Sylvia's Journal

During my early morning writing routine I watched a BBC documentary about the Kabul skateboarding club, Skateistan. It was founded by an Australian skateboarder who introduced the sport to marginalized youth in Kabul. The images were those of another Afghanistan than what we usually see: young boys and girls on skateboards, parents cheering them on from the edges of the skating rink and foreigners walking around freely in Kabul. The images lifted my spirits.

More spirit lifting happened during the day as we embarked on our new leadership development program with the local consulting firm CALD (Centre for African Leadership Development), a new organization founded by five enthusiastic leadership developers. We selected CALD out of a field of 7 respondents to our RFP. Our instincts (and their descriptions of themselves) appeared to be accurate.

I mostly hovered in the background and supported my colleagues and the new team by providing feedback, context and stories about sobering and uplifting experiences elsewhere. It is one of the more satisfying roles for me to play as I marvel and enjoy seeing others embrace what has become practically a way of living for me. The enthusiasm and energy were palpable. I do believe that I am in the business of energy liberation (leadership) and conservation (management).

Before I went to bed I watched the BBC again to suddenly hear a familiar voice and see a familiar face, that of our Beirut days house mate Peter from the UK. In the 30 intervening years he has become an energy intelligence specialist and participated in a heated discussion about oil transactions in Kurdistan. As an English teacher kicked out of North Yemen in the late 70s, arriving on my doorstep in Beirut, I would have been hard pressed to imagine him in a suit and tie commenting to the world on middle eastern oil.

While Soros explains to his Aljazeera interviewer that any blog site is a media site rather than a technology site [I have the odd feeling that this is significant] I try to make sense of my very bizarre dreams about scientists and salami. Maybe the dreams were triggered by the wonderful Italian food that we had last night at Don Vito’s and watching the Discovery channel for too many hours.

It rained most of the day. It reminded me of those rained out Sundays that make you want to snuggle up with a book in a chair by the window. In my case that book is my Kindle with its collection of books to choose from. If I am not in the mood for one I can simply toggle to another.

My colleagues moved out of the fancy Sheraton and into my more reasonably priced hotel with its much larger rooms, big balconies, free internet and breakfast. It’s easier now; we were able to meet as a team without need for taxis, and divided the workload for the next three days.

Pierre-Marie got the top level apartment with its newly installment Jacuzzi tub and the 45 feet terrace; I am one floor below, with two balconies and a regular bathtub; the same kind of room as Liz, one floor further down. This represents exactly our places in the MSH hierarchy.

Through facebook I discovered that my longtime friend Anne was also on mission in Addis. We met for dinner and caught up on news about families and work. Later in the evening I noticed another friend coming this way. What’d I do without facebook?

I decided to forego the macchiato five floors down and instead had my cup of Nescafe and instant oatmeal. This allowed me to linger in my pajamas for a good part of the morning.

At about 11 AM Liz picked me up for an outing into town. First stop was a leather factory. Leather is a big thing here which I could have figured out since they eat so much beef. On the outskirts of town, in the factory’s shop, we found racks full of coats and bags of the softest leather. I am not much of a leather person but some coats were hard to resist, especially at the prices advertised. Liz emerged with a elegant jacket that appeared to have been made for her, such a perfect fit. We will return next week to make the final decision about some items we asked them to put away for us.

Next stop was the coffee place, Tomoca, where we had our first macchiato of the day, coming out of an enormous espresso machine. We sipped our coffee from the tiny cups while breathing in the wonderful smells of freshly roasted coffee beans. Liz will take back the coffee beans I ordered while the ground coffee will come along to Kabul as a treat to anyone who has been living on Nescafe too long.

The rains moved in and we skipped the Mercato, allegedly the biggest market in Africa. Instead we headed for the Boston Spa building to make our appointments for a hot stone massage, a manicure and a pedicure for next Saturday when we will have earned such treatment. Above the spa is the Lime Tree café, a bookstore/café/restaurant that has the feel of the universal university bookstore/cafe restaurant. Not surprisingly you can find many young expats sitting behind their computers checking email while drinking their lattes.

