I'm back

I arrived in Paris on Monday afternoon and started my debriefings immediately. I still don't understand it, but everyone is really happy with my work. It doesn't seem to me that I have done better than an average job. Anyway, I just finished my debriefings on Wednesday. I have already met up with several of my collegues from previous missions who are passing through Paris to or from missions, or who are working in headquarters.

I will be leaving Paris for the Savoie on Friday afternoon. I have already begun eating and drinking like a wildman. Tuesday evening, I had already drunk enough, when the owner of the restaurant where I was announced that it was his birthday and brought out the champagne and cognac. The walk home was difficult!

The weather in Paris is gorgeous! Today is a public holiday - celebrating the signing of the peace treaty for one of the wars - so everyone is out, sitting on the terrasse of cafés watching the world go by, which is one of the favorite passtimes of the French.

I will be returning to Paris at the beginning of June. The financial director and her deputy, both of whom are good friends of mine, offered me a 3 week job to teach the course for future admins here. I'm really looking forward to it. The course ends on the 20th of June - just in time for me to catch an overnight train to the Lac du Gard in Italy for a party on the 21st of June at the home of our Medical Coordinator from Darfur, who will be finishing her mission shortly.. And the head of our "desk" (management of a cluster of countries) has put me down on the list of candidates for the context and environment training (training course for future field coordinators) in September in New York. I'm pretty excited about that, too.

But for right now, I look forward to finishing my apartment in Lyon and living in it.

Khartoum

I arrived in Khartoum yesterday evening from Nyala. I got a lot of presents just before leaving - quite a few clothes. I think that they were telling me that I dress like a bum, which is true. Anyway, the pair of pants fits me like a glove! The local shoes also. The hat, too. I don't know how they did it!

The only problem with last minute gifts is that you have to enter them into your baggage! So I did some ruthless last-minute sorting again. I threw away some of my really old, torn T-shirts (the ones in which I dressed as a bum) and got rid of some of the papers that I no longer need. Everything fits in, and I have all my baggage from my 9 months, old and new, in a dufflebag and a small backpack at around 16 kg.

Speaking of kg, I scared myself today. I spent the night in the MSF transit apartment here in Khartoum last night. There is a scale in the house, so I got on it. I weigh 65 kg, or 142 pounds. I don't think I have weighed so little since I was 14 years old. It's true that I look like one of those skinny old men from a concentration camp - I don't have a muscle anywhere. But in fact, I feel fine - I have already started to recover some sleep-time. I hope working on the apartment in Lyon, eating everything that one does not find in Darfur, and drinking a few beers will get me back into shape.

I leave Khartoum this afternoon, arriving in Dubai a little after midnight. Then I leave Dubai around 8:20am. This is fine, because Dubai is one of the world's largest duty-free shopping centers in the world - I have a few electronics goodies I want to purchase. My credit card, which hasn't been used since my break in Zanzibar, is going to start smoking!

I will arrive in the Paris airport tomorrow at 1:30pm. I'll be there for 2-3 days for MSF debriefings, a trip to the embassy for an extension of visa space to my passport, etc. before going back to Savoie/Lyon.

It is just now registering in my little mind that I am leaving Sudan!

I'm going home

I leave Darfur tomorrow. It does not seem possible that it has been 9 months already. I have pretty much finished the handover to my replacement (who is another American), I have given away a few of my electronics goodies to some of the national staff, my bags are pretty much packed, and we had a small going away party at the house last night. So it is pretty much the end.

This was my first time in coordination, and I miss the direct contact with the beneficiaries of the programs in the field. But once again, I learned a lot.

My last month was probably the most interesting one. The highlight was going to Adila, where there was no set-up at all and creating a program in 10 days. The first day we made our purchases for the base in the biggest town in the area. The next day we took the 2 1/2 hour drive to Adila and found a place to rent as the base (office, two housing areas and the place for a warehouse). The next day we opened the recruiting process and began to take the applicant files. After that, the newly recruited medical staff from Khartoum (people who had already worked with MSF elsewhere) arrived and we filled them in on the project, They helped us to recruit the other 54 people the next day, Before leaving, I set up the accounting system, started the human resources data base, made all the work contracts and wrote the car and property rental contracts. All this under pretty primitive conditions. I have already had the experience of reducing programs, but this was the first time to be involved in a set-up starting from nothing,

I’m really happy to have been here. I think that I left the admin stuff in pretty good shape, although I left a list of pending issues of 4 pages - tt is never less than this! There’s quite a few things going on right now – receiving international drug orders for all the sites, the start up of the Adila program and the PlumpyDoz distribution program, a NEW water distribution program in a NEW site, some problems of dry wells in our existing water distribution program, a lot of hiring of medical staff, some personnel problems, and a few others.

I don’t think that I have ever worked so hard for so long as I have here over the last 9 months. And that is saying something! I am looking forward to 3 to 4 months of break. It will take about a month of work on the new apartment, but after that, I hope to relax, eat, drink (I'm dreaming of wine and beer - alcohol is forbidden here),travel a bit and sleep.

And I am looking to finally having a small place to myself in Lyon.