Sylvia's Journal

I found a surprising message in my mailbox on one of the many social networking sites I subscribe to. A boyfriend from my early teens found me on the internet. He is now the chief of Schiphol’s freight services. Our meeting place will be obvious, if not in the air, then on the ground. We have not seen each other for more than 40 years.

We left our hotel in Abidjan yesterday and drove to Bassam. While I was waiting for Oumar to check out I took some pictures of the lobby, a special request from Sita who thinks my blog should have more pictures. I went all out.

When you enter the hotel the first person (thing?) you encounter is a large seated statue of a local king in traditional garb. To me he looks like a Ghanaian king the way he is dressed with his Kente cloth and all the gold(paint), but then again, the Ghanaians and Ivoirians are cousins, if not brothers.

The king sits with his back to a large waterfall sculpted out of cement, plastic vines and leaves that blocks the lobby off from the street and fills one side of it. On the left of the entrance all the chairs are bunched together to make room for the ceiling painter. This made it a little harder to get a good view of the wall decorations, pictures of shiny and slippery beauties that, I presume, are intended to lighten up the experience of meeting with a business partner in a hotel lobby.

On our way out of town we passed by a roundabout that I had noticed earlier because of the two huge cement statues of an eagle and a lion. They stand by the side of the road, rather forlorn, as if waiting to be put in a more fitting place, or returned to where they were taken from. The lion needs some repairs as its head has been cut off. The eagle is intact and spreading its wings as if to fly away. I asked Alphonse how come the lion was damaged and the eagle was not? He did not know.

After driving past countless little beach restaurants, all equally inviting but all ignored, we arrived in Bassam at lunchtime. We had to ditch our plans to go to one of the beach places in order to honor our commitment to the rest of our facilitation team of starting our work at 2 PM. And so we settled in the hotel’s open air dining area, next to a noisy and splashy swimming pool full of teens and preteens. We assumed we could eat quickly and start on time. We did not. Lunch took an hour of preparation (grilled chicken and fries). We ordered our drinks, ginger juice, going for the least chemically enhanced drink we could find on the menu. It was served in two tones: green at the bottom and yellow at the top. We asked about the green and were told ‘c’est pour decoration.’ We asked for an undecorated drink.

Sometimes it is good that time is so very elastic here, since our co-facilitators were not quite on schedule, if there is such a thing. One showed up five hours after the appointed time. I watched Oumar use this as a teaching moment (‘How long have you known about this assignment? You know, being a facilitator has certain implications…’) He did it with grace and great care. We’ll see how this team will evolve; for now calling us a team is either premature or an article of faith. This is going to be as just-in-time as it can get, since the program starts today after lunch.

We met the president of the CCM who is a retired professor and gave him the design and our intentions in a nutshell. We were doing this in the hotel lobby where a huge plasma screen TV is permanently turned on (as it is now while I am writing, the X-files). I always find it hard to engage with people who are watching TV during the conversation but no one else seemed to be bothered and there were signs that people were indeed listening.

As far as the field visits are concerned, everything is extremely sketchy but no one seems to worry, so I don’t either. It certainly will be an adventure from a design and facilitation point of view. My past experience was in South Africa which had none of the protocol requirements and no outsiders handing out money to pay for this or that. Interestingly, when talking with people in private here they dismiss the protocol as something that isn’t really necessary but collectively everyone agrees it is important. This is the power of myth-making at work; only interesting if you can observe it at arm’s length but a pain in neck when you’re in it yourself.

For dinner we drove in a noisy diesel Mercedes to a maquis hardly recognizable from the outside but well known by our local hosts. The notion of serving a customer with speed and grace was entirely unknown to the two sullen waitresses who seemed just as happy to see us go. We nearly did go when over an hour later we still had not seen any food. When it finally arrived we had two types of fish, aloko (fried plantain), rice and atieke. This time I believe a few uninvited guests slipped in along with the food, judged by the gurgling sounds coming from my stomach last night, but luckily gone this morning.