Sylvia's Journal

Computer viruses are more rampant in West Africa than anywhere else. I don’t know why but my computer constantly gets infected by the pen drives (data sticks) that people use to exchange files. May be it is because many people travel with pen drives or external hard disks and use them in internet cafes. It is the computer equivalent of having sex with strangers in bath houses. So when someone gives me a pen drive in this part of the world I am particularly careful. Yet somehow one virus slipped into the system. Symantec discovered it but told me there was nothing it could do. I had just finished reading Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone about the Ebola and Marburg virus and it felt a little bit like catching one of those. With some sense of dread and foreboding I was waiting to see if this infection was going to be fatal.

And then it happened, the sluggishness, a reboot and then all my personal settings disappeared. Everything familiar on my desktop had vanished. Instead I saw the solemn grey Dell screen that is standard in the new computer. While all this was happening the one facilitator who I had not seen in action yet was doing his session. I needed to watch him. I tried not to panic.

What happened next was quite similar to my reaction 6 months ago in the other crash. The feelings generated by both crashes were remarkably similar. There was a moment of bewilderment, followed by surrender – a recognition that this was an event entirely beyond my control. And then there was an intense effort to concentrate on the here and now and trying not to think of what lay ahead; while life went on in the background. Only for me had the foreground and background traded places.

I alerted Cabul to my predicament and he started to Skype chat with colleagues in Boston for help. He was my first responder and was able to stop the wave of panic by finding everything else that was not on the desktop. That was one big sigh of relief, something similar to when the doctors said, “You will all be OK.”

And then came the period in which everything that was simple before and that you took for granted no longer was. Like the names of people you email regularly that automatically complete themselves when you start typing; or the way the desktop was organized; or Outlook that needed to be installed and was empty at first, taking hours to fill up with megabytes of content, or all the electronic Post-It Notes that I had on my desktop with things I wanted to remember or be reminded of, such as codes, numbers, quotes, book titles, websites, etc.

Several hours passed and I started the long work of computer rehab to re-build everything that had to do with personal settings until I had no more energy left. Back in my room I restarted my computer again for reasons I can’t remember anymore. Then there was that moment of suspense, staring for what seemed like eons to the empty blue blank screen, and then suddenly, there was the old desktop again with everything on it, as if nothing happened, even the files I had been moving from one place to another were where they are supposed to be. As if it was all just a bad dream.

There was rhythm yesterday in our conference room. And one rhythm set of another and another. Before we knew it we had a chain reaction.

It is delightful to work in a context that is not big on protocol. We shove a table to the front of the room. It had some nice Kente cloth (not the real thing, a print) pulled over it which set it apart from the participant tables that were covered in a sort of fancy bed sheet with blue lacy corners. The other thing that set it apart was of course the plastic flower arrangement, a staple in any hotel that is worth its salt. If you have plastic flowers on your table, then you know you are important.  I have seen people enter a workshop room and scan it for the plastic flowers. It is like a beacon that guides people to their proper place.

The regional director, the doc from the central level and I sat in back of the ‘head’ table and each said their words of encouragement and support and then we set to work.

I rarely ventured out from my seat in the far left corner where I watched and occasionally took notes for the feedback session that we had at the end of the day. This is truly a very experienced and accomplished group of facilitators; a sharp contrast to government officials I have worked with in other parts of the world who have a habit of telling people what to do. They tell first and ask later, if they ask at all. Rhythm is usually lacking.

By lunch people remarked, in a surprised sort of way, that there had not been any powerpoints or people lecturing them. As the day wore on the surprise increased; people participated; people were not dozing off; people were full of energy. It always amazes me that after 25 years of exposure to American or British or German or what not experts who do training of trainers, having what I would call a normal engaging inquiry into people’s realities coupled with an orientation towards some simple frameworks is so extraordinary that people notice. What has everyone been doing all these years?

It is of course all in the structure of the design. Interestingly Axel wa also thinking about structure which he mentioned in an email just when I was thinking about structure. Structures can be constructive and destructive. This applies to any structure in our lives of course. If you design it well, the action will follow in predictable ways getting exactly where you want to go. If you design it badly, the structure will constantly pull you off track and you spent all your energy amaking course adjustments. You may never make it to your destination.

