Closer and closer

Dubai was so hot that my favorite lunch place on Dubai Creek did not serve food on the terrace. I suppose it is to save the waitresses from heat exhaustion. It was 38 degrees Celsius at 11 in the morning. We crossed the creek in (or rather on) one of the little water busses for 30 cents each with some 20 Sri Lankan or Bangla men. By the time we entered the restaurant our clothes were soaked and sticking to our skin.

Lunch inside the restaurant was not as much fun because we couldn’t watch the colorful activity on the creek. We drank a liter of water each to replenish the liquid our bodies had lost during our very short walk outside. Re-hydrated we took a taxi to the Emirates Mall so Axel could see Dubai ski with his own eyes. The mall is larger than any I know of in the US and we confirmed that anything we would ever miss in Kabul can be obtained in Dubai. We bought some extra luggage for our move in September.

Back at the Dubai airport, a place that has become like a second home to me, we chilled out in the lounge for awhile, catching up on what happened in the rest of the world while we were in Kabul. The hoped-for upgrade eluded us (too cheap a ticket) and we resigned to a long and full flight to Amsterdam. As it turned out, for me it was a breeze. As soon as I had buckled myself in my KLM seat I feel asleep, to wake up only an hour outside Amsterdam. Axel had not such an easy time. We suspect that the diminutive Thai masseuse may have actually broken his rib – probably a rib that had been injured in the accident and that was not able to withstand her 90 pound of pressure applied with her knees on his back. He has decided he does not want to go back there until he can say in Thai ‘enough!’

Annette came to pick us up at 5:30 in the morning and whisked us along empty highways and through a sleepy Amsterdam to her house on one of the canals. There she treated us to the kind of Dutch breakfast I miss a lot in the US (and will miss in Kabul). We needed to stretch our legs, not having had any exercise in the last two weeks, and walked along and across canals through a very quiet Amsterdam. Even the haring kiosk was not yet open, a disappointment. But we were able to sneak a quick ‘pilsje’ sitting at a sunny terrace on the Prinsengracht in the cool Dutch summer breeze.

And now we are waiting to board the last leg of our flight to Boston, armed with cheese, dropjes and cognac. I have been away for exactly one month, during which summer arrived and the garden has started to produce all the things we planted in wet April and May. I can’t wait to see and taste things for myself.

Smooth

So far it has been smooth sailing. The only mishap is a broken nail from picking up my suitcase the wrong way. No lines in Dubai for checking in, a half full plane with empty seats beside us – a good night sleep, no turbulence and a smooth landing ahead of schedule.

We took the bus from Schiphol to the Aalsmeer flower auction, the biggest in the world. Steve had no idea what happens behind the scenes to get flowers from Kenya, Colombia or Israel to our neighborhood florist. Now he knows.

The auction buildings cover acres of space with 1000s of trolleys and hundreds of buyers racing against a clock so everything is bought, bagged and shipped to wherever the buyers are in the shortest amount of time possible. It’s a mindboggling logistics wonder.

Sietske picks us up at the auction and takes us home where Steve is treated to a spectacular breakfast of good Dutch bread, two kinds of cheese, fresh eggs , and thick creamy yogurt. We park Steve in the room where the orphaned ducklings are parked for the night (too cold without a mother duck) so he can rest from the long walk through the auction and a sleepless night in the plane. I take care of other stuff and drinks one cup of coffee after another , produced by Sietske’s fancy espresso machine.

Everything is in full bloom here. The lilacs and wisteria already finished and early summer flowers are out. I can’t wait to see our budding lilacs and that last asparagus.

Running home

I thought Sweden had laid claim to the colors blue and yellow – but all the jerseys I see say ‘Boston Marathon 2009.’ I am flying to Amsterdam with many winners, some the world’s best who are going home to Addis or Nairobi, and some who achieved their own personal best. There are a few who wear their medals around their neck, others are still in their running shoes. Many are travelling with proud significant others, including kids, who cheered. I see more women than men who are recognizable as marathon runners, although many others, not in gear, also look trim and fit; this plane load has very few of the usual obese Americans.

Northwest has moved in with Delta – its looks like absorption rather than a merger. I see only Delta uniforms, Delta logos and wonder about the nice Northwest people who used to check me in, serve me – did they simply change uniform or were they laid off?

