She asked if I would like to go with her son. She seemed nice, and I decided I could control the situation, so I agreed. Her son called a day later to arrange to pick me up. I decided it would be safer not to tell him where I lived, so we met at the gallery where I had met his mother. When I told him I was from Minnesota, he said he had met some people from Minnesota a couple of years before. They were part of a baseball team that toured in Germany. He said the players were from Moorhead. I chose not to tell him how much of a coincidence that was. I didn't let him know that I was from Moorhead. I never heard from him again.

I spent a lot of time in Germany with a German, Karl Ullrich, while I was in Stuttgart. We met at a German/American friendship organization. I had been attending the meetings for several weeks before Karl Ullrich started attending. In the course of our first conversation, I probably told him where I was from and then he mentioned that he had spent Christmas in the United States, in Fargo. He had spent Christmas in Fargo because his wife was on a teacher exchange there. He and his wife had gotten married so that they could both go to Fargo - U.S. law makes it tough for unmarried couples to spend extended periods of time in the U.S. He and his wife had been living together for several years; they married because of the teacher exchange visa, but then he decided he really didn't want to spend the year in the U.S. because he wouldn't be able to work. His wife was accepted for the exchange, although they had both applied. So instead of going with her, he stayed in Stuttgart. When she got back to Germany, they were divorced.

The reason I was assigned to Stuttgart was that I had lived in Iran. I know that may sound strange, but Germany was the furthest point west that Iran Air flew, so the wealthiest of Iranians who wanted to travel to the U.S. would fly into Frankfurt. The Frankfurt consular section was full of Iranian applicants every day. Stuttgart was a little bit further away, but we still got our share of Iranians. I didn't conduct any interviews in Farsi, but I was able to use my knowledge of Farsi to understand what was going on behind the scenes.

Most of the time, the course of an interview with Iranian applicants was predictable. So when an applicant's story varied from the predictable, it was memorable. One man came to Stuttgart to apply for a visa to travel to the U.S. to visit his children. He was accompanied by an Iranian couple who lived in Stuttgart and served as his translators.  Both the man's son and daughter had left Iran before the revolution. They attended high school in England and then went to the U.S. for college. It had been seven years since this man had seen his children. But it was difficult for for any Iranian to overcome the presumption of being an intending immigrant, so I refused his application. Later that day, I filed his application away together with his previous five applications - all of them refused - and a letter from a rabbi in Los Angeles on this man's behalf. We had received it several weeks before. In it, the rabbi requested we give him positive consideration for a visa so that he could attend his son's wedding. The applicant's son was raised Christian - the man's first wife was Christian - and he was marrying a Jewish woman. The applicant was Muslim.

The next day, the applicant came back by himself. Since I had connected him with the letter, I chose to reinterview him. Because he didn't bring a translator this time, the interview was in English. The first question I asked him was why he hadn't told me he was applying in order to attend his son's wedding. He gave me the most sensible, and atypical, answer ever. He said he had applied for a visa to travel to see his children. If he arrived the day after his son's wedding, that was OK because what he really wanted was to see his children, not to attend a ceremony. I asked why he had come back again a day after I had already refused him. He had a feeling that he would be able to answer my questions better himself than through a translator. I decided to take a chance - actually several chances. First, I gave him a visa. Second, I told him that I had been close to a Jewish family in Iran when I lived there. And I wondered what had happened to that family. I asked if he could help me find out about the family when he returned to Iran.

About three months later, I got a phone call from the applicant. He was back in Germany and wanted to see me. He had had to convince the German consular officer in Los Angeles to give him another visa so he could stop in Germany again on his way back. I guess that consul trusted him, too. I shouldn't have agreed to meet with him, at least not without telling someone else at the consulate. But I trusted him. It's an intuition thing. I met him for lunch on a Saturday. He told me he had found my Iranian family now living in Los Angeles.  He said I should expect a phone call from my friend Abraham soon. He also admitted that he had told me one lie during his interview; he said he had a job in Tehran when he was unemployed. He knew that telling the truth about that would have made it much more difficult for me to grant him a visa. But he wanted me to know about the lie so that I would continue to trust that he would tell the truth in the future.

I did get a phone call, but it wasn't from the Abraham I wanted to hear from. It was his nephew whose name was also Abraham. The nephew was two years older than the uncle. The family had gotten out of Iran several years before and were living in Los Angeles. But my Abraham had been arrested by the Revolutionary Guard and executed. If I hadn't trusted the unusual Iranian applicant, I probably would still not know what happened to Abie.