Late in the day the facfee beast reared its ugly head. I have come to expect it and it was nice to have Cabul with me to deal with it. Facfee stands for facilitator fee. The entrenched belief is that money motivates and without it there will not be movement. It is so entrenched, all over Africa, that it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Until a year ago I had never heard of this facfee thing. It is a payment in cash to people to do what is considered ‘in addition’ to their regular work. It is an escape hatch from contracting which can never be done with public sector employees as per USAID regulations.  Before when we used to do the facilitation ourselves, it wasn’t an issue because the government officials we worked with were participants not facilitators. They received the per diem which, in some countries, can be a nice salary complement, especially if you go to many workshops and they last long. With the trend towards short workshops (one or two days), this is not longer so interesting. And with the trend towards local facilitation, this becomes an issue. With private sector or NGO people we contract, either directly with them, as independent consultants or through their organizations. Of course this time all of this is a bit shaky as we organized the event over the holidays and, not knowing the cast of characters, we arrived without anny contrtacts in place. We did not want to establish contracts with people or organizations we did not know. Cabul has to iron this out in the next few days before we head home so that we can have the proper contactual arrangements with everyone. As for the government employees, there is a broken record, stuck in the groove that says ‘not allowed.’ We’ll see where that takes us..

On Saturday morning Cabul and I set as out as tourists. ADRA had made driver Charles and an ADRA car available to us in exchange for expenses, a very generous deal. We drove to Fort St. George at the end of the bumpy road into El Mina.

The Portuguese arrived here in 1482 attracted by vision of gold. They built a fort with a church inside it, as they did in many other places along the West African coast. The Dutch, their arch-rivals at the time, showed up in 1637 and kicked them out. They enlarged the fort with two moats and a drawbridge that has a distinct Dutch flavor. They turned the Portuguese church into storage space and made a more austere church in the main building of the fort, right above the female slave quarters, dark and filthy places where the women and men were held, separately, waiting for the ships to take them across the Atlantic.

The old church now holds an exhibit about culture, kings and the customs of the land. The list of kings goes back to 1300; the first 350 years seem more stable with kings chosen along the maternal line; the second 300 years favor the paternal line but there is much interference from the Portuguese, then the Dutch, and then the British. Kings sit on stools rather than thrones, and thus kings are stooled or destooled as the case may be.

As the guide told us delicately, the Dutch men, and the Portuguese before them, were without wives in these dangerous tropical lands and so they needed ladies. Thus, from time to time the miserable group of women was let out of their dank and dark dungeons into the courtyard. Standing in that very place I could picture how the governor, leaning out over a balcony two stories higher, would scan the crowd for his enjoyment. While he was doing this the blinds on the church windows across from him would be ordered closed. Clearly he did not want God to see him as he was preoccupied with his baser instincts.

If the governor could not make up his mind the guards used a Dutch rhyme that I learned when I was little (iene, miene, mutte). Our guide Richard recited it with the right intonation; the words were a little off, but may be it is because it was old Dutch, a language I never learned.

The ‘lucky lady’ was cleaned up by soldiers and given some food and sent up through a set of backstairs and a trapdoor to the governor’s private quarters, to be used as he wished. After he was done she’d go back down the trapdoor and held for a while on the floor below to entertain the officers who lived there before being discarded back into the mass of misery down below. Her only hope was that she conceived. Pregnant women were released. They could go home, a walk of some 1000 miles, or stay in town and become the mothers of a new group of notables. Their children had Portuguese or Dutch last names and were of light skin, which meant better in the social pecking order. They became the new elite. They are still very visible to this day al along the Southern coasts of West Africa. The Maternity Home has been restored and stands as a symbol of new life, in more than one sense.

The Dutch were driven out by the British in 1872. With the abolishment of slavery the place started to decline as a commercial center. Now, with the help of the EU and the Dutch government an ambitious restoration project is underway. Pictures of Dutch Crown Prince and his Maxima show the launch of the project.

