Sylvia's Journal

Exactly at 9PM I was picked up by the ICRC driver. I congratulated him on his punctuality. Going to the airport, in many developing countries, is a bit of a trust fall; in this case in particular since the next Air France flight wouldn’t be until 4 days later.

As we drove to the airport I noticed military everywhere. It was true that we drove by kilometers of barracks, but still, the police and military ought to have been behind the serpentine wired walls, not in front. The driver commented that it was possible that the president was either on his way into town from the airport or out of town to the airport. That worried me a bit.

“What happens when the president is on the road, and how would you know he is coming or going your way?” I asked. “We never know, you just find out when it happens. It’s simply bad timing. Everyone is stopped, whether in a car, on a bike, by foot. Even ambulances are stopped,” said the driver. “It can be a long as an hour wait.” That made me a bit nervous. I watched the police and military intently to see if the president was approaching. He obviously was not, because they did not look very alert, chatting with each other, checking their phones. I could relax.

I made the flight and the driver hurried back home as soon as I had been deposited.

We had a long day full of heated discussions about what quality of services means in the context of the two rehab centers. We divided the group in 3: one group had to list what quality looks like from the client’s perspective, another from the provider perspective and the third group from a management perspective. The last two were easy since we had both managers and providers in the room. The first one was more difficult, to put oneself in the shoes of someone who needs the service but may not be educated as to what to expect. Imagine someone who had her leg amputated after having been given an injected with a dirty needle, then an untreated infection, then gangrene leading to the only remaining response to save her life: an amputation. Imagine the trauma of all that, and then to travel 600 kilometers in public transport (what if you have to pee?) arrive at the entrance of a crowded hospital with no indications of where to go and who to address. It would be traumatizing for a man, but even more so for a woman. 

After the lists were completed each group moved over to one of the others and indicated with a (+) or (-) sign whether the listed aspects of quality were being honored/present or not. Because of time constraints (we have very slow and soft starts every day) we could not have another round; good enough for now. 

The review of the lists and the plusses and minuses was heated, especially the minuses but surfaced some important issues. The culture card was played frequently, it’s a card that implies that one has very little control over things. This is true of course, there is so much here that people have no influence over whatsoever; interestingly, the one thing they do have control over, their attitudes and mentality, is something they seem reluctant to do- and this was one of the things that got in the way of quality.

The habits of talking over each other is common in meetings. By setting norms at the beginning there is always the hope that these will impose order. But they never do, unless a higher authority is created. Sometimes they look at me, as the higher authority, to maintain the rules but I always decline. I usually give a little speech about everyone being responsible. But that never works either. In Francophone West Africa a Village Chief is often proposed. I usually push back against that because it complicates my work when have to report to a Village Chief who knows nothing about process facilitation and my methodology. But this time I decided to go along. After a while I got the hang of asking permission to the chief to speak, and I realize we can meld two approaches together. He was, more or less, able to handle the competing voices when we chanced on a hot topic. Most of the time I remembered to ask his permission (like ‘OK, can we move on now?’), and when I forgot he was forgiving, we exchanged smiles. It costs me nothing and it honors a tradition.

At the very end, an actual higher authority (the Deputy General Director of the hospital, AKA Monsieur le DGA) came in to listen to the results of our meeting. But our Village Chief had disappeared. This was a problem as he was the obvious person to welcome the DGA, everyone said so; second in line was the (real) chief of the rehab center. But he had left the room as well to look for the Village Chief and now both were gone. 

We hadn’t discussed the process of the formal closing, after all the hard work of structuring processes I forgot to pay attention to this last process – a process probably no one considered a process. I asked who welcomes, who introduces, who closes, etc. no one had thought about it and so it was rather disjointed, especially with the two Chiefs gone. In the end it all worked out although it was not the exciting and seamless culmination of the week’s work to the DGA with the presentation of the teams’ commitments. The food also came half an hour late, so the celebratory dinner was more like a feeding frenzy with everyone helping himself and herself to as much as the food as possible. And it felt hardly celebratory. By the time I got to the feeding station most of the food had gone – I got two brochettes and a Madeleine  cookie. I missed the little pizzas and some other ‘mouth teasers,’ that were piled high on people’s plates, then covered with a napkin to take home. This is about living in a place of scarcity – get what you can get before it is gone; even though all the people in the room have a salary that can sustain them. It wasn’t a leadership course so I kept my observations to myself.

