Sylvia's Journal

People are beginning to realize that this leadership program is different. On Monday morning some of the participants had indicated – nonverbally and possibly unconsciously – that they really did not need to be here; that they did not need a leadership training, that they had already attended courses on leadership and, because of their position, were already leaders. Others were testy. Two walked around in a cloud of negative energy, their faces in an angry grimace. I wondered what was going on in their life that made their faces so tight and full of anger. One woman had said earlier to one of the organizers that she did not think she ought to participate because it would be ‘trop scientifique.’ Etc. To balance things out there were also people who were surrounded by a positive spirit that was infectious; they wanted to know more, be better, improve themselves and make a positive difference. They were impatient to start, showed up at the designated hours and wanted more, more, more. The combined cast of characters is, in this sense no different from other programs, except that in this group, nearly everyone is at the very top of their profession, organization or association. It is a condition for being in the group.

Since the field visits and yesterday’s introduction to all sorts of ideas that were new to them things are beginning to change. I was particularly happy to hear one person say ‘most of our failures (in terms of a society delivering quality health services) are because we are concentrating too much on the technical aspects of our work…’ I felt like giving him a high-five, but he is an earnest priest in a long grey collared robe so I contained my enthusiasm. I did ask him to write his words down so I could use them as a quote but what he delivered to me a few minutes later was an intellectualized version of these words, no longer direct from the heart but filtered through the intellect. Too bad, he spoke so eloquently. It is very hard to get them to bring the intensity of their intellectual activity down a few notches as it translates everything into abstractions. There were other small shifts: the trade unionist so much liked the challenge model we teach as part of our leadership program that he plans to introduce it in his training sessions. Yeah!

I am beginning to learn people’s names, workshop behaviors and quirks. Not enough to say something about everyone as I like to do at the end of a workshop, but enough for a few remarks that I am supposed to make as a psychologist. I will not disappoint them. The introverts, this includes the big boss, are harder to read for me and I won’t be able to say anything more than a few banalities as we bring this first workshop to a close.

We worked beautifully as a facilitation team yesterday, dancing I call it. But there was one glitch that created some heartache. We discontinued the contract with one of our team who simply had the wrong profile to be effective; rather than helping to do the work she was using up our precious energies as we tried to teach her the ropes. The distance to bridge was just too big. It was hard and painful but the only right thing to do, a quick cut now rather than a long drawn out struggle that would only generate frustration and exhaustion. She took the bad news in stride. There were many bases to cover to get to this result, requiring multiple conversations and emails to line up all the stars, including the fallen one.

A new configuration of the team is emerging. It includes Flore, our MSH admin assistant as an apprentice. We are swimming against the cultural currents that define who counts and who is worth listening to. A young woman is not considered an appropriate choice to teach about leadership and management, even when everything she does and has accomplished oozes these capacities.

Over lunch we talked about stress. When I mentioned the notion of setting boundaries and turning one’s cell phone off for starters, once home or during the weekend (most people walk around with at least two, some three) I was reminded of John Galbraith’s quote: faced with the choice of proving one’s opinion or changing it, everyone gets busy on the proof. My three lunch companions all got very busy explaining to me why this could not be done. I pushed back a little bit and was then told that ‘here things aren’t like that. You don’t understand.’ I used to get annoyed with those comments but now I let them pass and change the subject. It is no use to talk about choice when people feel so completely at the mercy of forces bigger than themselves (culture being the biggest one), even those who are at the very top. It is both sad and scary and, I believe, explains much about Africa’s predicament.

The field visit to Aboisso, a town close to the Ghanaian border, took us one hour further East of Bassam. It is a busy two lane road that is part of the larger corridor that connects Lagos to Abidjan. By chance I drove back from the field visit in the rented bus rather than the MSH car as I had done on the way out. When the MSH car finally arrived back at the hotel we learned that they had avoided, by a hair’s breadth, a horrendous accident that could have ended very (very) badly) if it wasn’t for the alertness and skill of driver Alphonse. He was visible shaken even though he said he was not. His quick action had avoided the unspeakable (failli de mourir). The phrase has of course particular significance for Oumar and myself. We were both very grateful having been spared this experience this time. We are also thankful to Alphonse. An experienced and alert driver is no guarantee for accident free driving but it helps in these parts of the world.

To my great surprise we left exactly at the appointed time in the morning, not just around 8:30, which would have been good, but exactly at 8:30. Imagine that!. This turned out to be a very good thing because, with an hour drive ahead, followed by the required protocol visits, a morning is very short; too short really.

