I am writing from Paris again. We have been preparing the course for the future group of 17 admins this past week, and the course starts tomorrow. I hope they are all good, because we need all of them in the field as soon as possible.
The general assembly for MSF-France was last weekend. The election of the president and administrative council was pretty important this year – there were a lot of absences. Most people, including me, are very pleased with the outcome. For the first time, we have a woman president – Marie-Pierre Allie, who is excellent. And I now have two very good friends on the administrative council.
I’ve crossed paths with a lot of old colleagues this past week in headquarters, including some old national staff members who have become expatriates. It’s great that MSF is improving here: the people who started as local staff have great experience and motivation to bring to our programs in the other countries where we work.
My next assignment is now official. I will be leaving at the beginning of August for a year in the Democratic Republic of Congo, also known as Congo Kinshasa to different it from Congo Brazzaville. I will be the coordination admin in Goma, on the eastern border next to Rwanda.
I’m really excited to be returning to the same area where I did my first mission in 2005-2006. The site where I worked, Kayna, has closed, but apparently quite a few of the people from that program are still in the area working with our other programs. The assistant admins in Goma are the same ones that were there when I was in Kayna, and they are great!
The programs are also interesting. There’s still a lot of conflict in the area, so response to displaced populations is often an issue. We are also working in a hospital which receives a lot of combat wounds, and there is a big nutritional program. An agreement has been signed recently to incorporate the old Rwandese rebels into the Congolese army or repatriate them to Rwanda, but the implementation of these plan will be tricky and will probably incite some more fighting.
I will have a lot of work to do. On one hand, the assistants are in place and well trained. On the other hand, there is a lot of work to do on the salary scale and the internal regulations for the staff. The program is expanding. And the field teams still have to evacuate from their sites from time to time. It won’t be busier that Darfur was, but it will be pretty close to the same level.
I wasn’t planning to work in Paris for three weeks, and the work on my condo is going a bit slower than expected, so I don’t think that I will be getting back to the States this time. I will try to finish the apartment by the end of June so that I can relax a bit during July, so that I can concentrate my full energy on Congo for a year.