Yesterday morning I had the extraordinary experience of sitting in a meeting in Ghaziabad (in Uttar Pradesh) while also sitting in my hotel room in Niamey. A century ago this would have been considered magic, or at least impossible. But thanks to WhatsApp it was possible.

My Indian colleagues are on an exploratory mission, while visiting their family in Uttar Pradesh for Diwali. The exploration is about better understanding what the municipalities are struggling with so that we can finetune our proposed design to the Department of Urban Development. I am very grateful for my Indian team mates – they find out things I could not possibly have learned from a distance. It’s humbling to realize how little I know about what is going on nearly halfway around the world. 

I learned from our graphic designer member of the team that the Dutch are very involved in waste removal and clean water in Uttar Pradesh – he was scribing a meeting and made a fabulous graphic about it. Of course, the Dutch would be involved in waste and water management, coming from a country that is partially below sea level. It has led to extraordinary creativity and a very specialized expertise.

We still don’t have the contract in India and it may not come anytime soon as our proposal has been winding its way through the bureaucratic maze while we are busy learning directly from stakeholders about the complexity of the urban renewal work – it is not just about aligning the departments within the municipal government, but also aligning and mobilizing the multiple actors outside the municipal confines 

So far, our design is just focusing on the internal alignment, which we assumed is a start (which will be confirmed or disconfirmed by my team mates once the interviews are completed). Our initial design is based on the premise that there is much collective learning that needs to be engineered, between departments in one municipality and between municipalities to learn from each other (among other things on how to deal with all these outside forces, especially the ones that create troubles for them). We’ll see what happens, it has been a wonderful experience so far and the relationship with my Indian team mates is priceless, no matter what the final outcome will be. Win or lose, there will not be failure.

Today we concluded the conversation about the activities (in the plans) of the teams of Niamey and Zinder. They indicated what they had been able to accomplish and the things they had not been able to do or finish, and why. And what was the impact (the successes and failures) had on the improvement of the efficiency and effectiveness of the services they provide. And finally they pulled out what they could learn from all of these experiences. As it turned out one of the teams had come to realize that all the things they had not completed where entirely within their ‘sphere of control;’ it was their very behavior that got in the way. That led to an animated discussion with everyone, in the end, agreeing that they were the only people who could turn things around, not needing any extra resources (or if so, very little), not even extra time. It’s that simple.

Of course, words come easy; people know exactly the right words to use (team spirit, listening to each other, be responsible), but I know that action is a little more complicated, especially when confronting people is simple not part of this culture (easy for me to say, as a Dutch person, where confrontation is common and not automatically a threat to friendship or work relationships. I think here the things are more complicated.

We ended the day with an exercise that required printing out two pages – the things that would be so easy for me back home, but here not so. I walked back to the center in 35 degree heat to print the pages, but the person was locked out of his computer – there was no alternative other than walking back and transcribe the necessary information from my computer, by hand; the IT man said he could help out and we walked back to the center, back in the heat, and now we were successful and arrived, papers in hand, just when the session was about to start, with 2 minutes to spare, ooooff (wiping brow). 

I had hoped to go for a cooling swim after all that walking in 33 degree heat but the pool was ‘sous traitement.’ To kill all the little beasties in the pool, the guard explained me. I asked when the treatment was done and learned it takes 72 hours – some beasties! It may explain the slight green tinge of the water and the cloudiness when I swam on Saturday.

onoOf the 72 hours only 24 are done so it looks like I had my one and only swim the day I arrived. I stayed for a while by the pool, sweating and looking longingly at the water, but then remembered it was full of hard to kill beasties; I had a beer to cool me off and then ordered my dinner and went upstairs to change out of my bathing suit. I went down for my habitual dinner of brochettes on the unattractive terrace, by myself, in the unrelenting heat, even at 6PM. This time I was armed with Swiss bug spray, complements of ICRC, to deal with the more visible beasties swarming around me. I had my brochettes with veggies giving myself a break from frites.

