Sylvia's Journal

Nightlife is active around the hotel throughout the night. It is a good thing I usually sleep well but occasionally I wake up and wonder who is out there being entertained by those who earn their living that way. When I get up early in the morning there are always a few stragglers down below, night creatures who appear to dissolve in daylight, then re-appear when it gets dark.

Yesterday we spent the entire day practicing how to monitor and evaluate the leadership work. We use real life examples of leadership-driven change projects that we have gathered over the years. I think it was an eye opener for our new facilitators who are more used to focus on individual transformational work – good work that is notoriously weak in showing anything tangible as a result.

Today they get to practice sessions that they will do for real on Friday when we are really launching our program with what we call a senior alignment meeting, an attempt to get the bosses on board – at least the ones that show up (something we have no control over).

It has been raining ever since we arrived and were told to have brought luck (i.e. rain) with us. The rains are like monsoons and drench the city, leaving huge puddles wherever the roads are not paved and overwhelm the drainage on paved roads. As a result the electricity goes on and off, a problem that everyone seems to take in stride and which shows up in poor internet connections and the inability of restaurants to produce pizzas.

My longtime friend Youssouf from Burkina also showed up in Addis, even staying in our hotel. Liz now is the only non French speaker. Occasionally we slip into French and Liz gets to experience a little bit of the total immersion that she will throw herself in when she comes back to the US and heads to Dartmouth for a 10-day French intensive course. Youssouf and Pierre Marie know each other of course. In their company I experience that special ‘je ne sais quoi’ that makes working in Francophone Africa (something I have not done for a long time) so wonderfully appealing.

During my early morning writing routine I watched a BBC documentary about the Kabul skateboarding club, Skateistan. It was founded by an Australian skateboarder who introduced the sport to marginalized youth in Kabul. The images were those of another Afghanistan than what we usually see: young boys and girls on skateboards, parents cheering them on from the edges of the skating rink and foreigners walking around freely in Kabul. The images lifted my spirits.

More spirit lifting happened during the day as we embarked on our new leadership development program with the local consulting firm CALD (Centre for African Leadership Development), a new organization founded by five enthusiastic leadership developers. We selected CALD out of a field of 7 respondents to our RFP. Our instincts (and their descriptions of themselves) appeared to be accurate.

I mostly hovered in the background and supported my colleagues and the new team by providing feedback, context and stories about sobering and uplifting experiences elsewhere. It is one of the more satisfying roles for me to play as I marvel and enjoy seeing others embrace what has become practically a way of living for me. The enthusiasm and energy were palpable. I do believe that I am in the business of energy liberation (leadership) and conservation (management).

Before I went to bed I watched the BBC again to suddenly hear a familiar voice and see a familiar face, that of our Beirut days house mate Peter from the UK. In the 30 intervening years he has become an energy intelligence specialist and participated in a heated discussion about oil transactions in Kurdistan. As an English teacher kicked out of North Yemen in the late 70s, arriving on my doorstep in Beirut, I would have been hard pressed to imagine him in a suit and tie commenting to the world on middle eastern oil.

While Soros explains to his Aljazeera interviewer that any blog site is a media site rather than a technology site [I have the odd feeling that this is significant] I try to make sense of my very bizarre dreams about scientists and salami. Maybe the dreams were triggered by the wonderful Italian food that we had last night at Don Vito’s and watching the Discovery channel for too many hours.

It rained most of the day. It reminded me of those rained out Sundays that make you want to snuggle up with a book in a chair by the window. In my case that book is my Kindle with its collection of books to choose from. If I am not in the mood for one I can simply toggle to another.

My colleagues moved out of the fancy Sheraton and into my more reasonably priced hotel with its much larger rooms, big balconies, free internet and breakfast. It’s easier now; we were able to meet as a team without need for taxis, and divided the workload for the next three days.

Pierre-Marie got the top level apartment with its newly installment Jacuzzi tub and the 45 feet terrace; I am one floor below, with two balconies and a regular bathtub; the same kind of room as Liz, one floor further down. This represents exactly our places in the MSH hierarchy.