After the fort we visited a similar imposing building but there the restoration and ‘touristification’ had not yet taken place. We were the only people there and had to wake up the ticket seller, sleeping on a bench in a stark naked room with only a transistor radio for company. We paid 2 dollars for a self guided tour as per the fee schedule posted on the wall but there was nothing to guide us; the place was in disarray with debris and construction material strewn along, bats and birds nesting in the turrets. They did not like our intrusion. It was a very short tour.

After lunch at the restored Bridge House, now a hotel and restaurant, we left for Kakum National Park. The park is about 35 kilometers inland, and has the only canopy walk in Africa, according to our forest ranger guide. We started our walk with buses full of Ghanaian adolescents, mostly church groups, and a sprinkling of foreigners. The walk up was tricky for me, uneven rocks and quite steep at first. But even I was in better shape than many of the young Ghanaians, so I understand the health minister’s preoccupation with ‘Mens Sana in Corpore Sana.’ Cabul and I were number 2 and 3 on the walk which consisted of 7 spans of 40 to 60 meters long that were constructed from aluminum ladders laying flat on the bottom of nets tied to ropes and with a plank over the ladder to facilitate the walking. The walks were between 11 and 40 meters above the ground. It was breathtaking to be so high up with the sounds of the forest canopy, mostly insects and birds. We were sufficiently ahead of the teenagers to not hear their shrieks of laughter and terror. We watched them later as they stepped on the first walk, the boys teasing the girls, the girls playing their damsel in distress role to the hilt.

Back at the park entrance I visited the exhibit which was nicely done. It was the first time I saw the Adinkra symbols used in ways I like to use them. Many are stylized representations from nature and it is graphic design at its best: the fern stands for endurance and defiance; the snake climbing up a palm tree stands for doing the impossible and 4 crocodiles pulling outward stands for unity. It gave me some more ideas for next week.

I am sitting at a breakfast table in an open air restaurant that looks out over the ocean. I have a front row seat and watch hotel staff wash the Harmattan dust off the warped ping-pong table. Behind him, not allowed on the hotel premises but as close as is possible are young men in their Rasta outfits trying to sell trinkets to holiday makers. In back of them, just along the water’s edge, a few women walk in a line in and out of view with enormous piles of firewood and bowls on their heads. They walk fast, bare feet. And far off on the horizon I see the fishing pirogues, some with sails others with paddles or motors.

Yesterday morning we left Accra early. We arrived in Cape Coast and went straight to the Ghana Health Services regional office to make a courtesy visit and see the workplace of one of our teams next week. After that it was time for a little holiday as the Brits call it. One of the regional Office staff had booked us in a delightful beach resort, the Coconut Beach Hotel for Friday and Saturday night. Sunday we move to the venue for the workshop which is right behind the regional health office in the town of Cape Coast.

To get to our temporary quarters we drove through the old slave port El Mina, which reminded me of Zanzibar and other slave ports I have seen along the coast of Africa. The place was teeming with people. They are dwarfed by the two imposing buildings that we will visit today. One is probably the old governor’s castle, the Dutch were here in the 17^th century, the other I am not sure about. We are going to visit the town today.

The resort is a few kilometers outside El Mina, at the end of a bumpy road that leads through a small fishing village. Small fish are drying on racks everywhere.

We bought access to the hotel’s hotspot access network. I had not expected it and later wished it hasn’t been there. Connecting to it became an exercise in patience and I gave up quickly and ended up sitting by the ocean and reading for hours. Against doctor’s orders I ordered a Pina Colada. It is the kind of drink you are supposed to have in places like this. It was heavenly. Cabul was more task-oriented than I and fiddled with his budget spreadsheets until the numbers came out right. Today he too is going to relax and we will be tourists.

Today is our big event for this week. We call it the Senior Alignment Meeting. The purpose is to bring senior government officials on board with our leadership initiative by exploring links between the things that keep them awake at night and the promises of this program. When we did this program in Nepal a couple of years ago only 7 people showed up of the 35 invited and we did not quite get the alignment we had hoped (we got it later). Here it looks like we’ll have the opposite. We would have been happy with 10 people but the latest tally is nearing 40. Whether numbers correlate with degree of alignment remains to be seen.

