How to become instantly popular

I'm running a project which involves hiring some smart but not necessarily experieneced people for temporary work, on what I consider to be a vastly over-paid daily rate.

Untill you have this kind of power, the power to engage people and pay them...you never know just how many friends you have. Suddenly everyone you know at work is being very nice to you. And by the way, do you have a job for their brother/sister/cousin ?

Fair enough I suppose but today this rather odious character hounded me...actually followed me out of the buidling. Last week sometime, my collegue A introduced me the odious character. As I was on sick leave at a critical juncture in the project, A helped out with a lot of the hiring. This guy's sister is on the wait list of people who could be hired if a position came up. Clearly A had had enough of the guy hounding him and since it was my project, passed him on to me.

I'm quite tired today and had my mind on other things (like sneaking off to somewhere will a good net connection so I could chat with the bf) and this guy just wants to annoy me about how I should hire his sister, how she has been recommended by the Rector, how she needs a job (her and couple of million other Rwandans), and how I should help him out cause we are collegues in KIST (he works in some satelite centre upcountry). I so do not want to deal with this guy. To top it all, he follows me into the office to "greet" the director of my unit, a move clearly intended to intimidate me. I'm tempted not to hire the girl cause he was such a pain in the ass!

Itangazo: Rwandatales has a little sister!

I am currently writing on my new blog
Postcards from the Edge

Its more of a bloggy blog than Rwandatales, which I've tried to keep as a series of article style postings. I will keep posting here on various issue but if you've ever wondered what my day to day life is like here, then Postcards is the place to be!

“A day late and a dollar short”

Friday, we’re back on generator power but the internet seems to have disappeared. But I’m not worried about that, because my mood has crashed and with it my motivation.

I have a fairly complex project to manage this month and I’m not doing anything. I’ve spent the last two weeks in work avoidance mode. Now, much of my gripes at work centre around having not much to do, or at least not much interesting work. So here I am with an interesting project, one which will let me feel like I’ve achieved something this year and I’m a lame duck. I conceived it, I developed it, I was instrumental in getting the funds to support it but when it comes to the implementation I’m nowhere. I wish that the project had got this far while I still had the energy to run it.

How have I got myself to this point? Well, here’s a brief narrative of the whole sorry affair, which I think is indicative of projects in this neck of the woods.

Early 2006:
In the beginning of 2006, I was asked along to a few meetings of the “then quite active, now defunct” ICT in Education committee to give inputs on spreading internet access in schools. The “then quite popular, now completely out of favour with GoR” Internet provider which was in discussions to provide said access, mentioned when they provided internet it would be up to the schools (or the ministry) to make sure they could use it properly, in terms of having trained teachers & technicians, adequate LAN infrastructure and such essentials as physical space of computer and electricity. This presented a whole load of interesting questions on which schools had what facilities, on their eReadiness.

One definition of creativity is the process by which a problem is turned into an opportunity, or so I claimed on my Berkely MBA application (they still didn’t accept me, the bastards). So I developed a little project for my university to conduct a schools eReadiness survey using final year students and/or recent grads. The idea was that as well as in inventory of IT equipment and general eReadiness, we’d also do a bit of Monitoring and Evaluation on the computers already deployed, as well as giving the students so real world experience and (if they were entrepreneurial enough) introducing them a potential customer base for their skills. And I could feel like I’d done something worthwhile, given that the report could also be used a basis for policy development and expenditure prioritisation.

Summer 2006 :
So the project plan was written initially Feb 2006 and presented to the Ministry in April. They agreed it was a good idea and much needed but said that due to procurement procedures it would be impossible to simple “hire” us like that, there would have to be a tender process. And of course they didn’t have a budget for it anyway, so the idea was shelved for the summer. Around the end of the summer I was approached by a private sector IT player with an offer to fund the survey phase of my project, via the university’s links with said IT player. All looked well but since promises are not cold, hard cash I didn’t move on it.

November 2006: We were asked for an invoice for the project in a real, big hurry and as a result of this I screw up the invoice amount. Even though I catch the error in less than 72hrs its too late although the Funder does suggest initial funds would be dispatched as long as I started using the first sum (this is because of the Absorption Capacity problem). Around this time an International NGO approach the Ministry offering to help with my little project. At this time I also tell the Funder to contact the Ministry to tell them they will support the survey with us as implementers. From a protocol point of view, we cannot inform them because they are our parent ministry.

Jan-April 2007: During this time there some to-ing and fro-ing between myself and the Funder and some unsuccessful attempts on my side to get senior management and the ICT people in the university involved in the project. Now that we are getting funds I will need help for the implementation, esp since my job has changed and I’m no longer with the ICT Centre.

