Tanzania

Day 0 to Day 1

When Miyako and I told our World Bank colleagues that we were flying to Dar es Salaam on Ethiopian Airlines, they asked an incredulous "Why?" Incredulous at our innocence, I think, about Ethiopian. How bad can it be, I thought, flying in Business? I learned exactly how bad it could be. The 767 plane -- probably serial number one -- seemed to be a discard from another airline. With a seat that didn't recline unless you stood up and leaned on it with one hand while depressing the button with the other. With food that one could barely eat (in Business Class!). With a bathroom sink that leaked water on the floor and made the whole floor wet. So I stopped wearing socks.

However, my aisle-side co-passenger was most interesting. I introduced myself to her soon after we had sat down. Nancy is a young girl who is traveling to Malawi because she has a bit of respite in her hectic schedule of traveling back and forth to a host of countries in Latin America and some of her Malawi colleagues need help. She is a graduate in International Something from Harvard and works for the Development Grant Facility in Washington DC. I was quite taken by her when she tried to read her book in the dim light from the back of the plane because I was trying to sleep and she didn't want to have her light on.

Our schedule had only a two-hour break in Addis Ababa and our plane had started two hours late from Washington. (Miyako thanked me for my foresight in getting visas for Ethiopia.) But our plane made up some time on way to her refueling stop in Rome and if she were to make up some more from there to Addis, we (and our luggage!) might make it to the flight to Dar.

(Allow me to take a little break and introduce the protagonists of this story. I am Atish Sanyal, an Indian bloke leaning towards geekiness (if you can call a 51-year-old geeky :-). My elegant colleague, Miyako Soller-Pastor, is much more interesting. As you can tell by her name, she is Japanese – only from her mother’s side. Her father is French and so is she. To complete the internationality, her husband, Tim, is American of Irish/Scottish descent. Her excellent English is made interesting by her slight accent. When people meet her for the first time, they have difficulty understanding her – the English that comes out of her mouth does not match the Japanese of her countenance. Once they understand that she is French, she is understood perfectly!)

I usually don’t sleep on planes, but the movie I was watching on my personal tv (earlier, I had to fight with it to extract it from my armrest) was pretty mushy and I dozed off. When I awoke, it was light outside and thinking of using my window seat to its fullest, I pushed the blind up. We were flying over the flattest landscape I had ever seen and the most monotonous in color. So this was the Sahara – a large, flat, sand-colored expanse. As I searched for nuances in the grayness, the monotony was broken by the appearance of a rift in the flat plain. A ribbon appeared and grew wider as we flew over it. It was a river and it was an amazing sight. It looked as if someone had spilt water on a flat sand floor and the water had found some shallow path to flow across. Within the river’s bed, there were furrows in which water flowed, but the sand was wet on either side for what must’ve been miles. It suddenly occurred to me: Were we flying over the Nile??!! Whoa! I looked up at the flight-map schematic that was ever-changing on the tv screen in the front of the plane. Yes. It looked like we were directly over it – it was even labeled on the map. But wait! The Nile flowed south to north and we were flying north to south. How were we crossing it at right angles? Hmm. Maybe it was just another river. In the middle of the Sahara desert. Right. So geography isn’t my strong suit.

Try as I might, I could not get a good photo of the phenomenon; and so it must remain etched in memory. But what a lost opportunity!

We arrived at Addis Ababa, only an hour behind schedule. We rushed to the gate from which our flight to Dar es Salaam was to leave. At security, they asked us to take off our watches and our belts. But we kept our shoes on, so that’s something. I asked the airline check-in dude at the gate whether our luggage would be on the flight to Dar. We had ample time, he assured us. He was right. The flight was two hours late in arriving at Addis!

