There … and Back Again

Entry for 8 July 2009:

On Sunday, my 7-day H1N1 quarantine having finally expired, we had a Saturday Adventure in Santiago. La Moneda is the Chilean equivalent of the White House, except that there is a cultural museum underneath it. An ambitious exhibit about Rapa Nui (= Easter Island) had opened two days before, and we also discovered exhibits on the Mapuche Native American people of Chile as well as a show featuring the art, poetry and music of Violetta Parra. We happily spent the afternoon wandering through these three exhibits, covering diverse but essential elements of Chilean culture. Violetta Parra’s primitivist artworks are very colourful, some using the medium of yarn on burlap, others oil on board; almost all feature music in some way. In many of her pieces, birds emanate from fiddles, apparently representing the sound of the music. Much of her music uses the rocking 6/8 cueca rhythm of Chile’s national dance; she was one of the forerunners of the nueva cancion (new song) movement of the the 1960’s and ‘70’s.

The Mapuche exhibition featured different kinds of craft, but what most struck me was the information about Mapuche shamans and their accessories, including a special kind of drum, called a kultrung, and their totem, called a rewe, with 4 to 7 notches or levels, representing both the 7 levels of the Mapuche cosmology and the skill level of the shaman. Two weeks ago, when we went to the Precolumbian Museum in Santiago, I was also struck by the importance of the shaman in south and meso-american culture and made a point of taking lots of pictures of shaman paraphernalia. So once again I cross paths with my dad.

But the main attraction was the exhibit on Polynesian/Melanesian culture and art. I can remember being fascinated by the Polynesians when I was a kid, reading Thor Heyerdahl’s book Kon-tiki about his voyage by reed boat between Peru and Polynesia, and his later book Aku-Aku, about his expedition to Easter Island, or Rapa Nui. Rapa Nui is of course famous for its Moai, the hundreds of huge carved stone heads that were carved centuries ago, under somewhat mysterious circumstances. The exhibition had a couple of Moai, but covered broad range of Polynesia culture, including the mysterious and untranslatable writing found at Rapa Nui.

After that, there was nothing for it but to investigate the music of Rapa Nui and the Mapuche people, which occupied us for a good part of the next day. Once I’d tracked them down, I found that the music of Rapa Nui is much more melodic than that of the Mapuche. But I was pleased to discover several tracks of music for Kultrung, or Shamanic drum.

However, before the shopping trip, for our last day in Santiago before returning to Scotland, Diane took me to the Sculpture Park that the stretches along the River Mapoche not far form our hotel in the Providencia neighborhood. It was a beautiful, mild, sunny winter’s day, as we wandered through the park, created in the 1980’s, looking at the sculptures and taking pictures.

Finally, we got up on Tuesday morning, packed, ate breakfast, paid our bill (quite large by this time) and said goodbye to the staff at the hotel. Cecilia, Gloria’s cousin, drove us to the airport, where we began our long journey back to Scotland, via Madrid and London. We arrived at our flat in Hyndland about 4:30 in the afternoon on Wednesday, 18 days after we’d left.

I had lain awake for a long time the night before we left to return home, restless and a bit anxious after being away for so long, but determined to do a better job taking care of myself and to avoid running myself down so much, under the pressure of work. It wasn’t fun being stuck in Santiago under quarantine, unable to go out, but at some level it’s quite clear that I really needed the down time, to recover from the intense pressure of work.

When I woke up this morning at 4.30 am, finally back in my own bed, there was again that delicious moment of disorientation: “Why is it so light outside? Why is the door to this room open?” And then I remembered: No longer in that hotel room in Santiago, in the dead of winter, far away, but back in Scotland, where it is still summer, in its own way: home.

