Sylvia's Journal

I found a surprising message in my mailbox on one of the many social networking sites I subscribe to. A boyfriend from my early teens found me on the internet. He is now the chief of Schiphol’s freight services. Our meeting place will be obvious, if not in the air, then on the ground. We have not seen each other for more than 40 years.

We left our hotel in Abidjan yesterday and drove to Bassam. While I was waiting for Oumar to check out I took some pictures of the lobby, a special request from Sita who thinks my blog should have more pictures. I went all out.

When you enter the hotel the first person (thing?) you encounter is a large seated statue of a local king in traditional garb. To me he looks like a Ghanaian king the way he is dressed with his Kente cloth and all the gold(paint), but then again, the Ghanaians and Ivoirians are cousins, if not brothers.

The king sits with his back to a large waterfall sculpted out of cement, plastic vines and leaves that blocks the lobby off from the street and fills one side of it. On the left of the entrance all the chairs are bunched together to make room for the ceiling painter. This made it a little harder to get a good view of the wall decorations, pictures of shiny and slippery beauties that, I presume, are intended to lighten up the experience of meeting with a business partner in a hotel lobby.

On our way out of town we passed by a roundabout that I had noticed earlier because of the two huge cement statues of an eagle and a lion. They stand by the side of the road, rather forlorn, as if waiting to be put in a more fitting place, or returned to where they were taken from. The lion needs some repairs as its head has been cut off. The eagle is intact and spreading its wings as if to fly away. I asked Alphonse how come the lion was damaged and the eagle was not? He did not know.

After driving past countless little beach restaurants, all equally inviting but all ignored, we arrived in Bassam at lunchtime. We had to ditch our plans to go to one of the beach places in order to honor our commitment to the rest of our facilitation team of starting our work at 2 PM. And so we settled in the hotel’s open air dining area, next to a noisy and splashy swimming pool full of teens and preteens. We assumed we could eat quickly and start on time. We did not. Lunch took an hour of preparation (grilled chicken and fries). We ordered our drinks, ginger juice, going for the least chemically enhanced drink we could find on the menu. It was served in two tones: green at the bottom and yellow at the top. We asked about the green and were told ‘c’est pour decoration.’ We asked for an undecorated drink.

Sometimes it is good that time is so very elastic here, since our co-facilitators were not quite on schedule, if there is such a thing. One showed up five hours after the appointed time. I watched Oumar use this as a teaching moment (‘How long have you known about this assignment? You know, being a facilitator has certain implications…’) He did it with grace and great care. We’ll see how this team will evolve; for now calling us a team is either premature or an article of faith. This is going to be as just-in-time as it can get, since the program starts today after lunch.

We met the president of the CCM who is a retired professor and gave him the design and our intentions in a nutshell. We were doing this in the hotel lobby where a huge plasma screen TV is permanently turned on (as it is now while I am writing, the X-files). I always find it hard to engage with people who are watching TV during the conversation but no one else seemed to be bothered and there were signs that people were indeed listening.

As far as the field visits are concerned, everything is extremely sketchy but no one seems to worry, so I don’t either. It certainly will be an adventure from a design and facilitation point of view. My past experience was in South Africa which had none of the protocol requirements and no outsiders handing out money to pay for this or that. Interestingly, when talking with people in private here they dismiss the protocol as something that isn’t really necessary but collectively everyone agrees it is important. This is the power of myth-making at work; only interesting if you can observe it at arm’s length but a pain in neck when you’re in it yourself.

For dinner we drove in a noisy diesel Mercedes to a maquis hardly recognizable from the outside but well known by our local hosts. The notion of serving a customer with speed and grace was entirely unknown to the two sullen waitresses who seemed just as happy to see us go. We nearly did go when over an hour later we still had not seen any food. When it finally arrived we had two types of fish, aloko (fried plantain), rice and atieke. This time I believe a few uninvited guests slipped in along with the food, judged by the gurgling sounds coming from my stomach last night, but luckily gone this morning.

