The Devex Newswire of March 10 included a link to a video of John Oliver about USAID. I watched all 33 minutes of it. It made me intensely mad and sad. It was a little over a year that we received the stop work order from a USAID contractor I did work for work in South Africa. Work I was negotiating with other organizations that occupy or occupied the global health arena never materialized. Hearing people in the Oliver video delight in the demise of USAID – people who clearly knew nothing about the work that was done through USAID – is still very hard to stomach. I hope these men are being visited at night by the ghosts of those they harmed.
There was more sadness when I started cleaning out my files from the work I did until that fateful ‘stop-work-order’ day. I had kept these files active even though nothing active was happening. It was wishful thinking that one day we would liberate the work from the woodchipper (and put Elon in it). Now I know this may not happen anytime soon although I hope one day we will bend over and gather all those dropped threads. I leafed through the folders, reading proposals, interview notes and reports of my findings to the people who had hired me. A few years earlier I had finished a two year course on team coaching and I was excited about the promise of working with teams rather than individuals. My team coaching practice in the USAID world never got off the ground.
During my years of coaching and working with teams I often reflected on how much drama there was in organizations before our current administration. I had been a keen student of Cy Wakeman who calls herself the drama queen. She had calculated that people in US corporations spent some 2.5 hours a day immersed in drama, which is 2.5 hours a day less for the work they are being paid for. In some of the organizations I worked with there were people who claimed it was as much as 4 hours a day. Little did we all know that all this small ‘d’ drama disappeared overnight when Musk went to work with his chainsaw. That was the real Drama.
Sylvia's Journal 
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