Sylvia's Journal

When you arrive in Ghana a big sign with the words ‘Akwaba’ welcomes you. Right below it is another sign “Peadophiles and other sexual deviants are not welcome here.” There was a gentleman sitting behind me on the plane who was reading a help-yourself-type book with the title, “The Hardness Factor.” I did not have to read the subtitle to know what that was about. I don’t’ think he fits the category the Ghanaians are afraid of, at least not yet. The lady sitting next to me on the way back was reading a much tamer book that contained 105 prayers. Of course I don’t know what the prayers were for.

When you leave the country you are reminded every 10 meters that drug traffickers eventually get behind bars. Someone designed this campaign, hired an ad agency and now it is considered implemented. Will any of these campaigns make a difference, I wonder?

On my last night in Accra I saw another campaign at work as I was watching a local TV network: a compelling ad shows people trying to slip money into the hands of officials for work they are not supposed to be paid for. In the first part of the ad you see various officials happily pocketing the bills and providing the payer (briber) with whatever it is he wants. Interestingly, none of the bribers are women. Then, the movie is rewound and the same scenes played over again but this time each of the officials portrayed (women among them) shouts ‘NO’ with the sound missing but you can read their lips. They bravely and selflessly put the common good before self interest. It looks so simple. It is a strategy out of the behavior change school that believes that exhortations to “just say no!” actually work.

That it is not as simple I witnessed at Accra’s airport yesterday morning. In order to get checked in and cleared to leave Ghana, with all your stuff intact, you have to follow a very convoluted and circuitous process with many stops where officials go through the same documents, open and close (or not) your suitcase and rifle through your carry-on baggage. A gentleman in front of me, flying business class to some UN meeting in New York pressed a 5 Ghana Cedi bill (about 5 dollars, a considerable amount of money for ordinary people and low level officials) into the hands of the lady who was checking his hand luggage. This is the weak chain in the security link. I watched her lips and she did not say ‘No.’ Instead she quickly zipped up the bags and the UN delegate was cleared. They saw me watching. I saw no signs of shame, secrecy or anything that indicated they considered what they just did wrong. I wondered whether they had seen the ad and if they did, whether they considered it had anything to do with their own behavior.

It may be a common practice and hard to stamp out, but in my line of work, the places I travel to, I have never needed money to get through a barrier. This includes a checkpoint with drunken teenagers carrying Kalashnikovs in northern Rwanda a few years before the genocide, a Kenyan security agent who found cash on me and told me I was not supposed to export any Kenyan Shilling (nice try) and a Guinean customs agent who wanted money but instead got a pack of condoms which I had been given after touring a PSI project in Kankan. May be the latter does count as a bribe but it has a nice side effect from a public health point of view.

I was thinking about the ad that urged me to contact an official whenever I witnessed bribing. I tried to imagine actually doing that right there in the airport and realized that the exhortation to ordinary citizens to act on (rather than only denounce) corruption is a nice idea but quite naive. I looked at officials in the area and wondered who I would go to. Who would be the righteous one who would take my complaint serious? Who would thank me because I had helped him (or her) stamp out the practice? More likely, I suspected, would be a polite nod from the official who would then turn around and make the rest of my departure miserable or encourage other to do so.

Corruption is so tightly woven into the fabric of life that I don’t think you can tackle it through exhortations on TV. And so I justified not sticking my nose into the UN delegate’s business. My Quaker consciousness rebelled a bit against this decision but my Dutch sense of realism and practicality won out in the end.

I am still not sure I did the right thing but I did get upgraded again to business class. Reward for what?

Yesterday I was up early, did my exercises and took my regular seat in the internet café behind one of the big clunky machines. I finally got the hang of posting my blog from a pen drive. It takes some organization and it takes time. But at about 3 dollars an hour one can be patient.