In the plane from Addis to Dar, I was seated next to gentleman with rather an imposing attitude. He had the window seat and I was dreadfully envious of him. However, I stuck out my hand and introduced myself. "Klaus Ebermann" he said. What do you do, Klaus, I asked. "I am the EU's ambassador to Cairo," said Dr. Ebermann. Wow! Whoa!! Good Grief!! I said. Mostly to myself. "I work at the World Bank," I said, not willing to let him think I was just some dumb shmuck (which probably means something in German Deutsche). "Bob is at the World Bank, huh?" he asked, "Bob Zoellick? He's good friends with {somebody}, you know. Jogging friends." Ok, I said, I'll shut up now. Again to myself. "So are you located in Dar?" he asked. No, we are going on a mission from Washington. "Are you on the {something really impressive-sounding} project?" No, I am doing a technical deployment of some really cool technology that will make it faster for our country offices to access HQ-based web applications. "Good".

When I first saw Dar es Salaam, I thought I was in Calcutta with black people. The same tall thin green trees (I don't know the name), the same divided roads with lamp-posts with advertising blocks three-fourths of the way up. There were golmohur-esqe trees with large beans (no flowers) and traffic going every which way with no discernible lane markers. And bouganvillas and palm trees rounded off a totally familiar city-scape as we drove through the city and it's police check-points to the Kilimanjaro Kempinski hotel. But no. No autorickshaws. And no livestock; not even dogs. And the first thing that strikes you is how clean the place is. Not a stray piece of paper on the roads. Wish 'twere so even in the USofA!

Joyce is right! The Kempinski is a slick hotel. Spacious one-room space with a three-room toilet area with a bathtub and attached shower-room and commode-room. The grounds are pretty and colorful (mostly green) with rectangular ponds in black stone.

There are a couple of nice restaurants and an 8th-floor bar with a view of the waterfront and a 1st-floor swimming pool where Miyako says its really cool to swim on your back because you can see all these stars. On my feet and looking up, I can't recognize any of the stars or constellations. Weird. Is this really the first time I have been in the Southern Hemisphere?

We had arrived too late to take the 4:30 boat to Zanzibar. So we checked into the Kempinski and asked them to cancel the room in the hotel in Zanzibar that Emslies Travels had reserved for us. Also, if they had requested a tour guide, he wouldn't find us because we wouldn't be at the hotel where they were expecting us. So could Patrick please reserve seats for us on tomorrow's boat to and back from Zanzibar? Sure. Do you know anyone there who can show us around Zanzibar -- pick us up at the dock and leave us when the last boat leaves? Sure. Cool.

Where can we eat dinner? At any of the restaurants in the hotel, Patrick said. Is there a decent place in the neighbourhood where we could eat local food – we’d probably be eating in the hotel the rest of the time anyway? Try the City Garden restaurant – turn right and then right again and then, before you come to the big tower building, make a left and there it will be. (Do all directions have a “before you get somewhere, turn” step?)

But first, we needed to get some local currency. Although the bellhop was happy to get $2 from me and a couple of Euro from Miyako, others might not be so accommodating. We asked what the exchange rate was. About 1000 Tanzanian Shillings (TSH) to a USD, we were told. We found a currency-exchange place in the hotel. We didn't think their exchange rate -- TSH 950 per USD -- was market-appropriate, but (as McCain said about Pakistan's involvement in the war against Iraq/Afghanistan) it was the only game in town. There was a young man there, brown like me. He needed us to show him proof of purchase for the Travelers Checks (TCs) that we were carrying. Huh? Fortunately for us, Miyako had kept the counterfoil thingies that American Express explicitly says to keep separately from the checks (and which I, brightly, left in Burke, at home :-). All I had was the printout from AmEx showing how much TCs I had purchased and their numbers and denominations; the guy didn’t accept it. Basically, he was a junior chap, wary of making some terrible mistake and being frauded for a hundred dollars. (Chicken!) But it was not a convenience for the hotel’s guests. Miyako exchanged some TCs. She gave me half.

We ate at the City Garden. It was a garden restaurant, meaning the tables were under self-supporting rectangular awnings, not under a roof. Miyako’s seat was just out of the awning’s protection and we hope she didn’t eat too many leaves falling from the trees above.

