In Memory of Sylvia - Natural and Human Resources

Friday was the 6th yahrzeit of my mother in law, Sylvia Kacal. She died of Malaria in Malawi, where she had spend about 2 years, on October 24, 2003.

In thinking about her work, I have been drawn to the concept of resources. It's possible to think that her whole life was about resources. She taught school for many years - helping children build on their resources of intelligence to learn about the world. She ran an art gallery in the Hilton Hotel in Port of Spain, bringing together local Trinidadian artists and tourists with money to spend. Then in her 50s she went back to school to get a degree in Coastal Resource Management - building on volunteer work she had been doing with the Caribbean Forest Conservation Association and other organizations working to preserve Trinidad's natural resources.

For the last 10 years of her life, she worked as a consultant on projects to help preserve local natural resources and turn them into sources of income to local people through eco-tourism. When she died, she had just finished running a course for tour guides in Mulanje, Malawi.

Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world. It was one of Sylvia's great gifts to be able to see all the resources available even in one of the poorest of places and work to enlarge them. After the tour guide course, she became involved in a search and rescue effort to find a Dutch woman, Linda Plonk, who worked for a local NGO who had gone missing. This involved bringing helicopters and sniffer dogs from Europe to conduct the search and Sylvia ran a home base managing logistics for the searchers. The woman they were looking for was never found.

The week leading up to Sylvia's death was not only the week when we try to get back to normal in Israel after weeks of fall holidays, it was also a week of unusual sunspot activity. At the end of the week, we learned she had died.

May her memory be for a blessing and may we learn from her ability to bring resources to bear on all situations. A million people, most of them children, die each year from Malaria. Malaria is first and foremost a disease of resources - basic sanitation, simple resources such as screens and mosquito nets, make a world of difference in eradicating malaria. Find out more and donate at www.malaria.org or www.rollbackmalaria.org. World Malaria Day is on Sylvia (and Sasha's) birthday, April 25.