I went out with a longtime friend last night who I had not seen since I last worked in Ghana in 2004. I had my first not starchy meal (Tigerprawns and haricots verts, or, as they used to be called when we lived in Senegal, Harry Couverts). We caught up and compared experiences of getting close to our sixties; we who always thought only other people got old. I received a good overview of the lay of the land, at least one person’s perspective and received some advice that may prevent surprises. Much of this has to do with expectations and people taking things so for granted that they fail to articulate them. This is what sometimes gets foreigners in trouble. We assume, but we don’t check. So last night I checked. It is all part of the leadership practice we call scanning

During the day we designed and prepared for this important meeting with four members of our newly built facilitator team. To get us in the right frame of mind, we started the day with a wonderful internet slide show called an Irish prayer that was sent to me the night before by one of my colleagues whose mother just passed away. It is about wishing people not smooth sailing and beds of roses but the things that help you through rough times. It was about all the things that we experienced over the last six months.http://www.e-water.net/irishblessing_en.html

We had a very productive day. The resulting design of the meeting today is better than the draft I did on my own the night before. I had used some of the Ghanaian Adinkra symbols that mean something I felt was relevant for this program and us as a team: Two Heads are Better than One; Doing the Unusual or the Impossible, and Unity.

The leap of faith part is that I have not yet seen any one of the team members facilitate. Some people might say that it is risky to do this with such high level folks but for me it is a calculated risk. It will test my belief that facilitation is easier and less likely to go off the tracks if the design is robust. Most of the failures I have seen in meetings were a direct result of not having a design at all.

I discovered that several of the people I met with during the nutrition meeting At UNICEF in New York a month ago are actually meeting again across town, right here in Accra. There is a lot of traveling and meeting going on in the world I live in and I wonder when some of these people are ever home. But maybe people also wonder that way about me.

While I am preparing for the immediate future, as in today, I am also, on the side, preparing for other trips over the next few months, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Afghanistan. I am catching up with my old lifestyle and it makes me happy. The assignments are exactly the kinds of things I like to do.

Up and running was far from my mind for months. Actual running is still not in the stars. My regular walking has greatly improved. I am rarely limping. I can get myself into ADRA’s large SUVs without too much effort. I don’t think people here can tell that I was in a wheelchair four months ago. But still, the nerve endings in the ball of my right foot and in my toes are not back to their old state. Sometimes it feels as if I walk on a wad of cotton balls. There has been no significant change in months now and sometimes I wonder whether this is the way it is going to be. I have discovered there are many people with neuropathies in their feet or toes. People usually don’t talk about them unless you ask. I am learning that this condition simply becomes part of who you are, like a scar. You learn to live with the odd sensation(s). If this is the only lasting damage from our fall from the sky, I have no reason to complain.

I am starting to get sloppy about my exercises-in-the-shower routine. Part of the reason is that the shower is actually a narrow bathtub and the angles and surfaces I need are not right. Once I am out of the shower the tasks of the day call me and the exercises are forgotten. There is also no one else around to remind me.

Yesterday was a day of up and running in the figurative sense. At a little past 9 o’clock we had 10 potential leadership development facilitators seated around ADRA’s conference room table, half of them from the ministry, and over half of them women. Nearly all of them were informed at the last minute, some just an hour before. This was not because of bad planning or anything like that; I considered it in a more positive light: a spontaneous response to the seeds we had dropped about the program and scattered into the wind during the last 24 hours.. The group was enthusiastic and diverse, representing various sectors, organizations and professional interests.

I had planned a full day orientation and team building workshop during which people experienced some of the exercises they are expected to facilitate next week in Cape Coast. That way I would be able to observe them in a group. I saw what they are passionate about and gleaned insights from their long and deep experience in Ghana. We shared our personal philosophies about learning, leading and managing and we reviewed some of the challenges that the teams they will be working with will be up against. I asked one of them to facilitate our own visioning exercise which led to a great conversation about inductive and deductive planning approaches.

