Music saves the day

I'm now more than a week into my temporary escape from Freetown and I've seen and done some pretty great things, like....:

-Walk to a castle nestled in hills full of vineyard and enjoy a glass of wine while taking in the view
-Float along the River Rhine while mentally deciding which castle I would choose for my own
-Visit a 1000 year old cathedral surrounded by a quaint gothic village
-Walk along the remains of the Berlin wall
-Drink beer by the half liter
-Walk through the Brandenburg Gate

However, yesterday was a bit of a difficult one.  I woke up in the morning with plans to go out to brunch with the friend I met in Berlin.  I didn't have many euros so I was hoping to find somewhere to change money.  In Freetown, you can change money almost anywhere, and even if you don't have leones you can basically always pay with dollars.  Germany is not so dollar friendly, unfortunately.  The hotel wouldn't change money, but gave me information for a place that would.  I went there, but it was closed.  I decided I would go meet my friend and figure it out there.

We decided getting money changed wouldn't be too easy, but we could surely get money out with an ATM (which I had done only a few days before).  We were very, very wrong.  We tried probably a dozen ATMs throughout the city with no luck.  As each ATM refused to cooperate, I became more and more sure that someone had cleaned out my account.  This happened to several of my colleagues in Sierra Leone and it seemed strange that my card had worked only days before.  I was seized by an unshakeable need to check my bank statement.  Unfortunately, I couldn't remember my password so we ended up returning to the hotel to get my password and check.  My fears were, of course, unfounded.  I had plenty of money in my account, I just couldn't access it.

So, one problem was solved, but the mystery of why I couldn't access my money was still pending.  We went back into town and managed to find a place that would take credit cards and had our brunch, at 1 pm.  My friend had to leave to go back to his town so I was left by myself.  I went to go try to find somewhere to change money.  The first person I went to try to give me 60 euros for 100 dollars, which I didn't accept but I eventually found someone.

I sat in the train station feeling a little shell-shocked from how the day had gone so far, but not feeling like it was a good idea to go to the hotel and call it a day.  My feet were also still aching from the 10 or 15 kilometers we had walked the day before, exploring the city in full.  I convinced myself to go back to an area I had particularly liked the day before and was rewarded greatly for my pluck.  It turns out the June 21 is the 'Fete de la Musique' throughout Europe.  It is the first day of summer and at one time, a French king (or equivalent to a king) designated that this date would be known as the Fete de la Musique and would be marked by concerts throughout the city.  As I walked around Berlin, I couldn't help but run into small concert after small concert.

In the end, it may not have been exactly the day I had in mind, but it was still a good one.  I saw that my friend here in Berlin is truly someone you can count on as he helped ease my panic and trekked with me to the hotel and back into the city.  And since I was wandering aimlessly in the city rather than on a mission of some kind, I ran into the street concerts and felt free to sit and enjoy them.

Escape From Freetown

I’m writing this post from inside a high speed train on my way from Frankfurt to the Black Forest in Germany.  I left Freetown on Friday night to start a two week vacation, which will be my last before I finish my contract in August.

Leaving Freetown on Friday was typical.  Although my flight left at 5 am, I needed to catch the boat to cross the bay at 1:00 AM, so I needed to be there by 12:30 and needed a car to pick me up at 12:00.  I spoke with our fleet manager to arrange to have the car there at 12:00.  This, of course, didn’t happen.  I ended up getting a driver who wasn’t on duty to take me to the boat and paid him out of pocket.  Then I waited for the boat to leave for 30 minutes, had a 45-50 minute trip across the bay, another 20 minutes or so from the boat to the airport, 10 minutes getting through the first security check, 20 for the next, and then an hour standing in line to check in.  I didn’t realize this, but at Freetown airport there are actually no computers so you’re supposed to print out your ticket, which I didn’t do.  In any case, they worked it out.  15 or 20 minutes to make it through immigration and security and then and hour or so waiting for the plane to take off.  Typical Freetown life.

After a layover in Casablanca for a few hours, I finally arrived to Frankfurt.  I was really anxious about arriving to a place that was completely new to me, where I didn’t speak the language, and trying to figure out how to get to the place I was staying.  My fears, however, were completely unfounded.  After a few missteps, I found myself at my destination.  Frankfurt has an amazing public transit system that would put even DC to shame.  It’s hard to explain how liberating it feels to be able to decide where I want to go and what I want to do without having to deal with calling multiple drivers, dealing with other people calling and wanting the car at the same time, and knowing that everyone knows exactly what I’m doing all the time.  Despite its name, Freetown is the place where I’ve felt less free than ever before in my life.