I thought I had a very quiet last quarter of 2019 ahead of me which would prove, income-wise, that I had effectively retired for three-quarters. But things popped up, some unexpectedly and one other a possible outcome of my first (unsolicited) proposal. Aside from planned short trips to Chapel Hill and Niger, South Africa, and possibly India is on the menu. Axel is going to accompany me on my second trip to South Africa next month so that we can vacation in a place where summer is just about to start.  

Now I am in Niamey, exactly 2 years after I arrived here in the middle of the night from Bamako. It is the 2^nd of 3 planned trips of a 3 year project that ends sometime in 2020. I am hosted by ICRC. On arrival I was given an envelope with a phone and lots of papers to read and some to sign (to show I had read them and received the phone). ICRC operates in all the dangerous places in the world and knows a thing or two about the safety of its employees and consultants. This is the reason why I ignored all the high alert messages from the travel agent regarding my trip to Niamey. 

I am staying in the same hotel, as I did last time. It is  much younger than I am but feels old, tired and neglected. The room is surface-cleaned but the dark red carpet has a few more stains and the entire room feels grungy. I have had this sinking feeling of entering into a grungy or depressing hotel room many times in my career, never mind the many self-congratulatory stars on the hotel’s awning.  But then, after a few hours, I am OK with the room, spread my stuff out, tried out anything that should work, including the hot water, the TV, the lamps and the internet, and made the room my own for the duration of my stay. I even abandon my slippers after a while and walk barefoot on the old and spotty carpet. It’s a bit different from my lodging two weeks ago in Pretoria.

I asked for a room with a view of the Niger River and the giant swimming pool. There was a little humming and hawing but I got my room. I went for a swim in the somewhat cloudy water and then escaped to my airco-ed room. It is too hot to be outside, even at 6PM. I watched, from the coolness of my room, two ladies swimming with a man, a relative I presumed, trying to instruct them. They each had a large orange life preserver that looked like it belonged on a boat. The women stayed in the water for hours, giggling and floating and occasionally trying some swim strokes. When it was time to go they changed in the ladies’ room and emerged in full Islamic costume, none of the parts of their bodies that had been so freely exposed during their swim, showing now (other than hands, ankles and face).

I sat on the terrace where one table had been set for me, no one else seemed to think it a good idea to eat outside (it’s hot and there are bugs and the menu is rather limited). But I find the cooler indoor restaurant depressing and did not want a pricey buffet. I don’t like buffets with their good looking salads made from yesterday’s leftovers, their desserts that look better than they taste and the heavy dishes.  Since I eat very little I consider the hefty price I pay a subsidy for the other eaters. I had essentially been sitting all night, then all day and again all day, doing brain rather than physical work – I didn’t need much food. 

The outdoor restaurant has a menu that looks like it hasn’t been reprinted or re-issued in a decade. There is a variety of pizzas, some salads, fresh (?) juices and two kinds of brochettes, meat and fish. The brochettes are ordered by the stick, small sticks or large sticks. I ordered 3 small ones which the waiter finds odd as they are ‘mouth-teasers’ as the French call them, not actually considered dinner.  I am served 9 tiny pieces of roasted meat served on three small bamboo sticks with mustard, hot sauce and a powdered spice mixture. I wanted fries but decided to eat light and save the fries for day two. I ordered the ‘small vegetables’ plate as a side, which invariably means a heap of tiny canned peas and carrots. 

I washed my simple meal away with a can of Flag beer that came from Togo. Despite being listed on the well-fingered menu there is no more bottled beer here as all the local breweries have closed. So no more ‘conjoncture’ either, the  local brew that stayed low in price even if all the other prices went up. I can’t remember the precise reason for this unusual and informal name of the beer.  