Through facebook I discovered that my longtime friend Anne was also on mission in Addis. We met for dinner and caught up on news about families and work. Later in the evening I noticed another friend coming this way. What’d I do without facebook?

I decided to forego the macchiato five floors down and instead had my cup of Nescafe and instant oatmeal. This allowed me to linger in my pajamas for a good part of the morning.

At about 11 AM Liz picked me up for an outing into town. First stop was a leather factory. Leather is a big thing here which I could have figured out since they eat so much beef. On the outskirts of town, in the factory’s shop, we found racks full of coats and bags of the softest leather. I am not much of a leather person but some coats were hard to resist, especially at the prices advertised. Liz emerged with a elegant jacket that appeared to have been made for her, such a perfect fit. We will return next week to make the final decision about some items we asked them to put away for us.

Next stop was the coffee place, Tomoca, where we had our first macchiato of the day, coming out of an enormous espresso machine. We sipped our coffee from the tiny cups while breathing in the wonderful smells of freshly roasted coffee beans. Liz will take back the coffee beans I ordered while the ground coffee will come along to Kabul as a treat to anyone who has been living on Nescafe too long.

The rains moved in and we skipped the Mercato, allegedly the biggest market in Africa. Instead we headed for the Boston Spa building to make our appointments for a hot stone massage, a manicure and a pedicure for next Saturday when we will have earned such treatment. Above the spa is the Lime Tree café, a bookstore/café/restaurant that has the feel of the universal university bookstore/cafe restaurant. Not surprisingly you can find many young expats sitting behind their computers checking email while drinking their lattes.

The afternoon was reserved for work – getting ready for the first event that starts on Monday when we will create the team that will run the leadership program after we leave, two weeks from now.

Liz and Pierre-Marie, our colleague from Cameroon, picked me up again at the end of the day and we headed for the Beer Garden Inn, a German brew pub with a menu in German and shiny copper kettles brewing the beer in full view. The place was packed and we got the last open table. Soon we found ourselves with a contraption on our table that delivered the beer from a tab, coming out of a meter long cylinder; imagine that, one meter of beer!

We did not order the full meter (5 liters). Ours was filled to the 3 liter line, about 65 cm, with foam filling up the remainder of the cylinder. Iit was plenty for us girls, although we suspect that Pierre-Marie could have handled the full meter.

A few men, sitting behind us, had started with beer up to the 75 cm line (about 4 liters) and seemed to have given up after drinking about 60 cm of that. They looked rather tired as they slouched on their seats. Twenty cm of beer can tire you out easily. Simple pub fare accompanied the drinks and made for a very pleasant evening.

Back at the hotel it looked like the Oscars were being handed out; the place was full of excited young men and women. A red carpet led me up the stairs, then abandoned me by the elevator. The red carpet continued to the basement nightclub with its loud music, dominated by the thump-thump of the base, which got louder by the hour.

At 2 AM in the morning the scene outside my hotel was buzzing with people, men mostly, and some women of ill-repute, drinking enormous amounts of alcohol and getting noisier by the minute. I stood on the balcony for awhile, not being able to sleep, and surveyed the animated scene 6 stories below, then retired to my bed to continue reading why Richard Dawkins thinks God is a terribly destructive delusion. 

The receptionist at the hotel told me that Michael Jackson was dead. If you were to believe the TV, nothing else happened yesterday, not even in Iran. An email from an African colleague offered condoleances. Michael was one of our tribe, believe it or not.

Here in Addis, I heard his songs on car radios, in restaurants and shopping centers. Watching CNN I learned that even the US House or Representatives had a moment of silence. I think he would have liked knowing. May he does know. All channels on my two fancy flatscreen TVs were covering Michael, ad nauseam.

I spent a good part of the day chasing the elusive Ethiopian telcom simcard. Such cards are now the monopoly of the state. It controls who gets one and who does not. This stands in sharp contrast to the sale of such cards in other African countries.