I don’t want to make you all think that I hate living in Freetown, because that definitely isn’t true.  There are absolutely great things about it like my friends, without whom I would have had a nervous breakdown long, long ago.  And to be honest it’s definitely one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever lived.  But it’s not easy.  Although I guess it’s not supposed to be.

Although life in Salone can be hard, the time that I’ve spent there has flown by.  When I get back from my vacation on the 27^th of this month, I’ll only have a little over a month left before I come back to the US.  The overwhelming feeling I’ve been having at work these days is that there just won’t  be enough time to accomplish everything I wanted to before I leave.  When I started in my new job as the Freetown Health Manager, I took on the management of a huge project with a team of 21 people and a gigantic budget.  My job was to get it restarted and get it all organized.  I’ve made a lot of headway, but there are still miles to go until I could say that my job is done.  The hard truth is that in the end, I’ll probably have to just do my best to control my inner perfectionist/control freak and accept that someone else can pick up where I left off and it simply will not be the end of the world.

Highs and Lows

In the field of global health, as in a lot of fields, there are a lot of highs and lows.  There are days where you find yourself so fulfilled with the work that you're doing that you couldn't imagine doing anything else and days where you find yourself wondering if anything you're doing makes any difference at all.  And some days you even have both of those intense feelings within a period of hours.

This week I had one day that has exemplified a lot of my experience here and the highs and lows that have gone along with it.  As I've talked about before, I've now moved on from my position as OICC Programme Manager focusing on Ebola response and have transitioned into a position as Freetown Health Manager where my job is implementing our long term health projects in the capital.  Just to give you a sense of the scope of our project in Freetown, we have at least 70 project activities that have to be completed during the next six months.  Although I manage a team of about 20 people, I had been finding that the responsibility for getting things done was all falling on the shoulders of the three of us at the top of the pyramid.

After discussing this with my boss (who is amazing, by the way), we decided to plan a one-day planning workshop with the team to increase understanding of the whole project and create detailed workplans for each of the project activities.  I was really excited about this idea and threw myself into planning.  I chose a great location that is close to the office but very pretty and sure to be a relaxing place for everyone to get to know each other and attack the task at hand.

I came into work on the day of the event and was told that the place we wanted had not been booked, but an alternative had been found.  Not ideal, but ok.  The alternative was further away, so we had to find a way to get the whole group there.  However, our fleet manager told my colleague there was no fuel in the cars.  I went to the Fleet Manager and managed to convince him that this was not an option and got us a car.  At this point, it was 9:10.  The event was meant to start at 9:00.

We got into cars and started moving.  For about 5 minutes until we hit a massive traffic jam where we sat until 10:00.  We finally arrived to the location, which was of course not as nice as the one I had originally requested.  And, as it turned out, had also been double booked.  My boss told me he would handle the double-booking issue and I started to set up.  Of course, only one outlet in the hall worked, so we had to re-arrange the entire room set up.  Finally by 10:30 or 10:45, we began.

I managed to shake off my frustration and found myself commanding the room as I started my presentation.  The team was responsive and engaged and everything seemed to be coming together.  I honestly had serious doubts about whether this exercise would work.  We were asking our team to do relatively high level planning for a large number of activities and there was a definite possibility that they wouldn't be able to do it.  I had set aside about 3 hours of the day for group work, so if we found that the team couldn't handle it, disaster would have been inevitable.  As we put them to work, there were some challenges, but between myself and my boss, we worked with everyone and people caught on.  Before long, I found that I didn't even need to assist the team with the work and I just left them to do it.

By the end of the day, our team had taken every activity in our program and had developed a detailed plan for its completion.  For those of you who have worked in development and with large groups of varied experience and capacity, this is the kind of result that you can scarcely dream of.  I was on cloud 9, feeling like I'd gotten to know my team better, built team solidarity, increased capacity, and saved myself a ton of work all in one fell swoop.  My boss said to me 'we've made tremendous progress today,' and I couldn't help but agree.

And then I stood outside the training hall with my colleagues and waited an entire for a car to come pick us up, calling our Fleet Manager about every 15 minutes trying to understand why I found myself waiting for a car, once again.  It finally arrived and I made it back to the office and went out to a bar overlooking the ocean for drinks with my colleagues, ending the day on not necessarily a high, but with the warm feeling of sitting with people who you have become your family and sharing the highs and lows of your days.

And that, my friends, is more or less a typical day in my life here.  A roller coaster from being on the verge of tears to feeling unstoppable to feeling incredibly proud of your colleagues to feeling like your colleagues are completely useless to feeling awed by the beauty of this place and finally feeling so exhausted that all you can do is fall into bed and do it all again the next day.