Busy, busy, busy

Things haven’t stopped since I came back from my break.

A friend of mine visited me here in Abuja. He is Nigerian. His family lives in Lagos, but he is doing his studies in the Ukraine. He came up from Lagos to get renew his passport here. We had a great weekend together.

We are now preparing for our semi-annual “Mise a Plat”. This is a French expression pretty much meaning “Taking things back to the beginning”. It is where we look at the objectives we have for each country and each project, what this year’s objectives were and where we are, what have we accomplished, are the objectives the same for the next 6 months, and what resources do we need to obtain the new objectives. The project teams really put a lot of thought into their presentations, and we were impressed with the quality of work. Now, we will be consolidating the work to decide what we will ask for in Paris at the end of October for 2012.

In conjunction with this meeting here this weekend, we had 15 people in the house, including some visitors and people coming and going from their assignments. I was in charge of the physical arrangements: audiovisual, rooming, meals, and cooperation with the logisticians for the cars. All considered, this went pretty well. We managed to have a good meeting and some quality time together during and after the workday.

We are also recruiting for 3 posts in our coordination team. We have between 15 and 75 candidatures for each post – quite a bit of work to screen them and choose who we hire.

I also have a lawyer and a human resources specialist who just arrived, staying here for several months to do an in-depth review of our human resources policy. We have been waiting for this team for several months, and I am very happy that they have arrived. I know both of them, and I have great confidence that they will produce a good proposition for the future policies for our national staff.

At the same time, we have had someone from Paris to help us with a funding contract. We have the help of EuropeAid for our Jahun Emergency Obstetrics program. This is great. They are funding about 50% of the project. It is the first time we have worked with this organization, and as we do not have so many of these cooperations with donor institutions, we are in need of help to make sure we comply with their reporting specifications.

Also during the next 10 days, we are going into our last budget revision of the year, analyzing where we are in our projected expenditures and seeing if we need to make any changes to the budget through the end of the year.

Besides that, my deputy has done an outstanding job of working on a new form for our monthly cash requests from Paris, which incorporates a budget expenditure follow-up. She has just finished the work, to be incorporated this month for next months request.

Finally, I am leaving tonight to stand in for the project coordinator in our Kazaure Nutrition Project. He has just left for his home country for a week. I will enjoy working with the team there, while managing the other tasks from afar.

Never a dull moment!