Another Iranian applicant appeared with her husband who had been living in Germany for the past several years. He had come to Germany to get his Ph.D. and had stayed on. His wife hadn't been in Germany long; her German wasn't strong. Neither was her English, so her husband translated. During the course of the interview, I realized not just that his face was familiar, but why. He had been in my first English class at National Iranian Radio and Television in Tehran. That term I had the most advanced students, so his English had been quite good then. But he wouldn't speak English with me.  Several years in another country, speaking a third language, was enough of an explanation for that, but I asked some probing questions to be absolutely sure I had not mistaken him for a former student. While most Iranians are able to keep a straight face when telling what we call lies, but they define as something else, in his case, a puzzled look appeared and grew deeper as I asked questions about aspects of his history that no American consular officer should have any knowledge of. Eventually he, too, recognized me and the puzzled look turned into a smile.

A few months later, he came to the consulate to invite me to join him and his wife for dinner at a popular restaurant. I agreed, but then later got cold feet. I had gone so far as to contact one of the security guys at the military base to accompany me, but when I realized I wouldn't be able to keep a straight face or maintain any story about the security guy being my boyfriend or any other plausible story, I pulled out the Iranian's wife's visa application to find their telephone number and called them to say I couldn't make it.

Another Iranian gentleman applied for a visa in Stuttgart and got me as his interviewer by chance. The day before his wife had applied in Munich and been refused. His answers were also memorable for being so sensible and therefore atypical. I asked why he had come to Stuttgart to apply instead of applying in Munich. He looked me in the eye and said it made no sense to apply there when his wife had been refused. But it wasn't just his apparent honesty that led me to take a chance on him. He handed me a letter of invitation from his son's landlord. Most of the time we didn't put much stock in invitations. But this one was signed by one of my high school classmates who worked at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. The applicant's son lived in a basement apartment of the couple's Moorhead house. I showed the applicant the signature on the invitation and explained that I knew the couple who had invited him, and I knew they were honest and honorable people who would never do anything illegal. So when they said they would make sure he would return to Iran at the end of his three-month stay, I knew they meant it. I was willing to give him a visa because I also knew there was no way that he could have known in advance that I knew his son's landlord.

The next day I got a phone call from that high school classmate who asked if I would also give their tenant's mother a visa, too. I agreed. I never did think that giving a visa only to one spouse was an effective way to ensure an applicant wasn't intending to stay anyway.

Were all of these just coincidences?

More later. . .

Day 70 - Spy Story, Part I

Image by ocularinvasion, via Flickr

This is a story about coincidences and other spooky things.

Before my first State Department assignment, I had lots of training:

• five weeks of orientation;
• five weeks of ConGen Rosslyn, the Foreign Service Institute's training for consular officers;
• two weeks of Western European area studies;
• fourteen weeks of German language training which included a half-day each week of advanced area studies of Germany;
• one day of security training.

The area studies course was taught by the same man who taught the advanced area studies course, Kendell Meyers. He offered those of us who promised to read it, a copy of a book on "the German problem," the term used in those days for the likelihood - or unlikelihood - of the two Germanies ever being reunited. I picked up a copy of the book from him, although I never did read it.

The one day of security training brought me to the attention of Diplomatic Security because I was the only one in the room to raise my hand when they asked if anyone had ever lived in the eastern block. They asked me to stick around for a special briefing which consisted primarily of them asking what kind of contact I still had with anyone living in or from Romania. Since most of those contacts were limited to exchanging Christmas cards with my former students from Iasi, they didn't seem overly worried. They warned me about the possibility that one of those contacts might suddenly reappear or get in touch without a good reason. They warned me to be very cautious of anyone from that region, especially if they asked questions about my work. And they told me I should be sure to contact them if anything suspicious happened. Afterwards, I had visions - nightmares - of my ex-husband's family making contact with me. I would have been happy to turn to Diplomatic Security for help if that happened.

I am a very good student, so I followed the instructions from the security experts very well. Before I got onto the plane in New York, I took everything out of my wallet that would identify me as an employee of the State Department, except my diplomatic passport, and I put them with a card into an envelope and mailed them to myself at my German address.  And I hid my diplomatic passport at the bottom of my carry on bag, keeping my tourist passport handy on top. That way if the plane was hijacked, the chances of my being identified as a federal employee would be smaller, or at least so I thought. Later I realized that my ticket had a dead giveaway on it - the GTR number that indicated it was purchased by the government. That's an irrelevant fact at this point in the story.

