The person replacing me in my job in Nigeria arrives in about 1 week. I have heard some very good things about her. We will have a handover of about 10 days, and she will take over as the Coordinator of Finance and Human Resources for the country. I will stay here until the end of April, to finish implementing some new policies that we have been working on for more than 6 months. That will make 18 months that I have worked and lived in Nigeria.
Then I go back to Lyon in France for about 1 month. I must return to renew my residence visa. I have been living in France for 27 years, but I am still not a citizen.
And I just accepted my new job. I will continue with Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, or in English, Doctors Without Borders), still doing administrative work in the field, but I will be on a 1 year renewable contract with the Emergency department. That means that I will have short missions (2-3 months) in which I go somewhere where there is a natural disaster, war and displaced populations, epidemies, or some other crisis, to do the administrative things necessary so that our doctors and nurses can help the people. This is what MSF does best and what we are known for. It will be very exciting.
I have now been working with MSF for 7 years, mainly doing administrative work, but for long times in the same place - 8 months to 2 years. I have had to deal with emergencies in the past (displaced populations because of violence, cholera, vaccination campaigns) but on a small scale within a long term project. Now for at least 1 year I will be doing exclusively emergencies. Between assignments I will be at home in Lyon, but I commit to be ready to leave within a 48 hour notice period. At most I will have about 2 weeks off every 3 months. If some miracle happens that everything is right with the world, they use us to fill gaps in the long-term projects, or have us work in headquarters. That doesn’t happen a whole lot.
When I have finished this assignment, I want to move to project management, being responsible for a long term project for 6 months at a time. This emergency job will be very good to help me to prepare for the change of positions.
Hurray!
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Sunday, February 12, 2012
February 2012
Hi all
Nothing much has happened since my last posting. The violence in the North continues, so the flights to and from Kano are almost always shut down. That means that we send people back and forth from our Northern projects with a 9 hour car movement. The roads are good, and the scenery is rocky, rough desert so it is interesting but still tiring.
One of my contacts from our New York office is here for a couple of weeks, and I am going down to Port Harcourt with her this week. Our trauma hospital there has been severely space limited for quite a while, and we have a project to build and rent some space close by to give us breathing room. Another guy from New York is already there working on the plan. They will be the ones to try to sell this project to our operations people in Paris, so it is very important that they are involved in the finalization of the project, and the rational behind it. We were really lucky to find some space near the hospital, so I hope we get final approval on the plan. It will really make the work environment much better and will improve the quality of care that we can give.
Our big human resources policy review is moving along. The pay scale and function scale report has been issued, but apparently, the cost involved has already raised a panic in Paris. It is going to be a hard sell. So we are looking at justifications, alternatives, and our presentation strategy. The implementation of this review is why I have postponed my departure from Nigeria. It is really important to me to clean up a lot of things discrepancies in policy and fix some things, as well as to pay our staff correctly so that we can hire new ones and keep the ones we have. The presentation of this program in Paris has been pushed back 1 week. Once we get approval (or not) we have to prepare our presentation strategy for the staff, explain the thing to the project managers, have meetings with the staff in each site to explain the new policies, work on changes to our pay plan to implement the new policies, and then distribute new work contracts to all the staff and get them signed. Most of the work within Nigeria falls on me. I cannot stay longer than the end of April, and I think we can have all of this done by then, but not if we have more delays.
I have now been in Nigeria 15 months. I am starting to feel it. But recently, I have been able to get some work out of the way that had been lingering for a while. If we can get our HR review approved, that will give me a surge of energy which will help me up to the end.
Nothing much has happened since my last posting. The violence in the North continues, so the flights to and from Kano are almost always shut down. That means that we send people back and forth from our Northern projects with a 9 hour car movement. The roads are good, and the scenery is rocky, rough desert so it is interesting but still tiring.
One of my contacts from our New York office is here for a couple of weeks, and I am going down to Port Harcourt with her this week. Our trauma hospital there has been severely space limited for quite a while, and we have a project to build and rent some space close by to give us breathing room. Another guy from New York is already there working on the plan. They will be the ones to try to sell this project to our operations people in Paris, so it is very important that they are involved in the finalization of the project, and the rational behind it. We were really lucky to find some space near the hospital, so I hope we get final approval on the plan. It will really make the work environment much better and will improve the quality of care that we can give.
Our big human resources policy review is moving along. The pay scale and function scale report has been issued, but apparently, the cost involved has already raised a panic in Paris. It is going to be a hard sell. So we are looking at justifications, alternatives, and our presentation strategy. The implementation of this review is why I have postponed my departure from Nigeria. It is really important to me to clean up a lot of things discrepancies in policy and fix some things, as well as to pay our staff correctly so that we can hire new ones and keep the ones we have. The presentation of this program in Paris has been pushed back 1 week. Once we get approval (or not) we have to prepare our presentation strategy for the staff, explain the thing to the project managers, have meetings with the staff in each site to explain the new policies, work on changes to our pay plan to implement the new policies, and then distribute new work contracts to all the staff and get them signed. Most of the work within Nigeria falls on me. I cannot stay longer than the end of April, and I think we can have all of this done by then, but not if we have more delays.
I have now been in Nigeria 15 months. I am starting to feel it. But recently, I have been able to get some work out of the way that had been lingering for a while. If we can get our HR review approved, that will give me a surge of energy which will help me up to the end.
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