Sylvia's Journal

We ended yesterday’s workshop a little earlier than planned because the participants used up so much of their energy in the morning that there was little left after lunch.

We were done about 3 PM and once again I found myself in that sweet spot which is called ‘goods delivered;’ a place that is both empty and full at the same time. Free to relax and do whatever I want, it always takes awhile to recover from the adrenaline surge that accompanies such an event. For the first time I felt how bad my foot ached. I had not paid much attention to the pains because I was focused on other things. With that need for attention gone I suddenly became a cripple. I had, after all, been standing and walking non stop for two long days. A bath helped. A foot massage would have been better. I remembered the 90-minute foot massage I had in China; something like that.

Cell phones are on big part of my professional life; less so my own and more so those of participants which always ring in workshops no matter what agreements you make about it. I get exposed to an amazing array of ring tones. This week I heard some interesting new ones. One cellphone rang like a marching band was coming around the corner; another was a laughing baby. It was hard to keep a straight face when it rang. Click here to hear it.

In the middle of the conference room was a large bouquet of roses; compliments of the hotel. The roses were still in good a shape when the room was disassembled. I pulled out the best looking ones which are now gracing my room in a beer glass. The arrangement was sprayed with a gold glitter spray for a special glittery effect. The floor of our room was also sprayed, each morning, to make it smell ‘orangy.’ The person in charge of the conference rooms, who I first mistook for a doctor because of his white coat, proudly showed me the the spray; made in America, he pointed out. The resulting scent was one of waxed floors treated with chemicals that smell like they ought to be outlawed rather than the intended orange blossoms.

My new found facilitator friend from the local management institute, Eneye, invited me out for an evening of culture. While I was waiting in the dark hotel lobby, the lights do go out from time to time and sometimes the generator overheats, she arrived with her driver who I mistook for a husband, and her little sister. They took me to a cultural restaurant that was already full with Ethiopians and only a few foreigners. Guests are seated on uncomfortable low stools or chairs that look like the obelisk of Aksum and tables that look like woven laundry baskets with a platter on top. There appeared to be always room for a few more people. Soon we were packed like sardines.

Stunningly beautiful waitresses served the traditional food, goat and lamb stew served with sauces that ranged from very hot to inedibly hot, on top of what Axel considers a dishrag (injera), a large spongy pancake, with more rolled up injera, dark and light colored, on the side. Musicians playing traditional instruments formed the backdrop of a tiny stage. More stunningly beautiful young men and women danced a variety of traditional dances in an odd assortment of outfits that seemed decidedly unafrican. I loved the music and the dances. There were dances that were simply happy and peppy and those that were more of the possessed kind with much shaking of body parts. In one dance the woman rolled her head so fast that her face looked like an early Picasso, where the eyes, nose, mouth and ears are all in the wrong place. At times I feared her head may simply come off. Eneye, her sister and I touched our necks in sympathetic pains.

This morning I was woken up at 4:30 by warm fresh bread smells coming in from below. The smells were accompanied by the throbbing sounds of music and dancing that came from the night life that was apparently still in full swing in the neighborhood.

This morning the rain is coming down in sheets. It is the kind of rain that washes away roads. It is considered a good thing. Rain is about food and thus life and survival. My colleague Karen has arrived last night. She, too, brought rain, a good omen for her, a good thing for Ethiopia.

I never set foot outside the hotel yesterday. This is what happens when I am in the middle of a workshop. It is the downside of such short events – there is no time off. The day starts early and ends late.

Of the 30 people invited about 20 showed up with a lot of coming and going. This seems the trend in such intitial (‘inception’) events. I can understand this. There are many demands on people’s time and why go to this inception workshop when there is much else to do. I consider myself somewhat of a gardener: preparing the soil, planting some seeds. If I am lucky I see some of them sprout right in front of my eyes. I think I did see some green coming out of the soil.