Once in Aboisso our larger group split into smaller groups. Flore and I accompanied two CCM members to the NGO Lumiere Action, an organization that receives funds from the Global Fund through CARE to help people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS manage their disease and their families. Its office is right next to lab of the general hospital. This is a good place to be because once diagnosed as sero-positive, the patient can be seen immediately by the agency’s staff. It is a wonderful example of private-public sectors working together. We were told that when the group was not on the premises, most newly diagnosed with HIV left the hospital grounds and in doing so, fell through the cracks as they returned to their communities, may be infecting others.

The staff of the agency includes a few supervisors, counselors and volunteers. The very junior and enthusiastic ‘senior’ staff is crammed into an office that is barely 2×3 meters, most of it filled with dossiers, a small table and plastic chairs. The dossiers are a mystery to me; boxes full of papers with information about patients. One wonders what will happen when the caseload really increases, as it has been of late. It is only going to go up.

The agency works with the extreme poor, people who go into debt and borrow money to pay for transport to go to a patient meeting in town. We went on a short drive to that part of town that is defined by the word ‘transit. Aboisso is the last big town before the border with Ghana. Not surprisingly the prevalence of HIV/AIDS there is high. Our hostess took us to the house of a sero-positive woman with 7 children of various fathers; the youngest child, Belem, was diagnosed as positive. She doesn’t know about the others. Some of the other children were ushered out of the simple bar structure that provides a little income to the sick and single mother; they don’t know and mom did not think they need to know. It was very humbling to be so close to the bottom of the societal pyramid. We were all touched by the devotion and caring of the agency’s chief who had clearly gotten the confidence of many people who might not have made it without her. But it is also overwhelming when you think of the number of people who need the same kind of tender loving care. It is hard to even consider the word luck, but it seemed that the woman we met was lucky in a perverse sort of way. Even in bad luck there can be good luck.

A night full of dreams that were dense and a bit somber. I think they were that way because I am a little bit anxious about today. It is all one big experiment yet I am supposed to know what I am doing. I do in some ways and I don’t in others. I have no idea how well our hosts today are prepared for this unusual kind of visit, a learning visit rather than an inspection visit. There is no model for this. People understand it intellectually but will they get it in the heat of the moment? I will be going to a small NGO called Lumière Action with only two other people. We have asked to accompany some of their field workers. More about that tomorrow.

I stayed up late last night in the hotel’s lounge because that’s where I can get the wireless, not in my room. It is already more than I had expected so I am grateful for this service that would have been inconceivable when I was last in Cote d’Ivoire, 15 years ago; especially in a three star hotel outside the capital city.

I was alone in the lobby lounge that is made to look like a living room with a large plasma TV that is permanently on, showing one American movie after another, with mouths that speak English while the words come out French. The films are of the action type genre that I can only tolerate when doing something else or on a plane with the sound turned off. When it gets really late the X-Files come on; also dubbed in French. The only other person watching was the receptionist. I suppose it is one way to pass the lonely evening in the empty lobby.

A small gadget mounted on the wall puffs out, at set intervals, a tiny cloud of some chemical compound meant to make the room smell ‘fresh.’ The smell is strong and overpowering, especially since the thing puffs rather frequently. I believe these gadgets are meant for bathrooms, but here someone had a bright idea. This morning I discover the same gadget is mounted on the wall of our conference room. It makes a soft squeaky sound each time it releases a puff; it continues to catch me by surprise, and then I remember.

We started the workshop in a rather tentative way. Only one third of the invited members and their alternates were in the room at the appointed time after lunch. Right there we had the entire ‘problematique’ of a voluntary body before our eyes; if you want to test it, start on a Sunday afternoon, during school vacation, in a place 40 km away on a congested road that makes the distance appear twice as long. It is actually amazing that we had about half the people in the room by the time we ended the day, and all but 5 at night time.

Launching a workshop is like taking a plane up into the air. You have to get to a certain speed and get the weight and balances organized right. You can calculate much of this in advance (and you should); you have to trim the plane just right, all the while watching the various instruments that provide information you need to take into account. And then there are those things you cannot change such as wind and temperature but you better be prepared to adjust your wings.

That is exactly what we did. Oumar and I were well prepared and we adjusted our program when it became clear it needed adjustments, given who had shown up, or rather how many had not. Oumar, in his masterful way, used the example of this adjustment to teach our local counterparts a few lessons about leadership on the fly.

One of the members of the CCM was also a student in the last of MSH’s publicly offered leadership course that I taught in Dakar in 2001 with Bula-Bula from the DRC, one of Francophone Africa’s all time master trainers. We co-facilitated many workshops in the 1990s. But Bula did not take good care of himself (leadership lesson #1: Stay alive!) and died of a heart attack quite suddenly and much too early. I sometimes think that Oumar channels Bula.