May 2007 : The money for the survey arrives our account and we go see the Ministry about getting their blessing and support to implement. We cannot visit the schools nor are we likely to get cooperation from Headmasters without an official letter from the Ministry. We are told the Ministry cannot help us as they have not been officially informed of the Funder’s support. I thought this had all been taken care of in November, and now I’m exactly where I don’t want to be…in the middle of a political wrangle with some people’s noses out of joint. I give up on it for some months.

July- Mid Aug 2007: The NGO steps into the picture again to offer some much needed intervention in terms of back up on the survey development and as intermediaries between us and ministry – this is particularly urgent now as I may be leaving Rwanda in September. Starting the project appears to be more intractable than middle east politics. The Ministry have now been informed by the Funders and while we have been waiting for the written go-ahead from them, they then turn around and say that, in fact, they need a letter from us requesting a letter from them. Arrgh! I again get disheartened and try to ignore the project hoping I’ll be out of Rwanda before the pressure comes to implement.

Mid Aug- Present: I’m not leaving till Jan, so it looks like I have to deal with the project since, quite unfathomably, the university and ministry senior management seem to now be a big hurry to implement. I know the university is nervous about the Funders money being on our account for so long without being used. A chance meeting with the Funder’s representative shows that he also is getting pressure from above to show results from the donation by mid October. Le shit is hitting the proverbial fan. And I feel like I’m in a weird East African version of “Brewsters Millions”, having a considerable sum to shift through public coffers in an incredibly short time.

So I assemble a project team(not as easy as it sounds), send everyone the documents, inform them the timescales are tight and call a meeting. To which only the Ministry representative shows up, and he’s driven across town to get to us. Bleuch! I feel like giving up completely. Or not. I want to do this, I want to do something concrete and at the same time I want it as far away from me as possible. Its all a day late and a dollar short (actually several thousands but those counting?) and I wish to high heaven, I’d been able to get the project to this point sometime last year, when I was still enthusiastic about it.

Cultural Toxic Shock Syndrome

Cultural Toxic Shock Syndrome: A condition arising out of operating in an alien culture over a long period of time, well after cultural adaptation has taken place, where anger and frustrations at the differences in operation start to turn inwards. At this point the cultural environment has, like a bacterial infection, become toxic to the subject.


It is around 19:00 and well after sundown when I leave the office. I walk to the gate of the institute and flag down a motorbike taxi, my preferred method of transport for the past few years. A few minutes in to the journey he asks me in French, if I can speak Swahili. I tell him no and he tells me in hesitant French that he doesn’t speak the language. This moto guy is now becoming a metaphor for why I must leave Rwanda. He hasn’t even bothered to ask if I speak Kinyarwanda he has already assumed that I don’t, in the same way later he will assume I live in the area of my neighbourhood with the fancy houses and the embassy residences. He then asks me if I’m a student at the university. Again he has assumed, I am white and taking a moto and therefore I cannot be staff. A keen anger rises in me against this stranger who is giving me a ride across town my home. I want to lash out, punch something or go home and cry or just pack my bags and leave. All these feelings some at once and its been happening far too often recently.

I walk on the streets and I cannot stand feeling the judgements people are making about me as they walk past. You may wonder if this is paranoia…I wish I had the luxury of giving myself that option, but when people come and ask you for money, assume to don’t speak any of the language, start to tell you their life story in full expectation that you’ll care and want to do something about it, refer to you by the generic mzungu even though you’ve been working with them for a year, you have little recourse to telling yourself that its all in your head. With every one of these interactions my individuality is stripped away by other people’s assumptions of what I am. And I feel diminished as a person, dehumanised. Maybe I should be stronger; maybe if I was I wouldn’t be so affected by other people’s judgements. But whatever of that strength I had in me when I got here has long been drained. Now I feel somewhat like a sponge soaking up all these assumptions, these most invisible of put downs and yet at the same time raging against the insult wanting to battle out my frustrations.

What’s even more annoying is that the moto guy has not registered that when I approached him, I spoke to him in Kinyarwanda. Its so out of what he expects me to do that even though his ears have heard the words from my mouth, his brain has failed to register that I’m literally speaking his language. I’m so incensed by his assumptions that I don’t bother to tell him that I do speak Kinyarwanda. Its different, it’s so different from what he expects and so it has been blanked out. Someone once told me, or maybe I read it in a book, that one of the defining characteristics of Rwanda is the inability to deal with difference. It’s true that it permeates everything here…that cultural awareness that you must not stick out, you must not go against the grain, you must preserve the consensus. I stick out and it seems I must be told this one way or another, every single day.

I used to get angry at the frustrations here and it would be obvious that I was angry. I’d argue with people and get mad. So much song and dance just for something simple, like getting a bill paid or a wage cheque or getting someone in authority to sign a letter. So much energy for so little output. Now I don’t shout so much, but the anger is there and with nowhere to go it turns inside and makes you feel like you’re tearing at yourself.