On my second night I ordered the same 3 ‘mouth-teasing’ brochettes but now accompanied by fries – an enormous heap of fries served with hot sauce, ketchup and mayonnaise. They were salty, limp and greasy but I ate them all because, against my better judgment, I do like salt and fat.

The bill was 2 dollars more even though I had essentially the same meal as yesterday, at least according to the menu prices. The waiter from yesterday (who stood right by me) had forgotten that the cans from Togo are two dollars more because the local bottled beer on the menu is not available anymore. Maybe a good reason to finally change the menu and take all this local stuff off. Or is it nostalgia, those good old days? Could be, I am sure they were better before the end of Libya, ISIS, the guns and the smugglers found a niche in the Sahel (and the construction companies that are fortifying the best real estate in the city).

The nice Air France people at the Niamey airport shifted me one class up from the back of the bus to the mini B-class that the French call Premium Class. It is not B-class but it is nice enough, with slightly more space than the cramped coach seats.

I sat next a man from Texas who was on his way home.  He has a job with a USG contractor that has him on a rotation of two months in Niger and one month home. He was a pilot but he didn’t fly in an aircraft. This made me conclude that he was a drone pilot. He did not respond enthusiastically to my curious questioning and so I stopped.

From the size of the enormous US embassy that is being constructed out of unassailable materials on the banks of the Niger River, I gathered that the American Government is not planning to leave Niger any time soon. The Saudis, the French, the Algerians, the Malians and the Chinese, in a kind of Embassy armed concrete race, are also building, expanding or reinforcing their enormous fortresses, on prime real estate spots in the same area.  Being a construction company with influence and access must be a goldmine.

The four American servicemen who died here – widely reported in the international media here, but apparently not in the US – and the subsequent spats between Kelly, Trump and McCain, have put Niger and our operations on the map.  For Americans, awakened to this news, over a week after it happened,  what the men were doing there in that far away spot, was apparently a surprise. It is hard to imagine that the Head of the Armed Services Committee knew less than the guy downstairs selling souvenirs in the hotel’s lobby.

I had a feeling that my Premium Classe neighbor was not too keen on talking and so I stopped asking questions. We each pulled our eye shades down and went to sleep, it was after midnight anyways.

I slept a few hours. The flight is short and one ends up missing a night no matter what one does. That I was tired became clear when I couldn’t find my passport and boarding pass after spending a few hours in the AF lounge. As it turned out I had left both in the shower. At least I knew I had them when I entered the shower. I got a lecture from the stern looking lady at the desk when she handed me my passport – as if I didn’t know that I should keep my passport with me at all time. I felt a bit sheepish, looking at my toes during the lecture.

I had used the last of my four international upgrades that Delta hands to its very frequent flyers. This made the final leg of the trip very pleasant. I finished my audiobook on Seeds, caught up on coaching class homework, read a bit (Sue Monk), and tackled a 1024 piece puzzle on my iPad.

Delta now lets its passengers use a text app, like WhatsApp or Viber, during the flight for free. I was able to chat with Axel while in the air. I was also able to announce my arrival to the US Customs and Border Patrol using the handy Mobile Passport App, also from the air. It took less than 5 minutes from getting off the plane into the arms of Axel. Boston’s Logan Airport is the best and only airport in the world where arrival is easy as pie.

On the way back to Niamey we met a father and daughter; the daughter supports a school in Zinder, for boys and girls from various villages in the region. We had flown out with them and then saw them at the hospital. We had learned from the hospital director that they were related to a late French president, bearing his name. We had fun using our smartphones to figure out their precise relationship with the late president. A few searches on the internet and we knew who they were; in fact we knew a lot more about them then they could have imagined. We checked out the family tree, and then pictures until we figured out their precise relationship with the late president. And then we went over to meet them and had a nice conversation in the waiting room, and then in the plane, sitting next to each other. We learned about the school and how they had set it up, keeping girls from getting engaged at the age of 12, staying in school, the negotiations…and then the pride when the first batch got their Bac. I thought of Razia Jan.