We took a break that took twice as long as I had planned because we went to a popular lunch restaurant, another maquis, which required a car. Despite our efforts to be organized and order ahead of time it took an hour before all of us had received our meals. The manager of the restaurant was trying to instill an attitude of customer service in her wait staff but it was a lost cause as all of them, including the kitchen staff, struggled to keep up with demand. It was a seller’s market and thus bad luck for us. But the food was great and so was the company and there was lots to see.

Next to us a large number of Maggi sales people (‘Maggi and Me, the Secret of Goodness’). They were celebrating something. They were all dressed in the same bright red and yellow shirts. I regret I did not take a picture of them; it was such a festive sight. I asked the two white managers, older gentlemen, who did not look half as smart in their shirts as their young Ghanaian salesforce, how one could get a shirt like that and their answer was ‘you work very very hard.’ They emphasized every word in a way that made it seem an unattainable dream and look at the proud wearers of the shirts with some envy. Cabul thought it would be nice to have a uniform like that. It does create an instant and clean sense of belonging. In search of the missed picture I went on the Maggi (=Nestle) website of Ghana and found all sorts of useless but interesting information. There actually was a Mr. Maggi (Julius) who founded the famous cubes over 100 years ago. I did also learn that there is a coveted “MAGGI Homowo Kpopoi Manye” title at the grand final event of the Homowo Festival, a harvest celebration in the Ga community around greater Accra. Maggi sponsors cookouts where, I presume, much Maggi is used. This competition has evolved, according to the site, to become not only a key brand-building event for MAGGI, but also for the ethnic group called the ‘Ga.’ Imagine that, brandbuilding for ethnic groups. I am struggling with the concept.

Today is my Irish-twin brother Willem’s birthday. For one month each year we have the same age. That month just ended today. Happy Birthday, gefeliciteerd!

Yesterday was like the Tetris computer game, where different shapes fall from the top of the screen to be stacked right at the bottom of the screen. Good hand-eye coordination and fast reflexes are needed to guide the shapes into the right spot so that they create a smooth surface for the next series of shapes. If you stack them wrong you quickly get into trouble and to the game is over before you scored any points at all. The more progress you make, the faster the pieces come ‘raining’ down. When a layer is completed it disappears and you get bonus points or are promoted to the next level in the game.

We have been playing this game for awhile. At first, back in October, the Tetris pieces came down slowly but they have been speeding up lately. Yesterday the pieces came down fast and furiously as we had to nail down dates, times, venues, participants, hotel reservations, facilitators, meals, materials and more. We also had to throw ourselves into thick traffic to visit most of the key players in this leadership development adventure. I am pleased with the results, the most important of all is that we were received warmly everywhere with more than pledges of support; we got everyone’s full cooperation, their confidence and enthusiasm.

Our partner, the Adventists Development and Relief Agency (ADRA/Ghana) was particularly helpful and became our graceful host, making their office and conference room available as well as a driver and car. We criss-crossed Accra several times, often searching for our destination. Streetnames are absent or hidden and places are referred to as ‘in the neighborhood of this or that landmark.’ For newbies like us this is a big challenge. Even our Ghanaian driver was stumped a few times.

Halfway through the day I discovered that it was Cabul’s 27^th birthday. It was too late for a decorated birthday chair at breakfast but not too late for a celebratory meal in the evening that included a Margarita à la Tante Marie in a little maquis (open air) restaurant that served a variety of African foods from the region. The margarita did not quite fit the local food theme but it did go, belatedly, with the Chimichangas Cabul had for lunch at the US embassy. The embassy also houses USAID and is brand new; a fortress-like structure that sends out one signal that says ‘America is under attack’ and another that says ‘don’t even try.’ It is discouraging to see our tax dollars at work in such a costly, and in my view unproductive and reactive way. I could see ways in which all that money could be used creatively and productively to create more attractive futures for those who willingly blow themselves up in or near our embassies. Cabul and I are on the other extreme of our our tax-dollars-at-work continuum. I’d like to think of us and this leadership program as good and more creative value for money.

My Guinean ex-colleague and good friend Namoudou Keita, who is based in Togo, happened to be in Accra on leave and joined us for dinner. Namoudou is learning English and since Cabul does not speak French, this seemed like a perfect occasion for Namoudou to practice. That was the theory. In practice there was a lot more French than Cabul could handle. It left him eager to learn French.

