At the same time that I was writing my last posting to this blog, I did one of the more stupid things in my life. I had arrived in Stonetown from White Sands Beach with a taxi, and I had an hour and a half before needing to go to the airport. I decided to write my blog entry and buy some small Christmas presents to distribute here. So I told the taxi driver to keep my bag and come back around 12:00 noon.
About 1:00pm, although I had not yet seen the taxi, I really had to go check in to the airport, even without my bag: goodby to my earlier purchases, goodby underwear, goodby toilettries. When I returned here two and a half days later, I discovered that the taxi driver had understood 12:00 Swahili time (6:00pm). Upon realizing that something was wrong, he had taken my bag back to the hotel, an hour away. The hotel has sent my bag, transporting it to the airport, which is again an hour away from them. The bag is now in Khartoum awaiting cargo transit back to me here in Nyala. I am looking forward to having underwear and a razor again. (Yes, I have been going without underwear for a week. You can call me “tubeless”.)
I am really impressed by the honesty and helpfulness of the people of Zanzibar. (Somewhere, also, there is a god who looks out for fools.) I had already decided to return there on vacation, even when I thought that my bag was lost forever, but now it’s certain that I will be returning.
Upon arriving here in Darfur, I was thrown back into the fray of things. My financial boss in Paris and my human resources boss from Khartoum were here, ready to get to work. I haven’t had a slow moment yet. But things are good. My work with Laurence and Denis was fruitful. And locally, we have taken some decisions to consolidate the coordination, which will reduce costs and facilitate decision making. Even more - we are making some successful explorations into new communities in South Darfur (where we want to establish a presence) in which we can take a foothold and do some important work for the displaced populations. We should be able to take some action quickly.
At the same time, we have a lot of turnover for the moment; a lot of people wanting to get back home before the holidays. Our turnover in coordination has been about once every 6 weeks for a long time now. This makes it tough to get new programs up and running. Fortunately, our Head of Mission, who is leaving in 10 days, knows Sudan inside out. He’s been in and out of Darfur several times. This guy is amazing. He can converse intelligently on about any subject one can think of – in French, English or Arabic! And apparently, he is being replaced by someone just a good. Damn! I DO work in a good organization!
Fortunately, even though the turnover is high, we don’t have the gaps we did a couple of weeks ago. I definitely have enough to fill my plate: payment of the annual bonus to the local staff, continuing to define the job roles of our new local staff here in Nyala, development and government approval of a layoff plan in another site, trying to cope with staffing of the medical operations during the 7 days (!) of holidays for Eid and Christmas, replacement of one of our admins during the same period in Niertiti, helping to break in the new arrivals to coordination, 2008 budget preparation, and closing the accounts before the end of the year.
But since I am still a big kid at heart, you can be sure that I will be taking the day off at Christmas, distributing gifts, making food, and generally being a big slobbering idiot. That’s what Christmas is all about!
