Sylvia's Journal

The meeting I am attending helps me understand better the context and realities of this country’s response to the AIDS crisis. The meeting has only one other white person in it, a German who just started living here. The meeting’s language is primarily Kiswahili. Although the German looks like he understands Kiswahili, he confides to me that he doesn’t. Once in awhile I recognize an English word such as ‘bureaucracy,’ or ‘sustainability.’ Periodically I ask for translation but I am mostly watching people. Occasionally my neighbor makes a remark that gives me some clues about the issues she is thinking about and that need her attention. Sometimes these are commentaries on what other people say, or on statistics; and sometimes they are topics that only women will understand.

I made a trip to the tiny internet café of the hotel where the meeting is being held to discover that the computer runs on very old software. A message showed up that the system is no longer protected from viruses because the software has not been updated. By then I had already picked up the Trojan Horse and the Rungbu virus on my pen drive. I spent the rest of the morning scanning my computer to make sure no other viruses crossed over.

At lunch I sit with a retired professor of Muhimbili School of Public Health. He is a sociologist and talks to me about the early years of the AIDS epidemic when he was a lone voice crying in the wilderness. There was and still is much stigma attached to being HIV positive and he has lost many colleagues, educated people, who even on their deathbed were not able to acknowledge the disease they were dying of.

From the presentations and side conversations I learn much about the ripples and unintended side effects of the huge amounts of money that stream into the country in the battle against the disease, especially how it affects the lowest layers of organized civil society, the community-based organizations. They are trying to implement activities at the village, ward and household levels. There are expectations that money will solve all problems yet spending the funds has repeatedly been problematic, suggesting that something other than money is needed. [Bunny, the main character in Upton Sinclair’s Oil! remarked on page 490 that “he had learned this much from his father, that money by itself is nothing, to accomplish anything takes money plus management”]. As it happens, this is also one of the main messages of our Leadership & Management Program.

Another side effect is that the care of orphans and those affected by the disease is beginning to discriminate against those who are not HIV-positive. As the wife of the President of a neighboring country commented, “why, you are making people want to be positive!” Apparently in some schools there are more AIDS orphans than non orphans (one indicator programs are being evaluated on). This of course creates much resentment among those who have managed to stay healthy, but poor nevertheless; their schoolfees are not being paid. And finally, it appears that the implementation of care and mitigation activities, two of the three major strategies, are beginning to overshadow the strategy of prevention. As long as prevention is not effective, the other two will require increasing amounts of money to sustain an ever growing pool of people affected by the disease.

One PowerPoint presentation follows another. There are close to twenty. It becomes increasingly difficult to see the forest through the trees. This is too bad because I know there are other ways to structure such meetings that would help create more of a dialogue and keep the forest visible through the countless presentations describing a multitude of trees, some the same and some different from one another. Simple mind-mapping would already have helped; not on the wall though. Hotel management has posted a sign that nothing can be put on the walls. But I could have done it on my computer, quietly in the back, if only I would understand Kiswahili. So I am struggling with how to stay awake, making to-do-lists and writing in my journal; and when that is done I play solitaire. I am sitting in the back row and so I can see that I am not the only one; but, thanks to my Calvinist roots, I appear to be the only one who is self-conscious about it.

I also break the monotony of presentations I cannot follow by taking bathroom breaks. Outside the room are large framed portraits of participants, taken in the morning, developed and printed on large glossy paper and framed in cheap plastic frames. This is a gamble that the photographers take – there is no guarantee that people will buy their pictures; and if many don’t, it will be a significant monetary loss. Apparently they know their market – they are selling well and it must make it worthwhile. They also must have learned over the years not to take pictures of the white folks because they don’t buy. That is correct and I am grateful there is no portrait of me in the gallery.

On Wednesday night, after a work session, I have dinner with William and Isaac. I came back to the hotel too late to meet their participants. This will happen on Thursday morning.

At night I pack while watching a Nigerian movie about a bad church leader. There are many fat men in it with sunglasses and sticks and skinny young women who whimper a lot. I can’t understand what they say but I don’t need to. The story is obvious. The announcement for the next episode promises that things will end badly for the church leader. That is good.

The next morning I watch another Nigerian movie. Once again there is the fat man, also with a stick, but this time also a little fat and obnoxious boy. They are bad and because of that I know they will come to a bad end. There are also several skinny, poorly dressed men who act like children in the fat man’s presence. They too whimper a lot. Witchcraft, in the shape of eggs and wax dolls play a prominent role in both movies. I soon learn why. When the movie is over the credits say ‘Thank you Jesus, you are my inspiration!’ This is Nollywood, with a religious twist.

