I have completed 3 of the 5 days of preparing for our alignment meeting, plus three evenings for running my ‘night’ jobs as one colleague calls them: being the lead facilitator on a French language virtual leadership course for teams from Ivory Coast, Madagascar, DRC, Senegal and a few other countries, and putting the finishing touches on session designs for the TB-medicines conference that starts on March 1 in Bangkok.
The day job has been relatively light with lots of time spent in tuk-tuks in traffic. I am wearing my mouth mask, as do so many others here, to protect my lungs from the fumes. We interview stakeholders in the provision of wheelchairs. It is one great puzzle to entangle and the notion of a stakeholder meeting is unclear. People are polite. When I ask what they want out of the meeting they say: ‘that you meet your objectives!” I can hear them think ‘dear’ at the end of the sentence. I am sometimes embarrassed to be part of a long line of donor representatives, which I am for all intents and purposes, selling their wares. There was a kind of a stakeholder meeting in December; some attended, some did not; some saw the report, some did not, and no individual or organizational names are attached to the action plan items. Who is responsible I cannot discern. This too was a workshop/meeting organized by externals. These are the only ones that would pay for such a gathering. I would like this meeting to be different, with a focus on energy, passion for the task, collective inspiration and accountability, rather than purely intellectual, focused on producing more plans that don’t make your heart beat faster.
The antidote to cynical thoughts is watching the young kids with cerebral palsy being fitted in their tiny wheelchairs. The ear to ear grins, the sense of liberation that they show brings tears to my eyes. For the first time in their lives, these kids will be able to interact with the world in a seated position. It is hard to imagine what that means: it means better nutrition, better muscle tone, and the learning of social skills. The lives of these kids and their families will never quite be the same, and better for it. Our alignment meeting is to make sure that these kids are followed as they grow, get bigger wheelchairs, get PT. But right now there is no guarantee that this will actually happen. In 6 months they need to be fitted again, but by whom, and where, is the question.
In the meantime Axel is touristing in the north, seeing the Ankor Watt complex, having massages, resting, worrying about snow in Manchester, and eating food that taste good but sometimes upsets the stomach. He will bus down to Phnom Penh on Friday and arrive, hopefully, in time for our dinner cruise on the Mekong to celebrate the end of the level 2 fitting of wheelchair course with the participants.
On Saturday we are taking a break and drive to Kep on the coast for a relaxing 24 hours. After that it is show time.
Sylvia's Journal 
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