Opportunity Knocks

After one week in Tanzania I flew up to Barcelona for a project meeting. I know. I know.

Tough life, right?

Checking in online and upgrading for 93 euro got me a row of three seats to myself which I immediately claimed as soon as the stewardesses began to shut the overhead compartments. I read a chapter or two of The Tiger's Wife on my birthday Kindle and as soon as we leveled off I zonked out for the remainder of the flight. In the morning, my face puffy and my hair floating in the dryness, the flight attendant peered at me, then asked me if I didn't want something to drink. "You slept well, no?"

And a good thing too since upon arrival I met the rest of our small operations research committee and drove us up into the hills near Girona. I think I drove slowly, careful like a drunk, feeling the weight of ferrying not only our USAID 'boss' but also one of the world's great malaria professors, a colleague I have known for several years but have only recently begun to impress. He's also the reason why I'm in Tanzania on this assignment.

Heading into the heart of Catalunya the fields are green with short crops and stubby stone buildings poke out behind trees and shrubs. Small cars zip around curves in the road, veering to one side as another approaches. Clouds fringed the tops of hills and further away, the mountains.

Two hours later we arrived in a small town with a tiny textile factory that produces some kind of cord to be used in other textile manufacturing. There is a primary school. A church from the 11th century that requires a very large key. Just down a narrow road from the church we find the Malaria Consortium Catalunya Office, which Albert has rehabbed over the course of many years from animal barn into a three story retreat. The houses here each have large garages on the first floor, you know, for their horses and carts, originally. Stairs go up the middle to the second floor with two bedrooms on one side and the fireplace, bathroom and kitchen on the other. At the back, a closed in porch the width of the whole house with a new petit balcony and just a few windows. The walls are two feet thick and white washed.

The third floor has Albert's master bedroom on one side and his office on the other. Everything is tiled by hand; shelves are somewhat rough hewn; towel bars are bamboo mitred into the corners. Coffee sacks line the ceiling of the front porch and are stained in places from a leak that he can't find. Curtains and wall hangings are printed cloth from Uganda and other travels. The breeze comes through the whole house, front to back, and from the porch you see a kumquat tree and the neighbor's abandoned fig tree reaching over the wall, in an effort to make itself useful.

Everyone else in the village is square and short and we are noticed, conspicuous in our number (6) and our technical fleeces.

The meeting centers on the operational research agenda for our project and we duly discuss, in a rambling manner, all of our potential studies and our focus for the coming three years. I am utterly charmed by the scenery and the breeze and the mountains in the distance and the quiet. The economies of small towns escape me, but 800 voting adults is enough to sustain a butcher, a baker, two hairdressers, a tabac, and a few repairmen. The doctor is in town three days a week. We wait to pass through the narrow road to the church one evening as a man unloads bag after bag of groceries from his car, handing them to an unseen companion standing in the doorway of their home. He waves to us and hurries back into the drivers seat to clear the way.

On our way to Friday's dinner at a small hotel-restaurant in the hills further up, we pass an epic stone bridge built the same town as the town's church, spanning a deep gully where the locals go swimming in the heat of summer. One can jump from the rocks into the deep water, about 10 meters, but the bridge is likely 30 or 40 meters up, and no one has jumped from it for swimming purposes. Outside the restaurant the smells are quiet, green, and small - it has been raining, and the dirt parking lot is damp under our feet, and the olive trees are pleased to soak up the early season moisture. The air is clean.

It is too early for vacationers and we are the only people in the restaurant; we order salads and charcuterie, which comes with blood sausage in both negra and blanca variaties. The river trout is fresh, pink and as far as I can tell, deep fried with a massive dose of homemade aioli. Pa amb tomaque starts us off and Albert shows us how to slice the garlic in half, rub it on the huge slices of toasted local bread, then take half a golf-ball-sized ripe tomato and rub its inner contents on the bread till it turns just pink. A few drops of olive oil and some salt and all is right with the world.

In the car in the morning as we drive from our hotel to Albert's, The Gentleman Prof gently confirms that I do not, in fact, have a PhD. And proceeds to tell me how at his institution in Basel it is possible to get these three letters by working at my regular job for the next three years and producing three papers, then taking a few classes and defending the oral exam. "It would be a win-win situation; we could get a great dissertation out of you and you would get the degree." Unlike nearly all other public health training programs Basel focuses on public health practice and does not expect its students to remain in the ivory tower writing NIH grants or running clinical trials that will lead to the next greatest molecule. I am somewhat astounded with his confidence and with the fee structure, which works out to something like 400 bucks a year. At some point I would need to teach; however, the program is structured in such a way as to give credit for areas of strength and interest, rather than shoving one into a small box based on the advisor's interests. The in-person work could be completed in one semester.

And so, yet again, by virtue of hard work and good luck, I find myself with an opportunity, something I can make happen and that others want to make happen. A win-win. An opportunity that fits into the current short-term life plan and would no doubt lead to further opportunities. There are two international schools in Basel and Josh has a British passport. My head, already filled with thinking from the Tanzania assignment, now has some new options and implications to grind over and over into the fine powder of a decision.