The afternoon was reserved for work – getting ready for the first event that starts on Monday when we will create the team that will run the leadership program after we leave, two weeks from now.

Liz and Pierre-Marie, our colleague from Cameroon, picked me up again at the end of the day and we headed for the Beer Garden Inn, a German brew pub with a menu in German and shiny copper kettles brewing the beer in full view. The place was packed and we got the last open table. Soon we found ourselves with a contraption on our table that delivered the beer from a tab, coming out of a meter long cylinder; imagine that, one meter of beer!

We did not order the full meter (5 liters). Ours was filled to the 3 liter line, about 65 cm, with foam filling up the remainder of the cylinder. Iit was plenty for us girls, although we suspect that Pierre-Marie could have handled the full meter.

A few men, sitting behind us, had started with beer up to the 75 cm line (about 4 liters) and seemed to have given up after drinking about 60 cm of that. They looked rather tired as they slouched on their seats. Twenty cm of beer can tire you out easily. Simple pub fare accompanied the drinks and made for a very pleasant evening.

Back at the hotel it looked like the Oscars were being handed out; the place was full of excited young men and women. A red carpet led me up the stairs, then abandoned me by the elevator. The red carpet continued to the basement nightclub with its loud music, dominated by the thump-thump of the base, which got louder by the hour.

At 2 AM in the morning the scene outside my hotel was buzzing with people, men mostly, and some women of ill-repute, drinking enormous amounts of alcohol and getting noisier by the minute. I stood on the balcony for awhile, not being able to sleep, and surveyed the animated scene 6 stories below, then retired to my bed to continue reading why Richard Dawkins thinks God is a terribly destructive delusion. 

The receptionist at the hotel told me that Michael Jackson was dead. If you were to believe the TV, nothing else happened yesterday, not even in Iran. An email from an African colleague offered condoleances. Michael was one of our tribe, believe it or not.

Here in Addis, I heard his songs on car radios, in restaurants and shopping centers. Watching CNN I learned that even the US House or Representatives had a moment of silence. I think he would have liked knowing. May he does know. All channels on my two fancy flatscreen TVs were covering Michael, ad nauseam.

I spent a good part of the day chasing the elusive Ethiopian telcom simcard. Such cards are now the monopoly of the state. It controls who gets one and who does not. This stands in sharp contrast to the sale of such cards in other African countries.

I stopped at 4 different state-run telecom offices. I was asked to show my ID and then told they had run out of simcards. I saw long lines and people filling in multiple forms but I never saw a simcard changing hands. We went on a wild goose chase all over Addis. The suggestion that maybe we should call ahead before going through thick traffic to another branch office was met with indifference. No, we don’t have the number, and you should just go. I don’t know whether it was a case of foot dragging, not being able to say no to a foreigner, a supply problem or an intentional creation of scarcity. We finally gave up. I felt rather handicapped without a cellphone as landlines are very unreliable. How did we live without cell phones before?

Interrupting the chase from time to time I joined my colleagues who had flown in from the US ahead of me and were busy orienting our new project director. We are getting ready for an intense two weeks in which we have to bring many new people on board and hand over the running of the leadership program and put in into local hands.

Slowly the sky darkened and a thunderstorm produced some significant rain. In the office I was congratulated for having brought the rain, a sign of good luck. The big rains have been slow in coming and people are worried that another drought is in the making.

In the absence of a simcard I made my phone calls from the receptionist desk. It’s a busy place with people coming and going. One person came in and pulled a large wooden model that is used to demonstrate condom use, out of a plastic bag. Nobody flinched; it was as if he was showing the proofs of a brochure. I started to laugh because it was something both ordinary and extraordinary. This is part of the business we are in.

