Wildlife

A lovely Sunday afternoon….

I went to my first game park in Swaziland, and it was fantastically low key, on Sunday afternoon we just decided to go to Milwane (it is only about half an hour drive from Mbabane).  We left our cars at the only camp in the park and stumbled across 2 different types of antelope grazing in the camp, monkeys running through and 2 hippos by the side of the lake only about 5 meters from where we standing!  We then for a walk through the park, apparently because there are no big cats it’s safe (although I thought the crocodile we saw could have done some damage if it wanted to).  Anyway we survived and saw some great scenery and antelope, wildebeest, warthogs and the most enormous crocodile I have ever seen.

I’ve uploaded my first set of wildlife photos to bore you with.

Procurement - Swazi Government Style

In classic Swazi style Alison, our Country Director, received an invitation to participate in the Laboratory tender assessment session on a Friday for a meeting scheduled from Tuesday to Friday the next week.  As the current link person to the laboratories this opportunity was quickly delegated to me.  From my questions about the agenda and the process, it was clear that it was going to be a very different procurement process to anyone I have ever run or participated in…. It has been an fairly frustrating four days, and we haven’t finished, I’ve been advised we are needed back Monday and Tuesday next week as well.

All the tenders had been submitted as very weighty tomes (with an original document and 4 copies) and the meeting was run with strict formality, even though everyone in the room knows each other well and works together frequently, there was a chair and the procurement team of two where the ‘secretariat’ to document decisions and confirm the data the decisions were based on.  I would have expected the procurement team to have reviewed, assessed all the tenders and then provided a summary of it to the assessment team to review and check some original documentation to confirm.  In fact the opposite was the case, the assessment team was expected to review all of the tenders to confirm the information and criteria were met…. Which sounds kind of fine, until you have to check supplier by supplier (all 21 of them) that the 92 pages of pricing proposals have been correctly transcribed into excel and if they have quoted for the correct pack size.  Then to review it all again to confirm they have authorization from all the manufactures they quote for to sell their material.  I had suggested if we were going to eliminate the ones without manufacturing authorization we may want to do it the other way around, but it wasn’t supported.  Painful is the only word for it, especially as 3 of us out of the 9 people in the room generated 75% of the output and the rest spent a lot of time talking about how hard work it was!

I have been commenting and capturing improvement suggestions as I go through, I just hope some of them will be taken on board,  I think they are coming around to my number one suggestion of a pre-screening so they have a more reasonable number of suppliers to assess at this level of detail.   Also, it seems as though the laboratory people are valuing the learning experience of going through the information in detail.  And I hope they remember next year the importance of clearly defining assessment criteria up front and being very clear regarding the documentation you want suppliers to provide to enable you to do the assessment.   Hopefully it will be downhill from here!

PS … I have been a bit late posting this, and it has not been downhill, it’s going to take longer than the additional 2 days they planned for at the end of last week…

This is Africa!

Today I had particular exposure to – this is Africa…. I went to pick up my work permit.  I thought the hard part had been done with the application, and I had confirmed before I went that it had been approved.   How wrong I was!

First, I was directed to Room 117, where amazingly there was no queue, they confirmed the work permit was ready and then sent me to Room 101.  Room 101 was piled high with stacks and stacks of yellow folders on the floor on the desks.  It was so full that at first I couldn’t work out if anyone was actually in the room, following a tentative hello from myself someone popped up from amongst the stacks.  Apparently I had to give him my receipt and my passport and then go and wait in the queue for Room 103 to pay my fees, he would find me in that queue to return my receipt.  So back down the narrow, dark and busy corridor to the queue for Room 103, I was feeling a bit heartened, so far it hadn’t taken too long and the queue for Room 103 had been much longer when I’d come to apply for the work permit. 

Eventually I got to the front of that queue, paid for my permit and was directed to Room 119….. Excellent, I thought, when I saw there no queue. Except it turned out that the door was locked which meant that no one was in, still I was hopeful they had just gone out and would be back shortly, I had seen lots of people heading in and out of their offices locking the doors behind them.  So I waited, watching a lady walk up the corridor carrying my file including my passport, try the door and then walk off again, saying that I should wait … This carried on for a long time, in fact, until it was lunch time.  I had to do something, so I headed down to the far end of the corridor to the man in the room of files and explained my problem, he took me to Room 107, to see the lady who had been walking up and down the corridor.  It turns out that the one person who can sign work permits was in a meeting (and then probably going for lunch).  Did I have any options I asked, well I could wait, or I could leave everything and come back after 2pm, at which point hopefully the person who could sign the permit would be back.  Having already been waiting in the dark narrow corridor for an hour and a quarter I didn’t really fancy waiting out lunch time as well.  So I headed back to the office really hoping that my passport would stay safe and get back to me.  About an hour and a half later I headed back to Room 119… oh dear a queue, luckily my man from the filing room was just coming out and let me know that I didn’t need to queue here as the permit had already been signed, so I could just go to Room 107 to pick it up.  Yipee!  So after visiting 5 rooms, a lot of queuing in a dark corridor I now have my work permit! 