While I was on the plane, a woman sitting across the aisle from me and who spoke with an eastern European accent asked me if I had a spare contact lens case. She said she was having trouble with her contacts and she wanted to take them out. I had a spare case, so I gave it to her. When she gave it back to me on our arrival, I threw it away, just to be sure she wasn't trying to sneak something into my new home.

Once I got to Stuttgart, I established some habits for security. I really didn't think I had to worry about it, but I used it as a game. And because I had lived in Romania several years earlier, I knew the value of following security tips.  One example was that every morning when I left for work, I would put a small sliver of paper in the door jamb as I closed it. When I got home in the evening, I would check to see if the sliver was still there before I unlocked my door.

One day at work, the phone rang in the visa section where I worked. A local employee answered it and told me the call was for me. So I answered it. The man on the other end of the phone said something like, "Hi, Sandra, guess who this is," in an American accent. I didn't know many people yet, so I said the name of the only American man I had met at that point, David. He said yes, and then he started asking me questions about what I was doing, what I was wearing, and where I was within the Consulate. He was chatty and friendly, a little flirty. I avoided answering any questionable questions. But when he asked me a couple of questions that David should have known the answers to, I didn't answer and told him he already knew that. At that point, the caller hung up. I still hadn't caught on that the caller wasn't David or anyone else I knew. I called David right back to ask him why he hung up on me. As soon as David answered the phone I realized the guy who called wasn't anyone I knew.

The way the guy got through to me was pretty tricky. I don't know if it was a security issue or if the guy was just a lonely American. He called the Consulate and told the operator that he had been at the Consulate the day before and he was calling to talk with the woman he had talked with then. So the operator put him through to the consular officer on the American citizen services side of the consular section. She was a bit more savvy than I and concluded that the guy just wanted to talk to an American woman, so she hung up on him.

The guy called back and told the operator that she had put him through to the wrong consular officer, so the operator put him through to the visa side of the consular section. When the local employee answered the phone, he said he wanted to talk to the consular officer. She asked if he meant Ms. Wenner. He said yes, so she put the call through to me. I answered with my first name, so now he had my full name.

I talked with the security officer right away about the incident and he brought the Marine Security Guard detachment commander into the conversation. Together we concluded that it was probably nothing. But when I got home from work that day, the slip of paper was on the floor in the hall, not stuck in the door jamb. So I called the Det Commander; he came over and went through the house to be sure there was nothing out of place. I realized that the slip of paper might have fallen out during the day. Or maybe I was careless and turned the knob before putting the key into the lock, releasing the tension that kept the paper sliver in place. We concluded that unless something else happened, my day had just been a series of coincidences.

Or had it?

More later. . .

Day 69 - Picking Out Potatoes

Potatoes image by lisibo, via Flickr

I learned another lesson from Mom that I use every single day of my life - both at work and at home. That's why this one deserves individual attention. And I learned this one before the age of 12 when we still lived in 307, before the move across the street to 312. It is a slight variation on the cleaning up spilled milk lesson.

I don't know that Mom set out to teach me anything that day. She needed help getting dinner ready. She gave me a potato and asked me to go downstairs and find five more about the same size.  With four kids in the family, we ate a lot of potatoes so Dad bought them at a potato farm in 50-pound bags, kept in the basement. I went down to the bag and pulled out five more potatoes, but I didn't settle for the little size of the one Mom gave me. I picked up five much larger potatoes and thought Mom would be pleased.

She wasn't.

She wanted six potatoes about the same size because she planned to bake them. If the potatoes were larger, they would take longer. If they weren't all the same size, they wouldn't be done at the same time.

I don't recall if Mom sent me back down for potatoes the right size or if she went down herself. No matter. The message stuck.

But I needed a reminder. While I was in college, I worked at my church in the office for one summer. During that summer, something went wrong with the transportation of the kids home from camp. Pastor  told me to prepare a letter to all the parents and send it right away. I prepared the letter, but I didn't see any point in sending it because it wouldn't arrive in time for the parents to get the message. Besides, I knew that all the parents were being called with the same message. So I didn't bring the letters to the post office. The next day, Pastor saw the stack of envelopes on my desk and asked me why I hadn't mailed them. I said it would be a waste of money because the letters wouldn't arrive in time. He looked at me and told me that sometimes it was important to take an action even if some other factor would interfere. In this case, he wanted the parents to know that we took every step possible to let them know about the problem. Instead, I hadn't mailed the letters. And that meant it was likely that some parents would complain that we hadn't told them. Answering machines were a thing of the future so parents who weren't home when the phone call was made would have good reason to think we hadn't informed them.