Axel brings me to Logan and we miss the nice dinner we used to have at terminal E – it was part of the parting, the treat of a last dinner together. At terminal A, Delta’s home, there is no restaurant for people who are not passengers, only one Au Bon Pain. It is dirty and serves nothing of interest to us. Axel is very affected by this change and I see him walk away with droopy shoulders. When he is out of sight and we are done waving goodbye we talk on the phone for awhile longer. He said the goodbye hit him harder this time. We wonder whether it is the missing restaurant. We could arrive earlier and have dinner at one of the airport hotels. Next time.

I am in the Delta lounge, waiting for our call. I am surrounded by suits, a few women, runners, but mostly suits; a man with high blood pressure makes an aggressive call to an underling back wherever his office is to do things the underling finds difficult or uninteresting. The boss is persistent and speaks louder as the clock ticks towards our departure. There is an urgency in his voice (‘I have no time!’). I am glad I don’t work for a company that ends in –ex or –co, even though it might give me business class travel.

Sita is going to Beirut on the 8th of May before going to Amman. That is the day that I am flying over Beirut from Dubai to Amsterdam. It gives me an idea, but how to make it work. I travel on such cheap tickets that any change requires change fees of hundreds of dollars. Still, I am going to explore this. I bet I could fly to Amsterdam and get a miles roundtrip ticket to Beirut and hang out with her for a few days before resuming my trip home, on the hallowed grounds that saw Axel and me turning into a couple, now 30 years ago.

I sleep fitfully in small chunks throughout the flight. I watched the Benjamin Button film without sound because I wanted to sleep. This makes it a very confusing movie – even more so when you miss whole segments while asleep. The only thing I got was that the main character got younger and younger and it had something to do with a clock going backward.

Sietske picked me up for a brief layover at her house where everything is in bloom. There are freshly laid eggs from her chicken. While she checks out a Polish couple who are going to clean her house, I get to write my blog and take pictures of the cherry tree in full bloom with petals blowing covering everything like pink snow. Sietske feed the potbelly pigs and alets them loose in the yard. If she gives them enough food they will not uproot the bulbs and perennials. They are like hippos, but not dangerous.

We go for a walk with her old dog Trouve who reminds me of Axel in the way he is distracted by every interesting thing (for the dog it is smells) on his path. It’s a slow walk which gives me extra time to enjoy the flowers, fully leafed out trees and the geese, ducks and other water fowl with their darling babies.

Interminable

The waiting, for the evening to start, for our driver to come, for getting through the security line, then the check in line, the passport control line, and the last line of getting on the plane, seemed interminable. The plane was full, not one empty seat. It was also full of newly adopted babies and couples experiencing the first stresses of travelling with infants that cry a lot. Nevertheless I managed to sleep the first half of the flight and killed the second half by watching Slumdog Millionaire on the tiny screen in front of me, and being distracted by the excitement of our airplane breakfast.

We had only a couple of hours in Amsterdam; too short to go to the supermarket in the arrival hall and too early on Sunday morning to call people. But there was time to buy cheese and chocolates for back home. I bought Liz the State of Africa to give some historical and political context to her next visits to Africa. All the places we work have their last 60 years explained. The post-colonial history of Africa is confusing, complicated and not very pretty.

I am allowed to bring one guest into the KLM lounge on my Flying Blue Platinum Elite card, the most important benefit of flying this much. This is where I introduced Liz to cheese for breakfast and a café-au-lait that was not as good as our Ethiopian macchiato but much better than the Northwest airplane coffee served on flight 59.

I made my routine ‘I-am-out-of-Africa’ call to Axel as soon as we touched down and cell phones were allowed. He was still in February while I was already in March and assured me that this time he knew I was on the early morning flight and would be there before I walked out into the arrival hall (he was).

En route we befriended an American-Ethiopian with a Red Sox baseball hat, which is how we knew he was going our way. The plane to Boston was half full again and without any adopted babies – the couple with the crying infant and toddler was heading to someplace north of Sioux City on another plane. I imagined the home coming banners, flowers and balloons that would great the little family at the home airport. Such excitement for some, bewilderment for the little kids.

Our plane had a large contingent of women, of all ages, who returned from Tanzania, several of them with henna tattoos on their hands, except the white-haired and osteoporotic grandma sitting by the window. One of them was very sick and needed more than one barf bag. I thought of Liz and her good timing.