At the end of the day I returned to my large apartment via a local supermarket where I bought fresh roses for next to nothing. I continued unpacking while watching interminable re-runs of Michael Jackson, grieving fans and celebrations of his life. I asked the Italian restaurant to bring my meal to my room, accompanied by a large glass of south African (not Italian) wine and celebrated my safe arirval in Addis, great colleagues and an exciting new venture.

I bought and upgrade to business class for the last leg of the trip for an outrageous amount of points, 45500 – worth nearly two free round trips in the US but it was worth it. I was one of only a handful of people in the spacious cabin, without even a neighbor when they started moving people to the front out of an overflowing economy class. An ecstatic Scotsman plopped next to me, proudly showing his silver NW frequent flyer car. I tried to be happy for him but found myself a little annoyed about my expensive upgrade, having gold and platinum cards aplenty. Some people are lucky about these things. I have been flying with platinum cards for the last 10 years and only very rarely had such luck.

Breathlessly I read the entire book of Masuda Sultana on the plane, My War at Home. I had downloaded it on my Kindle as soon as Ghia had introduced me to her by email and now I am thrilled that I will someday meet her, in Kabul or Stateside. The book is an autobiography that starts with a 16 year old Afghan-American girl being married to a doctor 12 years her senior who slowly finds her voice and becomes an activist for Afghans women’s rights and justice for victims of US bombing attacks after 9/11 in Kandahar. It’s also a book about leadership for people who think they have no voice.

After I finished the book I finally started to focus on my assignment here in Ethiopia and drafted an agenda for the facilitator training that will start on Monday. Today I hope to meet the members of the consulting firm we hired to serve as our facilitator team. I have three days to orient them and bring them on board, after that they will run the senior alignment meeting with bosses and then run the first workshop in two places as a split team; eveyone will get a lot of practice and exposure. It’s a just-in-time kind of thing which allows us to withdraw quickly and support them from afar; a formula that has worked well in countless other places and leaves everyone with a great resources in country – win/win for all.

When I arrived at the hotel I was greeted by guards and attendants who are starting to recognize me. This time I was given an upgrade to a suite without having asked for it (frankly, I don’t care all that much about the size of hotel rooms – it’s the internet access that concerns me more). But when I opened the door to the suite I noticed clothes and other signs of life that indicated to me the room was not mine and I withdrew quickly.

The room next door was open. Inside I saw a group of people hatching some plan or another. When they streamed out and found me in the hall it turned out to have the manager among them. who apologized and invited me to take that room for the night. Tomorrow the enormous suite will be mine, he promised.

I slept well, with te thump-thumping of the active nightclub on the backside of the hotel, 7 floors down, only faintly audible. I woke up with the sun streaming into my room from the 45 feet terrace. And now I am going to have my first cup of the best macchiato in the world. It is served in the Italian restaurant 6 floors down that functions as the hotel’s restaurant.

At 8:30 AM we showed up at the Boston Spa, a full service beauty salon owned by an Ethiopian businessman who made good money in Boston. He traded in his two swanky beauty salons on Newbury Street for this one, plus the resort where we visited last Saturday and another one 500 kilometers further north. A framed Boston Sunday Globe cutting on the wall tells the story of successful Africans returning to their homeland to help the middle class expand, and look good in the process. His own success is allowing others to be successful – this is the trickledown theory. He employs an army of young and gorgeous beauticians, trained at Addis’ Aroma College. The staff-client ration seemed to be 6 to 1.

I started with the hot stone massage while Liz started with a facial. After that we traded places. Hot stone massage was a new experience for both of us. It combines heat, hands, stones and oil. The room was decorated, like the one in Kuriftu resort last week, with rose petals, white towel sculptures and candles on the ground. One nearly set my dress aflame.