Once again, I realized that knowing the reason for the instruction would have been helped me avoid making an error in judgment. Now the lesson was firmly planted.

When my first husband Don and I arrived in Berkeley several years later, I again went to work for a church. Whenever my boss, Pastor Walt, told me to do something, I asked him "Why?" One day he commented that my generation seemed obsessed with knowing the answer to "Why?" I think he thought the question implied "Why should I do what you tell me to do?" when what I meant was "What are you hoping to accomplish if I do it that way?" With that explanation, he seemed satisfied.

How do I use this lesson these days? At work, nearly every day someone comes to me to ask me for "a SharePoint site." SharePoint is a web-based platform that can serve as a content management system (think libraries online), a content delivery system (think website), a workflow processing system (think applications, such as automated data processing for calculating and delivering payroll), or a collaboration zone (think wikis, blogs, discussion boards, or even Facebook). So "a SharePoint site" can mean any number of different things. So you see why my first question in response is some variation of "Why?" Sometimes what my customer needs is just a document library, not an entire site. But even if they need a site, I need to know what they will use it for, who will need to access it, what the relationship of the site is to already existing sites. Knowing why my customer thinks they need a SharePoint site is essential to providing them with what they need.  If I just gave them what they asked for, I wouldn't be helping them solve a problem or accomplish a goal.

At home these days, knowing the answer to "why?" is essential when I help Alex with his physical therapy for his repaired knee. The first day the physical therapist came to see Alex, he hadn't gotten a full answer to "why?" from Alex's surgeon, so he started Alex out with exercises at the usual pace, too aggressive for Alex. As soon as he heard from Alex's doctor's office, he called us back to tell us not to continue with the exercises until he came back the next day. Then he showed me not only what to do but explained why Alex's therapy needed to be more conservative. If he hadn't given me that explanation, if I only knew what to do, I could be pushing Alex to do too much. For one exercise, it is important for me to lift Alex's leg to be as straight as possible and then for him to pull my hand down to the bed. But if I lifted Alex's leg up from his hip, that would be too much extension. The action would look the same, but the method would put strain on the wrong muscles.

In the house, we have a canister lighting system in the kitchen. There are six canisters, but when we flip the switch, we never know how many will turn on. We usually get four, sometimes only three. And every now and then - but not often - we get all six. We wanted to know why. We called our home warranty company to request an electrician come to look at what we believed might be faulty electrical system. The electrician looked at the lights and explained that there are two reasons that one of them might not come on: either the transformer was not functioning or the thermostat sensed the light was too hot. He eliminated the first possibility because if there was a problem with the transformer, the lights wouldn't be intermittent - once off, they would remain off until the transformer is replaced. But the thermostat is designed to turn the lights off when they overheat. His conclusion was that the canister fixtures themselves are faulty, but the electrical system is fine.

Now we know. We don't have to worry about the lights. We can put up with them until we can't put up with them any more. It is important to know the answer to the question, "Why?".

Day 68 - Baking Banana Bread

Banana bread image by RobynAnderson, via Flickr

I made banana bread today. It reminded me of a number of lessons Mom gave me that she would probably have considered home economics lessons, but I consider them life or work lessons,

For example, Mom told me I should gather all the ingredients needed before beginning to bake or cook.  That way I wouldn't get half way through mixing the batter and discover I am missing an ingredient. I thought of that lesson the day I watched Judy make Rice Krispies® bars. She didn't gather all the ingredients together first. She just started with the first ingredient - butter - which she melted in the pan. Since the marshmallows were not out, there was no cue that they were needed, so she continued with the ingredient she did have out, the Rice Krispies.

Much of my work life I have managed projects, or been the primary interested party in someone else managing them - software development projects, access control projects, renovating an old building to turn it into an embassy projects, implementing the Department of State's student loan repayment program - and making sure I knew what all the pieces were and when they were going to be available was very important in each of those instances.

