Sylvia's Journal

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.

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.

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.

We are halfway the training of trainers of small teams representing ICRC staff and centers that offer rehab services in Myanmar, DRC, Togo, Tanzania and Ethiopia. It has been a nice change from our usual counterparts – people more familiar with orthopedic devices and physical therapy than approaches to improve management and leadership in and of their centers.  Yet this is the role they take on when they get back to their respective countries.

The group is a mixture of nationals and expats, mostly from France and Switzerland, who are supporting the local staff. Since I am the only French speaker among the facilitators, I accompany the Togo and DRC teams and getting to know them better than the others. Some of the people I will meet again in two months, in Addis, when we start preparing for a senior leadership program focused on those people in leadership positions who can open doors or support the efforts of those we are with now.

We have a team of 4 facilitators which makes our duties fairly light when it comes to plenary sessions, but intense when it comes to the practical sessions when we serve as coaches and help the participants get familiar with our methods of teaching. They are starting to do more and more while we slowly move to the side. It’s one of the joys of my job.

At the end of the day we review the day, plan the next, make adjustments and drink our St. George Amber beer. Then we sample the many restaurant offerings (Turkish, Mediterranean, Ethiopian of course). And so the days slide by quickly and I begin to wonder when I will be able to sneak out and buy the coffee that Axel is surely expecting me to bring back.

Since I am working primarily with people from outside Ethiopia, I do not have to deal with the confusing way of counting time here. It is the year 2007 I believe, and the date, when I arrived, according to my driver, was 3.5 or 5.3, which I assume is the day and the month, not sure which one of their 13 months. I also don’t need to worry about appointment times where 3 o’clock means 9 o’clock and 1 o’clock could be either 7 AM or 7 PM.

It is July the 10th and July the 5th at the same time here. It is both 2009 and 2001 and as I write this, it is 11 o’clock and it is also 5 o’clock. It remains utterly confusing to have two calendars operating side by side in this society. Sometimes there is a helpful (EC) placed after the date or time, which means Ethiopian Calendar; but more often than not it is assumed that we know. When people say they were born in 1976 does that mean they are now 33 or 25? It is amazing that I haven’t heard much about collisions between those different ways of measuring time. Somehow people who deal with the non-Ethiopian world are managing this just fine.

I checked out of the hotel but not after giving the manager a piece of my mind about customer service. He nodded in agreement and invoked again the excuse of rationed electricity. An argument that doesn’t hold since (a) it is a predictable event (every other day) and (b) all hotels in the neighborhood have generators and an uninterrupted power supply for their guests. He looked at my bag as asked, “are you checking into another hotel in town?” I would have liked to say yes but I am leaving town.

Over break I talk with Pierre-Marie about his ambition to become president of Cameroon. He is serious and studies Obama. He needs a platform, or manifesto, and I have offered to mindmap his ideas while waiting for our plane tonight. I am proud to be his first campaign worker. We agree he should start small, like Obama, maybe run for a district assembly seat first. His ideas are wonderful and sincere – he does remind me of Obama, the same smile and the same quiet way of talking about his dreams, which are quite similar to Obama’s. This is why I took a picture of him under the Obama poster at the Bahir Dar airport.

Maybe he will also write a book, even though it will only reach the intelligentsia. Cameroon has a large illiterate and poor population that would willingly follow anyone who promises TVs and other material goods in exchange for a vote. Pierre-Marie is offering self esteem and pride instead and a kind of bootstrap-self reliance, but what would that be to a person without work and an income? And then of course there is the challenge of having to deal with the powerful oil and mining lobbies with their deep pockets and good lawyers; but if Obama can become president of the US, why not a president Pierre-Marie of Cameroon? Our motto here is ‘everything is possible.’

I am watching the local facilitators grow in front of my eyes. They are ‘getting it,’ and see how this program is different from other leadership work they have done before. They are seeing how each session builds on the previous and how the pieces connect. They have started to challenge old habits and sloppy thinking practices. This is my last day of coaching them and I am very happy; my job here is done. I can move to Afghanistan knowing that the Ethiopia leadership program is in good hands.

We celebrated the very high note ending of this first workshop in Pierre Marie’s government-owned-fancy-but-badly-maintained hotel with a pricy and mediocre meal ($6) and then made our way through thunder, lightning and rainstorms to the tiny airport. Because of the weather we ended up waiting there for hours which we passed by watching a grainy Ethiopian TV channel while the electricity cycled off and on. For periods of time we’d sit in the dark after which the nominal security checks resumed. Any person with bad intentions could have slipped in without anyone noticing, but everything felt quite safe in a small town sort of way.

When we arrived at our hotel in Addis the nightclub was throbbing at full speed. It was 1 in the morning