A Pre-Poem for Pat on her Leaving

Entry for 21 June 2009:

Pat Butson, one of the parttime tutors, has been teaching on the Monday Parttime course for some time now, but has decided that the stress of the commute from Edinburgh and the pressures on the course from the University, were too much. As a result, she has decided to retire from the course. This past Friday was her last day of work with us, so Thursday night, after my Professorial lecture, we had a leaving function for her at our old Jorndanhill hangout, the Three Craws (= Crows in Scots). We got her a piece of jewelry (Kathleen picked it out), as well as a collection of Spanish music and an earthernware bowl by a local potter (picked out by me).

I seem to have inherited the role of speaking at these functions, so I had the honor of making a little speech for her, composing a short piece I referred to as a “pre-poem” – meaning that it wasn’t polished and was partly improvished.

Afterwards, Pat and, along with two of her fellow former course tutors, Dot Clark and Margaret Harkness, sat and talked and talked until the pub closed and they threw us out. It was a lovely evening, and I will miss her sorely.

* * *

Here is a representation of Pat’s leaving piece:

Wise one, carrier of tradition
Holder of the Process,
I’ve looked to you –
Not for direction,
But for possibility.

Travellor in places
Both rainy and sunny,
You went many places
And were many things
Before you came to us.

You have laboured
In our vineyards,
Long and hard:
Emotional labour.
Generations of students
Have you imprinted
On their souls.

Now you are going –
We wish you could stay! –
But your process
Needs to go on.

So we will bless you
On your way, trusting that
Your process and ours
Will meet again.

Voyage to Chile

Entry for 21 June 2009: [Continuing my out of order Blog catch-up]

After a blow-out of a week, I had a hard time getting myself ready to leave for our trip to Chile on Saturday morning. Fortunately, out flight was at midday on Saturday, which enabled us to get ready without too much additional sleep deprivation. The flights from Glasgow to London and from London to Madrid weren’t too bad, but the Santiago flight eventually ended up being delayed overnight until Sunday afternoon, almost 18 hours late. At 2 am Sunday morning we were made to get off the plane and after being herded through the enormous, virtually empty airport in the middle of the night, we were taken to a very nice hotel near the airport for 5 hours of sleep.

We return to the airport around noon on Sunday. Iberia airlines were not very transparent about what was going on, and rumors abounded: e.g., the aircraft was unsafe and the crew were refusing to fly it. While we sat on the plane for several hours, first on Saturday night and then again on Sunday afternoon, we were forced to listen to the same annoying jazz pieces (e.g., “Your feet’s too big”; Norah Jones, etc) again and again, until many of us wanted to cry or scream or both. The Madrid airport is huge, monumental really, a kind of Euro-giganticism, with high, sweeping roofs reminiscent of the Barcelona style of Gaudi, but bigger and without the charm, mostly glass and steel girders, and very little concrete. (Diane said it looked like someone had been let lose with a giant erector set.) The 300+ passengers became more restive as the delay continued and rumors circulated that we might be delayed for yet another day. Somewhat sinisterly, three armed police showed up at the gate on Sunday afternoon, apparently to deal with potential passenger unrest. A few people angrily demanded their luggage and money back. Others burst into tears, like one young Scottish violinist on her way to perform a Shostakovich opera with the Santiago Philharmonic. Over the hours, however, a comraderie developed among many of the passengers, and when we were herded back onto the plane on Sunday afternoon about 4pm, it was a strange experience to recognize the faces of so many people. Eventually, they finished completely replacing the computer system in the aging Airbus, and we were able to take off.

I was going to say that after all that, the flight to Santiago was an anti-climax, but actually there were a couple of bad moments: First, it took forever for our old, heavily-loaded plane to lift off the runway and finally reach cruising altitude. Then, as we approached the coast of Brazil, where another, newer Airbus had gone down 3 weeks earlier, we hit severe turbulence, and another anxious time.

[Footnote, July 6: Together with the difficulty they gave us rebooking to go home, we both vowed never the fly on Iberia again. “Next time, take LAN Chile,” our Chilean friends told us.]