The 8 hour flight was interminable – day flights tend to be that way, especially when you are going home. I slept a little, read a little, played solitaire and reviewed comments on the introductory chapter I wrote for another book we are publishing later this year and struggled with comments that I did not agree with. Writing is a very subjective business and it is the last frontier for me for dealing with criticism. It kept me busy reflecting during our long descent into Boston; one way to kill time.

Upon landing a few more lines and more interminable waits (getting off the plane, immigration, luggage and customs) before being reunited with Axel – the best part of the entire trip.

Gloom and room

The world economic crisis is showing up in the gloomy graphs on the front of the Dutch newspapers and in the empty plane to Amsterdam with room to spare. I have rarely had an empty seat beside me on my twenty years of Atlantic crossings. My first two flights in 2009 allowed me to sleep, fully extended over 4 seats as if in a bed. This is when a good thing is actually a bad thing.

And so I had a good (half) night sleep, full of dreams. The only one I remember is that I was about to receive a visit from some official who was coming to my house to extend a permit for something that was up for renewal and for which I had to show my continued proficiency. I knew I had to bone up on procedures or rules that contained precise numbers that I had forgotten. Somewhere in my (childhood) room there was a booklet that I needed to review before his arrival; but I couldn’t find it and the search became increasingly frantic. And then the beverage cart came through and released me from my anxiety, offering me watery tea in a Styrofoam cup and a tiny cereal bar that is supposed to taste like apple.

Axel drove me in to work yesterday morning. He had an appointment with the brain injury doctor. The visit was a routine check up and things are going in the right direction. But I did notice he forgot his wallet as we got into the car and is easily distracted when he remembers things he should have done/taken and did not – mostly small things, usually with little or no consequence, that show that his executive function is not quite where it needs to be. In spite of this handicap he appears to be handling the complex and complicated job of chair of the town’s community preservation committee remarkably well. But then again, if you work in town you can pretty much leave your wallet at home.

At work there was one more all-morning meeting with our evaluators, this time less powerpoints and more conversation that showed our virtual capacity building portfolio. I have seen it expanding over the years, seen colleagues learn their way into this, including myself in the area of virtual facilitation, and realized as I listened to their presentations that we have come a long way and have much to be proud of.

At lunch time Morsi, Jennifer and I took our intern Nuha out to lunch to celebrate her last day with us, or maybe it is ‘mourn’ her last day. Nuha and I have gotten quite close since we met less than a year ago in the BU course, she a student, and I the professor. We have introduced each other to our respective worlds, hers a world populated by women in a desert kingdom, mine a New England one that includes a lush Lobster Cove, trips in small planes and eating apples straight from the tree.

Nuha showed us pictures of camping out in the Riyadh desert with her female relatives, including a video of singing around a campfire. I have an open invitation to visit her when she is back in Riyadh and participate in such an event. It looks like fun but definitely would require some intense work on my Arabic before I go as it will be a total immersion experience.

The tent is not like what I thought hearing the word; in her world a tent is a like a huge Bedouin tent, permanently set up in the sand on the outskirts of the city, that you can rent if you don’t have your own, and all you do in it is sleep as the days are too hot to be inside and the evenings too cold (close to zero Celsius) and so you sit outside around a fire – it is the desert after all.

I have nearly finished working through my 10 Pimsleur Persian lessons during my commute to work and decided to check with my Afghan colleague Saeed whether I am actually learning something that people in Kabul can understand. He told me that people would notice that I spoke the language of Iran rather than Afghanistan but they would understand me. The problem is that I would not understand much of what they would be saying to me as the words are quite different. I now imagine that the difference is something like between Portuguese and Spanish, where the Portuguese can understand the Spanish speakers but not the other way around. Thus, getting an Afghan tutor is becoming more important now to help me make the adjustments in my newly acquired vocabulary.

And now I am in Amsterdam, waiting for my next departure, just a couple of hours away, first to Khartoum and then Addis.

In transit (last leg)

Worst it is, indeed. Although the flight is not full I am seated in a middle seat of three. Luckily I am separating a couple and end up with the aisle seat after all; so much for having platinum status. Yet the flight attendants keep coming by to see how the couple is doing (“you are travelling a lot with us!” she exclaims to the reunited couple, and asks if they are seated right, and I wonder ‘What about me?’ but then I remember I am a code share guest, a NW frequent traveler albeit on a KLM plane).