The gamble of working through facilitators whose skills I don’t know paid off, if not in the quality of their sessions than at least in the modeling we do of how people learn skills and how to coach and mentor. It was noted and appreciated I believe. These first team experiences are like awkward dances with a new date. We are polite, careful not to step on toes and the conversation carefully monitored, at least by some of us. I am looking for reactions, openness, sensibilities, etc. I am encouraged by the commitment I have seen so far: they arrived early, were well prepared and stayed late for a debriefing and feedback session after 5 PM. This meeting was punctuated by a very loud but short aerobics class taking places a few floors below us in the hotel.

For this group the notion that management and leadership are important for producing better health services is beyond doubt. What to do about it is less clear. This is why we are demonstrating some of the processes, models and tools our project can make available. I showed once again the video of the Aswan leadership program (Seeds of Success).

I think I have now seen it a hundred times and it remains moving. It is also compelling because it so clearly links leadership development with tangible results that represent lives saved and family tragedies averted. I could tell that the Ethiopians were intrigued and some appeared to be ready to take up the challenge. I hope that what we are doing now is simply planting the ‘Seeds of Success’ in Ethiopia.

A large billboard on the main drag advertises for ‘the best Ethiopian restaurant in North America.’ For this you have to travel to either Washington D.C. or to Baltimore. It seems a bit far when you are in Addis and hungry.

May 1 is a holiday. Nevertheless Tae, Hailu and I worked hard on putting the final pieces together for our ‘inception’ workshop tomorrow. The intent is to make a good case of why managing and leading is a skill that people who manage health programs ought to have. It seems so obvious but it is not.

I spent an hour each with the various members of our just-in-time facilitator team to rehearse their part in the workshop. Everyone will get to be the lead facilitator on one activity. Some people are a bit worried about this but how else to pass the baton to a local team?

I also tested out the Ethiopian music I donwloaded from the internet on my new colleagues. It turned out I stumbled upon the Ethiopian Cliff Richard and other musicians who had their peak in the 60s and 70s but are still well loved, especially by people with grey hair like me.

Tae and I went to see the workshop room in the Yoly hotel. The hotel felt more down to earth, more connected to Ethiopia than my Luxury Collection La-La Land Hotel that could have been anywhere in the world. So I changed hotels. Now I have a very large room that includes a kitchen, a balcony, and comes with permanent access to the internet, all for a much lower price. I can look into houses and yards that tell me I am in Ethiopia. My colleague Bannet, who is our project’s director, warned me that I am on the edge of the red light district. I reassured him that I usually don’t wander around at night in cities I don’t know. Nightlife, as seen from my balcony was active but did not interfere with my sleep.

Tae and I had lunch in a small café and I learned from her about the traditional coffee ceremony where, while the beans are roasted, a basket of popcorn is passed around. Then the aromatic beans are passed around like a smudge stick, the coffee brewed and served, sweet and strong, to be drunk in three small cup servings. Axel would like this place. Of course he expects I bring back some beans.

On the eve of the workshop I relaxed and ordered room service from the Italian restaurant below, wild mushroom ravioli and Tiramisu (the Italian influence is noticeable). I watched the National Geographic Channel which airs, every hour, an advertisement for a special next week with the words ‘Fasten your seatbelts for Air Crash Investigation.’ It shows images of terror-stricken passengers in airplanes that are crashing or exploding; my kind of documentary! Minutes later another advertisement says that donkeys and mules cause more accidents than airplane crashes. That ad was illustrated with a donkey kicking a pile of watermelons which rolled down a cobbled street and killed an old lady doing her marketing. Should I be relieved?

There was more good stuff on TV. A program about Dubai’s artifical island group (The World) showed how white-clad oil cheiks and Dutch engineers combine resources and ingenuity to do the impossible at unimaginable costs for the world’s richest people. It makes you wonder about our priorities. We could do a lot of other things with that kind of ingenuity and those resources in my line of work. At least it shows that, if we put our minds to it, everything is possible after all.