Freedom on the 4th of July

Entry for 4 July 2009:

It’s been a long week of sitting around my hotel room waiting for my 7-day quarantine to run out. The Tamiflu did away with most of the flu that I’d been so miserable with when I first came down with it. After the first day on it, all I had left was a bit of a cough. As the days passed, we developed a routine: We’d get up about 8am, after 8 hours of sleep. Diane would go down for breakfast, and bring me back a bowl with a bit of fruit at the bottom, to which I’d add granola and yoghurt. After breakfast, I’d do email for a couple of hours, trying to staunch for great gouts of messages that assailed me once I started answering people. (In spite of having a lot of time to do email, I barely managed to hold my own for the week, still a bit over 1000 messages in my inbox.) Then, we’d have lunch, cobbled to together with bits from breakfast and that Diane picked up at the grocery store. After that, I’d write for 4 or 5 hours, with a nap somewhere in the middle, until about 8pm, when we’d stop for dinner. Finally, we’d watch In Treatment on Spanish-language HBO, the hit psychotherapy drama that the US graduate students at the SPR conference were raving about as their main source of information about what really goes on in therapy. (A rather troubling thought, but that’s the subject for another blog…)

As I said, after lunch each day, I’d work on my Distinguished Career Award paper for Psychotherapy Research, now a month overdue. Paulo Machado has been nagging me about it for a year, since I got the award in Barcelona, and once against reminded me about how much he needed it when I saw him last week at the conference. I’d spent months trying to figure out what to do it on. It felts like I had to write something important, summing up the accumulated wisdom of decades of doing psychotherapy research. A tall order!, especially when I don’t feel particularly wise… Finally, I hit upon “Psychotherapy Change Process Research” as a suitable topic. Building off my 2007 paper for the German-language Person-Centred journal, Person, six weeks of 15 min per day plus several hours on the plane coming to Chile got me about 2/3 of the way through the paper. It’s not clear how many more weeks it would have taken if I hadn’t come done with the flu, but a week’s enforced bed-rest was enough to buy me the time to finish the paper, which I finally submitted last night. It was a challenging paper to write, an appraisal of what I see as the main methodological approaches to studying what makes therapy work, really a methodological tour de force. I spent a day at the end just filling in and checking my references. I hope that it will inspire others to use a broader range of methods more effectively.

I decided that I would count today, the 4th of July, as the end of my 7-day quarantine and proposed that we go out to dinner to celebrate. I spent the afternoon checking the proofs for the Adjudicated HSCED paper, which I’d finally manage to get revised last January. Then, a bit after 8pm tonight, I put on my shoes and jacket for the first time since last Sunday, and went down stairs. It felt strange to be outside of my room.

I’d passed a Mexican restaurant on Avenida Manuel Montt, around the corner from Gloria’s flat, so I dragged Diane there. Mexican food is what I miss most in Scotland. They’d toned the spiciness way down for Chilean tastes, but it was close enough to remind me of home, and we celebrated freedom, both personal and national. As Diane noted, it was much nicer than having to worry about the neighbors burning the place down with illegal fireworks. A man and a woman were playing Mariachi music, also toned down for Chilean tastes but still colourful and entertaining. I miss the US, I miss Scotland, I miss my Northern hemisphere summer, but it felt very good to finally get out for a few hours, to resume what will have to do for a normal life until we can get back to Scotland.

Professorial Lecture

Entry for 19 June 2009:

When the current Dean of Strathclyde’s Faculty of Education arrived 2.5 years ago, she proposed a series of professional lectures. Mine took place this past Thursday, during the Parttime course’s final intensive week, and served as my inaugural lecture. I debated for months about what to pick for my topic, until I heard Tom Bryce’s lecture in March, on science education. I said to myself, “That’s interesting – I’m doing science education, too. Why don’t I piggy back on Tom’s presentation, and talk about the research methods curriculum development work I’ve been doing over the past three years.”

Because it was a mixed audience, and my topic – not just research methods, but teaching research methods – was potentially quite dry, I spent a lot of time dressing it up with graphics and jokes. I worked pretty hard on it. In the end, the Powerpoint slides amount to 16 MB, too big to email or upload onto our research community’s Google Group site. (Too many high rez photos...)

