I returned
from my break in France
10 days ago. After a day of meetings and
getting my second USA
passport in Paris (so that we can obtain visas
in one while I am travelling with another), I took the train to Lyon and had a short week there. During that time I recovered my new 10-year
French residence visa, although that task alone took me 2 complete afternoons
and 250 euros (Vive la France). Now I am good until 2022! Other than that, I slept (a lot!), ate,
drank, caught up with some acquaintances in Lyon, made some new acquaintances,
and purchased a lot of very small Christmas gifts for the team, in case I am
once again on mission at that time of the year (a very high probability). During my return trip to Juba, I was in Nairobi for 1 day to do job interviews with 6 nurse
practitioners, so that we could hire 3 of them to work with us in the Yida
refugee camp in South Sudan.
In Juba, our pharmacy and logistics store is no longer
available, which generated a search on how to rationalize our installations
here. Right now, we rent an office, 2
houses for the international staff and people on passage, plus the
pharmacy/logistics store. We found a
beautiful solution – a new house large enough for the whole team and passage
(20 bedrooms), a building for our pharmacy, and space for our logistics
store. This will really reduce the
management of the coordination – 2 rental contracts to manage in place of 4, 2
teams of watchmen instead of 4,a smaller
team of cleaners in the residence, better communication among the team, and
less movements. We should move in around
1 December, and it will change our lives.
Since my
return, things have been busy. There has
been a lot of turnover in our coordination team, and that calls for a lot of
meetings. I have also been working on
staffing for 2013 (the country has legislated a change from a 48-hour work week
to a 40-hour work week), the budget for the upcoming year (we think the refugee
camp will be there all year), briefing new arrivals, debriefing people leaving,
and planning my handover of our emergency program to the regular South Sudan
coordination. I leave Friday to go to
the camp, with a pretty large agenda of things to accomplish, coming back in
the middle of the week. Then the next
weekend, I leave for a 3-day training session in Dubai
on how to communicate with the press in northern Africa and the Middle East without getting into trouble. That should be very interesting. Then I concentrate on the handover until my
departure on 15 December, maybe to Jordan to work with Syrian and
Yemeni refugees.