There appears to be a new subservience from the staff to the frequent flyers and I wonder whether directives have come down from the top to treat the most frequent flyers extra special, what with the economic downturn, you don’t want to lose those.

The seats seem a little closer each trip I take. Now even my small computer no longer fits on the tray table once the gentleman in front of me reclines. I try to type in a rather contorted way for awhile and finally ask him to un-recline. He is nice and sits straight.

I read more about the Khmer Rouge and thank my lucky star for having been born half a world away. The book gives me a new perspective on sitting in a crammed space and I realize it is not so bad after all.

I am no longer grimy because I took a shower, washed my hair and put on clean clothes for the last leg of my trip. After 14 hours in the sky and 8 hours of waiting in various airports I needed that.

The last 7 hours seem not so bad anymore. This assumes that we will depart on schedule – not entirely to be taken for granted as I look at the snow flurries and dark clouds hanging over the polder and moving in fast with heavy winds.

Now it’s time for some phone calls and then back in line.

Reclaiming my doc

Just hours before my departure for Amsterdam I walked into the American Airlines cargo office at Logan and gave the lady at the desk the number that would get me my passport. “Is it a dog?” she asked incredulously, checking off my number on the paper in front of her. “No,” I said, “that would be a spelling error. I am expecting a doc, not a dog, actually a very special document, especially for someone leaving the country in a couple of hours, by plane.”

She returned from the backroom with a large box, the size that tall boots come in. I was starting to get worried, a dog after all? I asked her to unpack my parcel until we got to what I wanted. Inside the big parcel was a smaller parcel and inside that was an envelope – this remained a game of suspense till the very end. Inside the envelope was my passport, the brand new one, with one page-size visa stamp from the embassy of the Bangladesh in Washington. And as some sort of reward for my endurance there was one surprise: it was a stamp for multiple entries, valid until the end of July. I better get myself some more business in Bangladesh.

And with that the adventure ended and I learned once more, as if I don’t already know this, that miracles do happen and whatever you name that benevolent power that exists in the universe, it is looking after me.

Getting my passport was the high point of a long day of preparing for what looked like a trip with all sorts of possible surprises. I had decided to pack light, in case I would be sent back to Dubai, and carry hand luggage only, even though this is a most likely going to be a three-week trip. That way I would not need to worry about checked luggage. Besides, I was not sure what might happen in Dubai with a terminal change in the middle of the night. There were simply too many plane changes for luggage to get lost. Furthermore, I will travel via Bangkok and I remember the airport chaos there a month ago – I am not sure how stable the place is now but I figured that with hand luggage only I could be nimble and respond quickly to last minute changes and other surprises.

Thus the packing became a little more complicated than usual, which is done mostly on automatic pilot. Now I had to decide which of my usual creature comforts to leave behind. It took me a good part of the day to make those decisions, in between other tasks that had to be completed.

Late in the afternoon, while the temperature was dipping far below freezing, we went for a walk with Chicha using the choker collar with the torture spikes because otherwise Tessa and Steve would get mad at us for messing up their dog training routine. It remains painful to watch the dog practically choking itself and making awful guttural sounds. The poor thing just can’t help herself – there are too many squirrels to chase; it’s in her genes. We’re probably doing the routine all wrong, telling her to heel when the choker hurts most – she probably figures that ‘heel’ is something better not done since it is associated with pain. We are not dog people and have no idea how dogs think and we don’t seem to get any wiser. Axel wants to take the whole family to a Petco dog training session so we are all on the same wavelength – sort of like family therapy instead of individual therapy, for the dog as well as the humans.

Axel drove me to the airport and after the passport was reclaimed we celebrated the miracle in the nice restaurant by the security lines of terminal E. It has become a bit of a routine to have a meal there before I board the plane so I can start sleeping right away. Next to us were three Russians drinking hard liquor as if there was no tomorrow. I am glad I was not on their plane.

The plane was only half full; nevertheless I did not sleep much, despite the meditation tapes; when the soft voice would come on after a long silence it would jerk me out of semi-consciousness and ended up having the opposite of its intended effect. We arrived early because of a strong tailwind and then waited 40 minutes for a gate to open up. I walked straight to the humongous new KLM lounge, took a shower and loaded up on good coffee and ‘broodjes met kaas.’ And now I am waiting for the signal to board the plane to Dubai, one I have now taken 3 times in the last two months, as if I have a real estate business there.