My first morning here breakfast consisted of cold pre-fried eggs on equally cold and very thick toasted white bread, sliced to the thickness of about one inch thick. Toast is therefore merely an idea as it is hard to penetrate to the center of the slice without burning the outside. Yesterday’s breakfast consisted of hard boiled eggs with the same toast and a tiny dish with miniscule amounts of butter and jam. At least nothing would be wasted.

There is a choice of a Lipton teabag, ingenuously constructed with two strings looped inside the teabag so that when you pull the label the strings magically lengthen, or Nescafe, now packed nearly everywhere in the slender stick package that was, when it first appeared, so very European. Hot water is kept hot for hours in a Chinese made thermos, ubiquitous in Africa. ‘The Perfect Choice’ it says on the label of this particular thermos that comes from the ‘Envy ™ serie.’

I was the only guest in the breakfast room as the participants had all gone home. I sat on a small balcony looking out over the ocean and the wavy palms. The words ‘Oh what a beautiful morning’ popped into my head and I had to contain myself not to break out into song. It was that kind of morning.

The rest of the morning I met for the last time with the facilitation team and we retraced our steps from the just-in-time start in January to the results presentation this week. The experience had been overwhelmingly good except for the continuing sticky issue of money requested for things that were not in our budget or we are not allowed to pay for as per US government regulations. These things tend to create a very negative field that can completely obscure whatever good feelings there were before.

When we were done there was a long wait before lunch. We killed time by talking about yesterday’s late start and how this was yet another example of espoused theories about leadership that bump into ingrained reflexes to leadership anchored in the institution of the traditional chieftaincy. Talk is cheap; acting on those words is dangerous and can cost you your job, as some have personally experienced. Most people cannot afford the luxury of speaking their mind. This is when I discovered that Brian (Brain) is not afraid. He has put his eggs in the basket of one of the presidential candidates who appears to have a good shot at the throne. If he wins Brian hopes to get a position in the presidential entourage. Then I will have a friend in a high place. Later in my hotel room in Accra I watched a video portrait of his candidate. I think I have to talk with Brian about that portrayal. His man came across as someone who hires young men out of work to dance and sing around him and look excited. I was not impressed and was struck by the general absence of women in the video montage.

The hotel in Accra hosted a fashion show to which all guests were invited. The most intriguing outfit was from an up and coming young designer who had attached a gold-sprayed calabash to the model’s derriere. It bumped around as she did her catwalk. It did not look like she could ever sit down with the thing dangling behind her. The ingenuous headdress, very African, very Ghanaian, also required at least one hand to keep it from flopping over. It was a nice outfit to look at but so totally impractical.
All models had faces like masks. I suspect that is how they were instructed. They posed where I stood (the photographers corner) and so I had a good up close look at their faces. Theirs was a kind of vacuous gaze. I had fun staring back; my gaze was met with a stare that only babies could trump.

And now back to JFK, about 10 hours away, westwards.

You can’t say no to royalty. Today’s royalty in Africa are the chiefs of administrative ‘tribes,’ of government ministries and departments. When they arrive late you feed them breakfast, even if 30 people have been waiting in a conference room for over an hour. Maybe they did not even ask for breakfast but you treat them like royalty, nevertheless. That’s the tradition.

So all of us were way off with our bets on how long after the official starting time of 9 AM we would actually begin the formal show and tell. It turned out to be one hour and a half. It never ceases to amaze me that this keeps on happening despite all the rhetoric (and much complaining) about punctuality. I watched people’s reaction intently and was glad that I was not in charge. Some people openly rolled their eyes presumably because they saw the contradictions; others are so used to it they don’t even notice; and finally there are the facilitators who appear to be, as a universal subspecies, in perpetual denial about when people will actually arrive. I stopped proposing to include the expected delays in the day’s programming by padding all the activities with extra time. We never caught up in the morning. Everything got simply moved up. People are used to this. I did not see anyone look at their watch but the participants did decline the afternoon break until the program was officially closed, and the bright yellow ADRA polo shirts and per diem handed out, late in the afternoon.

