Sylvia's Journal

We are back at the Alisa hotel which has as its motto “The Best Among Equals.” This is a bit of a mind twister. I suspect what sets them apart from the other equals is that they have two Cerulean (blue) leather couches in the lobby that flank a Herculean air-conditioning apparatus. I am sitting on one of the couches to pick up the wireless that does not reach into my room this time. I am surrounded by myself because of all the mirrors.

In the 25 years that I have traveled to and in Africa, the continent has made great strides: wireless internet, cell phones, ATMs,  just to mention a few of the things that have made our lives easier while on the road in Africa. You know that you are getting old when all this was unimaginable when I made my first trip across Africa in the late 70s. On the other hand, traffic jams were rare at the time, as is the more tangible pollution that goes with it.

Yesterday we started our day at the beach, having another breakkfast with a view. It seems that the beach resort is much frequented by the Dutch since the little library in the restaurant consisted mostly of Dutch books. This was perfect as I was in need of a new book. We read for a few hours, and swam in the best waves and water temperature one could wish for. Around noon we piled into the car with club sandwiches and limp but tasty French fries to return to Accra. It took several hours, especially the last few kilometers.

Susan had invited us for dinner at her house. She has spent much of her career in Francophone Africa, mostly West and we reminisced about places and people as old folks do (we did apologize to Cabul but he seems to enjoy it). We discovered that we all know Jerry Martin, among others.

Cabul and I completed the burning of CDs and we printed a set of certificates of appreciation for the staff of ADRA, from drivers to Country Director. Some twelve people have put their shoulders behind the launch of this program and in their various capacities contributed to the success of this first phase.

Today we are going for our debriefing at USAID this morning, then to ADRA, then to the Management Institute (GIMPA) which is at Legon University for lunch and then back to write reports and finish all that cannot wait. And then I am leaving for the airport, leaving Cabul behind who is still trying to get tickets to the Ghana-Guinea match or something else.

The best part of travel is going home.

On Wednesday night Cabul and I were eating our NicaBoca Glory desert (pink ice-cream with crushed peanuts and chocolate sauce) while sitting in a Caribbean looking restaurant, looking out at a starless night with a giant flaming oil rig in the far distance off the coast. (Could this be a real burning platform?) The NicaBoca Glory was a special indulgence to celebrate our achievement. Less than a month ago Cabul had asked whether we could pull off what we just pulled off. I had said yes but only if he came along. And so we did.

The workshop ended exactly at the appointed time and in the envisioned high spirits. All through the morning the facilitators had been facilitating and I had been busy thinking of loose ends that required my attention as well as preparing the materials and photos to be burned on a CD for each of the teams and a few high level officials. Outside the conference room Cabul and Jennifer were preparing for the ritual of handing out the envelopes. This is a euphemism for money. Participants get it on the last day so they don’t cash in and leave on the first day. Frankly, I would have preferred that as it would have separated the corn from the chaff, or at least the really light chaff would have been blown away. When people have no interest in coming other than the handout they receive I’d rather not have them in the room. On the other hand, now that they stayed, we may have planted some seeds.

The preparation of the envelopes required that Cabul make several trips to the local bank which was a severe test of his patience. In this part of the world banks are not there to serve you but to serve themselves. If you expect anything else you are bound to get frustrated. I am very glad that it was Cabul and not me who had to deal with this.

Once the closing speech was made the feeding frenzy started, both figuratively (the envelopes) and literally. Countless drivers came out of the woodwork to claim their envelope and a free lunch. The plan was for the facilitators to lunch together and reflect on the entire workshop and look ahead to the next. This part did not go according to plan. Some of the facilitators returned to the training room to announce that all the food was gone. How 40 people can eat that much food so quickly is a mystery but they did. This did not help their mood; several of them were anxious to get on the road. The discontent came on top of other grudges that were wrapped in verbiage about mismatched expectations. Some of it was our fault and some of it was about the meaning of ‘expenses.’ Unfortunately it was our new team leader’s organization that was seen by all as the miser. I felt bad because such things can create ripples that affect their work here. I am not sufficiently familiar with this country to know whether grudges like that hang around for a long time or are quickly forgotten.

It was a tricky situation that showed how quickly a sense of collective inspiration can be completely eroded by mismatched expectations, or, more seriously, by more basic needs. It also shows that the collaborative spirit was still a very thin veneer. It does make one think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The situation asked for leadership and that is what I then saw in action. The team’s new leader stepped up to the plate, got the anger and frustration out in the open and facilitated a conversation until agreements were reached in which we all, not just me and Cabul, had a role to play. We ended up not doing any of the thorough debriefing I had hoped to do because the last conversation used up all our remaining energies.

I committed a final faux pas by hugging instead of shaking hands. I could tell from the bodies stiffening under the hug that I had crossed a boundary. It was time to part company and go our way. Cabul and I quickly packed up our own stuff and left the hotel even though the restaurant had started to prepare more food and announced, by way of our driver, at 4 PM that lunch was ready. But by then we had just completed our debriefing with the Regional Health Director and preferred to continue down the road rather than turn back for what would be a heavy starchy lunch that I could do without.

After one more attempt to extract money out of an uncooperative bank and a finicky ATM (we did succeed eventually) we were off to our evening and morning of relaxation at the Anomabo Beach Resort – I kept calling it the Anaconda Beach Resort – where Cabul had made us a reservation. It is a hitchhikers and campers place on the ocean, simple and lovely. We took the most expensive rooms (45 dollars) for our night of luxury and had one big bottle of beer each, plus that NicaBoca Glory ice-cream desert.

