Sylvia's Journal

Archive Page 67

Snow: chores and play

Published February 5, 2015 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
Tags: New Hampshire

On February 3 we held a brief remembrance ceremony in both our Boston and Arlington office for our three young colleagues who perished in a plane crash in Afghanistan 10 years ago. People no longer on our staff came to pay their respects and we told stories. I read a brief letter from M in Afghanistan who benefitted from the scholarship fund that was set up by the family members of these three women. I remember the day well, working out at the gym and suddenly seeing the faces of my colleagues and the name of my organization on the TV screen.

The rest of the day flew by as I was busy finishing the paperwork of the trip I just finished and prepped for the one that will start next week. Having gotten up at 4 AM, shoveled the car out of the snow banks and gotten to work early, I was pooped around noontime and went home.

The next day I had scheduled to renew my Dutch passport. I made the appointment month ago knowing that on February 4-6 I was going to take Axel to an Inn in the White Mountains, a Christmas present. It seemed a good idea to go to Boston in the morning, get the right passport picture that only one photographer in Boston can do, complete the paperwork and, and then head out to New Hampshire.

Between the snow banks, the T-system functioning at half power, parking problems and the victory parade of the Patriots I couldn’t have picked a worse day to get into Boston. It took us 2 hours to get from Manchester to the photo place which happened to be on the victory parade route. Axel had dropped me off as traffic wasn’t allowed through anymore. I walked through puddles of melted snow, first to the photo studio and then the consulate, my boots no longer keeping the water out. At the consulate, the creation of a new passport was even more complicated than before as the new passport technology uses precise biometric information.

By noontime we were done and headed out to our Christmas present and celebrated two days of pampering at the Inn at Thorn Hill in Jackson (NH): knitting by the fire, a lovely dinner, falling asleep in the Jacuzzi and then early to bed, to get ready for a day of playing in the snow, which is so much better than having to get things done in the snow.

Home-coming

Published February 2, 2015 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Holland

I keep forgetting that on Sundays the Dutch railway system doesn’t quite work as advertised. The schedule my brother had laid out for me included trains that never ride on Sundays and trains that usually do but not on February 1. Eventually I made it to Soest, a small town in the center of Holland close to where the royals have their palaces. Having left Holland so long ago I don’t have the associations others here seem to have. Soest appears to have a reputation of being a sleepy town for retired people. It is true that behind my brother’s house there is an apartment building for people who are 55 and over. For his kids and their generation this means old; for us it is nothing.

We walked the town from west to east and from north to south – it is stretched out with enormous fields in the center, a windmill, grazing sheep, Iceland ponies…all very rural and a far cry from his former city house in The Hague. When I woke up the next days he said, “Isn’t it quiet here?” May be that’s the thing about old people. Then quietness is nothing new for a citizen of Manchester by the Sea.

We had another family reunion, only missing one of the siblings and so this is how I keep the family together; my transit through Holland always becomes a reunion.

When I checked in at the KLM desk at Schiphol I asked about the Boston snowstorm Axel had warned me about but there was no news other than the plane was taking off as scheduled. It is hard to imagine a snowstorm when the skies are blue.

Three and a half hour out of Boston the captain told us the ‘fasten your seatbelt’ signs would remain on for the rest of the flight. He gave a 20 minute warning which made for long lines for the toilets. We flew in total whiteness the rest of the flight and were warned that if we couldn’t land in Boston we would go to Philadelphia. Everyone clapped when the plane had landed and stopped. It was the braking that was a bit iffy given that the entire airport was covered in snow and the visibility was probably no more than 30 feet, if that.

The ride home continued under a total white-out condition and when we got home Axel had to shovel a path between meter high walls of snow to our front door. It was the most challenging home coming ever.

Ups and downs

Published January 31, 2015 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Ethiopia, Kenya

Before heading to the airport I had a most inspiring coffee chat with an Ethiopian (woman) friend I worked with 7 years ago. At the time she worked with a government institution mandated to train senior government officials. What we proposed somehow unnerved them as it was out of the ordinary. We had hoped we could partner but they didn’t bite. The meeting with them was mostly memorable because of the excellent macchiato they served during our meeting; imagine that, at a government agency. But then again, this was Ethiopia.

My friend is busy teaching life skills to young Ethiopians and empowering women of any age. I learned about the Digital Opportunities Trust, a social enterprise that focuses on young people all over Africa. Her stories were both inspiring and sobering. She has moved away from senior leadership training because of the unwillingness of those at the top to examine their own behavior. This sounded familiar.