The hot stones amplify the pressure of hands and made for a wonderful massage with the heat just on the edge of tolerable. I was surprised the masseuse never dropped the slippery stones; she was clearly very experienced. After I was done she rubbed the oil slick of my body with a hot wet towel, gave me a robe and walked me across the hallway, carrying all my stuff. That was a good thing because I felt all slick and rubbery, hardly able to walk straight and not much of a thinker either. Luckily the distance was short.

The facial room, aside from more petals, candles and sculpted towels, had a tray with various electrical implements that looked much like a dentist tray. I have only once had a facial in my life, a present from Sita and Tessa, some years ago, for Christmas. That was one hour. This one was booked for one and a half hour and I wondered how she could possibly fill all that time. As it turned out it was not just a facial but a delicious head massage, shoulder massage and, once again, a lower leg and foot massage to kill the time while my nutritional mask was drying. All the while a music tape was looping over and over, with muzak made from popular seventies songs and some new age instrumentals.

My face was scrubbed, vacuumed (which sounded like the glob-glob of octopus tentacles getting a hold of my face), something that I imagined to be a sort of a mini cattle prod (not sure what the instrument looked like but it killed the bacteria I was told; if there had been any more volts it would have been a form of torture). I had no idea that my skin needed that much work. But then I learned that we white folks have thin and dry skin that needs much protection; black people have thick and oily skin and Chinese people have very thick and dry skin. She learned that in the Aroma Academy and had to take special classes to be able to treat the foreigners. My fragile white skin required five layers of lotions and creams: tonic, dry skin cream, some other cream, sun screen, and after sun screen. The cosmetic industry has a good thing going for itself.

With a last pat on my cheeks and forehead she ended the session, brought me a sugarless lemon juice and left me quietly to return to the world. Liz emerged a little later, also looking a little dazed, and enchanted with her hot stone masseur. We walked upstairs in slow motion and enjoyed a very leisurely lunch, mezze and quiche, our last macchiato and a pizza-to-go for our pre-flight dinner. The taxi driver who took us back to the hotel had a picture of Obama glued to his dashboard – he was just as happy with our new president as we were.

We spent the rest of our time in Ethiopia cleaning the oil from our skin and hair, packing, doing our expense reports and catching up on the news that happened while we were otherwise engaged. And now onwards to Amsterdam.

We finished our work this morning with a visit to the chief of the national AIDS program in his well appointed office. Even his secretary had a desk that was fancier than any senior official we visited in the region; no comparison for anything further down in the administrative hierarchy. The senior leadership team has benefitted from countless and probably costly training in country and overseas as well as personal coaches. That they have their act together is obvious but, as the chief admitted, it is not trickling down. This is where we hope to join forces; even though it is on a limited scale, in 2 regions and 5 zones each, at least for now.

Liz, Yohannes and I delivered our findings and recommendations at our funder’s office to a small team that listened intently to our presentation. We received their blessing and some additional exhortations to look at private management consulting firms that will benefit from being involved in our work. It would be a good deal for them: being paid for opportunities to develop their staff and be part of an approach that is different than the usual expert-driven management consulting approach.

We returned to the office and tied up some loose ends, took pictures, delivered thank you gifts and said our goodbyes before our colleague Belkis took us to her mom’s house for a last Ethiopian meal. It was completed with a coffee ceremony that included smelling the roasting beans, popcorn and a cup of great coffee.

After that Belkis took us out shopping in her large SUV with stick shift, something she has not entirely mastered. Scratches on the car attested to her self-proclaimed limited driving skills and we had some close calls. Liz was blissfully sitting in the back and could be in denial while I was trying to stay cool in the front, trying not to show occasional rushes of adrenaline. Needless to say there was much honking and angry frowns. Luckily there wasn’t much traffic and the worst that could have happened would have been a fender bender – which would of course have put a literal dent in our afternoon plans. Rest and relaxation is reserved for tomorrow morning when we go to have our hot stone massage and facial at the Boston Spa.