Today’s entry can not make it from my pen drive to the website. Some incompatibility of one kind or another.  I probably won’t be able to post again until I am back home on Friday the 7th.

Yesterday I met with the person to whom I will serve as a coach; in the coaching literature this is sometimes called a coachee. I was awed by the complexity of her job and her openness to me, a total stranger from far away. She freely discussed her challenges and dilemmas. I had asked if I could shadow her as this would give me a better picture of the world she inhabits and see what she is up against. She suggested I travel with her to a meeting several hours inland from Dar es Salaam. I will spend two days and two nights there so that, as she suggested, we will have some quiet time to get acquainted and simply talk. I jumped at the opportunity.

My sudden departure from this palatial hotel means I have to put away the menu of Spa treatments that has been tempting me ever since I arrived. I had been considering the Kilimanjaro Retreat (145 minutes) that includes a Floral Footbath, a Tanzanian Coffee Scrub, a Thai Herbal Steam Bath and a Spice Massage; or, more extravagant, the 3-hour Body Symphony that includes a variety of floral baths, foot scrubs, aromatherapy, Thai herbal facial and whatnot. On the lower end was the Executive Awaken, a one hour combination of foot, back and head massage. I simply could not make up my mind over the weekend. And so I blew it because now I am checking out. By the time I come back to Dar es Salaam it will be Thursday and time to present myself at the airport for the trip home.

Later in the morning I met my colleagues at the MSH/Tanzania office which is entirely made of glass walls. It is the ultimate transparent office. You cannot pick your nose, play solitaire or cruise the Internet on your computer without anyone noticing. But because many people were traveling I could have done any of that if I had wanted to.

In the afternoon I met the team of faculty at the Muhimbili School of Nursing who are participating in our virtual leadership program that Morsi is facilitating at the moment. All but one of the team members were able to meet with me, including the Dean. We had a most wonderful chat sitting around a table and talked about the challenges of teaching nurses about management and leadership as well as the challenge of being a virtual student on top of the usual faculty workload, double now because it is exam time. It was nice to get to know this team in a different way from reading their postings online.

Back at the hotel I started packing while my IT colleagues from Boston tried to fix my email problems long distance, using GoToMeeting (which allows them to take over my screen) and Skype. After about one hour we thought they had successfully diagnosed and fixed my problem. This morning when I woke my computer up, the problem was back.

I woke up full of aches and pains more than once during the night and again in the morning. One of the pains was in my left big toe. I recognize the big toe pain from a gout attack I had many years ago. Now the big toe pain is gone but my body still feels as if it ran the marathon.

Yesterday the city was empty, as cities are on sundays in most of the world, and somber under an overcast sky. This made it the perfect day for finishing loose ends form last week, preparing for next week and cleaning out my email inbox now that I am more securely connected again. All this took the entire day.

One of two highlights of the day was breakfast. It was the most lavish spread I have ever seen; fit for a king (and president I might assume). The big dilemma at the start of the new day was where to begin? Pour myself some ‘young coconut’ juice with a splash of Champagne? And then some freshly baked croissants, almond and plain, with lavender honey or shall it be a banana shake? Take the fresh tropical fruits plain or with any of four kinds of yogurts or go straight to the muesli which is made exactly the way I used to make it in Holland as a child? The amazing array of breads in a basket was out of bounds. A little card said: not for consumption, for decorative purposes only. There were other decorations that were out of bounds, such as a large cylindrical vase, nearly half a meter tall with layers of pastel colored marshmallows and almonds. I am sure that, somewhere on the internet there is a website for ‘buffet decorations’ where people get their inspiration for such displays. I continue to fill ill at ease in a place of such extravagance in a country that has so many poor and malnourished among its people.

As part of my preparation for coaching I read about trust, mutual trust in particular. One aspect of that is sincerity. Do I tell the same version of a story to everyone or do I re-script is depending on the audience? One thing I am learning from public journaling is that I have to recognize what part of my writing is pure observation and what part is interpretation. Public journaling is good practice and a good discipline; actually the same discipline that is required for emails: would I be comfortable if the person I write about, or who observed the same event, reads my piece? If the answer is ‘yes’ I can hit the ‘Publish’ or ‘Send’ button; if the answer is no, I need to return to the facts and revisit my telling of the story. As a writer I can of course do whatever I want, embellish, adding little flourishes here or there or generalize what was very particular. But I’d get into big trouble quickly if I didn’t realize I was doing that.

