Sylvia's Journal

We spent all of yesterday with the core team of facilitators – reviewing the program in the morning and then practice sessions followed by feedback in the afternoon. The enthusiasm is quite amazing. It is not often that I work with government officials who arrive early and stay late, making 12 hour days. They are taking on sessions and teaching about concepts that they are still discovering themselves. They will be just a step or so ahead of the participants. One of the two regional directors whose districts will be in the program has entirely cleared his agenda. Both he and another high level official from the central government are fully present all the time.

The room setup is far from ideal. The room is filled to capacity with a huge oval made from gleaming tables that are immovable. The chairs are bulky and there are not enough for the number of participants we expect so we have to put regular chairs in the narrow strip that runs along the center of the oval. The floor is covered with extension cords holding other extension cords holding other extension cord and on and on. I suspect all of this goes into one socket.

Along both sides of the room are theatre chairs, bolted to the floor which, in their up position, leaves some space to pass from back to front, but when filled will not. There are few wall surfaces we can hang things on, even if we remove the giant pictures which reveal scary electrical outlets and dust from centuries. There are many large shiny and tasseled curtains in front of the windows and doors. It is not the most difficult place I have done workshops in but it will be a challenge.

Today will be yet another trust fall although less scary than the previous ones during this trip. Now I know the facilitators and that they are fully engaged. They want to succeed as much as I want them to, maybe even more. This has become their program and they have made promises to the big bosses and so, as one participant said, nous n’avons pas droit d’erreur. For me that is a bit stark, as mistakes are bound to happen, but, globalement, as people love to say here, we are on the right path and there will be results if we continue this way. Of that I am sure.

What started as a rather stiff meeting, following all the usual protocol, a near tangible fear to move off the beaten path, made place for a room full of energetic people wanting to show how much they want things to change. This is the predicament here. As one of the participants told me over lunch, we are so used to certain ways, and it is so difficult to break out of it, even if we want to. Indeed, I see this over and over. There is a lot of fear to challenge prevailing norms in the here and now but when we talk about a then or there, everyone is brave.

The intent of our ‘alignment’ meeting today was to create a buzz and get the support of the superiors of what will happen in the two regions where we are launching our leadership program. In a way it was also a test run for the newly formed ministry facilitators. I believe we accomplished everything and may be even more. The facilitators did a dynamite job, pretty much running the show with me doing only the shared vision as I knew that one was a bit too far out of the ordinary.

And then we set of for the interior, a 100 or so kilometers north east of the capital, to the town of Adzope which I can only remember because it sounds like a sleep medicine or an antidepressant.
We are lodged in a small country hotel which, to my surprise, claimed to have wifi (pronounced wee-fee in French), but of course not now. Luckily my dangle works well.

Everyone in the hotel is watching either a Brazilian or a Lebanese soap opera; the Lebanese with many tears coming out of very well made up eyes (no smudges) and the Brazilian seems to be about triangle relationships – all dubbed in French.

The waitress in the hotel made no move towards us when we sat down in the restaurant and kept watching the TV. We asked if we could eat there. She shook her head in the affirmative but didn’t get up. I asked if she was one in charge of the restaurant and she nodded yes again, without letting her eyes wander from the TV. I asked what was for dinner and she listed a few things. My colleague asked for a menu; reluctantly she got up and fetched a one page menu. I asked what was actually available: fish and chicken, peas and potatoes. She sat down again.

My colleague had brought two very large and ripe mangoes. We asked the listless restaurant (manager? Waitress? Cook?) to bring us a plate and a knife. Maybe she was relieved that we simply ate our own mango meal and didn’t ask her to do anything that would take her away from the TV. We decided to stick with our mangoes and consider that our meal. I asked her whether we could have mangoes for breakfast (we are in full mango season and they are everywhere) and she said no, we couldn’t have mangoes for breakfast, resuming her watch. The concept of customer service has not arrived here.

The weekend was boring, except for a brief interlude on Sunday with a colleague from the Johns Hopkins project who rescued me from the hotel and took me to a nice sandwich place in another part of town.

I swam a little in the pool, read a little, and caught some typos in the documents we need for our work for next week. I also sent the wrong document to my colleague and kicked myself a few times for that after she spent much time on her Saturday off fixing what had already been fixed in another version. I caught up on emails and complied with requests from HR to prepare our annual performance reviews.