Computer viruses are more rampant in West Africa than anywhere else. I don’t know why but my computer constantly gets infected by the pen drives (data sticks) that people use to exchange files. May be it is because many people travel with pen drives or external hard disks and use them in internet cafes. It is the computer equivalent of having sex with strangers in bath houses. So when someone gives me a pen drive in this part of the world I am particularly careful. Yet somehow one virus slipped into the system. Symantec discovered it but told me there was nothing it could do. I had just finished reading Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone about the Ebola and Marburg virus and it felt a little bit like catching one of those. With some sense of dread and foreboding I was waiting to see if this infection was going to be fatal.

And then it happened, the sluggishness, a reboot and then all my personal settings disappeared. Everything familiar on my desktop had vanished. Instead I saw the solemn grey Dell screen that is standard in the new computer. While all this was happening the one facilitator who I had not seen in action yet was doing his session. I needed to watch him. I tried not to panic.

What happened next was quite similar to my reaction 6 months ago in the other crash. The feelings generated by both crashes were remarkably similar. There was a moment of bewilderment, followed by surrender – a recognition that this was an event entirely beyond my control. And then there was an intense effort to concentrate on the here and now and trying not to think of what lay ahead; while life went on in the background. Only for me had the foreground and background traded places.

I alerted Cabul to my predicament and he started to Skype chat with colleagues in Boston for help. He was my first responder and was able to stop the wave of panic by finding everything else that was not on the desktop. That was one big sigh of relief, something similar to when the doctors said, “You will all be OK.”

And then came the period in which everything that was simple before and that you took for granted no longer was. Like the names of people you email regularly that automatically complete themselves when you start typing; or the way the desktop was organized; or Outlook that needed to be installed and was empty at first, taking hours to fill up with megabytes of content, or all the electronic Post-It Notes that I had on my desktop with things I wanted to remember or be reminded of, such as codes, numbers, quotes, book titles, websites, etc.

Several hours passed and I started the long work of computer rehab to re-build everything that had to do with personal settings until I had no more energy left. Back in my room I restarted my computer again for reasons I can’t remember anymore. Then there was that moment of suspense, staring for what seemed like eons to the empty blue blank screen, and then suddenly, there was the old desktop again with everything on it, as if nothing happened, even the files I had been moving from one place to another were where they are supposed to be. As if it was all just a bad dream.

There was rhythm yesterday in our conference room. And one rhythm set of another and another. Before we knew it we had a chain reaction.

It is delightful to work in a context that is not big on protocol. We shove a table to the front of the room. It had some nice Kente cloth (not the real thing, a print) pulled over it which set it apart from the participant tables that were covered in a sort of fancy bed sheet with blue lacy corners. The other thing that set it apart was of course the plastic flower arrangement, a staple in any hotel that is worth its salt. If you have plastic flowers on your table, then you know you are important.  I have seen people enter a workshop room and scan it for the plastic flowers. It is like a beacon that guides people to their proper place.

The regional director, the doc from the central level and I sat in back of the ‘head’ table and each said their words of encouragement and support and then we set to work.

I rarely ventured out from my seat in the far left corner where I watched and occasionally took notes for the feedback session that we had at the end of the day. This is truly a very experienced and accomplished group of facilitators; a sharp contrast to government officials I have worked with in other parts of the world who have a habit of telling people what to do. They tell first and ask later, if they ask at all. Rhythm is usually lacking.

By lunch people remarked, in a surprised sort of way, that there had not been any powerpoints or people lecturing them. As the day wore on the surprise increased; people participated; people were not dozing off; people were full of energy. It always amazes me that after 25 years of exposure to American or British or German or what not experts who do training of trainers, having what I would call a normal engaging inquiry into people’s realities coupled with an orientation towards some simple frameworks is so extraordinary that people notice. What has everyone been doing all these years?

It is of course all in the structure of the design. Interestingly Axel wa also thinking about structure which he mentioned in an email just when I was thinking about structure. Structures can be constructive and destructive. This applies to any structure in our lives of course. If you design it well, the action will follow in predictable ways getting exactly where you want to go. If you design it badly, the structure will constantly pull you off track and you spent all your energy amaking course adjustments. You may never make it to your destination.

Late in the day the facfee beast reared its ugly head. I have come to expect it and it was nice to have Cabul with me to deal with it. Facfee stands for facilitator fee. The entrenched belief is that money motivates and without it there will not be movement. It is so entrenched, all over Africa, that it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Until a year ago I had never heard of this facfee thing. It is a payment in cash to people to do what is considered ‘in addition’ to their regular work. It is an escape hatch from contracting which can never be done with public sector employees as per USAID regulations.  Before when we used to do the facilitation ourselves, it wasn’t an issue because the government officials we worked with were participants not facilitators. They received the per diem which, in some countries, can be a nice salary complement, especially if you go to many workshops and they last long. With the trend towards short workshops (one or two days), this is not longer so interesting. And with the trend towards local facilitation, this becomes an issue. With private sector or NGO people we contract, either directly with them, as independent consultants or through their organizations. Of course this time all of this is a bit shaky as we organized the event over the holidays and, not knowing the cast of characters, we arrived without anny contrtacts in place. We did not want to establish contracts with people or organizations we did not know. Cabul has to iron this out in the next few days before we head home so that we can have the proper contactual arrangements with everyone. As for the government employees, there is a broken record, stuck in the groove that says ‘not allowed.’ We’ll see where that takes us..