Sylvia's Journal

Everyday at lunch we eat with the students who are in residence at the institute. Because the dining hall is too small to accommodate everyone at the same time the tables are always full and you have to search for a place to sit. This means that you are likely to sit with people you don’t know, mostly students and occasionally with faculty or staff who are also in residence. This has been an unexpected treat. Yesterday I was sitting with a Zambian and Kenyan accountant who are following a course on financial management; the day before I was having lunch in the company of a insurance company director from Uganda, a trade representative from Malawi and a few Ethiopians following a course offered by the WorldBank about HIV/AIDS (“We are mainstreaming AIDS!” “Really? Why would you want to do that?”). And the day before that we learned about what trade representatives do in Zimbabwe.

For someone who is a great believer in networks this place is paradise. It also gives one a very different picture of Africa than the one that is generally known in the West. Here, Africa is populated by young and eager professionals who want to make a difference; very stimulating!

Before the lunch doors open everyone congregates in a cafeteria-like place; a WorldBank-sponsored HIV/AIDS course is given in back of folding harmonica doors while a large TV is perpetually on (and loud) showing South African soap operas with much drama, tears and shouting. Maybe this is a familiar backdrop for people who are, as they say, ‘in HIV/AIDS.’

I have heard some interesting perspectives here about Bush’s visit last week. He has gained much goodwill among people who rarely speak highly of him. One colleague surprised me most when he said that Bush’s visit was a testimony to America’s (generally admired) long term strategy which has been consistently implemented from as far back as Carter. To my surprise he saw no fundamental differences in the policies and strategies pursued by any of the presidents who followed him; including Bush. The choice of African countries visited was, in his view, very carefully planned (probably, we hope) and related to long term strategic interests around trade, access to primary resources and allies in expected future regional conflicts (just as described by Upton Sinclair in Oil!). It was an utterly novel idea to me and taught me something about how hard it is to leave the mainstream of opinions and explore current reality on its own merits; a topic, incidentally, that I teach.

I spent another full workday after I returned to my hotel in the early afternoon to assemble the results of our work in the morning; we refined the objectives of the course and identified the topics we think need to be taught to achieve each of the objectives, using colored post-it notes, complementing each others’ perspectives. We are very productive and I am hearing great stories; the work can hardly be called work. My colleagues are happy with the process of collaborative design which is new to them. Here, courses are developed by a professor about his or her favorite topic and then presented to a curriculum committee, all in a day’s work. Before I arrived they had balked at the idea of working a whole week on course design (why so long?) while we in Boston thought one week was very short to come up with a whole course. The final arrangement of work in the morning and, for me, putting things together in the afternoon is working perfectly.

I made a little outing to the supermarket across the street and bought a package of dried pineapple produced by a cooperative of local women. Although it tastes great, the presentation leaves something to be desired. The content of the package look like it was scraped from the surface of a dark and dank place where things similar in appearance grow. This may explain why I have never in my life seen sun-dried pineapple slices; packaging, by the way, is a topic that one of my colleagues is studying at the Maastricht School of Management with financial aid from the Dutch for his Ph.D. The Dutch offer a range of topics to choose from. If you want to pick your own topic, you pay for your studies. The available topics appear to be all trade related; those pragmatic Dutch!