The next morning, bright and early, we ate breakfast at the Palm Restaurant in the hotel and were impressed by the spread! Ten types of bread and danish with easily ten different jams and jellies (even mango!). And lots of hot dishes and freshly-cooked omelets and fried eggs and waffles and pancakes. However, being in a hurry to catch the boat, we ate only two plate-loads and rushed off in a cab to the harbor. We got there in a minute (it is really close to the hotel) and aboard the "speedboat" to Zanzibar.

We sat in the "first class" cabin while everybody else sat or stood on the deck outside. Our cabin was behind the captain's cabin, so we couldn't see anything in front of the boat. There were some ten of us -- a white couple who I had seen at breakfast in the hotel and we smiled and exchanged pleasantries, a local mother and her young child, and some six Indians! While we were sitting around, I heard Bengali from the other corner. I could only see the young daughter -- must've been around 16 or 17. Later, when I went outside to take some photos, I saw her with her camera. "Tomaar chhobi tulbo?" I asked, ("Shall I take your picture?"), offering to shoot her with her own camera. She smiled, surprised, and let me do so. When I saw the dad, he had obviously been told of the Bengali speaker in the middle of nowhere and we chatted a bit. They were vacationing from Zambia where he was a businessman. (A Bengali businessman?!)

I took a photo, with my camera, of the family when they were all sitting inside, asking for permission in Bengali. "The world is indeed small, (duniyaa shotti khuub chhoto)" said the mother and introduced themselves as "Mitras, from Zambia." "Sanyal," I said, "from Washington."

At the port in Zanzibar, we had to re-enter through immigration, fill in the same forms we did at Dar es Salaam airport and had to get our passports stamped. Pretty cool, entering the same country twice without leaving it in between.

We had to rebuff quite a few men who came up to us. "Taxi?" they would ask. No, I said, Mr. Simai is waiting for us. Mr. Simai was there, holding a piece of paper with "Sanyal" written on it. Patrick had texted my name to his cell! We introduced ourselves. He took us to his rather spacious van. He assured us that we would have a very nice tour and learn a lot.

His first stop was just a short distance from the harbour. It was David Livinstone's house! He was instrumental in stopping slave trade and he is honoured by his house being a Zanzibar Museum. However, Simai said that the house itself was in disrepair and not worth visiting.

He then showed us some trees and asked us to identify them. We had no clue; these were just gnarly trees. I looked at them from ground to leaves and found nothing peculiar. He said, "Come on, don't let me down. These trees grow near water," aha!, "and their name begins with M." Mangrove, I had to guess, since the root-areas of these trees were unremarkable. "Yes!!" said he approvingly. I was impressed by my guess. Later on, when I asked him some question, he said, "Thank you for good question, intelligent man." He was a fun person to have as a guide.

After that, he drove for a while, and talked of Zanzibar history and told us about its Sultans who were invited to overthrow the Portugese rulers and who were finally felled in a revolution in 1964. Suddenly, he stopped the van and showed us a remarkably crooked coconut tree. And then he asked us to look at our feet and kneel down. The ground was covered with "touch me not" plants.

Then we went a bit further and he turned left into a rut road where we bumped around. He stopped to show us a non-fruited tamarind tree (which looked familiar but was too far for me to identify) and a little monkey on the ground on the other side, under some coconut trees. Finally we turned in next to a hand-painted "Spice Farm" sign. This turned out to be a demo-plantation of a host of trees and plants, many were exotic spices and fruits. Miyako hadn't seen most; I had seen a few but there were many that I hadn't and I grew quite excited as the day went on.

One of the first remarkable plants was the cardamom tree. The frondy-leafed trees grow about 6-8 feet tall and the cardamom pods grow near the ground!! They dug out ginger and turmeric roots to show us. We also saw peppercorns, vanilla pods. And a cinnamon tree -- it's leaves have an interesting smell, the bark is ..er.. cinnamon and the roots! that's what puts the vapor in Vicks vaporub!

When we saw the mochas (banana flowers) on the banana trees, I thought I would teach our guide something he didn’t know.

“What parts of a banana tree do you use?” I asked.

Simai looked puzzled.

“Do you use the leaves?” I asked.