While the important people ate breakfast the teams used the extra time to get their final presentations in even more final shape. I could not help myself and dragged inserted photos back in shape here and there. People liked it when I helped them look thin again instead of the squashed creatures they had become. Pen drives were exchanged accompanied by queries of ‘how clean is your’s?” or “Are you free of viruses?” With all of us working in public health we have fun with these allusions to safe sex and infections. We, or rather our viruscan software, did ‘catch’ some nasty viruses in the process; Brian, who was first introduced to us as Brain – a name that stuck – lost some files. They were suddenly gone. If ever there was a good reason to back up, this is the place. I travelled with my two laptops, 2 pen drives and 2 multi-gigabyte hard drives. Between the two computers I juggle two versions of MS Office, one readable on one computer but not on the other. It gets rather complicated and it is a challenge and a half to backup the right new versions over the right old versions in such a way that the files (doc or docx) are on the right computer, hard disk or stick and can be opened properly.

During the morning I managed to sit through all 7 PowerPoint presentations without yawning. Listening to the presentations was actually quite enjoyable because they were sharp, tight and short. The facilitators had sprinkled the really good ones in between the less impressive ones but in the end they all came out quite compelling. Yeah for PowerPoint!

And once we started it was one smooth operation from start to finish. The presenting teams were confident and completely owned their challenges, showing results people had not expected possible in only 6 short months. And they promised more results and more impact by the end of the year.

I watched the facilitators guide the show with equal confidence. I was happy. Maybe this is what grandmotherhood feels like, watching the grandchild walk with confidence and seeing the parents enjoy the miracle; that’s how we were all together yesterday morning.

After the presentation a flurry of excited conversations took us through lunch. We discussed a senior leadership program for teams from the central level. The top is usually left out from the sort of practical training district officials often receive. They are occasionally sent to overseas courses but most are theoretical and very cerebral. The senior leaders are very thirsty for having the experiences that their subordinates have, and so the doors are wide open and we started to explore how and what to do. I am thinking about using juggling as a metaphor for learning. I did this many years ago in Turkey and produced some twenty fine jugglers in the process, all wearing suits; they were also to have become better trainers but of that I don’t have first hand experience.

In the evening Naomi and I accompanied the facilitators for a walk on the beach followed by a meal that was slow in coming, and pricy for Ghanaian standards; the worst was my five slice pineapple desert that cost the equivalent of 5 dollars; this in a country where pineapples practically grow by the side of the road as a weed. Everyone agreed I paid ten times too much, so I left the precious pineapple fibers stuck between my teeth for awhile prolonging the delightful taste of Ghanaian pineapple.

Yesterday I arrived in Cape Coast quite rested. Somehow I managed to take a few catnaps on the way down there even those the car rattled and vibrated like a truck. I already knew that, if there is no choice, our bodies are quite adaptable and the mind can simply shut off.

I arrived at the Sanaa Lodge hotel about noon time, expecting to see the entire group at lunch. I was wrong. I was welcomed with applause as I entered the conference room in the middle of the 4^th of 7 dress rehearsal presentations. It is then that I realized, once again, that the visa/passport hiccup that had postponed my trip by a day had, after all, been a good thing. I have a hard time sitting through many slide presentations and seven in one morning would have been a bit much; three and a half was just right.

 Some teams had done well, others less so. I noticed that the tendency to call absences (lack of this or that) ‘obstacles’ was still alive and well.  It was good to sit in the back and listen and see where our notes or instructions have not quite had the desired effect. But it was also nice to sit in the back and be an observer for a change. The facilitation team, brand new to each other and the material in January, had nicely come together and was entirely and confidently in charge.

Naomi is here from our partner organization ADRA. She flew in from the Southern Sudan via Kenya and is here to be proud of her organization, especially the team leader William who is the exemplar of a leader and exactly the right person to lead this program.

We walked around the reception area with our laptops trying to ‘catch’ the wireless  signal which the hotel claims to have and we failed to find. The hotel’s IT guy is looking into this but since we are leaving tomorrow we are not holding our breath. The five clothes hangers I asked for have not arrived either and will probably never do.

