Sylvia's Journal

We are nearing the end of the retreat and doubled in size. Social workers and psychologists have streamed in from all corners of Rwanda. The hotel has set up a tent on the lawn to accommodate us. This is a challenge as there are no more walls. The hotel staff has populated the tent with an odd assortment of tables and plastic chairs.

The tent comes as a surprise. With the tables removed in the conference room we had used so far we could have accommodated everyone inside, but it was too late – the tent is up and paid for. Now there is even less comfort with English and so we keep on snipping away parts of the ambitious agenda.

In the meantime the per diem issue has been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Also, the excitement of turning from renters into owners is beginning to insert a new energy in the room/tent. The participants are now mobilizing themselves (as measured by the number of people in the room at each day’s starting time).

There is another sign that the ownership we want is materializing. The participants of the core group, the 40+ people who we started with on Tuuesday, are now the new guides, explaining the 50 newcomers what we have done in the last 2 days. It is very exciting to see this happen – the design holds and is working exactly as planned, in spite of all the adjustments. We are now on the sidelines. We can let go. The baton is now in their hands. I am watching people who were at times reluctant or confused participants share the products of our work as if they were car salesmen. You’d think they had owned the design from the get go.

We left Kigali at daybreak in order to arrive early on the shores of Lake Kivu to set up the room, get our instruction slides in order, dot the ‘i’s’ and cross the ‘t’s’. Official starting time was 2PM

I had put in a lot of padding for the afternoon sessions as I was aware of the many factors we would have no control over. One such a factor was the actual versus planned departure of the participants from Kigali.  Planned for 8AM, the last bus left Kigali around 11:30AM. By the time they arrived everyone was tired and grumpy, even more so when they discovered that their per diem was half of what they expected.

The time buffers around each activity paid off. We ended the day only slightly behind schedule and caught up by the next day.

The language barrier is omnipresent. Although it is true that everyone in HQ or field lead positions can speak English, comprehension by many is more limited. We had to insert quite a bit of translation.

The processes, from historical timeline to mission to vision to contradictions to strategic directions was taxing at times. The inductive processes and our requests to look for patterns and naming them is new to many. Concepts and tasks needed much more explanation, and often translation, than we had expected. In addition, the chief’s English is also limited. Her second language is French, which none of my colleagues speak well enough to use. And so I have parallel conversations in French – there is much that gets lost in translation.

In addition to the language complications (a continuation of what we experienced in Bangkok) there were many taxing moments with client requests, needs and desires a constantly moving target. This too may be related to none of us communicating in our first language. Adjustments, re-budgeting of time, making short cuts and dropping things altogether were the order of the day.

We were aiming for ownership, which is always hard in the beginning. Getting ownership means people go at their own pace and the products of their thinking may not quite be up to the standards one would want. It is the tradeoff between owning and renting someone else’s ideas.

We moved into the Gorillas hotel in Kigali for two nights. Monday was an official holiday. We used it to align expectations around our roles and how to function well as a team. In the afternoon we met with our local colleague who is seconded to the organization, about which I have yet to learn a lot. My MSH colleagues who are here with me have worked with this organization for several years and provided me with some critical contextual information.

We checked several assumptions that are implicit in the retreat design and fine-tuned or micro-designed sessions wherever possible. The design won’t get tested until we take off, always an important moment when we learn about language and other challenges. Until that moment the whole enterprise is theoretical.

Later we discovered many more unverified assumptions as well as a number of miscommunications and misunderstandings which led to some very challenging facilitation acrobatics. One lesson I learned is that if the client says we meet from 8:00 in the morning till 7:30 at night I better challenge this right away. I know such long days are counterproductive but sometimes we give the client the benefit of the doubt. That was a mistake.

Our presentation before USAID of the work plan for year one was so much better than the rehearsal, as it should be. The meeting had been shortened by 30 minutes but we managed to stay within those boundaries and even leave some time for comments. We digested the experience over lunch and then everyone went their way. I stayed for a brief orientation of a few diehards to make sure they know what kinds of resources we have in the wider MSH family and how to access them.

Upon the return to my hotel  I rewarded myself for the successful completion of my first assignment with a 90 minute hot stone massage – something I had been looking forward to. Managing short openings between calls with Boston I managed to enjoy a short dinner and sat by the poolside. It was ‘African night’ and the buffet offered only African food (at least for the main course). It turned out to be the only African food I have eaten here (if you exclude the lunch dishes at the office).  It included an astonishing array of starches, any kind of meat and a few veggies – delicious but filling. It was also music night with the same band as last week singing the same mournful songs.

