Sylvia's Journal

We are nearing the end of the retreat and doubled in size. Social workers and psychologists have streamed in from all corners of Rwanda. The hotel has set up a tent on the lawn to accommodate us. This is a challenge as there are no more walls. The hotel staff has populated the tent with an odd assortment of tables and plastic chairs.

The tent comes as a surprise. With the tables removed in the conference room we had used so far we could have accommodated everyone inside, but it was too late – the tent is up and paid for. Now there is even less comfort with English and so we keep on snipping away parts of the ambitious agenda.

In the meantime the per diem issue has been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Also, the excitement of turning from renters into owners is beginning to insert a new energy in the room/tent. The participants are now mobilizing themselves (as measured by the number of people in the room at each day’s starting time).

There is another sign that the ownership we want is materializing. The participants of the core group, the 40+ people who we started with on Tuuesday, are now the new guides, explaining the 50 newcomers what we have done in the last 2 days. It is very exciting to see this happen – the design holds and is working exactly as planned, in spite of all the adjustments. We are now on the sidelines. We can let go. The baton is now in their hands. I am watching people who were at times reluctant or confused participants share the products of our work as if they were car salesmen. You’d think they had owned the design from the get go.

We left Kigali at daybreak in order to arrive early on the shores of Lake Kivu to set up the room, get our instruction slides in order, dot the ‘i’s’ and cross the ‘t’s’. Official starting time was 2PM

I had put in a lot of padding for the afternoon sessions as I was aware of the many factors we would have no control over. One such a factor was the actual versus planned departure of the participants from Kigali.  Planned for 8AM, the last bus left Kigali around 11:30AM. By the time they arrived everyone was tired and grumpy, even more so when they discovered that their per diem was half of what they expected.

The time buffers around each activity paid off. We ended the day only slightly behind schedule and caught up by the next day.

The language barrier is omnipresent. Although it is true that everyone in HQ or field lead positions can speak English, comprehension by many is more limited. We had to insert quite a bit of translation.

The processes, from historical timeline to mission to vision to contradictions to strategic directions was taxing at times. The inductive processes and our requests to look for patterns and naming them is new to many. Concepts and tasks needed much more explanation, and often translation, than we had expected. In addition, the chief’s English is also limited. Her second language is French, which none of my colleagues speak well enough to use. And so I have parallel conversations in French – there is much that gets lost in translation.

In addition to the language complications (a continuation of what we experienced in Bangkok) there were many taxing moments with client requests, needs and desires a constantly moving target. This too may be related to none of us communicating in our first language. Adjustments, re-budgeting of time, making short cuts and dropping things altogether were the order of the day.

We were aiming for ownership, which is always hard in the beginning. Getting ownership means people go at their own pace and the products of their thinking may not quite be up to the standards one would want. It is the tradeoff between owning and renting someone else’s ideas.

We moved into the Gorillas hotel in Kigali for two nights. Monday was an official holiday. We used it to align expectations around our roles and how to function well as a team. In the afternoon we met with our local colleague who is seconded to the organization, about which I have yet to learn a lot. My MSH colleagues who are here with me have worked with this organization for several years and provided me with some critical contextual information.

We checked several assumptions that are implicit in the retreat design and fine-tuned or micro-designed sessions wherever possible. The design won’t get tested until we take off, always an important moment when we learn about language and other challenges. Until that moment the whole enterprise is theoretical.

Later we discovered many more unverified assumptions as well as a number of miscommunications and misunderstandings which led to some very challenging facilitation acrobatics. One lesson I learned is that if the client says we meet from 8:00 in the morning till 7:30 at night I better challenge this right away. I know such long days are counterproductive but sometimes we give the client the benefit of the doubt. That was a mistake.