Sylvia's Journal

Except for my very short trip to Ivory Coast earlier this year, I haven’t been much in French West Africa for nearly a decade. The arrival at Cotonou airport reminded me of arriving in Mali decades ago, or in Haiti before the new terminal was built.

The French have many great words to describe the chaos: pagaille, anarchie, brouillamini, cafouillage, désordre, gâchis. Maybe it is the poet it in me that likes these words that are so full of the noises they describe. You can practical hear the luggage carts bumping into each other, grinding to a massive gridlocked halt; the enormous boxes wrapped in plastic film containing luxuries from France, dwarfing the men in dusters below them; the big mamas with their oversized boubous and large gauzy scarves; the babies, finally asleep and the husbands busy greetings friends and relatives.

There was no way I could see, let alone extract, my suitcase from the fast moving baggage belt through the throngs of people and carts that separated me from my case. Being tired and resigned rather than assertive I was slowly but steadily pushed into the walls of the tiny arrival hall. I think the hall was designed a long time ago when planes were DC6s and small boys carried one’s possessions past sleepy douaniers.  

Some people, maybe those from the diaspora, dressed in western clothes rolled their eyes at me as if to distantiate themselves from the disorder of their homeland.  

I thanked my lucky stars I had only one suitcase and nothing else.  I had offered to bring a Xerox box full of books – but that offer was made to late, for which I was most grateful. I surrendered until the suitcase would appear, and settled in for a long wait. Eventually it did appear and all was well.

This is what surprises me about this part of the world: the total acceptance, or maybe tolerance, of what seems such an easy problem to solve. Why not get rid of these bulky baggage carts and engage more of the skinny porters?

My sparring partner here, who hails from another part of West Africa, has a pair of glasses with one of the sides of the frame entirely bent out of shape. He doesn’t seem to notice or mind. Last time I saw him he still had the small sticker with the strength of the lenses (2+) attached to them. I wonder whether it is the same frame, now without the sticker. I think that frame was bent too.

I carry with me a small notebook and write down the things that I see that I find inexplicable. Sometimes these things make me smile, sometimes they make me wonder and once in a while they get me very irritated. I ponder all this while stuck in traffic and occasionally I have a brilliant thought, like this one: It occurred to me that the people here live very much in the present, unlike us in the US who live either in the past or in the future.

For example, even though it may rain heavily (the weather site for Benin tells me so, and, presumably farmers know about this), no one carries an umbrella. And then, when it rains, surprise, everyone gets soaked. Maybe that is the point – it’s refreshing while it rains, but afterwards?  [And of course, there are few Senegalese here, the guys who are selling umbrellas in New York, it’s more lucrative.] I, on the other hand, even though I never actually use an umbrella, always have one handy, just in case.

The people who live here could benefit to live a little more in the future whereas we could benefit from living a little more in the here and now. In that respect my co-facilitator and I make a good pair, me fretting about things that may or may not happen, anticipating alternative scenarios, and my partner looking happily through his crooked glasses at what is right in front of his nose. We have been making good leadership workshops together since back in the previous century.

My doctor told me I should eat more garlic to counter the hot flashes, whether caused by a malfunctioning thyroid or because I am of a certain age. This requirement is more than fulfilled by the restaurant of Hotel du Lac which sprinkles all its dishes with enormous amounts of garlic that leave me gasping for fresh air.

We completed our first day preparing members of the ‘Order of Pharmacists’ of this country for their leadership role in realizing their mission of promoting ethical and independent behavior and honoring the pharmaceutical profession as a critical actor in promoting and maintaining good health.

After a hesitant start that made our careful planning of yesterday irrelevant from the start, we ended up with five people in the room, plus two of our colleagues. This will be the team of coaches, to oversee the leadership program that is for the rank and file who will join us on Wednesday.

Compared with facilitating a meeting of 120 people on my own only 2 weeks ago, this ratio is rather luxurious, 7 people with 2 facilitators and tomorrow only 3 participants per facilitator. Only on Wednesday will the ratio be more reasonable: 24 for the two of us.

We are retrofitting an approach painstakingly developed over the last 10 years to a situation that doesn’t quite fit the design – but it is robust enough that the general principles are relevant even to this small group. The challenges of the pharmacists lend themselves well to the Challenge Model, a visual image with embedded questions to get from mission to ‘what next tomorrow?’

We tackled questions of ethics as well as support for a profession that suffers from unregulated sellers of both legal and potentially ineffective, counterfeit or smuggled drugs – cheap prices for drugs of unknown origin and dubious effect. But with a sizable illiterate and superstitious population, such practices go easily unnoticed. The bonafide pharmacists are being asked to comply with ISO standards and engage in a lengthy, costly and rigorous certification exercise. The prize for such compliance is a promise of better earnings at a later time but many are not yet convinced. There are only a handful of early adopters (some in the room with us). The challenge is how to get more of them. That was one of our discussions today, to be continued tomorrow.