And then there’s the men. The god-damn, stupid, mother-fucking men. From the moto guy who asks quite pointedly if I’m married, Why the fuck do you want to know asshole? You really think lack of a ring gives you a licence to try it on?, to the guy whose a friend of a friend who asks for my phone number, No I don’t want to give it to you, in fact I don’t ever want to see you again but I can’t afford to offend you yet until I find out who you’re related to, to the newspaper editor type who texts me to say I really turned him on, Oh, you thought it was cute that a woman could have an opinion eh?, to the Minister who concludes a conversation where he is giving me hassle over project delays he was instrumental in creating, by obviously flirting with me, Why don’t I come to visit you? Cause you’re a crinkly, pompous old rag and if I didn’t have to operate in this town I’d gladly stab you in the hand with my cocktail fucking fork. Honestly, it’s at points like these that I feel like the strung out junkie chick in that scene with her therapist in “Requiem for a Dream”. But like her, I’m just smiling my way through as the cold rage builds and poisons my system.

I’m going back to somewhere I don’t have to fight the gender wars and I don’t have to struggle to be treated normally. And I don't feel like being violent towards most people, most of the time. This place has become toxic and often I feel like I’m hovering on the edge. I don’t want to be this sensitive, I hate that every little thing affects me, I feel like I’m being crushed. Its time to leave. Seriously.

The Polyamorous Paradigm for an increasingly mobile world?

Polyamory (from poly=multiple + amor=love) is the desire, practice, or acceptance of having more than one loving, intimate relationship at a time with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved. Polyamorous perspectives differ from monogamous perspectives, in that they respect a partner's wish to have second or further meaningful relationships and to accommodate these alongside their existing relationships.

I haven’t seen the man I love for over 6 months. The likelihood is that we will never live together in the traditional sense, well not for many years in any case. Its not what I would choose if I had the choice but its something I am coming to terms with slowly. Maybe its my history in the research community but many of my friends spend most of their time on a different continent from the person they love. As the world gets more mobile, the need to have an interesting and fulfilling work life will make more and more of us used to be being on our own, in one way or another. Researchers and other global players are disconnected and mobile…how does this affect our intimate relationships?

I first picked up the concept of polyamory from a friend in Switzerland who was happily telling me that his new girlfriend was fully polyamorous, and by the way would I like to go to dinner with him. I became intrigued with the idea that a person could be in love with two (or more) people at the same time and that all could live together in an open and honest relationship and I did some research. There are a few community sites for people living in polyamorous relationships and even families. Many poly families cited the advantages to child rearing of have a bigger pool of wages earners and adult “energy” as one of the biggest advantages of their way of life. It harps back to an earlier concept of community upbringing for children. However polyamory is not to be confused with polygamy, the swinger scene or even with extra-marital affairs, and there are various types of polyamory involving various numbers of partners who may or may be sexually involved with other members. For example in the simplest case of 3 people, there is a poly-V, where two people are sexually involved with the third but not with each other. And there is a poly-tri where all three are sexually involved with each other. In fact poly-people don’t even frame their definitions in terms of sexual contact, they might simply state one relationship pair is closer than another, as 3 people are very much involved in each others lives regardless of sleeping arrangements.

Two interesting things struck me from the various stories of poly relationships which I found on the Internet. Naturally, there was a period of readjustment and jealousy and breaks-ups involved in most stories before they could settle and play happy families. However, in almost all cases, particularly when all 3 people in the relationship are heterosexual, I found that there was a first relationship and a period of geographic separation which allowed the third person to become close to one of the partners in the first relationship. Perhaps without the separation its quite difficult for most of us to have the “space” to develop deep feelings for a person outside of our relationship. Its face it, intimate relationships take up a lot of CPU time…if we are serious about someone it takes up our time, our emotional energy and our brainspace.

Not that this is a bad thing, just that for another meaningful relationship to appear, one which is not replacing or in any way subordinate or superior to the relationship we are already in, there needs to be some degree of separation. They way we are living our lives today, more and more people are mobile and this will allow or force separation on otherwise loving couples. Many of the contributors to polyamory discussions also cite a love of community, of sharing living beyond the nuclear family as both an unexpected advantage to polyamory and as a large draw to the arrangement. Mobility and the general culture of the individual found in many developed countries, tend to place people in situations where families are not close. But we are still social animals and this will drive us to create that sense of community in new ways.

So I wonder, as our lives are increasingly mobile and spending a lot of time away, or chunks of time away from our partners becomes the norm – will the separation, the need for individual fulfilment and the search for community edge polyamory towards the mainstream?

Pigeonholing and the problem of vertical job markets

How can being refused a job that you didn’t really want in the first place, make you depressed?

Well, when you’re me, pretty much anything related to career has the potential to bring you down. I’ve never been very good at such things and although people have always told me I have a lot of potential, it never materialises into anything I would recognise as career success. And I’m getting a bit for potential – people want to see progress.

