Hello, readers. I haven’t posted anything since the middle of January. Sorry, I have been busy.
My collegue who takes care of the finances returned to France for family reasons, and I had to replace her during that period. And this past week the person who takes care of all the transit (airline bookings, visas, etc) was ill (a malaria crisis, along with typhoid fever!), so I was taking care of her work too. At the same time several staff problems came up, including 2 former staff members to took us to court for abusive dismissal. We won our case, but it ate up 2 weeks of my time. I thought I would die. But the finance person returned to work Friday evening, the transit person should be back Monday. And I head off now to one of our field operations, Nyanzale, for 4 days.
It is always good to get out of the coordination office to go to the field. There we see the beneficiaries of our work, which is always motivating. In Nyanzale, we work in an existing health center. We have been there since 2007. Nyanzale is a small town at the limit of various ethnicies and has been often been the front between various armed groups in past conflicts. We entered a very small health center and turned it into a 110-bed hospital. We also have 3 teams who go to outlying health posts each day to assist them in treating the populations where needed. We change the routing of these teams as the need arises – epidemics, displacement of populations due to conflict, an increase in sexual violence, etc. The outlying area also has a big need for clean water in the villages. We are currently looking at projects to provide this access to water.
There are a lot of reasons for my visit. The entire expatriate team turned over during the month of January, and they need some support. I need to talk with each of the members of our staff who have potential to grow with our organisation to plan their growth paths. We need to put some systems into place concerning human resources. There are some discipline problems that I need to look into. And we will have a general staff meeting where I will answer questions concerning our human resources policies and remind them of our charter of treating everyone equally and without prejudice, to the best of our abilities.
We leave tomorrow morning. It is a 7 hour car trip. I will be going up with 2 other coordination members: our pharmacy manager and one of our flying logisticiens. They are both great guys, and I am looking forward to the trip. I will be returning here to Goma Thursday.
