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.