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.