For some time now I’ve thought I was somehow caught in a catch 22. I don’t have enough experience to get contracts as an independent in Africa. So I need to return to Europe and get some experience. Except that in Europe by my age, employers expect to see 10 years experience in a very narrow field of application, for instance in testing of software for medical applications. What I have is breath but not depth. This works in Africa and to a greater extent in US/North America because those job markets are set up to put value in transferable skills – there is an attitude that if you can run a public sector insurance company, you can probably make a good stab at running a plumbing company. The European job market is more cautious and places emphasis on domain expertise.

And whats the definition of an expert? Someone who knows more and more about less and less. I’ve figured out that I’m the kind of person that gets bored as soon as I get comfortable. As soon as I get a grip on how something works, I like to move on. I’m with another friend of mine who responds to the question “what can you do?” with “What is it you need done?”. I’ve enjoyed the times in my professional career where I get to look at something (a business, an organisation, a team, a project) figure out where the problems are and suggest ways to get around them. It’s the kind of thing that business consultants do most of the time….and you can probably bank on those skills in an African or North American context where being a generalist is valued. Unfortunatly, I need to go back to the developed world for a while, for professional development and for my own sanity. And I don’t have rights to work in North America (H1-B’s being rarer than hen’s teeth these days). So, I’m kinda stuck with where I can legally find work –Europe, where its not so easy to be 10 years are graduation and selling general skills.

But never mind, I thought I’d give it a go and asked an old college buddy in consulting where I should be looking for opportunities. I applied to one of the “Big 5” consulting companies based in Ireland. Not that I was particular about returning to the Ould Sod, but the firm were in the middle of a recruitment drive. That was a few months ago and after finally having a very detailed telephone interview, I got the feedback earlier this week. I was rejected on the basis of not having enough commercial experience in implementing IT systems, and while they recognised I had a willingness to learn, they advised me to reapply when I got more experience (presumably from a less picky company!). Then the HR person told me that the manager who interviewed me said I would be great for an NGO role.

God how depressing! He probably thought that was encouragement…I had experience, I had worked in Africa ergo I must be suitable for NGO work – case closed. Despite the fact that all of my experience in Africa has been working for Government not Non Governmental Organisations. Despite the fact that I don’t have qualifications or major background in International Development or any desire to work with NGOs – much work in international organisations, certainly in the UN, is glorified administration. It was good to have exposure to that but I need something new, something else. But I had been pigeonholed, and most inaccurately so. I could see I was going to get that problem in most places I tried to gain employment in Europe. There was nothing for it – if I wanted to progress, I would have to retrain…again….10 years after I left University with an MSc. I just had to hope I wasn’t going backwards.

The Rwandatales Recommendations for Visiting the Gorillas

Some stuff to Consider

- Gorillas are further down the mountain in the rainy season, so if you’re not interested in the hiking try to go then BUT the trails are slippery and treacherous in the wet season.

- The rainy season brings bamboo which makes them more playful BUT Gorillas hate the rain, so when it rains they tend to just sit there and do nothing, so try to get a day when its not actually raining. This is very tricky cause you usually need to buy your permit well in advance.

- You may not get a choice of the group your going to visit but if you do, be aware the more famous one, Susa, is also the longest trek. Some people have trekked for over 5 hours to see them in the dry season!

- REMEMBER that under 16’s are not allowed to visit the gorillas, this is strictly enforced and ORTPN (the tourist authority) will not give refunds on permits for any reason.

- Pick a group that suits your fitness level and remember that bigger numbers don’t always mean a better visit. My group had only 8 members.

- Mine was a very good visit, but be prepared for the fact that the Gorillas might not do anything much or, in rare cases, you might not find them at all. A lady on my trek said they slogged for hours and saw only 3 gorillas sitting in the rain and not moving.

- STOP TAKING PHOTOS at a certain point. Many lower end “point and click” digi cams don’t take good pics without a flash anyway and you should take some time to relax and watch the gorillas without spending all your time clicking.

- Do what the guide says, when he says it – seriously! And don’t forget to make sure you’re not blocking others when viewing or taking pics.

- It’s possible to go there and back in one day from Kigali. I left at 04:30 and got back at 15:00, which included about an hour of messing around at the Park HQ and Ruhengeri, however my trek was very short. You can go with a tour for about 100USD per person (transport in 4x4 and lunch) or just hire a car and driver for a little less. This is a better option if you have people to split costs with.

- There are two places to stay near the park HQ at Kinigi but you still need transport to get you to the HQ and to get from HQ to the trail head. This transport will usually come from Ruhengeri anyway, so there’s no advantage to staying in Kinigi from that point of view.

- Don’t plan on doing much the night after your Gorilla visit, you’ll be tired!