On a continent where most of the people have little money and live at great risk with very little protection I always wonder why the majority of large buildings in the center of its capital cities are occupied either by banks or insurance companies. Whose money and who is insured, one wonders. The place around our hotel is awash with banks and insurance companies.

We started yesterday with a visit to our MSH colleagues who have an office on the outskirts of Abidjan. We are much indebted to them since they are making all the logistical arrangements for our adventure here. It is always nice to meet far-flung members of our extended MSH family. Alphonse the driver who picked me up at the airport has been assigned to drive us around. He is very helpful in showing us what is where, where to eat and what’s happening on the political scene. After one day in Abidjan I told him I saw no signs of this being a danger post; for that I have to go north, he said, adding that even there it is calm right now.

Some two weeks ago we had shipped 3 boxes containing some 50 copies of our leadership book to Abidjan via DHL to be handed out to the workshop participants. Since no one here had seen the boxes we tracked them down on the DHL website and discovered they were in Nigeria. They have been on an interesting world tour: picked up at our office on the 29th of August, shipped via Ohio and Florida to San Jose in Costa Rica where DHL realized, 4 days ago, that the boxes were shipped to the wrong place. Since then the boxes have been in Panama City, Caracas, Barbados, London, and Brussels before landing in Nigeria. According to DHL they left the Lagos DHL office at 5 PM local time yesterday. With any luck they arrive today in Abidjan but that’s only half the challenge. Getting boxes out of customs can be a huge undertaking, especially when you are in a hurry. I am not counting on seeing our shipment any time soon.

After our visit to the MSH office we returned to town and set up our computers in the conference room of the CCM in the center of town. To get to the CCM’s floor you can take a tiny elevator that has no lights. Once the door closes you are in the dark and can only hope that the electricity does not go out. If that were the case for any length of time it would lead to a slow and somber (dark) suffocating death, I imagined. After one trip up I decided to take the stairs, also in the dark, but less constraining and good for digesting the heavy (starchy) meals that are common in this part of the world.

For lunch we went to an abandoned hotel which has a working restaurant on the top floor. You had to know it to find it. It would have been the last place I would have looked for a restaurant. The tiny restaurant, without windows and with hard slatted chairs did not look very inviting. But appearances are misleading. I had my first sampling of Cote d’Ivoire’s famous cuisine: a piece of fish in an eggplant sauce with rice; slightly spicy and delicious. For Oumar who comes from the Sahel, this place has it all: the sea and forest for fish, fowl, fruits and vegetables in abundance.

After lunch we worked with the administrator of the CCM, which included some teaching right there and then by Oumar. Oumar is an exceptionally gifted teacher and a serious and conscientious worker. He knows where Africans stumble and confronts people, gently, where most other Africans I have worked with would not dare to. He runs the show and I am there to support him; I am not sure he needs much support but we enjoy working together and besides it is fun to see him in his element, as a trainer/facilitator.

For dinner we went to a small roadside restaurant in Treichville, a part of the city on the other side of the lagoon where there is life after 5 PM. The Plateau section of town, where our hotel is located, empties out at 5 PM when all the offices close; it becomes a ghost town. We took a taxi with an angry driver; Oumar, always the teacher, tried to teach him about customer service (not a bad idea given the unemployment and the glut of taxis here) but he wouldn’t listen and deposited us angrily at a main artery after having gone through several red lights and taken the reserved bus lane, driving faster than prudent; as accident survivors we were a bit sensitive to his driving style (‘doucement, doucement s’il te plait’) but this only made him angrier.

We talked more about our respective accidents, which would have been boring to anyone else, while we ate our Kedjénou and I had a beer twice the size of a normal beer (‘plus petite, ce n’est pas la peine, said the waitress). On the way back we had another taxi adventure. This time the driver was more congenial and willing to be taught to stop at a red light. I don’t think it will stick but at least he was willing to please us for the duration of our ride.

I am waiting for the ‘technicien’ which is what you need here to connect to the internet. The best signals on the wireless list come from Standard Bank next door, especially the one for the CEO but of course they are locked. While I am waiting and writing I watch a French program that is entitled ‘people in bathing suits aren’t necessarily stupid.’ What I see does not match the title.

