October / November posting

One big project down: we closed the site of Kabizo last week. Although the closing of a site is not the most pleasant of events, it went well. My changes to the payroll software for the final payment worked like a charm! And the team on site did a great job of communicating with the staff, helping them put together their résumés and to apply for jobs available in our other sites. Even the government made some concessions, making it easier for the staff to apply for government-run training to help them with reinsertion. We also paid a big portion of the final payments here and the other sites, so that the staff didn’t have to travel with a lot of money on them – road robberies are a common thing here.

But with the closing of Kabizo, and the down-sizing of the Kayna project, I should have some more time to concentrate on the long-term projects. At least, until we open up a few more sites.

Here in Goma, we are doing a lot of recruiting. We just hired a psychologist (to work with patients, victims of sexual violence, and even with the staff) and a radio operator for the weekends (we stay in contact with the cars by HF and VHF radio). We are in the final stages of recruiting a maintenance person and a mechanic. We have just started the process for a guard (148 candidates for 1 post!) and for a pharmacy manager. And tomorrow, we start the process for someone to coordinate all our activities concerning violence (sexual violence, armed aggression, etc.). Recruiting is managed directly by me, to protect our national staff. Unemployment here is very high, and friends, family members, and others in the community would put enormous pressure (physical, monetary or both) on a national staff member to be hired. And it is also unfair to put national staff members in a position where they could be tempted to take bribes in exchange for influence in the hiring process.

Our head of mission just returned from the semi-annual meeting in Paris, concerning our directions for the coming year. No big changes. We will continue to work in the hospital in Rutshuru, where we send all the surgical patients in this area. We have 3 surgical teams, and will be adding a 4th team to cut down on the hours these people put in. And we continue with Nyanzale, a health center in a zone which changes hands between the different factions of conflict very often. Up north around Kayna, the programme changes every week, with sporadic fighting breaking out here, then there. So we are modifying the program to give us more flexibility in getting to the areas where we are needed, when we are needed. Other than that, we will continue to follow the situation, opening where we have to. We are sending a team to south of here tomorrow to help with an outbreak of cholera. Already this year, we have had 13 temporary programs of this type, and that will continue.

That puts quite a bit of pressure on the staff, so from time to time, we try to lighten up. It had been a long time since we have had a staff party, so we had one this past weekend. A lot of the staffs who had just been let go from Kabizo were there! No one got drunk enough to be really obnoxious (not always the case). And, seeing how the party was on the day of Halloween, I just had to play the idiot. Some of the staff really thought that I had been attacked when I showed up. I swear that someday, I will grow up. But don’t hold your breath.