Sylvia's Journal

On a continent where most of the people have little money and live at great risk with very little protection I always wonder why the majority of large buildings in the center of its capital cities are occupied either by banks or insurance companies. Whose money and who is insured, one wonders. The place around our hotel is awash with banks and insurance companies.

We started yesterday with a visit to our MSH colleagues who have an office on the outskirts of Abidjan. We are much indebted to them since they are making all the logistical arrangements for our adventure here. It is always nice to meet far-flung members of our extended MSH family. Alphonse the driver who picked me up at the airport has been assigned to drive us around. He is very helpful in showing us what is where, where to eat and what’s happening on the political scene. After one day in Abidjan I told him I saw no signs of this being a danger post; for that I have to go north, he said, adding that even there it is calm right now.

Some two weeks ago we had shipped 3 boxes containing some 50 copies of our leadership book to Abidjan via DHL to be handed out to the workshop participants. Since no one here had seen the boxes we tracked them down on the DHL website and discovered they were in Nigeria. They have been on an interesting world tour: picked up at our office on the 29th of August, shipped via Ohio and Florida to San Jose in Costa Rica where DHL realized, 4 days ago, that the boxes were shipped to the wrong place. Since then the boxes have been in Panama City, Caracas, Barbados, London, and Brussels before landing in Nigeria. According to DHL they left the Lagos DHL office at 5 PM local time yesterday. With any luck they arrive today in Abidjan but that’s only half the challenge. Getting boxes out of customs can be a huge undertaking, especially when you are in a hurry. I am not counting on seeing our shipment any time soon.

After our visit to the MSH office we returned to town and set up our computers in the conference room of the CCM in the center of town. To get to the CCM’s floor you can take a tiny elevator that has no lights. Once the door closes you are in the dark and can only hope that the electricity does not go out. If that were the case for any length of time it would lead to a slow and somber (dark) suffocating death, I imagined. After one trip up I decided to take the stairs, also in the dark, but less constraining and good for digesting the heavy (starchy) meals that are common in this part of the world.

For lunch we went to an abandoned hotel which has a working restaurant on the top floor. You had to know it to find it. It would have been the last place I would have looked for a restaurant. The tiny restaurant, without windows and with hard slatted chairs did not look very inviting. But appearances are misleading. I had my first sampling of Cote d’Ivoire’s famous cuisine: a piece of fish in an eggplant sauce with rice; slightly spicy and delicious. For Oumar who comes from the Sahel, this place has it all: the sea and forest for fish, fowl, fruits and vegetables in abundance.

After lunch we worked with the administrator of the CCM, which included some teaching right there and then by Oumar. Oumar is an exceptionally gifted teacher and a serious and conscientious worker. He knows where Africans stumble and confronts people, gently, where most other Africans I have worked with would not dare to. He runs the show and I am there to support him; I am not sure he needs much support but we enjoy working together and besides it is fun to see him in his element, as a trainer/facilitator.

For dinner we went to a small roadside restaurant in Treichville, a part of the city on the other side of the lagoon where there is life after 5 PM. The Plateau section of town, where our hotel is located, empties out at 5 PM when all the offices close; it becomes a ghost town. We took a taxi with an angry driver; Oumar, always the teacher, tried to teach him about customer service (not a bad idea given the unemployment and the glut of taxis here) but he wouldn’t listen and deposited us angrily at a main artery after having gone through several red lights and taken the reserved bus lane, driving faster than prudent; as accident survivors we were a bit sensitive to his driving style (‘doucement, doucement s’il te plait’) but this only made him angrier.

We talked more about our respective accidents, which would have been boring to anyone else, while we ate our Kedjénou and I had a beer twice the size of a normal beer (‘plus petite, ce n’est pas la peine, said the waitress). On the way back we had another taxi adventure. This time the driver was more congenial and willing to be taught to stop at a red light. I don’t think it will stick but at least he was willing to please us for the duration of our ride.