Sylvia's Journal

I spent the entire day yesterday with my ten colleagues from the project here in the funky guesthouse where we met last time. We had asked for the Chinese room but people were staying in the bedrooms around it and so we returned to the Louis XV room where we had started our retreat 7 months ago.

We sat around a large dining table that was set for royalty when we came in. We had the staff remove the silver goblets and decorations, the crystal candelabras and the huge silver center piece, a terrine filled with moss, so that we could see each other across the table. We sat on damask covered chairs, a little rickety and creaky, but very elegant.

A pheasant and loud quaking ducks darted in and out of our room. The ducks were probably the babies that wandered in and out last March, chased by the mothers. Now these same mothers are grandparents, just as I am.

Outside on the wide porch two oversized South Africans were enjoying a healthy snack in their white bath robes. We talked about Bion’s dependency assumptions while they considered their next move: more food or massage?

After an exquisit lunch of poached salmon we discovered that the 10 people in the room represented nearly all the stops on Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions (individuality vs collectivism; high vs low power distance; high vs low uncertainty avoidance; masculinity vs feminity and Michael Bond’s time orientation (long versus short).  It was extraordinary, given that these data points came from only 10 people as they considered their own places on these dimensions and the places they’d put ‘their people’ on.

We explored more diversity in learning styles and modes of handling conflict and a small committee is looking at gender. Some experiential exercises anchored the conversation in actual behavior – we may see we do this, but when in a competitive mode, most of all revert back to our defaults – a status we are not always aware of.

Given the extraordinary diversity, it is actually a miracle to see this group so productive and successful. But the success comes at some price, the mental energy it takes to navigate all these differences.

I am preparing for my departure late tonight. The expense report is done; the report is on the program for this morning – a time of endings and new beginnings, with two plane rides serving as the transition between these two states.

Every morning, like brushing my teeth, I dutifully vote 10 times for Razia jan on CNN’s heroes page. She is one of 10 people selected who are now vying for the top spot. I don’t know what the prize is but I am sure it will benefit Afghan girls and that is what matters. Please cast your votes here.

I am back in Pretoria for the home stretch. Today I finished the design, after having run it by the chief last night over dinner. For the retreat we are returning to the same fantasy place (Illyria house, Chinese room) where we were 7 months ago.

Since the business center (a chair with a computer and a printer) at the hotel was not functional (empty ink cartridge) a colleague was so nice to come and get me and installed me at her home office while she was preparing dinner. When I was done I joined a little Dutch boy in baking cookies – the same boy who I had met, with his parents and 5 siblings, two weeks ago. We are good friends now, especially since we got three times the expected number of cookies from the dough and we got to taste them to make sure they were alright.

I am trying to catch up on my two Coursera courses and dutifully do my quizzes at the end of the week. One of the courses has a feature called SSC (screen side chat) with a doctoral student or lecturer reviewing the four topics that got the most votes on the discussion forum. Imagine having to comb through posts from 100.000 students every day.  He acknowledges the authors of insightful questions and manages to make the course feel quite intimate. At the end of each week we are asked to answer questions about whether we believe the teachers care about us (yes!), whether it feels as if he is present (yes!) and such.

I am beginning to suspect what the business model might be and it is all about learning. Imagine getting all these real life stories from 100.000 people – there must be at least 1000 research papers hidden in the discussion forum.

My neck is still tender from the Thai massage Katie took me to. The satin curtain-enclosed massage spaces reminded me of the Thai massage house in Kabul, which was eventually closed when the masseuses didn’t get their visa renewed (supposedly because they were taking away jobs from Afghans, ha!)

The massage was long overdue after two weeks of way too much time in front of a computer – and as a result rather intense. I kept wondering whether to ask her to reduce the pressure a bit but then she moved to another part of my body.

We completed the morning’s outing with a sushi meal at what is becoming one of my favored restaurants. I ordered a copy of the meal to take home for dinner.