And as if to emphasize this point I learned that Robert Mugabe was elected to be the new Chairman of the African Union. My friend and colleague PT in Lesotho wrote in response to this news, “[I] am so disappointed. Something is terribly wrong with African leaders, their decisions and choices. Unfortunately no one will save us but ourselves. They know he will promote and protect corruption, and promote culture of impunity. It will take ages for Africa to be emancipated politically and economically. The continent is desperately in need of fresh ideas in order to progress at a desired pace.”

Further illustrations of the big egos and bellies of African officialdom accompanied me on the plane from Addis to Nairobi (in front of course). They kept their AU delegate badges around their necks even though the conference is over. I looked at their big bellies and watched the young female handler – carrying the boss’ hand luggage which was a large carry-on which she carefully repacked with the many boxes of tax free whiskies, champagnes and Dunhill cigarettes. They were treated to a special van and a security person who took them to the transit lounge. Once there they had to mix with the likes me.

Symptoms and roots

Published January 31, 2015 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Ethiopia

At breakfast this morning I watched how hotel clients puzzled over the three large hot liquid dispensers that were not labeled. We all knew there was one with hot water, one with hot coffee and one with hot milk. But they were not labeled. One risked completing the tea with coffee or the coffee with hot water or the hot water with milk. It was a bit like those shows where you have to pick a door that hides a prize, two you don’t want and one you do want.

One gentleman stood there for a long time, looking for a staff member to help him with his choice but none was in sight. He was clearly not one of the trial-by-error types.

Eventually he spotted one of the wait staff. Recognizing the helplessness of the customer, and without exchanging a word, she resolutely put his cup under the right spout and he walked away relieved. She had solved the problem but it will recur again and again. I was surprised that it didn’t occur to her to put labels near each of the containers – I knew they had them as they were there yesterday. But clearly someone had forgotten to put the labels and this was obviously not her job.

It was such a perfect illustration of a phenomenon I observe over and over in the places I work. There is something missing in their customer service training and that is root cause thinking, something we include in all our programs so that root causes rather than symptoms are dealt with and some of these easy-to-solve problems don’t keep recurring.

French-french

Published January 31, 2015 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Ethiopia

We have arrived at the end of my three assignments, the last completed yesterday and celebrated at a cupcakes place in Addis with spicy chicken sandwiches and macchiato. The participants in our senior leadership program, conducted jointly with Yale University’s School of Public Health, have quickly become our new French and Swiss ICRC friends. Two we met last November when I was in Addis as well. They manage ICRC’s assistance to rehabilitation programs in Madagascar, Niger, Tchad, the DRC and Burundi.

On Thursday morning they presented the current landscape of physical rehabilitation in their respective countries. All of them are pretty bleak, with Tchad and Niger at the top of the list. These managers are not shying away from difficult places and most have lived a good part of their professional lives in hardship posts: Iraq, Pakistan, North Korea, Somalia, Afghanistan, etc. They are after all the kind of clinicians and technicians that help civilians who have stepped on mines or are otherwise physically injured in such places of conflict. It is a remarkable group of professionals who care deeply about the people who have become or were born disabled yet work in places where such people are shunned, put away and generally neglected. And if there are any services at all, these are poorly staffed, poorly equipped or entirely non-functioning. Their tolerance for frustration is tested every day.

For two days we sat around a table and talked about the senior leadership program we are about to embark on over the next 11 months. We will meet again in April when they return with a team of, hopefully influential or motivated, peopl, feom their countries to advance the agenda and implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of persons with disabilities (UNCRPD).

Although all are English speakers and some of the sessions were done in English, their default language is French. And not African French, which is what I have been exposed to for the last 30+ years but French French, spoken rapidly and with all the wonderful gestures and facial expressions that the French use when they speak. When we next meet the language will be French only, the singsongy French from Madagascar, the staccato-ed French from West African and Congolese French. It will be a French linguistic feast.

Addis

Published January 27, 2015 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Ethiopia

The driver who took me to the airport early in the morning has a son who is a 3^rd year neuro sciences student at Harvard. The aspiring neuro-scientist has a younger brother who is also trying to get a free ride at Harvard. My driver wants to go to the graduation in 2016 but for that he claimed a miracle would have to occur. Going to Boston at graduation time is a little out of his league, money wise. He is praying hard. It must work here as I assumed he also prayed for a Harvard scholarship, but his son’s talents must have been a factor as well, a God-given talent no doubt.

He told me his son was invited to spend Christmas in California with his ticket paid, both ways, he added, by a woman who turned out to be a friend of mine. Small world!

I was once again at the airport with plenty of time to spare. As a result I was able to enjoy the brand-new Kenya Airways lounge (the Pride Lounge) for hours. Having left too early from the hotel to partake in its breakfast, the lounge made up for this serving a full breakfast: eggs Florentine, cappuccino, a fruit platter and freshly squeezed juice.