Back at the hotel we parted from Namoudou and retired to prepare ourselves for our next set of tasks. I tried to catch the occasional wireless signal that wafts in and out of my room. While waiting for the signal to return I prepared for today’s first encounter of the Ghanaian facilitator team; a mishmash of people from public and private organizations who are interested or have been nominated to be part of the core team that will carry the leadership program forward after Cabul and I return to Boston. Back home we will cheer them on and support them using whatever technology is available, Internet, Skype, cellphones and, if necessary, carrier pigeons.

It was a good start of our trip and I kept thinking, “Something must go wrong now; this is too good to be true.” But nothing did. I have never quite gotten off to such a great and fast start elsewhere. There is something unassailable about having the support from the top leadership of all the groups we are working with: the ministry, USAID, ADRA and the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration. It proves the old saying that where there is a will, there’s a way, especially if the will comes from the top. The way forward is right in front of us and wide open.

I woke up from a dream about a nursing conference where I was in charge of a session that had a clever name and was about emotions. I remember walking to the session and leafing through the booklet that went with it. It was very fancy with glossy pages but I did not recognize it and it had nothing to do with what I had planned to do during my session. The booklet I had in my hand seemed prepared for a lecture whereas I had planned a series of conversations in pairs and small groups. I had counted on these conversations to produce the content of the session.

The dream was probably triggered by my reading an article last night about introducing participatory community planning events in Indonesia that, according to the author, went quickly off the tracks. It also represents the reality I usually have to deal with when we first launch a leadership development program. Often people expect the expert to lecture people into changing. Gently bending such expectations into a different direction is what I usually need to do in the beginning. There is sometimes resistance to this because the activity of bending, both for the bender and the bendee is not without effort. Lecturers, especially if they have been lecturing for a long time, require little effort or preparation; listeners to such lectures require little effort or preparation, only the presence of their bodies in the room. What I am proposing requires lots of work, from beginning to end.

Yesterday I slept in and found Cabul had indeed arrived as planned. Mamadou had picked him up and dropped himoff at the hotel. We had our cornflakes together in an otherwise empty dining room. Susan Wright from USAID stopped by the hotel to welcome us and painted us a more detailed picture of the context and cast of characters we will be meeting soon. Later, Moussa and Cire, Mamadou’s sons, who look like they are in their late twenties but are actually still in school, one under 20, picked us up in their father’s SUV and drove us through empty streets (it’s Sunday) to Mamadou’s house. Mamadou and his wife Zahara live in a sort of palace. The two crowns on the big black gate prove this. It is owned by a Northern Nigerian Chief who lives next door in a 15-room palace with the same crowns on the gate. Inside the house is majestic. Another couple, Ivorian/Senegalese joined us for an enormous lunch spread, including meshwi (a recognizable lamb) and chickens, looking puny next to the lamb, a large salad and atieke, a couscous-like substance made from manioc. Lunch was completed by fresh paw-paw, mango and pineapple, a real treat for us coming from a northern winter. Cabul got a large dose of French which was the primary language of all present, except the two of us. Sometimes we switched to English and Cabul could participate for a while, then back to French.

On our way home we drove around looking for a simcard for Cabul’s cellphone. The preferred place for this and a carton full of water bottles is the Shell station. The little stores at gas stations are common here too and have become the local convenience stores. Not much in terms of staples but lots for people craving sweet or salty snacks. Apparently, these bad eating habits are on the minister of health’s screen: a retired military by the (first) name of Courage (names are destiny). He believes in wholesome living, good eating habits and much exercise. He reminds me of Dr. Kellogg and his movement in the New York mountains at the turn of the (previous) century. There are some other priorities here that have to do with more basic health problems such as women and children dying during or right after delivery and the scorch of malaria, killing small children in droves.

The remainder of the day Cabul tried to stay up and adjust to the new time zone and I contacted various people I knew and did not know to say I had arrived in Ghana.

We had a delicious local meal in the, once again, empty dining room and withdrew too our rooms around 9 PM for another good night sleep.