I have nearly completed my week of inquiry into the senior team’s functioning, with only two more interviews to go.  The patterns are beginning to emerge from the heavily populated mindmap in which I am pouring the answers to my questions about progress, stand stills, informal norms and desired outcomes of the retreat. Getting the ingredients out of which to fashion the design of the senior team retreat was the reason for my one week trip to Pretoria. I consider it a success.

Friday night I participated in a ‘make-your-own-pizza’ night at Katie’s and Josh where a Dutch couple from Venlo with their six small children were busy fashioning the pizzas, even one with chocolate and marshmallows, which I let pass. It was an evening with much kid energy and great conversation about lives lived overseas and speaking Dutch (I passed the test).

Everything is changing again in Lesotho. The senior leadership retreat is indefinitely postponed as key participants were summoned by another ministry to do work that can’t wait. My counterpart has been transferred to another ministry and so we go back to square one. As a result my extended stay makes less sense and requires rescheduling on the Pretoria side as well.  In the meantime all the flights home from South Africa are filling up – it is amazing how, even on weekdays, all the flights (and there are many) are full.

I am working a few different jobs, as none is fulltime at the moment. There is the preparation for the senior team retreat of the southern Africa project, a follow up of a retreat 7 months ago – so far I am working from a more or less blank slate, talking with people, a few every day. The design should fall into place by the weekend when I switch back to the Lesotho project, with two events in the next two weeks: one senior staff retreat (government) and a capacity building event with civil service organizations involved in caring for orphans and vulnerable children.

I am also preparing for a trip early November to Bangladesh, a second try after the first attempt in April got frustrated by a multi-day general strike. I am watching with dismay pictures of street protests in Dhaka.

Back at headquarters attempts to define and create the learning organization at MSH are underway. I am working with a cross-organization team with some great minds on it. Although there is much written about learning organizations, we are on unchartered territory, as such an organization wide effort has never been tried on such a grand scale (MSH employs about 2000 people wordwide) and with a dedicated overhead budget.

And then there is the trip to Japan, in December. I am waiting for the contracting to be completed before organizing the travel, which will include Axel and a short vacation before the work starts. After that there are wide vistas of staying put which is a good thing as there are many things to celebrate (Faro turning one half year, Tessa and Steve returning from their road trip, Christmas and Christerklaas, and New Year).

Yesterday I arrived at the airport, got a rental car and found my way back to the MSH apartment.  It took less than a few minutes to get the hang of driving on the wrong side of the road. At the apartment I met the land lady who handy me a lantern, with the bad news that the electricity may well be out for a few days, after a bad storm on Friday that left the posh neighborhood powerless.

I went out to buy food that did not require heat or cold to prepare, which happened to be food I had not had enough of in Maseru: salads and fruits, and a bottle of wine. I prepared my meal before the sun set and was in bed with the lantern on my bedside table and a book when it got dark.  I have been reading a lot as a result of the power outage, finishing Sylvia Nasr’s fascinating story of the people who made modern economics (Grand Pursuit).

This morning I went to the local coffee shop where many other outage refugees were charging their electronics while sipping their lattes and cappuccinos– it created an instant camaraderie, even though I was a foreigner.

After making calls to the right people, one gentleman gave me the thumbs up and headed home. I did the same but realized we must have been living in a different neighborhood as everything remained off in the apartment. I decided to spend the rest of the day at a nearby shopping mall, selecting my lunch place based on the location of the electrical outlets. I had a very slow lunch, in sync with the recharging of the phone rather than the posted hours of the lunch place, to the barely visible annoyance of the wait staff. I left a very generous tip.

Not wanting to go home quite yet I decided to go see a movie (Woody Allen’s Rome) in a near empty cinema (so-so). I drove home before the sun set to make sure I could find my way into the apartment, expecting the worst, but found the refrigerator humming and the lights on.

Now everything is charged again and I am back on the grid, watching TV to see what happened in the world while I was away. Nothing good.