Last Call

Hello folks, I am still online. I got the official word that I will be heading out to the base on
Thursday morning.

So I hope to get a few things straight before I head out. The plane is mine to fill and so I hope I can take some things with me to make a grand entrance.

I wrote a huge email yesterday but I lost in a bad translating experience – as internet connections are weak I have learned my lesson one more time. Work in Word and then move onto Yahoo. Damn that makes me ugly.

D’accord

So in the mean time I am hanging in Lumbubashi. It is a quiet and calm yet sprawling city here in the guts of middle Africa. The roads are mostly paved yet not at all smooth and we bounced and jounced around poking here and there thru the dust and markets. The stoplights work but that doesn’t mean you stop, and for that matter you have right-of-way entering a traffic circle but not the right of way in the exiting of it.

The crew here seems good and it looks like the guys are getting a handle on the logistics side of things. There has been a huge turnover in staff at ACF (and more disgruntled expats are expected to terminate sooner than later) leading one to question what has been going on; but also hints at possibility. The month-old log and admin seem to have a firm grip on things now and are diligently trying to catch up on past defaults. Still it seems that the politicking at KIN remains a barrier to success.

Last night I went to a party hosted by our friends the Airserv. These are a bunch of pilots for hire for a private cargo flying company – mostly Americans and South Africans and that make-up sure smacks of CIA Air America kind of stuff. Who knows? Any way the party was in honour of, you guessed it, the sad and lonely death of a pauvre chèvre. Yes, the simple goat took the opportunity to cross the airstrip to get to the other side and was cut in half for its efforts. There I met a few new friends from MSF spain and a few folks from MSF Holland (Fred from Quebec the Lumbu FINCO who helped deliver a baby last week) as well. It is quite a story, the goat, as that kind of thing gets ugly fast – but the pilot I hear did great in aborting the takeoff and negotiating for the bisected viande de hoof. Scary and dangerous it is, to be sure, there is more: this causes an airplane to be grounded and checked by maintenance and so that risks our already tentative supply line by one less plane. Life is interconnected…

I really enjoyed myself. I spoke volumes in English during the party to be sure. It has been a tough couple of weeks in French and I was glad for the release. I yakked it up and worked the floor so to speak, as usual. The house is grand and the cheese and wine imported. But best of all was the international flavour – there we were yakking in three languages (four if you count South African English). The conversations ebbed and flowed into and out of English, French, and Spanish without anxiety or pretences with everyone following along sans the pressure of following the force majore of the language Français. All this in Central Africa too. It is nice when different cultures work together…

Today I did a tour of the town and found a good gyro and scoped out a few pizza joints, found an ice cream place, and identified a few of the nightclubs. I toured the gated compound of the rich and famous – or merely the politicians and generals and then poked up the hill to the five star hotel and its swimming pool. The pool overflowed with of rich Congolese in their undergarments as well as its share of pasty fat expats with fine, athletically lean femmes faciles. In Lumbu I can buy a one litre beer for almost the same price as a 250ml coke.

Around the pool I tripped over a gaggle of MSFers (‘hey’ he said ‘r you American?’ It is as good as any way to guarantee me to stop and clarify things) and coincidentally the folks involved in the plane crash. Luckly they were only grounded for a few minutes before another plane came to pick them up from their strip in Kilwa only 120 km south of Dubie. I also met the PC or chef de base for MSF-H there too; Christen from Germany keenly waits for my arrival. Seems that they had a problem last month and four children transferred from our TFC (therapeutic feeding center) died because they were transferred too late. Christen feels that a better protocol on transfers could have solved that one and so I am for it. We cannot allow that to happen again. There is a sad(er) side to all this – it seems to us here at ACF that the project is fully functioning in Dubie even though there has been no expat management for over three months. This incident calls into question all this; but the truth is that ACF stands on a moral high ground here and this is too political to swallow: ACF sitreps track all sorts of info regarding admissions and releases and transfers but it doesn’t track what happens after a referral. MSF does track what happens to the folks transfer and so for them our problems for bad planning reflects on their success statistics. What a world we live in!

Did I tell you that not one of our HQ staff, or any of our new Lumbu management has ever seen Dubie? There is no information of what is happening except for the sitreps and now they are called into question. There are no pictures. There is no background lists, or outstanding tasks or, for that matter, any discussion on the part of management of their vision for the base (other than it will likely close mid Dec). I ask things in my bad French like ‘what do you think is our primary task for this month?’ and get, at best, ‘you are the boss… So I am going in blind and as risky and disconcerting it is there is a sense of exhilaration. I hope I am up to the challenge! It is scary all this work in French, the dying children, the new context.