The next relevant lesson Mom taught me was never to break eggs directly into the batter. Instead, she taught me to break each egg into a cup first and then pour it into the batter. I thought it looked like an extra step, but she explained that sometimes eggs aren't fresh and if each egg was broken directly into the batter, a rotten egg would spoil the whole mixture. I don't think I have ever found a rotten egg, but I appreciated the scientific method approach to ensuring nothing invisible spoiled the batter when it was made visible. And identifying potential risks in order to mitigate them is a key step in any project management effort.

Mom also taught me that when I used one of the ingredients, I should put away the container it was in so that I would know when I was done that I had used everything. That's the lesson that was important for me today as I was mixing up the banana bread. When I was nearly done, I realized the butter was still on the counter. I had started out mistaking the first instruction - which called for a mixer - to involve the eggs. One of the eggs had a tiny crack so I was wondering it if was going to be my first experience with a bad egg. So that's what I put into the bowl first which I mixed until it it was a light golden color, just as the recipe said. Everything made sense next - I added the white sugar and the packed golden brown sugar and continued beating the ingredients.  I followed the recipe until I reached the point where there were just two bowls of ingredients left: the flour mixture that also had the salt, baking powder and baking soda, and the milk, to be added alternately. I was ready to add the first when I saw the butter on the counter.

But another lesson I learned from Mom is that there isn't just a single way to do anything. I could follow a recipe - or the instructions for a pattern - and I would come out with the desired result. But Mom also taught me that I didn't have to lay out pattern pieces on a piece of fabric the way the instructions showed; instead, I could fold the fabric to cut the pieces one at a time and end up with leftover fabric when I was done. Leftover fabric is good.

Likewise, there is no single way to mix banana bread batter. So I had forgotten the butter. I knew I couldn't leave it out, but all I had to do was put the butter into another bowl, turn on the mixer again, and then when the butter was a light golden color, I added it to the mixture. Voila! Banana bread batter was fixed.

A final lesson in this home economics series is the proper way to clean up spilled milk. My instinctive response to seeing spilled milk was to head for the lowest point, where the majority of the milk pooled, in order to clean that up. But Mom pointed out that it was more effective to start at the source, where the milk first hit something it wasn't intended to hit, like the kitchen counter or table surface. She told me that unless I cleaned up the milk at the source of the spill, I would never get everything cleaned up. Even worse, if I concentrated on the end point of the spill, I might not even be able to see the path the milk traveled to get there as the quantity eventually slowed to a trickle, almost evaporating from sight.

Mom's lesson for cleaning up spilled milk comes to me often at work. For example, when I worked as a software engineer, our testing team ran every new version through a series of tests and assigned a priority to any issues they uncovered. Priority 1 issues were those that caused the system to crash. Priority 5 issues were cosmetic. We addressed priority 1 issues first and sometimes made it to the priority 5 issues.  

One day I was ahead of schedule and I started on the priority 5 issues. One described extra spaces being added to the status message that scrolled across the upper right of the screen, depending on which floppy drive was selected. With drive A, the message was perfect. With drive B, one extra space was added. With drive C, two extra spaces were added. And so on. Extra spaces in the message were cosmetic, not meriting much time to address.

Except the reason for the extra spaces being added was found within the code that displayed the message, not the message itself. When I discovered this, I realized that if a user requested drive G, our priority 5 issue would become a priority 1 issue. We found the issue and corrected it.

That's cleaning up spilled milk from its source.

Because someone asked, here is the recipe for banana bread.

5 Tbsp butter
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1 large egg
2 egg whites (if I have them, I use egg whites. If I don't have them, I use whole eggs.)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups mashed, very ripe bananas (I find 3 bananas is usually about right.)
1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup heavy cream (I use milk)
1/3 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Spray bottom only of 9 x 5 x 3 inch loaf pan with non-stick cooking spray.
2. Beat butter in large bowl with an electric mixer set at medium speed until light and fluffy. Add granulated and brown sugar; beat well. Add egg, egg whites and vanilla; beat until well blended. Add mashed banana, and beat on high speed 30 seconds.
3. Combine flour, baking soda, salt, and baking powder in medium bowl. Add flour mixture to butter mixture alternately with cream with flour mixture. Add walnuts to batter; mix well.
4. Pour batter evenly into prepared loaf pan. Bake until browned and toothpick inserted near center comes out clean, about 1 hour 15 minutes.
5. Cool bread in pan on wire rack 10 minutes. Remove bread from pan; cool completely on wire rack. Slice and serve with butter and jam.