If I would have forgotten that it was our queen’s birthday yesterday the gentleman with his orange tie and the woman with her orange shawl at his side, dropped off by a KLM car, would have reminded me. They arrived at the Sheraton to celebrate the event in style and partake, no doubt, in the herring and bitterballen (a small round croquet) flown in with me from Amsterdam. I missed the event. There was clearly no search of the guest register for Dutch nationals. They wouldn’t have found me since I am here under the American flag.

I was woken up from a dream or dreams that included a rowdy group of young men messing up an artist studio and a little child that was given the ride of a lifetime by a bunch of whales tossing it around like a beach ball. It was a happy sort of tossing, not as scary as it sounds now in daylight. What woke me up sounded first like a small kitten in pain which turned out to be a bird that perched outside my open door, singing something very sad in a whiny sort of chirp.

They say in Ethiopia that a visitor who brings rain brings luck. The rains started yesterday and I walk around with a halo. I met my Ethiopian colleagues as well as two from Boston. A small group of potential facilitators was brought together when I insisted on being hooked up with local folks rather than doing the whole event on my own. I have gotten in the habit of doing this even though it does complicate matters. Today is a holiday and the workshop starts tomorrow. One by one they will come in today and give up part of their holiday to prepare with me for their role.

I have inquired about Ethiopian music, something I know nothing about. During the workshop I would like to play the kind of music that people here love to hear. It is hard for me to gauge what is cool and what is not. I downloaded some Ethiopian music from the internet last night and will test it out today on my co-facilitators. I discovered that the golden age of Ehtiopian music was in the late 60s and early 70s. It is a wonderful collection of a mostly jazzy kind of music with titles I cannot pronounce. I can’t remember what was happening here then but suspect it was still during the days of the emperor.

I also searched the internet for more information about the AIDS commission here, its mission and vision, but I could not find it. We had a long conversation about what comes first, mission or vision. In my book it is mission but here, clearly, it is vision. That is going to create some anxiety which I will need to manage in ways that keeps everyone happy. There are so many models that trip over each other. Here I come with yet another.

Armed with my last Dutch purchase, vitamins for ‘zakenmensen’ (business people), I arrived in Addis in the dark, after a brief stopover in a very hazy, dusty and sandy Khartoum. Addis is new territory for me. Exactly 29 years ago I missed a chance to go here, from Dakar, and never forgot the disappointment, but here I am, finally.

I was greeted by several signs that either meant ‘Americans welcome’ or ‘we want to to be like America,’ or both. We passed the Denver Café, the Boston Day Spa, a large statue of liberty and something that looked like Starbucks, same typeface and colors, but with a different name. We passed more cafes; this is after all coffee land. From my shaded view through the tinted windows of the Sheraton shuttle I saw a city that looked like a mixture of America, India and Africa: shopping mall ads, beggars in rags and momuments to celebrate the ephemeral African Unity. My co-travellers in the van were sitting with their blackberries in attention, waiting for a signal which they may never get. Communication with the outside world is restricted. My CGNet program does not list Ethiopia. I could have left my Skype headset and cellphone at home. One way or another communications with the homefront will be expensive, a scarce resource.

I am in Addis’ fanciest hotel, according to blog entries in the Virtual Tourist. The concierge and his helpers wear hats, either Fedoras or Bowler hats or, in some cases, one that is a cross between the two. My room was not ready and I was parked in the heavily draped and carpeted lounge where a pianist who looked like Angela Davis played hotel music. A gaggle of young beautiful women was, I imagined, waiting for further instructions from their impresario.

My bathroom has a scale with a paper sheet taped to it with ‘ideal weight’ for ladies on one side and for gents on the other. I am 2 kilos over the top of the ideal range; the result, no doubt, of 3 days of unrestrained consumption in Holland; another objective for the next 9 days to get myself in shape for two more days of unrestrained consumption after landing in Amsterdam on the 9th and before heading back home on the 11th of May.

I had a hard time going to sleep. My room has a door that opens on a small balcony overlooking an idyllic scene of pools and palms, more idyllic at night than in daytime. I slept with the doors open, sung to sleep by crickets, the sound of small waves (the pool?) and the faint barkings of dogs faraway; nothing that told me I was in the middle of a big African city.