I arrived in the middle of the day at an empty airport; a quiet time before the arrival of 100s of diplomats to attend what is the African equivalent of the UN General Assembly this week. Traffic is already tied up but with VIPs moving around the capital it will be even more so. The road out of the airport was already closed and we had to find side roads to get to the hotel.

I procured myself a simcard which means I can connect with friends and colleagues a little easier to use the little time I have here to get together. That started last night when former and current MSH colleagues, most of them having lived in Afghanistan, met for dinner and caught up. As usual, the conversation turned to flying, frequent flyer schemes, upgrades (or rather non-upgrades) and close calls. After all that is the one things we in common.

I was slated to have yet another call in the evening but the internet was too fickle to sustain a connection even though half an hour earlier Axel managed to show me on Skype what the snow accumulation looked like.

Memory lanes and bumble bees

Published January 27, 2015 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Kenya

My short stop-over in Nairobi went fast. On Saturday I joined my friend/supervisor at the lovely Fairview hotel (a country hotel in the city – indeed!).

A few hours later I experienced the infamous Nairobi traffic (even on Saturday) driving out one and a half hour with a friend of a friend and her 8 month old son in the back to the Nairobi exurb of Karen. When baby Karl started to scream I moved to the backseat and rubbed the little fellow who was looking for a breast full of milk. Disappointed in my ability to deliver the goods he kept crying until we arrived at our destination, a lovely country inn called the Talisman. The “gastrolounge’ claims to have a wide variety of food and drink for every pallet” (sic).There I found my friend Ida who left Boston nearly 2 decades ago and settled in Mombasa. While her husband kept her 4 year old engaged we were able to catch up on 20 years of missed and shared history. The way back was a little faster but not much and baby Karl slept.

Back at the hotel I handed the baton of my function as Global Technical Lead (GTL) for Leadership and Management to my successor JP who flew in from Dubai and who will join us shortly in Medford. She had moved her family to Boston in the meantime where they arrived just in time for the mega blizzard that is raging today on the East Coast. I feel sorry for them, coming from steamy Dubai. Her mom who is looking after the kids is probably less than pleased but I am sure the little ones are thrilled. Imagine that, living in a freezer suddenly and seeing your own breath while inside the warm and cozy Hyatt they have a pool and all sorts of goodies at breakfast. It would have been my dream.

My colleague and I downloaded about 50 years of stories onto our new team mate while she was busy scribbling notes on a large legal pad. She already showed she is a good listener and eager to contribute whatever new and fresh she has to offer.

In the evening I made another trip to memory lane, house number 2, visiting one of my 1951 cohort. After we celebrated turning 40 (a milestone which the women loved and the men were not that keen about), he left MSH and returned to live in his childhood home on the outskirts of Nairobi amidst what used to be coffee plantations. At that time the estate was far away from the city but now is more or less annexed. Still, it looked to me like a country club, charming and beautiful. He lives there with his wife, three high school children, a bunch of dogs, and then some motor cycles. We looked each other over, exclaiming ‘you have not changed at all.’ Once again we reminisced while walking the estate and preparing for dinner which we ate family style outside sitting around an enormous roughhewn table with a clay chiminea ablaze to take the chill (a relative concept) at bay. If it wasn’t for the traffic, Nairobi would be a dream place to live. His house is, even with the traffic.

I listened to the story behind the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation (EGPAF) where he works. It is both a sad and a moving tale that proves Margaret Mead’s famous quote ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’ EGPAF has contributed much to decrease the suffering of families affected by the virus. It is a mission-driven organization like MSH, but much more focused.

On Monday we spent the day at the office, meeting new and old colleagues and talking about public health leadership, management and governance. I repeated a webinar I did some months ago that most of my Kenyan colleagues had not been able to attend. When people asked about my new role now that I was no longer the GTL for leadership and management, I invented one on the spot: my new title will be bumble bee, the queen of cross pollination. I will travel from project to project and serve as a connector. My first cross-pollinations are between our Rwanda and Kenya projects as they have much in common.

And now off to Addis for my last assignment.

Back and forth

Published January 23, 2015 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Rwanda

Our presentation before USAID of the work plan for year one was so much better than the rehearsal, as it should be. The meeting had been shortened by 30 minutes but we managed to stay within those boundaries and even leave some time for comments. We digested the experience over lunch and then everyone went their way. I stayed for a brief orientation of a few diehards to make sure they know what kinds of resources we have in the wider MSH family and how to access them.