The driver, who besides being the top driver and an ‘arranger of everything,’ showed up on the dot at the appointed time. He had told me I had to be at the airport 3 hours before my departure at 9:10. That turned out to be way more time than was needed to make one’s way through the various check-in steps. As a result I was the first and one and only passenger and made for a very quick check-in process. The only delay was caused by a search in my baggage for ‘a radio with antenna,’ which the security staff claimed I had in my duffel bag. It turned out to be an electric toothbrush.

By now my Arlington colleagues have arrived in Amsterdam and are waiting for their plane to DC.  One of them was part of the team I joined 28 years ago at MSH when we started a 30 year run of management capacity building and laid the foundations for MSH’s later reputation in management, leadership and governance for health. We did not work much together after 1990, moving in different directions. And so we did a lot of reminiscing about the memories we have in common. I remember when I was young I found listening to old people reminisce boring. Now it is my turn.

Today all the team leaders and their teams put the final touches on the year one work plan. It is now one day to ‘lift off’ – the first official presentation of the work plan to USAID  Getting ready for this was a massive undertaking which required great attention to detail and alertness to version control, while working on the less than user friendly interface of Excel. Excel focuses attention on detail, the trees, making it hard to see the forest. One can get lost.

This afternoon we rehearsed the presentation to USAID. It was a real feat to get all the pieces come together into the required formats and have everyone in the room to rehearse. I am glad we did – everyone learned something and we will all be the better for it tomorrow when it is show time.

We have tried to work on Google Drive – something MSH is pushing and for which I have advocated. But the experience here, at a distance from the more or less guaranteed and fast internet and power we have in the US, is less than ideal and the experience frustrating.  It’s a good reminder of the conditions that make the work of our colleagues in the field so challenging – at headquarters we sometimes forget that.

At headquarters we also sometimes forget that changing the time of calls is inconvenient for people many time zones removed.  For us travelers between field projects and headquarters, with initiatives or work with other field projects that don’t take a break while we are away, this makes for long work days.  When our work day in Rwanda ends the work day starts in Boston and DC.  On Tuesday I rushed back to the hotel to be seated at my computer, connected, headphones on – foregoing the 6PM cocktail hour to decompress – only to find out at the last minute that the meeting has been cancelled and another one, following a bit later, was delayed.  It makes for frequent room service dinners and few occasions to disconnect from the computer and work.  But then again, this is the reality of our work, and for us travelers always a temporary condition.

On Friday night my other two colleagues return home to DC and I will be by myself. I have made an appointment with Hanna who is reputed to be the best hot stone massage therapist in town. I reserved 90 minutes for this; afterwards I will treat myself to a nice dinner, a glass of wine and go to bed early to get up before dawn for my early morning flight to Nairobi.

We are now fully immersed in the work planning exercise. It is disciplined, collegial and as rigorous as these things go. I think this is probably the most engaging and inclusive exercise I have ever been involved in. By Friday everything needs to be ready to present to our funder for a before-final sign off . And then the project staff will meet with their government counterparts for final approval. By then I will be in Addis and on to my third assignment of this trip.

Axel is busy planning his trip to Angkor Wat and then a boat ride do join me in Phnom Penh. It will be the second time I am in ‘striking distance’ of the famous temple complex and missing it again. I will visit it vicariously through Axel’s pictures, much like I did when we were in Japan and Axel told me about his fabulous trip to Kyoto. We have reserved a few days at the tail end of the Bangkok conference, to have a vacation together before heading home and preparing for surgery.

My colleague went to the handicraft center and asked if I wanted to come along. I said no, as I am not interested anymore in buying local souvenirs. I have distributed those I accumulated over the last 30 years among my colleagues and our house is already full of knickknacks (inside and outside boxes) from around the world. I could be easily seduced into buying more fabrics but I already have trunks full of them.

My work days are long. I leave for the office at 7:30 and when I get home at 6PM I order room service and have my phone calls with various teams and individuals at the home office. The massage place closes too early  (last call at 7:30PM) – I wished they’d be available at 11PM. It would make for a good start of the night.

With my job in Rwanda winding down I am casting my eyes to assignment 2 in Kenya which will be a nice combination of play and work for my short stay there.

A weekend at the Serena Kigali is pretty nice. I had my second massage after a visit to one of my colleagues in both his current house on one side of the city and the house he is building on the other side of the city.  His one and a half year son accompanied us which made me miss Faro.

I had all sorts of plans to write a short paper I have to produce by Monday, and tinkered a little with the outline, but the writing will have to wait until tomorrow when, once again I have great intentions and many distractions.

I am getting to know a new colleague and there is much to talk about. She is excited about landing in Rwanda; I would be too. The climate is beautiful, the vistas from every part of the city are breath taking and there are basically no traffic jams. And if there happens to be one there are many ways to descend or climb the various ‘collines’ as they used to be called in the old Rwanda.

