Sylvia's Journal

Yesterday I arrived in Cape Coast quite rested. Somehow I managed to take a few catnaps on the way down there even those the car rattled and vibrated like a truck. I already knew that, if there is no choice, our bodies are quite adaptable and the mind can simply shut off.

I arrived at the Sanaa Lodge hotel about noon time, expecting to see the entire group at lunch. I was wrong. I was welcomed with applause as I entered the conference room in the middle of the 4^th of 7 dress rehearsal presentations. It is then that I realized, once again, that the visa/passport hiccup that had postponed my trip by a day had, after all, been a good thing. I have a hard time sitting through many slide presentations and seven in one morning would have been a bit much; three and a half was just right.

 Some teams had done well, others less so. I noticed that the tendency to call absences (lack of this or that) ‘obstacles’ was still alive and well.  It was good to sit in the back and listen and see where our notes or instructions have not quite had the desired effect. But it was also nice to sit in the back and be an observer for a change. The facilitation team, brand new to each other and the material in January, had nicely come together and was entirely and confidently in charge.

Naomi is here from our partner organization ADRA. She flew in from the Southern Sudan via Kenya and is here to be proud of her organization, especially the team leader William who is the exemplar of a leader and exactly the right person to lead this program.

We walked around the reception area with our laptops trying to ‘catch’ the wireless  signal which the hotel claims to have and we failed to find. The hotel’s IT guy is looking into this but since we are leaving tomorrow we are not holding our breath. The five clothes hangers I asked for have not arrived either and will probably never do.

Susan and her colleague from USAID/Ghana arrived in the afternoon and we sat side by side in the hotel’s internet café having plenty of time to catch up during the innumerable pauses created by slow machines and slow connections.

For dinner we drove into town and had shrimp curry and jollof rice in a little shack on the beach. When we came back I had planned to head straight for bed but was told that a gentleman was waiting in the conference room for me. That was of course William, abandoned by his crew and acting very much like I would have as lead facilitator: taking care of details for tomorrow, getting all the handouts right and working late into the night. I ended up working with him, ‘drawing’ the vision that was created in January on a giant flipchart and reviewing all of the improved PowerPoint slides until it was past midnight.

Today we have been told that a ‘high-powered’ team is arriving from Ghana’s health headquarters to listen to the results of 6 months of intense leadership development work. This we have been promised by the top chief who cannot be with us, unfortunately. I was able to catch him on the phone in between meetings but that is all the contact we’ll have on this trip.

It is a risky thing to invite people for morning attendance at a site that is several hours and many traffic jams away from their usual place of work. We guessed how late some would arrive and when we could actually start. As usual, I am the more pessimistic one on that; all but one of my Ghanaian colleagues think that this time, here, now, things will be different. I have heard that said before and am doubtful but won’t make it my problem. I am, after all, an observer, or, as one of the facilitators said, “you are standing up on the fourth balcony above the dance floor, watching.” Ron Heifetz would be thrilled to know his metaphor is used so fluently in Ghana.