Sylvia's Journal

The bats and I were both late this morning. It was nearly 8 AM when I woke up and the sky was still full of them. Suddenly, and in just a few minutes, they vanished into the trees, as if humans and bats cannot be up at the same time. At dinner last night I learned that the bats are only on the section of town called Plateau. At one point the authorities decided to get rid of the bats (messy, noisy) and bombed then out of their trees and then cut the trees; an enlightened environmental action that did change things only for a while. All of the bats are back. It is, after all, their territory.

I was very aware of the date yesterday. The local news, radio and TV, all carried shots of our two presidential candidates, stiffly walking side by side at ground zero.

We made our round of visits to various stakeholders in the Global Fund to discuss what happened and sketch out next steps. We sorted out paperwork and contracts and began to lay the foundations for the next workshop that I will not attend, in November. I passed the baton, in the shape of a flipchart marker, to Oumar during our last facilitator meeting Tuesday night and he has been the team leader every since.

He leaves no opportunity unused to teach about management and leadership. He does this without even knowing it; teaching adults about changing their behavior is in his cells, he can’t help himself. We passed enough tidbits about management and leadership in our debriefing with the principal recipients of the funds that we left them hungry for more.

Last night at dinner, at a sidewalk restaurant, sitting on wobbly chairs around a wobbly table en plein air deep in Treichville, around a plate of grilled fish and atieke, he taught the president, the permanent secretary and our chief consultant about the Johari Window with great passion. My colleague Jana who taught Oumar about adult education would be proud. To hear such words as ‘moi chaché, moi aveugle, moi publique’ and ‘moi potential’ in such circumstances is quite amazing. Oumar, master trainer/story teller, kept them spellbound. It was wonderful watching him at work like that. I know the program is in good hands, he will do very well. His most important task is to transfer his skills to the local team so that he can look on, the way I do now, as his local colleagues take over. He has six more months to get to this result.

On our way to the restaurant the president took us on a tour of his childhood neighborhood. As he drove through it he kept pointing at this and that and added commentaries, the way I do when I show my colleagues in Holland where I grew up. Of course there was no comparison with that neighborhood (a small village really) and what it is now, as we are talking 1949: no paved road, few solid structures, no phones (c’était de la magie), few cars.

I could actually picture all this because my dad made a tour of Africa on behalf of the Dutch breweries in 1953 and left me a stack of postcards of many of the major African cities, including Dakar, Abidjan, Cairo, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Lusaka, Lagos, Antananarivo, etc. They are postcards made for foreigners like him, with a few cars showing (mostly old Peugeots) and many bare-breasted African women. The colonial buildings in the downtown shots are freshly painted. The shots of villages neat and orderly; not all that different from villages today except for the absence of the ubiquitous remains of the blue, pink, white or striped plastic bags. He also left me a diary that I have found hard to read at times because of the way he talks about Africans. He talks (writes) like a ‘colon.’ Even though not French or British, he was after all a man of his times. We have come a long way since then in terms of attitudes, but the environment has gotten the short end of the stick, bats, plastic bags, buildings and all.

Today is our last workday here and the report and the design for the next workshop are on the table. It turns out that not being able to change my ticket was a good thing; yesterday would have been too rushed. It was nice to sleep in and wake up with the bats.