I spent Saturday reviewing the documentation I received from the newly departed Finco in Kinshasa. I started trying to pin down some things…like who is actually IN Dubie? So I comparing the organogram (clearly a year or more out of date, ergo useless) to the electronic contracts to the payroll calc sheets. How come the payroll sheets still are calculating the pay for a night guard fired for sleeping? Is he still working or is this another Congolese game for free money? How come I have a contract for a night guard (Sleepy’s replacement?) but he is not on the payroll? Where is the contract and payroll for the cook/cleaner? How come one contract is in USD and the others in FC Congolese francs, just how messed up is that? Which leads me to all sorts of other questions, like the payroll excel sheets any good, out of date, or any of the cells miss-used? In the DRC, we pay salaries and also a prorata for children, travel, housing and a few other things, and then we have to take off expenses like taxes and pensions and other government things. Gosh, there must be twenty columns of inputs and expenses just to calculate one paystub. Now each of those columns has to be verified along with the proper name for each of 16 staff. How fun is all that? I wonder if the cells calc functions are working properly too?

There are other admin financial complications too. To start an explanation it is critical to understand that ACF functions on proposals and donors. ACF classifies itself as an emergency response organization, but the truth is that they cannot possibly be quickly injected into am emergency, as it requires the timely drafting and submission of funding proposals. Only after approvals are received it is THEN the activities can commence with project start-up chores. Hence, much time is invested in building proposals than it seems in doing the work.

This leads to a further (in my mind) complex of a philosophical degeneration into a consultancy mindset. You have seen it: money drives the system and the system then searches for money and the true purpose of the work (the beneficiaries) are superseded by the money hunt. I hope it is not true here. Potentially this is why Kinshasa seems distant and disconnected to us here in the field.

There are other problems in initiating activities as well. For example as ACF is into food distributions it is often dependent upon the WFP for food. WFP as we know are weighed down in politics of aid and the problematic delivery systems. ACF in the DRC at one point had to submit funding proposals to start in this emergency context. Upon winning the money it then had to go to the WFP whom after some deliberation and pudd-pulling coughed up the food. When it finally finally arrived it was too much food too late – the idps were on the move again and there was not so much need.

This is a fundamental difference between MSF and ACF. MSF has a pool of money it collects from the public and therefore can be free from the politics of funding, remaining neutral from the demands of donors. It can simply use the pot for a quick response, and the funding drives replenish the pot later.

Why do I tell you this? It is to explain the next task: my little project with the tiny staff have to attribute all the activities we are doing (there are three main activities – 1) the therapeutic, supplementary, ambulatory feeding activities, the hygiene and health education, the home visits and countryside investigations ECHO funded– 2)watsan US ODFA – 3)food security: education, seeds, and tool distributions, Congo Pool Fund.) require a complicated tracking and verification to meet the needs of the donors. This complicates our monthly financial systems. And really, which contract do you attribute those things you buy for the base which are used by all of the programs like pens for example. On the other hand, it also means we are limited in activities such to specifically meet the donor’s expectations and clearly there is no philosophy here that ‘money is no object’ (so efficiencies rule and that is good for me but also in that regard, I hope we are not too tied to budgets to look up and see our world around us).

So far that gives some insight into the nutrition, finance and HR side of the business. Now the logistics of things have been problematic as well. Things are changing here but slowly, I hope in time to accomplish some arranging stock buffers (tampon) before the real rains constrict the supply chain. I haven’t seen the list but I am hoping I can get a copy of all the items ordered since inception (can verify continued existence of durable goods and to formulate a sideways picture of the base and its state) and then distil it to a list of items still outstanding – I have concern that there may be up to 200 items still outstanding, so the rumours go.

All this to do in a few weeks before the rains start, with a busted truck, and no comms.

In the end the truth of the matter is there is only one way to know how things are going in Dubie – ya gotta go. So there is no point over analysing or worrying over at best historic at worst fabricated details. So for me the pressure is off and I sit and read this weekend. I continue to receive phone calls from Kinshasa that are very saccharine in their concern for me and my welfare (“don’t be afraid to ask any any question –even if we can’t answer it!). It makes me concerned and inquisitorial regarding the motivation behind such frequent and friendly concern. But I will leave that behind for now.