Sylvia's Journal

The Togo trip is nearly over. I am halfway home (in Paris now). I had wanted to buy an upgrade for the night flight from Lome but didn’t think it was worth the 500 euro Air France wanted. Instead I took a sleeping pill and I might as well have been in B-class. You can buy a lot of sleeping pills for 500 euro.

During this past week in Togo we, or rather ICRC, had brought together teams from rehab centers in Senegal, Mali, Niger, Togo and Madagascar. I knew some of them. Over the past three years we had organized these events but now we have passed the baton to ICRC which, in turn, is passing the baton to the management teams of those centers. In the process ICRC is also passing the baton of accompanying the process to its local (as opposed to expat) staff. This is how things should go. From being in charge I am now a hired hand.

We have worked together on this initiative with several Geneva- and field-based staff for the last several years. Now, after two last trainings (last week in Bangkok and this week in Togo), the teams will be coached rather than trained. They have their marching orders and have to show some pretty compelling results, starting in the next few months in terms of baseline data, and then over the next three years to show these data show improvements. No more easy money. Accountability it is!

We divided the coaching of the country teams over the next three years among our MSH colleagues. One will  coach the Cambodia and Myanmar teams, another the Pakistan teams, another the Togo and Madagascar teams and I get to travel to Mali and Niger in the fall (when the Harmattan blows in the Sahel). MSH is contracting with ICRC for my three trips to these countries and have monthly calls.  It won’t be enough to keep me gainfully employed but it will be interesting. I just have to find some other work in the side.

It was nice to have newcomers and old-timers to our management and leadership development program in the room together. The old-timers re-assured the newcomers that change was possible, that they should stop saying that they needed more money to do their work, and that they should start to change themselves rather than focusing on others to change. It was so very satisfying to have other people pass the message. This is experiential learning: experience first, then decide whether you like it or not. Having the old-timers in the room was very helpful.

I hardly left the hotel. One night I joined a small group to eat in a Chinese restaurant half a mile from the hotel.  A drunken motorbike taxi driver tried to recruit us to take a ride on his bike. He was ranting about how wonderful ‘les blancs’ were. We tried to ignore him but he ignored our silent treatment. At the Chinese we were the only guests, something that worried me but the food was good and freshly prepared. One of our ICRC colleagues has lived in China and dug up some Chinese words from his memory.

In front of the hotel is the beach which stretches all along the Bay of Benin for I don’t know how many miles. It is a beautiful wide beach with fine sands, the kind that would be any hotel’s dream in the US. But here it is, at least after dark, the territory of bad guys (‘brigands’). The hotel wouldn’t let us, two white women, walk the quarter mile or so to the water’s edge on our own even before it got dark.  And so a young hotel employee accompanied us and told us much about himself; when we arrived back at the hotel he wanted email addresses. This is all part of the dream of one day being sponsored to everyone’s dream – America. I let my younger colleague deal with this request. I get enough emails as it is from people desperate to leave the place they were born.