life is short

Two Three friends died suddenly in the last two weeks. The first was a newer friend, a young Islamabadi woman who was funny and keen. She was a passenger in a single-car crash a mile or so from our house. Apparently the driver had looked at her phone to change the song, lost control, and gone off the road into a water-filled ditch. The driver and two of the passengers drowned, two other passengers survived. It happened while SRB and I were in Lahore a couple of weeks ago and we drove past the spot on the way home. We stopped and got out and it was strange to see the newly-broken branches on the shrubs that she crashed through.

The second was an older friend, someone from C@P, who died last week. We hadn't been in touch a few years. I found out via a post on the C@P Facebook page. Linc forwarded me a message from another friend explaining that the friend who died had gone to the hospital for breathing difficulty, been diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia, spent a week in the hospital and been discharged. Then when the problems resurfaced they went back to the hospital and were diagnosed with cancer and TB. Three massive heart attacks followed and that was it.

The third was a childhood buddy and baseball teammate who drowned when his kayak flipped in some rapids. A gentle, sweet kid. I used to look up to his dad, too, who seemed like a cool guy. He (the dad) worked at the Textile Museum in DC. We'd been out of touch for many years.

Jack dying last year was a worse blow by orders of magnitude. There is no comparison. But still, it's terrible to feel such a sudden loss of people you care about, even if only a little or mostly in memory.

One of the things it's made me think a lot about is fear. I talk a big game sometimes about not being afraid in situations where I have no control. Turbulence, for example, doesn't much bother me because (1) plane crashes are exceptionally rare, while turbulence is common; and (2) by boarding I've ceded power over my life to the pilot and to the plane itself. The lack of control is freeing, in a way: if we go down we go down so what's the point in stressing about it? When others are scared during turbulence I genuinely feel okay about it.

But part of the grief I feel in the aftermath of these deaths is imagining of the panic and pain they felt at the end, and my heart aches for them. The first and third friends drowned. For the first, that means she was still alive when the car hit the water. I hope she was knocked out by the impact, because the thought of being awake, trapped, and pulled under water is almost unbearable. For the second, it's hard to imagine that he wasn't conscious, fiercely trying to right himself or get out of trouble until it was too late. And I hope the friend who died in the hospital was unconscious when his heart failed. But even if so, it must have been bewildering and terrifying to suddenly be in the hospital and sicker than most anyone expects to be in their mid-30s. Cancer? TB? Fuck.

2018 review - work

*Wrote this back in January but didn't publish it before for some reason. Maybe I thought it was unfinished.*

In 2018, we submitted 23 proposals valued at $95.5 million. That's nearly two per month, and for much of the year I was the only dedicated business development person on staff. That is a lot of ad hoc team formation, coordination, and management, not to mention the writing, consultations, design workshops led, Of those we won four, valued at $7.4 million, and lost five, valued at $9.4 million. The remaining 16 proposals, worth $78.7 million, are pending. That doesn't include the stuff we submitted the year before that we're still waiting on, or the $80+ million worth of potential projects we're negotiating with a few different donors. And, you know, all the other things I'm responsible for: communications, monitoring and evaluation, gender, stakeholder engagement (which includes the odious task of planning visits for big muckity-mucks).

I try to keep a pretty modest view of my own competencies. On the plus side, I'm a good writer and editor. I'm personable and confident and I can run a meeting or chip in usefully to someone else's. I'm committed to inclusion and justice in the office and in our work, moreso perhaps than many of my colleagues. But I'm not super well organized, prone to procrastination, a well-liked but uncertain and probably too-passive manager (although I think I've improved a lot over the last two years), and at least slightly out of my depth on a couple of the key things my department is responsible for: monitoring and evaluation (about which I know the basics but am not super strong) and communications (about which I barely know even the basics, apart from being able to write well). Occasionally my procrastination and dislike of certain tasks means things slide that shouldn't. When we're not winning money, that negative stuff really sticks out and it's hard not to question or feel bad even about the parts of my job I think I'm good at.

So it's kind of nice to look back and realize that what I perceive as a lack of success last year isn't due to a lack of hard work or productivity. We really did bust our butts.