I now have a little gadget that plugs into my computer and allows me access the internet wherever I am. It has been a godsend and for the first time in two weeks I can count on being connected. But really, how much time cans I sit in front of a computer, connected or not.

Watching TV has not added to my enjoyment as all channels show the same misery. And so I read (about the 1918 Influenza), do jigsaw puzzles on my iPad and read parts of the New York Times I usually don’t have time for; all this interrupted by meals. It’s very much like a long plane ride.

But tomorrow things will pick up and next week will, no doubt, race by as we go from one event to another requiring much coaching and encouraging of my brand-new team here. They will have to sail onwards on their own after I leave next Saturday.

I checked out the conference room we will occupy tomorrow. The gentleman who showed me the room, and helped me re-arrange the furniture, told me when we were done that he wasn’t sure this would actually be the room we would use. Hmmm. When I tried to get back to my hotel room the elevator refused to take me up and I needed a new room key.

In short, the only thing going for the Novotel is its buffet breakfast. I imagine that once business picks up here (I heard today there are plans to renovate this part of town) they either have to bring in a new management team, drop a few stars or wither away. I am not coming back, not even for the breakfast.

I left my small Chinese multi-socket plug in Grand Bassam with the hotel’s electrician. It had stopped working and I had asked him to take a look inside. It has travelled with me around the world since I first bought it somewhere in Africa light years ago.

He returned the thing to me saying it was very dangerous and there was no point in fixing it as the fuse was gone. I left it with him with the thick wire and the plug by way of payment for his services.

This morning I walked around the Plateau in search of a new item because most of the time I stay in hotels that have only one outlet and I have a phone (sometimes two), a computer and an iPad so I need more than one place to plug these things in.

The Plateau is (or maybe was) the commercial center of Abidjan. It was badly damaged during ‘les evènements,’ a popular euphemism in the francophone world for civil war. It hasn’t recovered and feels like a dead zone. The pavements and roads are in very bad shape and the shops are either shuttered or occupied by companies, many Lebanese, which sell electrical household items from fridges and airconditioners to mixers and toasters. I found another ‘multi-prise’ which is also made in China and is not grounded but it will have to do.

In the meantime I am trying to figure out how this Novotel dares to claim 5 stars. It is among the sketchiest five stars I have ever been in. The internet is wobbly, at best; the rooms don’t get cleaned unless you call housekeeping (no housekeeping cart in sight all day); laundry service takes three days; staff argues with you when you don’t understand something; the elevators date back to the 50s, the floor is covered with a yucky carpet (moquette); there are burn holes on the couch in my non-smoking room, the refrigerator cube can barely hold a large water bottle, no massage or pedi/manivures available, a tiny store that is never (wo)manned and a reception that cannot find my reservation. On top of that it is located in a derelict part of town. Yet the prices are similar to the fancy hotel Manila which, if we could extend stars, I would have given 10.

On Monday, after we have completed our alignment meeting we will travel into the interior, some 100+ kilometers north east from Abidjan to complete the fourth and last of my assignments. I don’t have any expectations about my lodging but wouldn’t mind being surprised.

We spent today (Friday) planning and practicing the various sessions we will conduct on Monday to launch the leadership program with stakeholders at the central level. We want their benediction and also create a bit of a buzz. We used the model that is central to our leadership program, the challenge model, to design the event, giving the brand new facilitators from the ministry of health another chance at practicing what they learned earlier in the week.

They are brave souls, taking on sessions that they would not have expected to run in their wildest dreams only a week ago. After lunch we had ‘micro-facilitation’ sessions which we applauded and then critiqued with a view to making them better.

I put the finishing touches on the slides with instructions so that we don’t have to make too many flipcharts as the number of invitees is high (50). This will be a bit of a management challenge.

And while I was doing this I watched French TV which, probably like any other station, showed one horrendous catastrophe after another. I can see why people sometimes think the world is going to hell in a hand basket – you would if you watch TV all the time: Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iraq, Korea, Abudja, Syria, South Sudan – all terrible stories of woe and terror, nastiness and incompetence. Luckily I know of many more instances where goodness wins the day and people focus on making the world a better place. There are always more of those than the nasties or incompetents.