During my last massage Abi, who is dabbling in astrology, remarked that I may not have enough water in my life. Many years ago a friend did my astrology chart and told me I did not have enough earth in it. I have since taken up gardening and hope that this has taken care of the imbalance. Maybe the plane crash was about too much air. And now it is water, she thinks. I heeded Abi’s advice and packed a small watercolor kit in my luggage and today I painted a Tanzanian still lilfe of fruits, collected from the fruit table at breakfast: two small plums, a banana and a tiny mango. I have lost the touch a bit but it was fun and afterwards I could eat the still life while admiring my rendering of it – fruits that will never spoil.

The second highlight of the day was dinner. I went to see Marc in his much more down to earth hotel and we had a simple dinner sitting outdoors. Marc teaches public health at Harvard and has started his own organization – D-Tree International – that is ‘bringing evidence-based medicine to frontline workers wordlwide.’ He gave me a demo on his PDA and even I could have been able to determine whether someone on retrovirals need to see a doctor or or not. Pretty nifty.

I never got to see Mount Kilimanjaro. It was always in the clouds and on departure from Kilimanjaro airport I sat on the wrong side of the plane. To make up for this, the decorators of the Kilimanjaro Kempinski hotel in Dar es Salaam have hung a huge photo of the top of the mountain above my desk. Now I can look at the mountain to my heart’s content for the next 5 days.

I took the Precision Air shuttle to the Kilimanjaro airport, saving US taxpayers US$60. I recognized some of my fellow passengers as the graduates from the Trade Policy course. We traveled in an odd looking plane, with luggage stored between us and the pilot. The plane was full of French, Dutch and British tourists on their way to Zanzibar, our first stop before landing in Dar es Salam.

The driver who took me to my hotel started talking about Bush as soon as he heard I was from the US. What a good man he was to have come all the way to Tanzania. I asked whether his visit had been very disruptive, traffic wise. One would expect a professional taxi driver to complain about such things; but no, it had been wonderful. He had stood along the road where people had waved little American flags. For the first kilometer, large lightboxes in the divider strip proudly speak of Tanzania-US unity in English and Kiswahili (Umoja). After one kilometer they are empty again waiting for new messages of friendship.

My driver was particularly impressed with Bush’s having danced with the Maasai. He kept mentioning it, complimenting me on having a president who is a good dancer; really, the things you learn while abroad, I had no idea. His handshakes with common people, his visit to a school and to ‘unabled’ children all added up to leave a big impression here. We then turned to the current elections. Everyone I have met so far is following the elections with great interest. An elderly gentleman who teaches at the institute told me, ‘mark my words, McCain will win!” There is also a fear of Obama getting shot. I understand that that is a fear that is particularly prominent in the US black community and it seems to have made its way to Africa. My driver did not know that it was Obama’s father who was a Kenyan (he thought it was his mother) and the idea that a simple villager from Kenya had produced a son who had produced what might become the next US President clearly caught his fancy. He was speechless for a moment and then broke out in a big grin. The Tanzanians don’t particularly like the Kenyans, who are loud, aggressive and too tribal in their eyes (the current crisis is no surprise to them); but vis-à-vis the US, they are brothers.

As it happens, I am staying in the same hotel that Bush stayed in. Of course for him it was emptied of ordinary people. I asked the bell boy what it had been like and he said it was very exciting, especially all these security people and CIA and FBI, things he knows only from Hollywood films, right here in his hotel! He too was impressed with the whole show, and in particular with how hard these Americans worked (day and night).

I, too, am impressed. Bush’s visit added two more stars to the hotel’s five star rating (according to my driver). It is of a luxury that I haven’t seen much in Africa. The bathroom looks like an advertisement in Modern European Plumbing (Italian), with floor to ceiling glass windows looking into the bedroom. They are covered with louvered shades for privacy, which I don’t need. I can watch TV (watching the homecoming of Prince Harry over and over on BBC) while sitting in the tub and look out over Dar es Salaam at the same time.

I had contacted one of my students in a virtual course a few years ago. She is the only one from the team I was able to reach by phone. As it happened she is now working closely with Marc who used to work at MSH during my first 12 years there. And as it happened he is in Dar es Salaam, so the three of us went out together for dinner and caught up with each others’ lives.