I have stopped watching TV as it is all about terrorists. The media appear to be as active as the terrorists themselves in seeding terror in our hearts. Instead I listen to the chickflick equivalent in audiobooks and do electronic jigsaw puzzles, interrupted by nice long meals in great company, sitting outdoors in a cool breeze: not too warm, not too cold. When people pity me about my long trips packed in economy they forget there are these nice stays in between – not always of course but certainly this time.

My shoulder is a little better these days even though there is no reason for that. Last week the nights were painful, bringing me sometimes to tears but now I have a large king size bed with 6 fluffy pillows with which I build a nest; it seems to work.

The internet connection is good enough to allow chats with Axel who, thanks to the wonders of technology, can call me, or  I can call him, as if I am in the office in Medford. He is busy planning his trip, accompanying me to Cambodia and Thailand mid February. Nearly 10 years ago he was doing the same when I was going to Nepal, planning to come along on a business trip but the Maoists spoiled our plans. We keep our fingers crossed that this will not happen this time. As far as we know there are no Maoists operating in Cambodia and Thailand; tsunamis and typhoons are more likely; those too we hope to avoid.

While listening to the final chapters of an audiobook on my iPad (to avoid the library removing it from my device),  I let the amazing Rwandan landscape slide by as we drove the 100 or so kilometers to Lake Kivu on the border with the DRC. Some people call Rwanda the Switzerland of Africa, with Switzerland a symbol that stands for mountainous beauty.  In contrast to most other African countries I know, the towns and villages we passed through looked pristine, well cared for and organized. One of my colleagues who has lived here for 8 years, and made this country his own, told me the orderliness and cared-for look is not just an appearance.

We arrived around 6 PM on Tuesday evening at our Serena Lake Kivu hotel. After we placed our baggage in our rooms we assembled for our opening session, an early start to gain some extra time on day one of the retreat.

We have now passed the halfway point of the retreat and starting to converge towards the intended results: a detailed work plan for Year 1 that can be used to fulfill our first 90 day deliverable, to create a budget for year 1 and present shortly to the ministry leadership and counterparts to make sure it is fully aligned with their priorities.

It has been a fun assignment as I am getting to know a new set of colleagues and also partner organizations I had never heard of or only by name: Jembi Health Systems from South Africa, Banyan Global from DC, Tulane University and the (Rwandan) School of Public Health.

I am also in my element because I get to observe people and their interactions with others. This is giving me some raw data to help inform interventions that I may propose to help them work as effectively as is possible given the mix of personalities, cultures, styles and levels of experience and expertise. Creating a new team out of this  is no easy task.

The hotel looks out over Lake Kivu. In the far distance is the DRC. In the middle of the foggy lake is a tall structure that captures the methane gas that escapes through the water from pockets deep down formed by the volcanoes that are ubiquitous here.  If you manage to think away the signs of civilization (people, structures) you can imagine what this place looked like when the earth created itself: a red hot bubbly mass of fireballs, gasses, minerals, flowing here and there, leaving the Rwandans the most deep dark and most fertile layers of soil. It is such a contrast with the sun-baked soil in the countries in the Sahel where, when you drop a seed on the ground, it will wither and die quickly; here it produces something green in no time.

I took care of the essentials after my first day at work here: a pedicure and a heavenly massage after a productive day at work, meeting the team, finalizing the agenda, studying the agreement with USAID and learning about the contractual requirements that we have to fulfill in the next 5 years.

I had heard about the Rwandan transformation (since I was last here). As a graph it would look like a deep dive into the netherworld and then a more or less straight line up.  Here are the things that I noticed as I traversed the city twice today:

• The sidewalks are even, clean, and devoid of weeds with on and off ramps. The maintenance is outsourced.
• All motorbike riders (taxis and privates) wear helmets; the motor bike taxis carry a helmet for their passengers. Not doing so will cost you dearly.
• Everyone has their seatbelts on, not doing so will cost you.
• The roads (I am told) to the provinces are as good as the ones in Kigali.
• Speed limits are checked. If you speed you pay.
• Cars generally look in good shape, not like the ones (taxis especially) I have taken in other countries in Africa that look like they hold together with wire, duct tape and gum, with questionable brakes and missing essential car upholstery.

It shows what is possible, and could be achieved in the surrounding countries, if the leadership thinks such public health measures are important. They certainly will have reduced the cost of caring for trauma patients or losing productive members of society to preventable traffic accidents.  I am sure I will learn about other public health measures that this country has taken to ensure a healthy and productive workforce.

My two colleagues have arrived from DC and tomorrow we will drive to Gisenyi  to start our retreat.