The networking immediately had its effects: they needed a physical therapist for one of the girls in their school and my colleague was able to connect them to a PT in Niamey. It helps to be extraverts and have done one’s research.  And then at the airport, we meet again, waiting for the plane to Paris. We would be sharing our third plane ride in a week.

I went for a very long swim which was both cleansing and meditative after our trip home from Zinder. The flight is not long (2 hours) but with all the waiting it takes a good part of the day; and there is always the sand, the dust. I ordered a large plate with fruit. Our diet at the guesthouse in Zinder had gotten a bit stale after three days: tough and stringy chicken – served the same way no matter what we ordered from the limited menu, and only cabbage, onions and a few carrots under the heading of ‘vegetables.’  We were never served fruit, even though I did see giant papayas in the market. There are few products that are grown locally such as watermelon, melon, papaya and giant pumpkins, cabbage, onions, potatoes but not a whole lot more. Pineapple, bananas, oranges, apples, grapes are all imported, either from the coastal countries south of Niger, South Africa or Morocco.

Every morning we were served a greasy 3-egg omelet with onions, and then there was Nescafe. That too had gotten a bit stale. After my swim I splurged and ordered the pricey Nespression as it is called here.

In the evening my friend from long ago picked me up and, once again, took me to the restaurant that doesn’t serve African meals. It was the security that made her decide not to go local. People here are worried about what is happening in Mali; as if to justify their worries, another attack took place this morning a little to the west of Niamey, again, near the Malian border – Niger’s Wild West.

On Saturday I called the one person I had missed seeing at our reunion in the basement of the stadium with the team that had reactivated the center in Zinder. When we started the leadership program they had picked that as their ‘project’ – it was inactive despite salaries being paid – but no patients.

She brought me to her home that was heavily guarded. Her husband is the minister of finance and she is third highest in another ministry; I was moving around in high circles – yet she was quite down to earth. I met two of her 6 children and learned she was widowed when the last one was born. She had remarried many years later and now has a guard in front of her house. She too is afraid of what is happening in Mali, and told me ‘when Mali has a cold we sneeze here in Niger.’ She too was unnerved by the attack this morning. I promptly received one alert (level 3) and then another with a level 4 alert.

It is strange that suddenly Niger is on America’s map. People now know there are soldiers here who die because there are many very bad people hiding in the Sahara, where there are no borders and lots of weapons. I guess it is time to go.

The last phase of my three-center trip is a visit to a newly re-activated rehab center in Zinder. This re-activating was the leadership project of a group of people during a Senior Leadership program that we conducted with Yale University. The purpose of this program was to strengthen the ability of various actors in the disability sector to work together, across societal divides towards a shared goal. The Niger team consisted of a Paralympics champion in a wheelchair, an older and well known activist who had nearly completely lost his sight, a young woman heading an NGO advocating for the rights of people with disabilities, and two women from the upper strata of Nigerien society in high level government positions, and married to people in power.

After about 9 months the team succeeded in re-activating the center that consisted primarily of four walls, a roof and people who received a monthly salary, without any services being provided. Now there are service providers and patients – not many, but at least a few people near Zinder with (primarily) missing limbs don’t have to travel anymore for 14 hours on a bus to get help in Niamey; big small victories, at least for some.

The original plan was for us to travel on Monday, as a team (two from ICRC and myself) to Zinder. This city is about 1000 km to the east from Niamey in a more or less straight line. For security reasons we are not allowed to travel by road, which would have lasted about 14 hours. We fly with the UN Humanitarian Assistance planes, the kind that ferried us from Dubai to Kabul before commercial airlines began flying that lucrative route.

There is no regular schedule and confirmations and tickets are obtained the day before departure. On Friday we learned there was no plane for us on Monday. Later we learned that the pilot had malaria, so probably good that we didn’t fly. But it did disturb our plans, as I am nearing my departure date of 10/21.

