I’ve now been here for 2 ½ months, nearly the halfway mark in my mission. I feel a lot better about the work. And I’m learning to do things with Excel that I didn’t know were possible, thanks to Caroline, my counterpart in Tibiri, who is an expert. I’ll leave a good set of tools here (as well as taking them with me for future missions) for the staff to use.
The work is definitely more loaded towards the human resources side than the finance side. The budget is done mainly by the admin in the capital, Niamey. Sanoussi here in Maradi does a good job with the accounting, and Amina is great as cashier. Amadou, the assistant for human resources is good, too. But there’s so much to do here on that side.
For one, we are preparing the payroll with MSF’s human resources database system for the first time this month, the same one we began using my first month in Congo. It’s a huge effort to get it ready, and most of the work was prepared before I got here by Amadou. But I know from experience that there will be tons of errors due to info which was entered wrongly or not at all into the database.
There is also the discipline side of human relations. I spend a lot of my time in disciplinary issues: unexcused absences, disputes, thefts, etc. For the moment, we are in a fairly big investigation, which has already triggered the firing of six employees. We are very careful to be open and impartial in our findings, to avoid accusations of power abuse. This is not really pleasant. Every time I go on one of our outside sites with our program manager to investigate, people start getting nervous if we just look their way. But it’s necessary for the well-being of our nutritional program.
We are also pruning back the program seasonally. Malnutrition here grows from April/May until around October/November when the harvest comes in. So we hire a lot of people on short term contracts during that period and start laying them off in November. We stopped about 30 contracts at the end of November. This month and next month will see more layoffs.
The Nigeriens (people from the country of Niger are Nigeriens, people from the country of Nigeria, immediately south of us, are Nigerians) are friendly and courteous. They are good to work with. And the expatriate staff is a good group. I am in House #1 (there are 4 expat houses) with the rest of the Maradi Nutrition Program staff: 7 women and me. We all get along well, which is important in community living.
Right now we are anticipating our directions for 2007. 2005 was dedicated to fighting severe malnutrition caused by a drought and grain speculation. 2006 is dedicated to fighting long-term moderate malnutrition using new methods. We hope that 2007 will go more towards the cause of this chronic malnutrition by getting the program closer to the villages in the countryside to fight the malnutrition at the source. That’s being discussed in Paris at this moment. It will be interesting to see what happens.