Susan and her colleague from USAID/Ghana arrived in the afternoon and we sat side by side in the hotel’s internet café having plenty of time to catch up during the innumerable pauses created by slow machines and slow connections.

For dinner we drove into town and had shrimp curry and jollof rice in a little shack on the beach. When we came back I had planned to head straight for bed but was told that a gentleman was waiting in the conference room for me. That was of course William, abandoned by his crew and acting very much like I would have as lead facilitator: taking care of details for tomorrow, getting all the handouts right and working late into the night. I ended up working with him, ‘drawing’ the vision that was created in January on a giant flipchart and reviewing all of the improved PowerPoint slides until it was past midnight.

Today we have been told that a ‘high-powered’ team is arriving from Ghana’s health headquarters to listen to the results of 6 months of intense leadership development work. This we have been promised by the top chief who cannot be with us, unfortunately. I was able to catch him on the phone in between meetings but that is all the contact we’ll have on this trip.

It is a risky thing to invite people for morning attendance at a site that is several hours and many traffic jams away from their usual place of work. We guessed how late some would arrive and when we could actually start. As usual, I am the more pessimistic one on that; all but one of my Ghanaian colleagues think that this time, here, now, things will be different. I have heard that said before and am doubtful but won’t make it my problem. I am, after all, an observer, or, as one of the facilitators said, “you are standing up on the fourth balcony above the dance floor, watching.” Ron Heifetz would be thrilled to know his metaphor is used so fluently in Ghana.

Given how many things could have gone wrong, it is a miracle that in the end nothing did. But my departure was one long suspense-filled affair. It consisted of a concatenation of just-in-times, starting sometime last week. First there was the late travel approval from Washington, then the last minute visa and passport return, the nearly too late departure from home for the airport, the long lines I was able to circumvent because I am a (very) frequent traveler. Soon this became a pattern of rush-rush-wait like a two-step dance. Once in the New-York bound plane we were put on hold in a far off corner of the airfield waiting for the thunderstorms to pass. Then there was a problem at Gate 1 at the Delta terminal at JFK which kept us sitting within view but out of reach of the jetway for another 45 minutes. And then it was back to rush-rush again, having only 15 minutes left to make my connection to Accra. Then another wait of one-and-half hour before take-off. As if the universe conspired to test and then reward me I was given an unexpected upgrade to the fourth row in business class fort the 11-hour plane ride to Accra.

There is a saying that ‘In the end, everything works out. If it hasn’t worked out yet, that’s because you haven’t gotten to the end. It comes from Brazil; must have been someone who had an experience like me today.

Fitting with the general theme of just-in-time I drove Axel to an appointment in Gloucester that was inserted in the half hour before the scheduled noontime departure from Manchester to leave for the airport. I kept myself busy for the half hour he was occupied, fueling myself with iced coffee and the car with gasoline. I ordered a flower arrangement for Magid’s daughter who returned from the hospital yesterday without her bothersome appendix. The saleslady shook her head when she heard I was on my way to the airport. “You rush to wait,” she added with a tone that indicated she had given up on flying some time ago. Rush-rush-wait, rush-rush-wait indeed.

After all this I arrived in Accra close to the expected arrival time (9 AM) and so did my suitcase, miraculously. I found, as planned,, a driver waiting for me; the same Charles who had chauffeured Cabul and me around 6 months ago. We immediately set out for Cape Coast, several traffic jams and a few hours away. I arrived just in time to hear the last 3 of the 7 team presentations, which was about the right number before lunch.

Today is Tessa’ 23rd birthday. I have been celebrating it all along from a distance, capped tonight with a cold beer, the best drink in this very hot and humid climate. I am glad I made it here but I was sorry to have missed the celebration. My spirit was in Lobster Cove, from the early morning birthday girl chair decoration all the way to the perfectly grilled chicken for dinner. These are rituals that go with the day. Happy birthday Tess!