Upon the return to my hotel I rewarded myself for the successful completion of my first assignment with a 90 minute hot stone massage – something I had been looking forward to. Managing short openings between calls with Boston I managed to enjoy a short dinner and sat by the poolside. It was ‘African night’ and the buffet offered only African food (at least for the main course). It turned out to be the only African food I have eaten here (if you exclude the lunch dishes at the office). It included an astonishing array of starches, any kind of meat and a few veggies – delicious but filling. It was also music night with the same band as last week singing the same mournful songs.

The driver, who besides being the top driver and an ‘arranger of everything,’ showed up on the dot at the appointed time. He had told me I had to be at the airport 3 hours before my departure at 9:10. That turned out to be way more time than was needed to make one’s way through the various check-in steps. As a result I was the first and one and only passenger and made for a very quick check-in process. The only delay was caused by a search in my baggage for ‘a radio with antenna,’ which the security staff claimed I had in my duffel bag. It turned out to be an electric toothbrush.

By now my Arlington colleagues have arrived in Amsterdam and are waiting for their plane to DC. One of them was part of the team I joined 28 years ago at MSH when we started a 30 year run of management capacity building and laid the foundations for MSH’s later reputation in management, leadership and governance for health. We did not work much together after 1990, moving in different directions. And so we did a lot of reminiscing about the memories we have in common. I remember when I was young I found listening to old people reminisce boring. Now it is my turn.

Showtime

Published January 22, 2015 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Rwanda

Today all the team leaders and their teams put the final touches on the year one work plan. It is now one day to ‘lift off’ – the first official presentation of the work plan to USAID Getting ready for this was a massive undertaking which required great attention to detail and alertness to version control, while working on the less than user friendly interface of Excel. Excel focuses attention on detail, the trees, making it hard to see the forest. One can get lost.

This afternoon we rehearsed the presentation to USAID. It was a real feat to get all the pieces come together into the required formats and have everyone in the room to rehearse. I am glad we did – everyone learned something and we will all be the better for it tomorrow when it is show time.

We have tried to work on Google Drive – something MSH is pushing and for which I have advocated. But the experience here, at a distance from the more or less guaranteed and fast internet and power we have in the US, is less than ideal and the experience frustrating. It’s a good reminder of the conditions that make the work of our colleagues in the field so challenging – at headquarters we sometimes forget that.

At headquarters we also sometimes forget that changing the time of calls is inconvenient for people many time zones removed. For us travelers between field projects and headquarters, with initiatives or work with other field projects that don’t take a break while we are away, this makes for long work days. When our work day in Rwanda ends the work day starts in Boston and DC. On Tuesday I rushed back to the hotel to be seated at my computer, connected, headphones on – foregoing the 6PM cocktail hour to decompress – only to find out at the last minute that the meeting has been cancelled and another one, following a bit later, was delayed. It makes for frequent room service dinners and few occasions to disconnect from the computer and work. But then again, this is the reality of our work, and for us travelers always a temporary condition.

On Friday night my other two colleagues return home to DC and I will be by myself. I have made an appointment with Hanna who is reputed to be the best hot stone massage therapist in town. I reserved 90 minutes for this; afterwards I will treat myself to a nice dinner, a glass of wine and go to bed early to get up before dawn for my early morning flight to Nairobi.

On track

Published January 20, 2015 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Rwanda

We are now fully immersed in the work planning exercise. It is disciplined, collegial and as rigorous as these things go. I think this is probably the most engaging and inclusive exercise I have ever been involved in. By Friday everything needs to be ready to present to our funder for a before-final sign off . And then the project staff will meet with their government counterparts for final approval. By then I will be in Addis and on to my third assignment of this trip.

Axel is busy planning his trip to Angkor Wat and then a boat ride do join me in Phnom Penh. It will be the second time I am in ‘striking distance’ of the famous temple complex and missing it again. I will visit it vicariously through Axel’s pictures, much like I did when we were in Japan and Axel told me about his fabulous trip to Kyoto. We have reserved a few days at the tail end of the Bangkok conference, to have a vacation together before heading home and preparing for surgery.

My colleague went to the handicraft center and asked if I wanted to come along. I said no, as I am not interested anymore in buying local souvenirs. I have distributed those I accumulated over the last 30 years among my colleagues and our house is already full of knickknacks (inside and outside boxes) from around the world. I could be easily seduced into buying more fabrics but I already have trunks full of them.

My work days are long. I leave for the office at 7:30 and when I get home at 6PM I order room service and have my phone calls with various teams and individuals at the home office. The massage place closes too early (last call at 7:30PM) – I wished they’d be available at 11PM. It would make for a good start of the night.

With my job in Rwanda winding down I am casting my eyes to assignment 2 in Kenya which will be a nice combination of play and work for my short stay there.

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