A new office

Due to the new project we launched recently, and the activities to support it, the CHAI team in Swaziland has been expanding.  Our old office had enough desks for 7 people and there were 10 of us working there.  It was generally okay as we had a conference room which we could use as a place to work, it did become a bit more interesting when we actually wanted to use the conference room for a meeting, that usually involved some convoluted musical chairs to sort things out. 

This week we have 4 new people starting, so something had to change.  Alison our Country Director has been working on new offices for some time, and when I arrived the leaseholder was threatening to offer the office to someone else if we didn’t move in by the 15^th July.  It is a new building and the offices hadn’t been fitted out when I arrived, so we really didn’t think it would be finished by the 15^th … we did hope that they would finish by the 1^st August though…… They haven’t, which means we moved into new offices that doesn’t have internet, enough desks and has builders apparently randomly drilling things, taking doors off the hinges etc.  The aim of moving in was to try and force them to finish things quicker than they may have done if we weren’t actually in the offices.  I’m not sure how successful that has been, luckily I have had a lot of meetings at other offices.  This offices will be a huge improvement once they get sorted, but this week is a bit of a transition week.  We are definitely going up in the world as we are all to get our own phone and extension number, rather than sharing 2 lines between the whole office (one of them being the fax line).

Trying to work with 4 builders and two drills in the area!  

Sibebe Survivor

This weekend saw the annual charity walk organized by the Rotary Club of Mbabane Mbuluzi, this involved 3,300 people walking, running and singing their way up to the top of one of the world’s largest granite monoliths.  It is kind of an interesting event in Swaziland as there isn’t really the culture of raising money for charity and generally when Swazi’s gets to the position where they don’t have to walk as a means of transport then they don’t do it for recreation.  This meant for most of our Swazi colleagues who came on the walk, the fairly gentle 6km hike was quite a challenge!

I live just off the only road to the starting point of the walk, on a normal morning I’d see two or three cars go by, on the morning of Sibebe Survivor there was a constant stream of fully loaded cars, buses and kombies (minibus taxis) heading down towards the start.  Mbabne is normally fairly quiet and we don’t really know what a traffic jam is, on the day of the walk there was a queue of traffic for about a kilometer before the start line and the parking area, it was great to see so many people out and participating in the event.   

If you want to know some more about the event and what the money is used for this takes you to the Rotary Club webpage.

http://www.sibebe.co.sz/index-2.html

A colleague of mine, Laura, designed and made our team t-shirts at her screen printing class, below are photos of the team at the start of the walk and at the top of Sibebe.

Eric or ‘just the intern’ as he has been known to describe himself took on the job of carrying our snacks up the hill.  Joe, who was organizing our team had very thoughtfully brought the snacks, but hadn’t thought through the container, he managed to pack them in a tub that wouldn’t fit into any of the rucksacks we had with us.  Well done Eric for carrying the tub all the way up and down the hill!

Laura then hosted a Sibebe Funday at her house to reward the ‘survivors’ with a braai and fun and games including a bouncy castle, a three legged race, egg and spoon race…..  Below is a very out of focus photo of one of the egg and spoon race heats.  I think I was laughing so much I couldn't hold the camera steady, the course involved running down the garden, through the bouncy castle and then back to the top of the garden again, you really got to see peoples competitive sides coming out!

Back to reality

After the crazy week that was the launch week, this week has returned to more of normality and no trips to the community.  At the moment is a relief but I’m sure I’ll miss shortly, as I don’t think I’ll have much reason for more trips as my role is primarily working with Clinical Lab Services unit of the Ministry of Health, which is based in Mbabane. 

This week has been focused on meeting with the key people in the lab unit to help me understand how they work and digging a bit more into the areas we have identified for support.  The one point that is becoming a common theme is the expectation that our support comes with funding attached.  Currently the whole of Swaziland is suffering from increasing disruption due to lack of funds from the government, therefore even though they need support in many areas their current burning platform is money to purchase reagents.  I have to keep on guiding the conversation back to areas I can help with, rather than things that are somewhat out of my hands….