We tried to conduct the session we would have held face to face via WhatsApp, and, when that didn’t work, by phone using one of the rare landlines.  With a tiny center, a four person team that has little understanding of organizational development and all the accompanying management and efficiency terminology, I concluded quickly that this wasn’t going to work by remote. The tools we use are already somewhat compromised in their use as I observed in Mali: full participation and insightful discussion of management systems, scoring their performance with candor and courage is a nice ideal – the reality dictates otherwise. Here with people just getting through the workday, the idea had clearly not landed. We had to go there.

Luckily, before the end of Monday we got our tickets and were told to be at the airport at 11AM. Sometimes one has to celebrate small victories. I went for a very long swim, had my brochettes and chatted on Skype with an old friend.

Most nights, after my swim, I sit at one of the four or five tables that are put out next to the pool. I don’t know why they remove the tables and chairs every night as there is no rain – they are all put under a little straw hut, and then dragged out again the next day.

I usually sit there by myself. Sometimes a smoker or two sit at one of the other tables; then I move upwind (there is always a breeze from the river). The poolside restaurant is supposed to be open from 6PM to 7PM for mini brochettes (3 small pieces of kebab with a delicious mystery powder that resembles the stuff I remember from Afghanistan in the 70s, when Axel and I lived on those as we traveled around the country – tea and kebabs).

I don’t know why they can’t continue serving those brochettes after 7PM, since the BBQ remains open much longer. It seems that they just don’t cut small pieces anymore. Once I arrived after 7PM and was served a brochette with four enormous chunks of meat on it. They were so big that I was able to squeeze three dinners out of it by have the remainder of my meal packed up in foil and storing it  in my room in my little college dorm fridge.

And so I learned to be there before 7PM and after 6PM. Even at 6:15 they are rarely ready. Sometimes the tables are set up but no chairs. One evening I stood by my table for about 5 minutes, just wondering whether they’d notice and give me a chair. I finally asked but got a response that I’d expect from a teenager being pressed into service against his will. Sometimes I am jealous of my colleagues who get to travel to Asia under the same contract. Most hotel staff in Asia understand the idea of ‘service.’  This cannot be assumed here.

I always order a plate of ‘petits legumes’ with my 2 mini-brochettes. The first week this plate consisted of winter squash, a vegetable that is a mix of cucumber and summer squash and looks like a small spaghetti squash, carrots and peas. I could tell the peas (small vegetables indeed) came from a can, and they tended to dominate. But the carrots and squash were fresh and tasty.

Last week the chef must have stopped buying vegetables, and the peas started to take over. Tonight a whole can of mushy peas was dumped on my plate and I protested. I refused to pay and told them for a four star hotel ‘de luxe’ as advertised, they should be able to do better than that.

(OK, let me vent a bit). They should also be able to fix their credit card machine which didn’t work at my hotel in Bamako and didn’t work here. This I had not expected since this hotel caters mostly to conference visitors from all over the region. I had made an assumption. All sorts of signs had fed my assumption: a notice that said “we add an extra 3% on bills paid with a credit card” and the many large logos of Visa, Maestro and Masters stuck willy-nilly to surfaces around the reception desk and the glass case that protects the cashier from greedy fingers. Maybe they could have put an X through those logos and statements? I suggested, or a sign to their ‘aimable clientele’ that the machine didn’t work right now (or never). This morning I learned that the machine has been picked up for repair. But it wasn’t there fault. The connections go, apparently, through Dakar. It’s those Senegalese again.

When one of the two ATMs in the lobby didn’t work and the other refused to honor my card, I panicked, how was I going to come up with 1250 dollars in cash before nightfall? A few calls with Axel, and chats with my credit card providers, and a mad dash around town from one out of service ATM to another, I finally managed to scrape the cash together using several credit cards. This led to Citibank calling Axel assuming the transactions were fraudulent and that they’d block my card. Somehow the fact that I just chatted with a Citibank person, and that I had registered my travels to Bamako and Niamey on their website, didn’t seem to have registered with the folks looking out for fraud (all pieces outsourced no doubt). Some people think Niger is the same as Nigeria and they are doubly alert. But the bill is paid, and whether I can get more cash another day with the card remains to be seen, but that is a worry for tomorrow.