Sylvia's Journal

I am working a few different jobs, as none is fulltime at the moment. There is the preparation for the senior team retreat of the southern Africa project, a follow up of a retreat 7 months ago – so far I am working from a more or less blank slate, talking with people, a few every day. The design should fall into place by the weekend when I switch back to the Lesotho project, with two events in the next two weeks: one senior staff retreat (government) and a capacity building event with civil service organizations involved in caring for orphans and vulnerable children.

I am also preparing for a trip early November to Bangladesh, a second try after the first attempt in April got frustrated by a multi-day general strike. I am watching with dismay pictures of street protests in Dhaka.

Back at headquarters attempts to define and create the learning organization at MSH are underway. I am working with a cross-organization team with some great minds on it. Although there is much written about learning organizations, we are on unchartered territory, as such an organization wide effort has never been tried on such a grand scale (MSH employs about 2000 people wordwide) and with a dedicated overhead budget.

And then there is the trip to Japan, in December. I am waiting for the contracting to be completed before organizing the travel, which will include Axel and a short vacation before the work starts. After that there are wide vistas of staying put which is a good thing as there are many things to celebrate (Faro turning one half year, Tessa and Steve returning from their road trip, Christmas and Christerklaas, and New Year).