Interminable

The video did not work in economy class of the NW plane taking me back to Boston so everyone got a voucher from KLM that was good for all sorts of things: a five minute phone call from Amsterdam to the USA, 2000 frequent flyer miles on KLM or partner airlines or 10 euro off at any of Schiphol’s restaurants or 15 Euro off a tax free purchase on board in addition to 50 euro off a ticket from KLM or NWA. I never knew video was considered that valuable. Something else was not working either which kept us at the gate for nearly two extra hours. That is probably because I text messaged Axel that I would be home soon. Two more messages were sent after that saying that I would be home a little later. What I forgot to include in those messages was that I was on the early morning flight, departing and arriving early in the morning, in a small(er) airplane than the usual wide body ones.

This last plane was empty too; in fact so empty that most passengers could stretch out on three seats. I did not think I needed to sleep after having slept all the way from Dubai to Amsterdam but regretted halfway through the trip that I had not staked out my territory with backpacks and pillows. Those last 8 hours of this 20 hour (in the air) trip were interminable.

Right behind me was a gaggle of teenagers coming back from a trip to Europe, noisily flirting with one another and a bit too peppy for me that early in the morning. One of them was a Moslem girl, wearing the hijaab tightly around her face and hair. In between the giggling and the games, she would occasionally pull out a small booklet with Quran verses, I presumed, to return to God on this holy day.

One of the flight attendant walked around with a Dutch language book in his pocket and after I confirmed that he was indeed learning Dutch we only spoke Dutch together which he managed amazingly well, much like Sita, with a heavy American accent. He said he had been at it for awhile but never got much a chance to practice because these darn Dutch always spoke English back to him. I knew the problem from Tessa’s and Steve’s venture to Holland when all her efforts to practice her Dutch were thwarted by those polyglot Hollanders.

On the row next to me was a Dutch (he)-American (she) couple with a 6 month old baby that did not sleep at all during the entire flight and then fell asleep promptly just before landing. They were on their way to the grandparents in Boston for the holidays. We talked about bilingual kids – their’s will be more Dutch than English because they live in Amsterdam and he is exposed to Dutch speaking children at the crèche which she pronounced like crash. I wondered what her family would think when she talked like that about her child’s crèche/crash. Mom’s Dutch was improving after 6 years in Holland and no longer a secret language; their home language (English) is now speckled with Dutch, much like ours was when the children were small.

When I called Axel at 11:30 AM to tell him I had landed I could tell from his surprised voice that he had not consulted the schedule and assumed he was to pick me up at the usual time, late afternoon; so much for traveling with carry-on luggage to allow for a quick exit from the airport. It took me exactly five minutes from the moment I stepped out of the plane to coming through the doors of the arrival hall after which I waited for Axel to drive from Manchester to Logan; still it was a nice reunion which we celebrated over lunch at Sam and Joe’s in Danvers.

Back home I found our living room empty; its contents divided over our bedroom, my office, the cellar and hallways, which makes everything rather full and crowded. Today the livingroom will be deconstructed to accomodate a new fireplace that will allow us to reduce our heating bill and burn up the old Norwegian maple, taken down earlier this year, without having the heat go up the chimney.

It’s good to be back;the best part of travel.

People

When you travel you discover the universe of people; its variety in size, intelligence, skin color, dress, and of course level of attractiveness. One thing that makes flying less tedious is that there is so much to see and guess about. I am curious about the people whose lives temporarily intersect with mine.

Here are some of my co-travelers on the Sunday evening flight to Amsterdam. There is the young Indian family with three small children, one boy and twin girls, pint-sized copies of their mom, even their clothes are similar. They wriggle like little fish when not asleep and talk with high-pitched voices, asking questions that no one answers. I am sure they are going to see the extended Indian family, grandma, grandpa and all the aunties and uncles and cousins. If this is the first time, they will be in for a shock, if the description of a such a reunion in the book ‘The Namesake’ has any grounding in real life. Because of the book I can imagine the reunion. The little boy exclaims, in perfect American English, pointing at the impressive cloud formations below us, “Dad is that Europe?” His eyes are the size of ping pong balls and everything is new and important to him.

