I'm writing this from Paris where I am having my briefings for Darfur. I leave tomorrow evening, getting into Khartoum on the 1st of August. I will stay in Khartoum until the end of the week, then flying down to El Geneina in Darfur.
I will have plenty of work to do. As part of the coordination team, I will be travelling between sites more than my first two missions. (For the moment, we travel only by air, to avoid armed attacks.) At first I will be responsable only for the finance (accounting and budget). Then at the end of September I should also take over human resources.
The program is changing. We have nearly finished our participation in a hospital in one site. We are reducing our activity in another hospital, but are refocusing on malnutrition and epidemiology in the camps there. In another site, we are augmenting our activity. We want to open up a new clinic in the rebel zone, but the government won't yet let us. And depending on this new opening, the regional coordination (that includes me) might be split with finance (that's me again) moving to a different city. Aside from all of that, there's a lot of work to do on training the staff, improving the security, controlling the expenditures, improving cost analysis, etc. In summary, it's just another MSF mission, although I will have more of a management position than in my previous missions.
Hopefully when I return, I will have a place to live in Lyon. I finished tearing everything out around the middle of July and then cleaned the stones and redid the joints in the one stone wall. All the electrical appliances have been purchased and delivered. I worked with the renovator last week to modify the mezzanine, put in the bathroom walls and string the electrical conduits. That gave us the time to define details together. He will return in November to finish the work (hopefully). Anyway, I won't be back until the end of April or beginning of May. I will do the painting then; it's only three walls!
I will have internet access in Darfur, although it will be slow and expensive. I'll try to keep this updated, but probably not more often than once a month.
