Dude, where's my house?
It’s been an eventful week. I went to a wedding, met the IMF mission to Malawi and suffered another setback in the struggle to get housed.
I promised last week to explain the slightly cryptic title, so here goes. One of my colleagues in the Ministry of Education (lets call her Snowball) was witness to the minor meltdown of a Japanese civil servant stationed in Malawi and clearly not used to the more, ahem, languid pace at which work tends to be done here. He had spent a good portion of Wednesday being victimized by misfortune and bad organization. The straw that broke the civil servant's back was when he turned up to an important meeting bang on time, only to be told that he had been erroneously directed to the wrong location. The meeting was actually taking place on the other side of Lilongwe. He arrived 30 minutes late. Cue breakdown. He collapsed into Snowball’s room, and seethed: ‘I feel like I’m playing an important game of catch. But I’m the only one who is willing to throw the ball! The other player will catch it, but never throws it back!’ And with that, he exited.
I do have sympathy for the poor guy. I’ve been to a number of meetings where it really has seemed like a random collection of people just wandered in without knowing why they were put in a room together. One of the funniest things I’ve seen this year is an IMF economist struggling to find out how close to our Staff Monitored Program we’ve managed to stay, while simultaneously attempting to open a foil-sealed bottle of orange juice. Eventually he gave up on the SMP, but managed to liberate the orange juice with a sharp pencil repeatedly jabbed through the foil. I’m pretty sure he considered using the same technique on the Reserve Bank President to extract information…
That said the IMF and the donor community in general are far from the paragons of organizational virtue that they seem to think they are. While the IMF incessantly demand information collated and presented to their specifications, trying to find out how much money they’ve actually disbursed to the Government (as opposed to how much they promised) is like drawing blood from a stone. Similarly, last week I was witness to the donor community’s version of a dispute over the billing, with one large donor mounting strenuous objections to a project for no apparent reason beyond the higher profile of another donor on the same project.
My colleagues at the Ministry of Finance, a passionate bunch of civil servants (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms), managed to see the lighter side of this, but I doubt we’ll be laughing if donor ego-clashes derail what could be a really important project for this country.
I’m certainly not laughing after what I was told this afternoon. The house that the Ministry is meant to provide me with may not materialise for quite some time, and I’m starting to suffer serious lodge-fatigue, as much as I like Maurice and the rest of the chaps who work here. Looks like I’ll have to find a house myself and then motivate the ministry to cough up the rent. It's all very frustrating
On a happier note, my driver (Cantona - humour me!) got married on Saturday, and myself, Snowball, and a couple of friends were invited. It all got rather embarrassing when I had to dance around Cantona, throwing money at him, with an audience of a couple of hundred people and a camcorder... They then read out for the entire audience what each of us got him as a gift. Real name-and-shame potential there, but fortunately I was on generous form that day...
I promised last week to explain the slightly cryptic title, so here goes. One of my colleagues in the Ministry of Education (lets call her Snowball) was witness to the minor meltdown of a Japanese civil servant stationed in Malawi and clearly not used to the more, ahem, languid pace at which work tends to be done here. He had spent a good portion of Wednesday being victimized by misfortune and bad organization. The straw that broke the civil servant's back was when he turned up to an important meeting bang on time, only to be told that he had been erroneously directed to the wrong location. The meeting was actually taking place on the other side of Lilongwe. He arrived 30 minutes late. Cue breakdown. He collapsed into Snowball’s room, and seethed: ‘I feel like I’m playing an important game of catch. But I’m the only one who is willing to throw the ball! The other player will catch it, but never throws it back!’ And with that, he exited.
I do have sympathy for the poor guy. I’ve been to a number of meetings where it really has seemed like a random collection of people just wandered in without knowing why they were put in a room together. One of the funniest things I’ve seen this year is an IMF economist struggling to find out how close to our Staff Monitored Program we’ve managed to stay, while simultaneously attempting to open a foil-sealed bottle of orange juice. Eventually he gave up on the SMP, but managed to liberate the orange juice with a sharp pencil repeatedly jabbed through the foil. I’m pretty sure he considered using the same technique on the Reserve Bank President to extract information…
That said the IMF and the donor community in general are far from the paragons of organizational virtue that they seem to think they are. While the IMF incessantly demand information collated and presented to their specifications, trying to find out how much money they’ve actually disbursed to the Government (as opposed to how much they promised) is like drawing blood from a stone. Similarly, last week I was witness to the donor community’s version of a dispute over the billing, with one large donor mounting strenuous objections to a project for no apparent reason beyond the higher profile of another donor on the same project.
My colleagues at the Ministry of Finance, a passionate bunch of civil servants (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms), managed to see the lighter side of this, but I doubt we’ll be laughing if donor ego-clashes derail what could be a really important project for this country.
I’m certainly not laughing after what I was told this afternoon. The house that the Ministry is meant to provide me with may not materialise for quite some time, and I’m starting to suffer serious lodge-fatigue, as much as I like Maurice and the rest of the chaps who work here. Looks like I’ll have to find a house myself and then motivate the ministry to cough up the rent. It's all very frustrating
On a happier note, my driver (Cantona - humour me!) got married on Saturday, and myself, Snowball, and a couple of friends were invited. It all got rather embarrassing when I had to dance around Cantona, throwing money at him, with an audience of a couple of hundred people and a camcorder... They then read out for the entire audience what each of us got him as a gift. Real name-and-shame potential there, but fortunately I was on generous form that day...
posted by the Maradona of Malawi at 6:22 PM