In front of me, across the aisle, sits a young (also Indian) fellow who is studying for an exam. One chapter is about Integer Programming – it looks complicated and tedious; there are lots of tables and graphs for him to remember. Next to me, on the other side of the seat that was left empty, sits a young teenager. He is probably about 18 and is dressed the part: hair dyed black with a few orange streaks, stuck together with some substance to make it stay up in a loose version of a mohawk cut; his pants barely held up by thin hips below a too fat belly. His arms are tattooed with text and pictures. When he leans too far over to my side I can smell the sigaret smoke in his hair. But his face is that of a big little boy and when we land he clutches a large teddy bear that wears a T-shirt with a Happy Hanukah greeting.

A few rows in front of me sits a short and heavy African American woman of a certain age. She has to be told which of the three seats is the window seat. Like the little Indian boy everything is new. She has no idea about the rule ‘ stay seated when taxiing.’ Her suitcase is of the size that ought to have been checked. Two flight attendants squished it into the overhead bin. I wonder about her story and what gets her to travel by plane so late in life and on such a long trip. Even after we land she is not sure what happens next. She is told to wait for the wheelchair and then sinks back into her chair. Her seat row mates are an elderly Indian couple, she with a cervical collar on, he tiny and bespectacled. I admire the flight attendants with their infinite patience. I wonder whether they are patient at home.

Across the aisle from me three enormous men are folded like pretzels in their exit row seats. I am glad I am not big. The only thing to their advantage is the way the seat is shaped around their backs and neck – good for them, not for me, I am too short for the curves to fit. And so we are all having trouble sleeping in these chairs.

And finally, in back of me is my colleague Jean who is on his way to the Comoro Islands. His ticket presented a challenge for the Northwest lady who had a hard time figuring out where to ship his luggage to – she’d never heard of the place. Jean will be working with Oumar who is flying into Amsterdam later today from Conakry. I will be gone by then and so we will miss an impromptu and unexpected reunion in Amsterdam.

Yeah!

It was a bit of a downer to hear about our new president while tea was served, an hour before landing. I had hoped, expected, wanted the pilot to get on the public address system and yell out ‘he won!’ (with all of us instantly knowing who ‘he’ was) but pilots are probably told to not disturb people who try to sleep (and I was one of them). When we got ready for landing and everyone was awake, we were told the good news by the pilot and everyone clapped. Still, I would have preferred to be with family and friends back home. I called Axel as soon as cell phones were permitted. It was 2:30 AM for him but he was still awake. Too much excitement! I think we all knew that Obama was going to win but we did not dare to say it aloud, lest we jinx the works. And so, with this election, I continue my perfect voting record.

What a day, yesterday. I finished my packing and my to do list by 10 AM. We went to the polls and then had a leisurely brunch at the Beach Street Café. We did a few more errands by foot and then took Chicha out for a long walk. She now has a collar that looks like a torture instrument with metal spikes that push into her throat when she pulls. Tessa and Steve think it is the best thing since sliced bread and will surely train her quickly to heel and not go after anything that runs or moves. I hate it and remember the days when I walked with her at the end of her leash, swerving from left to right, going after anything that caught her attention while pulling me along. I probably undid months of training then.

To assuage my guilt about using the terrible collar contraption we took a break at Singing Beach where Chicha was able to go collarless and romp around with all the other dogs, catch balls and sticks and run into the waves. It was a mild Indian summer day and one of the more joyful days I can remember.

And so, now I am at Schiphol and about to sit down for breakfast with my ex and dissect American politics. In back of me large TV screens show the map of the US with its red and blue checker pattern, more blue than red, luckily. I watched the crowd in Chicago and the excitement there and wonder about what’s happening in Kenya and whether they feel that he is also a bit their president.

Later, after breakfast – I picked a bad time to be outside the US. The only signs of festiveness are on the TV screens. Here, at the airport, life goes on as if nothing momentous has just happened – people stand in lines like they did before, the are worried about catching their plane, buy stuff – a normal day on Schiphol. I feel like jumping up and down and saying, hey guys, something great happened, we are going to be back on the rails in the US. I watched the festivities in Obama’s native village in Western Kenya – he is their president too, and all of Africa’s – I hope he has strong shoulders, it is a heavy load to carry in addition to all the messes he inherited elsehwhere in the world.