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.