Sylvia's Journal

I have enjoyed my stay in the new and improved Novotel – the best part was the swimming pool which, once again, was hardly used by hotel guests – swimming turns out to be a good activity with much less competition than the elliptical or treadmill machines – those tend to be occupied all the time before and after work hours.

We ended the four day retreat on a high note – even if sometimes I wondered whether we could get anything done with the constant coming and going of people trying to arrange three weeks of intense activity in the regions – there are advances to be arranged, bank visits, supplies, gas allotments, drivers and more. And unfortunately the project director wasn’t there to help me interpret all this coming and going – I tried to find out whether the difficulties they were having in organizing the activities was only because of the heavy administrative procedures (as they claim) or also with their own organizational habits (no! one said indignant when I suggested this hypothesis). It’s hard for me to interpret what is really going on, as I parachute in now and then.

At times I was surprised how often we pay for things that the government considers important, yet they are not in their budgets. Sometimes I think we (and other organizations like us) are like an ATM – you go there when you need cash to pay for stuff. I challenged the notion that the government finds certain activities important yet doesn’t put them in their budget. It is something I have trouble with when it comes to development assistance – is it really development or just easy money? The perdiemitis phenomenon (prise en charge as it is called in French) is one such a thing that was created to help the donor-funded program get their planned activities done. Someone in the 1979s had an idea when people were reluctant to come to training workshops – let’s pay them! The rest is history, and irreversible I am afraid – it is like any other entitlement program, easy to create, hard to undo.

And then there is the reimbursement for transport costs. Apparently last week some of the notables were quite insulted by the (minimum I suppose) 5 dollar transport reimbursements. My Ivoirian colleagues think this should be adjusted (upward of course).  Really? When people use official cars and drive a known distance which is then multiplied by a certain fixed amount, they should get more? Did we check the numbers or is it something else – when you are higher in the pecking order you should get paid more?

I inserted many tools and concepts that I am learning in my Conversational intelligence ™ course and am having fun with it – just as our teachers suggest – experiment, they say, have fun, play with the ideas. And I did.

My second week here in Cote d’Ivoire is with our team – some of the people I worked with last week and others who joined us.  The task before us is a creative one – with one large project over, and new solicitations before us, what should we be doing different? It is not easy to rethink a program that has, by and large, been very successful.  If it wasn’t for our office chief people would probably stay right where they are. We talk a lot about staying in one’s comfort zone, and how nice it is to dwell there.

The design of the week is emergent, I have a rough idea what the outcome should be and use for the overall design a methodology I recently learned, DRIVE, that takes people from Discovery, Re-alignment, through Innovation, Validation and Evolution. I am making some adaptations, aside from the translations, but by and large is provides a good structure.

I am inserting many elements of my neuroscience coaching program – mostly because I want to equip my colleagues with the tools to create a climate of trust, wherever they work. I have trained them over the years to shift from teaching to facilitating. They are already quite good at that; although from time I can see they wished things were less ambiguous and they could slide back in their teaching role, at which they are equally good, as long as they feel mastery of the material.

We meet in the basement of the office, a room that looks out over a narrow terrace and a small strip of dirt and grass where cars are parked. One of the cars parked there is a wreck. The front is destroyed, including the driver’s seat. The driver didn’t survive the accident. Each time I step out onto the terrace and look at that wreck I think of him. I asked why they don’t get rid of this horrible reminder of a departed colleague. It has something to do with transparency and accountability I gather; the same reasons why broken furniture cannot be discarded; why the hospital in Zinder had a pile of broken hospital beds sitting on its grounds – if they disappear it could look as if someone had stolen the beds, or the furniture, or the car. There must be other ways to account for broken things I wonder, especially this painful reminder of the occupational hazards of being a driver (and by extension, a passenger) on the roads in developing countries.

I had requested another hotel in the capital upon my return from the provincial capital. I had a great need to swim, after a whole week on dry land. The Novotel in Abidjan had a fairly large pool I remembered from when I last stayed there, even though that was not a good experience: the hotel staff was unresponsive and even entered into arguments with clients, the rooms were old and dirty.  I had vowed to never go back there. But this time my need to swim won out.

To my great surprise I found a transformed Novotel – friendly and accommodating staff, brand new rooms, a great fitness center and a room with a view over the Lagon.

I went from one extreme to another: instead of the little Nescafe sticks at breakfast, I now had not only access to various machines producing all sorts of real coffees in the restaurant (ristrettos, cappuccinos, espressos, machiatos), I even had a little Nespresso machine all to myself in my room, including a daily refill of the little capsules. I also went from a very limited menu (fish or fowl), to be ordered hours in advance, which was then delivered to my room to eat alone, to an abundance of choices, both a la carte and as buffet. I must add that the cost of this buffet probably exceeded the food budget of a poor family for an entire week.  This creates some discomfort at first – the contrast of rich and poor in the countries I work in hard to accept. But then again, I do like my creature comforts.

However the best was being able to swim and exercise daily – something I am now craving after a long day at work.

Some of my Medford and Arlington colleagues were wrapping up a coordination meeting at the same hotel. I saw little of them as I was in a planning and kick off meeting at the office and preparing for our work in the western part of the country.

I saw them off around dinner time returning home on the Air France overnight flight to Paris. The participants in their meeting were colleagues from Africa and Asia. They had flown in to discuss how to improve leadership of national malaria programs. I had already met some of them when they just started out and received their orientation in Medford. At the time I could tell they were wondering how to produce the results expected of them. In the meantime their programs have taken off, some with great results. They were here to learn from each other. I had dinner with a few that didn’t have flights on Friday and we were able to pick up the thread of where we left off. I got to know some of them a bit better. It was a nice bonus. We talked a lot about influence without authority as none have staff or budgets so they have to entice people to follow them in other ways.

I spread out my breakfast over two hours, not wanting to go back to my tiny room and work on a long list of things. But finally that time had come as eventually those colleagues I sat with had flights to catch.

We all watched in horror the events in Mali. I had noticed that the Ibis hotel no longer allowed cars to pull up to the front entrance. Heavy gates have been installed and guards are everywhere. Thought no one said so, everyone realized that what happened at the Radisson Blue could happen here. It has a chilling effect. The one American woman killed in Bamako was one of our people, on an assignment like each one of us, to improve public health.

It’s funny that I feel happy about going deep into the interior, far away from obvious targets. But really, how do we know what is an obvious target? Deep in Mali’s and Nigeria’s territory bombs have exploded and killed or maimed people. Most of the time we don’t even hear about this as the reporting bias is so blatant – European and American death count more – Facebook has exposed its own bias and made many people angry. When one is not exposed to the rest of the world through personal contacts, it is to forget that one is not the center of the universe.

Yet our chances of being blown up by an ISIS squad or being in a plane going down are very small, statistically speaking. Our biggest occupational hazard is on the road. Yet road trips feel a lot less scary. Ah, the brain is an amazing organ.

Talking about the brain, when I use the stairs rather than the elevator, a space in the hotel that doesn’t usually expect guests, the smell of mildew, wet carpets and cleaning chemicals instantly brings me back to my earliest memories of working in Africa: leaving the plane in Dakar of April 1979, my first trip to Nigeria, the hotel in Abeokuta, in 1987. Those smells are stored deep in my brain with vivid memories attached that are activated each time I take the stairs. It is hard to imagine that all this is possible because of a bunch of chemical and electrical processes.