I was delighted that representatives showed up from all four of the courses that I teach research methods to: PGDip Counselling, MSc, Counselling Psychology, and PhDs. There was also a scattering of colleagues, and the Dean, the Vice-Dean for Research, and some lecturers/professors from elsewhere in the Faculty. Diane and Lorna both reported that the last group were taking notes; afterwards, they said they were pleased and envisaged further discussions of the issues I’d raised.

I’d been quite anxious about the presentation, because of the unknown, mixed nature of the audience, so I felt much lighter afterwards. I’d developed a new, more entertaining style of Powerpoint presentation, and said some provocative and rather challenging things, which appeared to have been well-received. John McLeod came down from Dundee especially for the occasion, and did an inspired job of introducing me and saying how wonderful I was. While this sort of this is always good for the ego, mostly I felt touched by his going to the effort and how carefully he tried to support me. Finally, I felt inspired by how many of my students showed up, and they also felt inspired to be recognized and to see the overall framework into which their respective inputs fit, along with the philosophy behind it.

Monday Parttime Course Finishes

Entry for 21 June 2009:

Like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, I’ve come unstuck in time, at least as far as my blog goes, and am only now getting to material that I wrote down in my Pukka Pad on the flight from Spain to Chile. So be it!

* * *
An exhausting final week of the Monday PT course, in which we met every day. Many tears shed; one of my students said that they’d cried more this week than the entire two years preceding. Meeting for this 5-day intensive raised the course to a level of intensity that seemed to facilitate the process of clarifying progress in development as a counsellor. Students read each other’s self-appraisal statements describing their journey and current levels of functioning, and met with their PPD groups on Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday was a very long day of presenting their decisions about whether to take the diploma (the course uses a self-assessment process). For me this was the emotional pivot of the week, powerful and moving. Thursday was a long large group in which the students each took 10 min to present and get feedback on their decision. This was more contained but had many powerful moments, especially when individual students broke out of the mold to present their decisions in creative ways. Friday began with a final unstructured large group that addressed some long-standing one running issues and provided one last opportunity to practice resolving relational ruptures. We worked right to the end, before breaking for a final party/celebration of the two years of the course and its conclusion. This week-long intensive format seemed to work quite well; I would recommend it as a format for ending a parttime course.

This was the second diploma course I’ve seen through to completion since coming to Strathclyde. I was personally very pleased with how the course turned out and feel that I’ve learned a lot about the training process and how to facilitate it.

I Become a Statistic in the Worldwide H1N1 Pandemic

Entry for 1 July 2009:

The yearly international SPR conferences end with a banquet at some interesting and characteristic local site. This year the banquet was also a costume party in a rustic restaurant along one of Santiago's little rivers. (From sheer overwhelm, I decided I would just have to pass as myself: black hat and pony tail: not totally in the spirit but generally acceptable.) I’d had a nice time talking to Clara Hill and Leigh McCullough and visiting with Leigh’s Norwegian grad students. However, as the evening went on, the cough I’d had since I woke up that morning got worse, my head started to ache and I felt very tired and unwell. I lined up with the crowd waiting for the first bus back, then had to wait get a taxi back to my hotel. By the time I got back to my hotel it was 2am and I felt chilled to the bone.

Diane and Nancy had gone south to Chillan with Gloria and weren’t due back until early Sunday afternoon, so I slept in, got up, ate breakfast, and went back to bed and slept another three hours. It was clear to me by this time that I’d come down with the flu: fever, cough, headache, and aching muscles. When the others arrived about 2pm, I warned them off. After some discussion, Gloria and Juan (her husband) took us to a fancy new medical clinic. It was a rainy Sunday afternoon, and the place was packed with people, young and old, mostly miserable. It could have been an emergency room in the US. We were told that it would be a four-hour wait, so Gloria and Juan left us to it. We put on our face masks and settled in with our reading material. We were surrounded by suffering people -- a large number of them children -- and those who were there comforting them. We were witnessing the universal language of distress, support and soothing. At least half of us were wearing face masks, put on with varying degrees of care, and were doing our best to cough discretely behind them.