For dinner we went to the same place as yesterday but this time with an order placed ahead of time; it was waiting for us on the table. Back at the hotel, close to 10 PM, we found our local counterparts fully engaged in practicing their session of tomorrow, as we had suggested. I realized that I had overestimated the skill level of at least one so the practice was important. We spent the next hour coaching, practicing, more coaching and slipping in a few tidbits about adult education that were missing. I am encouraged by their engagement and enthusiasm. This includes Flore the local MSH admin assistant who is giddy with excitement about her good luck to be allowed to attend the workshop. I think I see a budding facilitator and coach. While Oumar and I were having dinner she replaced us, without being asked, as audience for our practicing colleagues. She gave them feedback and support that was much appreciated and very perceptive. Sometimes talent hides in surprising places.

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.

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.

I am waiting for the ‘technicien’ which is what you need here to connect to the internet. The best signals on the wireless list come from Standard Bank next door, especially the one for the CEO but of course they are locked. While I am waiting and writing I watch a French program that is entitled ‘people in bathing suits aren’t necessarily stupid.’ What I see does not match the title.

I arrived in Abidjan while it was still light but by the time my suitcase arrived, in the very last batch, it was dark. Alphone the MSH driver was waiting for me. It is always nice not to have to hassle with taxis after a long flight and seeing someone waving a piece of paper with your name on it in the packed arrival hall. The ‘rentree (des classes)’ in the Francophone world does not happen until the middle of September. This explains why there were so many children on the plane. Their presence made the wait for my suitcase easier. I marveled at their ability to have fun with whatever was at hand. I was totally absorbed by two 5 year old boys who commented on every suitcase going by. One of them had a well-used stuffed lion who he would deposit in between the suitcases, to be picked up a few meters further by his buddy, both squealing with laughter.

Downtown was empty, at 7 PM, which is unusual for an African city. Large concrete barrages, no longer in use, were shoved to the side around some of the banks. According to Alphonse everything is being rebuilt and repaired and things have been calm for a long time. It looked that way. In daylight there are few signs of the destruction, which acoording to Alphonse wasn’t so bad here on the Plateau part of Abidjan. ‘Wait until you see the destruction in the countryside,’ he added. This is what I see from my windows. The view is that of a hundred other African downtowns.

In the hotel I called Oumar. He was a slimmer version of the Oumar I remembered, slimmer and taller as if he had been stretched lengthwise. He was in a horrendous car accident in Kindia in Guinea some two years ago. No one thought he would survive but he did. He had none of the insurance cushions we had, nor the support of his employer (the government of Guinea) as I did. But the things we learned from our respective accidents were quite similar, about community and support networks and the taking and giving of support.

And after that I fell into a dream-filled sleep of 10 uninterrupted hours.

I used the morning of my first post vacation workday to check out the global fund website and download several documents about the Country Coordinating Mechanisms (CCM) by which the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria (GFATM) assures local ownership of interventions; reading for later, to pass the time in transit. I finished packing, filling my suitcase up with French books that had been culled from my library earlier this week, to leave behind with my colleagues in Abidjan. It produced a rather heavy suitcase.

Then it was off to the doctor. I arrived with my list of body parts to be discussed. After we had ticked each one off, I was hardly any wiser. I had some X-rays made of my sacrum and small toes to rule out any mechanical failures but we both knew that these would be unlikely. The doctor’s order is to continue with the physical therapy, do another round of acupuncture for my sacroiliac joint or go straight for the cortisone injection, get a second ankle opinion and set a date for the carpal tunnel repair surgery. This fall is going to have nearly as many interactions with the healthcare system as last fall.

On my way home from the doctor’s office I picked up some nice gentlemen who were out for a walk on this beautiful day, heading exactly in the same direction as I was (Joe and Axel). Joe took us out to lunch on the way to the airport and they both delivered me to Air France in time for them to squeeze in a visit to the ICA before closing time at 5:00 PM.

The flight to Paris is short, a mere 6 hours. By the time dinner is served you are already halfway there. I had a very short postprandial nap, too short, and woke up to see Indiana Jones, up to his neck in quicksand, refusing to pull himself out by way of a huge python. He is so not my favorite character; after I saw him in a snake pit in his first movie I have refused to see any new IJ movies; and now this, waking up to the only snake scene in the entire movie; my luck.

I tried to get back to sleep by listening to my meditation tapes which always put me to sleep before track one is finished; but not this time.

I arrived at an empty AF terminal E, was bussed to terminal C and found my way to the lounge which is the only thing that makes a 7-hour wait at CDG bearable. It is a reward for frequent flying and, counterproductively of course, for the huge ecological footprint I am making in the process. Tessa had me do a survey on the internet to ‘measure’ my carbon footprint some years ago, before the word was common currency. According to the not so scientific calculations my high-flying lifestyle required about 9 planets. Should I change jobs?

I showered, served myself a nice French breakfast including pain au chocolat, and am now ready to start reading and familiarize myself with my client. If all goes well, the next entry will be from Abidjan.