I arrived in Abidjan while it was still light but by the time my suitcase arrived, in the very last batch, it was dark. Alphone the MSH driver was waiting for me. It is always nice not to have to hassle with taxis after a long flight and seeing someone waving a piece of paper with your name on it in the packed arrival hall. The ‘rentree (des classes)’ in the Francophone world does not happen until the middle of September. This explains why there were so many children on the plane. Their presence made the wait for my suitcase easier. I marveled at their ability to have fun with whatever was at hand. I was totally absorbed by two 5 year old boys who commented on every suitcase going by. One of them had a well-used stuffed lion who he would deposit in between the suitcases, to be picked up a few meters further by his buddy, both squealing with laughter.

Downtown was empty, at 7 PM, which is unusual for an African city. Large concrete barrages, no longer in use, were shoved to the side around some of the banks. According to Alphonse everything is being rebuilt and repaired and things have been calm for a long time. It looked that way. In daylight there are few signs of the destruction, which acoording to Alphonse wasn’t so bad here on the Plateau part of Abidjan. ‘Wait until you see the destruction in the countryside,’ he added. This is what I see from my windows. The view is that of a hundred other African downtowns.

In the hotel I called Oumar. He was a slimmer version of the Oumar I remembered, slimmer and taller as if he had been stretched lengthwise. He was in a horrendous car accident in Kindia in Guinea some two years ago. No one thought he would survive but he did. He had none of the insurance cushions we had, nor the support of his employer (the government of Guinea) as I did. But the things we learned from our respective accidents were quite similar, about community and support networks and the taking and giving of support.

And after that I fell into a dream-filled sleep of 10 uninterrupted hours.

I used the morning of my first post vacation workday to check out the global fund website and download several documents about the Country Coordinating Mechanisms (CCM) by which the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria (GFATM) assures local ownership of interventions; reading for later, to pass the time in transit. I finished packing, filling my suitcase up with French books that had been culled from my library earlier this week, to leave behind with my colleagues in Abidjan. It produced a rather heavy suitcase.

Then it was off to the doctor. I arrived with my list of body parts to be discussed. After we had ticked each one off, I was hardly any wiser. I had some X-rays made of my sacrum and small toes to rule out any mechanical failures but we both knew that these would be unlikely. The doctor’s order is to continue with the physical therapy, do another round of acupuncture for my sacroiliac joint or go straight for the cortisone injection, get a second ankle opinion and set a date for the carpal tunnel repair surgery. This fall is going to have nearly as many interactions with the healthcare system as last fall.

On my way home from the doctor’s office I picked up some nice gentlemen who were out for a walk on this beautiful day, heading exactly in the same direction as I was (Joe and Axel). Joe took us out to lunch on the way to the airport and they both delivered me to Air France in time for them to squeeze in a visit to the ICA before closing time at 5:00 PM.

The flight to Paris is short, a mere 6 hours. By the time dinner is served you are already halfway there. I had a very short postprandial nap, too short, and woke up to see Indiana Jones, up to his neck in quicksand, refusing to pull himself out by way of a huge python. He is so not my favorite character; after I saw him in a snake pit in his first movie I have refused to see any new IJ movies; and now this, waking up to the only snake scene in the entire movie; my luck.

I tried to get back to sleep by listening to my meditation tapes which always put me to sleep before track one is finished; but not this time.

I arrived at an empty AF terminal E, was bussed to terminal C and found my way to the lounge which is the only thing that makes a 7-hour wait at CDG bearable. It is a reward for frequent flying and, counterproductively of course, for the huge ecological footprint I am making in the process. Tessa had me do a survey on the internet to ‘measure’ my carbon footprint some years ago, before the word was common currency. According to the not so scientific calculations my high-flying lifestyle required about 9 planets. Should I change jobs?

I showered, served myself a nice French breakfast including pain au chocolat, and am now ready to start reading and familiarize myself with my client. If all goes well, the next entry will be from Abidjan.