I stopped at 4 different state-run telecom offices. I was asked to show my ID and then told they had run out of simcards. I saw long lines and people filling in multiple forms but I never saw a simcard changing hands. We went on a wild goose chase all over Addis. The suggestion that maybe we should call ahead before going through thick traffic to another branch office was met with indifference. No, we don’t have the number, and you should just go. I don’t know whether it was a case of foot dragging, not being able to say no to a foreigner, a supply problem or an intentional creation of scarcity. We finally gave up. I felt rather handicapped without a cellphone as landlines are very unreliable. How did we live without cell phones before?

Interrupting the chase from time to time I joined my colleagues who had flown in from the US ahead of me and were busy orienting our new project director. We are getting ready for an intense two weeks in which we have to bring many new people on board and hand over the running of the leadership program and put in into local hands.

Slowly the sky darkened and a thunderstorm produced some significant rain. In the office I was congratulated for having brought the rain, a sign of good luck. The big rains have been slow in coming and people are worried that another drought is in the making.

In the absence of a simcard I made my phone calls from the receptionist desk. It’s a busy place with people coming and going. One person came in and pulled a large wooden model that is used to demonstrate condom use, out of a plastic bag. Nobody flinched; it was as if he was showing the proofs of a brochure. I started to laugh because it was something both ordinary and extraordinary. This is part of the business we are in.

At the end of the day I returned to my large apartment via a local supermarket where I bought fresh roses for next to nothing. I continued unpacking while watching interminable re-runs of Michael Jackson, grieving fans and celebrations of his life. I asked the Italian restaurant to bring my meal to my room, accompanied by a large glass of south African (not Italian) wine and celebrated my safe arirval in Addis, great colleagues and an exciting new venture.

I bought and upgrade to business class for the last leg of the trip for an outrageous amount of points, 45500 – worth nearly two free round trips in the US but it was worth it. I was one of only a handful of people in the spacious cabin, without even a neighbor when they started moving people to the front out of an overflowing economy class. An ecstatic Scotsman plopped next to me, proudly showing his silver NW frequent flyer car. I tried to be happy for him but found myself a little annoyed about my expensive upgrade, having gold and platinum cards aplenty. Some people are lucky about these things. I have been flying with platinum cards for the last 10 years and only very rarely had such luck.

Breathlessly I read the entire book of Masuda Sultana on the plane, My War at Home. I had downloaded it on my Kindle as soon as Ghia had introduced me to her by email and now I am thrilled that I will someday meet her, in Kabul or Stateside. The book is an autobiography that starts with a 16 year old Afghan-American girl being married to a doctor 12 years her senior who slowly finds her voice and becomes an activist for Afghans women’s rights and justice for victims of US bombing attacks after 9/11 in Kandahar. It’s also a book about leadership for people who think they have no voice.

After I finished the book I finally started to focus on my assignment here in Ethiopia and drafted an agenda for the facilitator training that will start on Monday. Today I hope to meet the members of the consulting firm we hired to serve as our facilitator team. I have three days to orient them and bring them on board, after that they will run the senior alignment meeting with bosses and then run the first workshop in two places as a split team; eveyone will get a lot of practice and exposure. It’s a just-in-time kind of thing which allows us to withdraw quickly and support them from afar; a formula that has worked well in countless other places and leaves everyone with a great resources in country – win/win for all.

When I arrived at the hotel I was greeted by guards and attendants who are starting to recognize me. This time I was given an upgrade to a suite without having asked for it (frankly, I don’t care all that much about the size of hotel rooms – it’s the internet access that concerns me more). But when I opened the door to the suite I noticed clothes and other signs of life that indicated to me the room was not mine and I withdrew quickly.

The room next door was open. Inside I saw a group of people hatching some plan or another. When they streamed out and found me in the hall it turned out to have the manager among them. who apologized and invited me to take that room for the night. Tomorrow the enormous suite will be mine, he promised.

I slept well, with te thump-thumping of the active nightclub on the backside of the hotel, 7 floors down, only faintly audible. I woke up with the sun streaming into my room from the 45 feet terrace. And now I am going to have my first cup of the best macchiato in the world. It is served in the Italian restaurant 6 floors down that functions as the hotel’s restaurant.