Belkis showed us her own home on the outskirts of the city not far from a coffee roaster where I stocked up on beans. We visited some handicraft places and purchased gifts for people we owe something to back home. Back in our hotel it was time to see if the new acquisitions would still fit in the suitcase (they did). We ordered out for chili pizza from Don Vito’s and indulged in a glass of Chianti and another fattening desert. Our last work-related activity consisted of writing up our notes, and passing on tasks to our colleagues in Boston and Addis. And with that our job here is done.

I woke up from a vivid dream that involved the delivery of a baby and a graduation project in landscape design. One might conclude that I am more than a little preoccupied with designing a good project and delivering this baby on time to our funders; this is supposed to happen tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM, one hour earlier than we had originally planned and close on the heels of our last visit to the federal HIV/AIDS program folks. We are jealously guarding our free time on Friday afternoon.

A rejuvenated (vaccinated they call it here) Liz joined us as we set out to the town of Nazareth (or Adama as it is called as well) to a zonal health office. Although it was not a long trip (from 7 AM till 1 PM), it did take the wind out of us and after our return to Addis we could have done with a nap, but we had more meetings and did not get back to our hotel until 5PM. The nap was inevitable then, a full hour long pre-dinner snooze.

Our visit with an expert in the Family Health Department revealed to us some of the headaches that form part of his daily life. We had to coax it out of him as he told us at first we had the wrong man and he could not provide us with answers. Since he was the only one around he had to be our man and we ended up getting a flavor of what he is up against, further informing our design.

The work environment of many offices looks rather chaotic to us outsiders, with piles of file folders, boxes, large computer sets stacked on or between multiple desks. Outside, a department that used to share the premises had moved out and left behind several large cannibalized generators, rubber tires and an assortment of rusted tools and bits of machinery that made the courtyard look more like a junkyard than a health office. Our host noticed me taking a picture of the mission and vision statement that was written on a board amidst the junk and old tires. He was quick to explain who owned the stuff and absolved himself from any responsibility. We left it at that.

There is a certain fatalism that accepts such disorder and chaos as inevitable and irreparable; the powerlessness weighted on me with the kind of force that causes an instant depression. Although not everyone is busy, I did feel sorry for the people who are. The people we met all seem to be working on their own, fighting their battles in a despondent and unquestioned isolation. Many obstacles appear impossible to overcome as they involve resources and thus require dealing with issues and practices that are either political or unethical or both. When allusions are made to this there are always shrugs or some nervous laughter but never the indignation that could fuel action for change. People may write letters to show they have tried to unclog channels but I don’t think they do it with any expectation of a resolution; it is more of a going-through-the-motions response, you have to do it. All this creates new crises as people give up and leave for better jobs elsewhere. This is called brain drain – another intractable problem that is portrayed as unsolvable by many.

Next on the agenda was a search for data on which to base the selection of our target zones. It was an informative wild goose chase that had us referred from one office to the next, seeing a total of 8 government officials and some retracting of steps before we got something that wasn’t quite what we wanted but the best we could get. The latter came not even from government workers, but from a duo of expert-coordinators seconded by a private agency like MSH.

Our final meeting was with our MSH colleagues, who work on different projects, to make sure that what we propose will enhance rather than detract from what they are doing. We are supposed to be ‘One MSH’ even though we do very different things. But then again, management and leadership is relevant to all and we believe that it will solidify our ‘One MSH’ here in Ethiopia.

After an Italian dinner downstairs with food that was too rich for our own good, we dragged our tired bodies upstairs and finished the powerpoint we will deliver tomorrow to our funder. Good enough for now was the operative word that ended our 13-hour workday.

There was something in the Ethiopian food we ate yesterday that made Liz very sick and sidelined her for the day. I was reminded of my bout with food poisoning some 25 years ago in Coney Island. I thought I was going to die then. She did too but didn’t; instead she spent the day in her room letting her body get rid of the toxins. Hopefully she will be well enough to join us tomorrow on our venture out of Addis. I experienced some intestinal rumblings myself but nothing serious enough to intervene with the plans for the day.