Eventually, after about three hours, they called us and a nurse took my vital signs. We then waited another hour for the doctor. The doctor, who spoke no English, was the most gentle, mild, humble doctor I have ever met in my life. He asked about my symptoms, and with Diane’s translations and my two years of high school Spanish as well as frequent gestures, we managed to communicate this information to him. We explained that we were scheduled to fly back to Scotland tomorrow and that we didn’t think I was healthy enough to do that. He agreed with this assessment and said he would give both of us medicine for the flu and a form for the airline to allow us to reschedule our return. He disappeared and came back with the medicine, which was two 5-day doses of Tamiflu (Diane's prophylactic because of her probably exposure) and a form filled out (of course) in Spanish, much of it handwritten. We asked when he thought we would be able to travel back to Scotland, and he said “Martes, Miercoles, o Jueves”, that is, “Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday”. This seemed almost too good to believe so we questioned him, and he reaffirmed this view. After completing the papers, he bowed to us and left. We gathered up our staff, went out to pay our bill (US$80, no charge for the Tamiflu), and had Gloria call us a taxi to take us back to the hotel, where I took my Tamiflu and went to bed.

Then next day was a holiday, the feast of San Pedro I think. The Tamiflu was amazing: my fever and aches went away, and, most surprisingly, my cough didn’t get worse. Just to be on the safe side, we decided it would be a good idea to wait until Wednesday for our return flight. When the Iberia folks didn’t answer their phone, Diane and Gloria went to the airport to try to book our return flight; however, they said we’d have to wait until Tuesday when their office in the city center was open. Then Nancy left to go back to the US, Gloria and Juan went back to Chillan, and I slept quite a bit. Gloria, who is a bit of a micro-manager (I think that comes from teaching pre-school teachers for 30 years), got her cousin Cecilia to get in touch to help Diane with the rebooking.

On Tuesday, Diane got up early and went with Cecilia to the Iberia office to be there when it opened. The person told them they had no flights until 15 July. Cecilia took Diane out for a cup of chocolate, then went to LAN Chile ($3300 each for one-way back to London), and finally back to the Iberia office. By this time the man there had read the paperwork completed by the doctor, and pointed out that the paperwork was actually a 7-day H1N1 quarantine order. Instead of leaving Chile tomorrow, we were going to be stuck here for another week! He then booked us on the first available flight after the quarantine expired, for the 7th of July.

Once we got over the shock, we tried to figure out what had gone wrong. First, there is a difference in Spanish between “el martes que viene” (the coming Tuesday) and “el martes proxima” (Tuesday of next week); the doctor had meant the latter, but we had heard him as referring to the former. Second, we were both anxious and desperate to get home, both which interfered with our competence in Spanish. Third, we had interpreted the doctor not testing me for swine/novel H1N1 as a good sign, but it turned out that I am part of a tidal wave of H1N1 cases that hit Chile this past weekend, a mixture of seasonal (it's winter here) and "novel" (H1N1) strains; at this point health authorities have given up testing.

As a result, I am restricted to my hotel room for seven days. I have a somewhat spotty wireless connection in my hotel room and so I am able to work some. It is now Wednesday. The Tamiflu continues to work wonders, I have been getting plenty of sleep, we are watching In Treatment every evening on HBO en Español, and I’ve spent much of my time so far rearranging (and in some cases re-rearranging) appointments for the rest of this week and most of next week. I haven’t been able to reduce the 1000+ pile in my inbox so far but at least it’s no longer growing so quickly. Diane is trying to keep from going insane from boredom. And I’m trying to finish a very late manuscript for Psychotherapy Research. It’s a weird kind of half-sick, half-work, half-vacation. Right now it feels like it will never end. And after all the hassle, inconvenience and expense, the worst thing is that it may not be swine/novel H1N1 and I may have to go through the whole thing all over again when the pandemic really hits Scotland. But I'm sure I'm in the count already!