In the morning we visited NASTAD, a group with a mandate that overlaps slightly with ours. We met with the country director and a consultant who man the small country office in Addis. Each new visit puts into place another small part of the giant Ethiopian HIV/AIDS puzzle.

After that we visited a health center with a nurse as the medical director. I learned that doctors don’t want the job. Of the health centers in Addis most are led by nurses who have the difficult task of keeping doctors in line, a huge headache. The doctors, from the descriptions we got, appear to be a bit of an undisciplined bunch, coming and going as they please, not required to punch their time cards (unlike most everyone else in the system) and letting the nurse-in-charge deal with the messiness of managing money, people, supplies, data and drugs. I commented that I did not see any grey hairs yet and was told she was only one month on the job.

Asked for examples of the challenges that she was up against she told the story about the new PMTCT center that was opened with much fanfare over a year ago but not in use because the septic system was not installed. It had been forgotten in the planning and no one noticed it when the construction company handed over the keys. Since then the health center has been asking the authorities for a septic system but it has not even gone out for bid yet. The new building will be old before it is even in use; just one more example that underperformance in health centers isn’t just a matter of missing technical skills.

One more meeting in the afternoon completed our investigations for the day. Our design is shaping up as we test ideas with various stakeholders, each pointing out things we missed or that need refinement. In the process we are also trying to pin down how much everything might cost so we can stay within budget limits.

Late in the afternoon I participated in a phone call that was a technological feat: a team meeting by phone with people in Chicago, Cambridge (US), Addis and Islamabad to prepare for a leadership program launch in two districts in Northern Pakistan next week.

The program for tomorrow is still unclear; some of the people we had planned to visit in health zones some 200 km from Addis are not available. They are being trained in something, a national pastime – the BPR is sometimes referred to as ‘Business People Removed’ (for training). We will remain in suspense where exactly we will travel tomorrow and how and where we will meet with our man from USAID. All we know is that we will leave at 7 AM and that our path will cross someplace. We cannot communicate directly with him because his cell phone fell into the water and damaged his simcard. I trust that all will be revealed in time.

A little box mounted on wall of my bathroom periodically puffs out small clouds of a sweet smelling chemical that neutralizes the natural smells in the bathroom. I try to imagine the hotel room designers sitting around a table listening to salespeople from companies that cater to hotels. It must have been a very good pitch because not only all the guest rooms but also the conference rooms have these puff machines. Sometimes I forget about it and the little squeak that accompanies the puff startles me. It sounds as if someone is letting out a deep sigh in the bathroom.

We had some more visits today to potential partners and vetted our emergent design with various stakeholders in order to make sure that there are no last minute surprises that require an entire overhaul. So far it is holding up under review; even better, we got some advice and ideas that improved it.

We met with the management institute but aren’t sure yet whether we can engage in a contractual relationship as per our and their governments’ regulations. This caught us by surprise and we are not sure how this will resolve itself. We also met with the chief of the Global Fund Secretariat and the chief of the Clinton Foundation, each showing us a different facet of the vast and complex development landscape.

We returned to the hotel exhausted yet there was more work to be done. Liz is facilitating a virtual strategic planning course and reviewing the homework of five teams. I had less work to do and was glad that I was not in any virtual event; it makes for very long work days.

For dinner we went to the Old Milk House restaurant, located on the 10th floor of an apartment building that has seen better days. It was a little creepy downstairs and the elevator even more so. But we made it up and down safely and ate a delicious Ethiopian fasting meal (no meat and no dairy) in between. It was served by a very solicitous young waiter who must have been disappointed about our mousy appetite as we did not even finish our single order. At the end of the meal a woman dressed in the traditional white dress served me my umpteenth cup of coffee of the day. She carried the coffee paraphernalia on a tray with a brazier with sweet smelling charcoal; a more traditional version of my squeaky puff machine.