The answer was no. I knew I had him hooked.

“Well, back home,” I said, “some folks use the leaves as plates to eat on.” Simai and Miyako looked impressed. “And, we cook the flowers. And, we eat the trunk of the tree,” I concluded, majestically.

I showed Miyako a banana flower within reach and how layer upon layer of the flower would uncover as the fruit grew. Simai was a bit impressed that I knew my stuff.

“When I was young,” I said, “my mother would give me a bunch of these flowers and I would have to individually pull the pistil – the hard, uneatable part – off the flower,” demonstrating, “and then she would chop up the rest of the flowers and cook them in a most delicious sabzi.”

But Simai had the last word, of course. “How many kilos of these would you like to take back with you? We just throw ours away.”

There were familiar jackfruit and normal bananas. We also saw red bananas! Lychees -- both green and ripening, sour to the taste (my face did its thing) -- and pineapples. And we saw cloves on a tree! Zanzibar exports cloves; probably its major export.

While we were walking around, Simai's helper from the orchard -- Saidi -- was weaving something all along with coconut fronds. Suddenly, he presented Miyako with a frog necklace and me with a tie. Very pretty, although also rather useless except for these photo-memories.

Finally, the tour was over. In the interests of time, Simai said, we would eschew the coconut-tree-climbing show and would participate in the fruit tasting. They gave us all kinds of fruits to eat -- oranges, lychees (which they have an interesting way of serving -- they cut it shallow with a knife all around its equator and then twist slightly; one half of the shell comes off; the half with the lychee is handed to us and we pop the fruit into the mouth) pineapple, star-fruit (Bengalis know it as kamranga) and bananas. Of course, we were given "young coconut water", exactly like daab is served in India -- a machete is used to sharpen one end and then the top is chopped off slowly, the lid taken off and a straw inserted. When the water is finished, a spoon is made from the shavings left from the earlier sharpening and the pulp on the inside is scraped off.

We also took a trip around the old part of town where the buildings are made from stone -- called Stonetown -- where we had lunch in a sindhi-style restaurant. (I have the genre wrong -- where they serve biryanis, you know.) But it was late and all we could get was "Pilao Kuku" -- chicken pulao.

We drove around to a few historically important places. We didn't enter the church at the "former slave market site" and probably disappointed our black guide. (Zanzibar was the center of the slave trade in Africa with David Livingstone playing a major role in its abolishment.) We visited the “Palace Museum at Forodhani” – the palace of the first Sultan, now a museum. The Sultans of Zanzibar were Arabs and at least the first few ruled both Zanzibar and Oman. There we saw paintings of Princess Salme who defied custom and eloped with a German friend of her father, changed religions and lived in Europe where she is buried. She wrote the book “Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar” which is quite famous and translated in many languages. Miyako wanted to buy the French version but was told that it was out of print. Amazon.com, here she comes.

From a poster, we discovered that Farok Balsara (okay, stop reading for a minute… do you know that name?) who later became Freddie Mercury of Queen (did you really know that name?), was born in Zanzibar.

At the end, we stopped near a bunch of shops and bought a few pieces of handicrafted artwork.

We saw a street vendor selling bhuttas – corncobs roasted on a slow fire until it is a nice speckled yellow and black! I didn’t eat any though. I don’t eat any in India either – too scared of catching something from open food.

We took a much larger boat back to Dar in a very comfortable "first class". We were high up and facing the incoming horizon. However, the pitching made Miyako quite sick while the diesel fumes got to me. But we survived and came back after a rather nice day spent in a beautiful area of the world.

By the way, Paul later told us that Dar es Salaam -- "Abode of Peace" -- actually used to be Bandar es Salaam -- "Harbour of Peace".

Day 2, Monday June 30

It was Monday and we were to go to work. They had told us that the Tanzanian office started work at 7am. SEVEN AM??!! I hadn’t even seen that part of the clock for many years.

If we had to, we had to. We woke up at about 6:30am and went down for breakfast and took a cab to 50 Mirambo Street – it was for the minimum fare, we now realize, of TSH 3,000 – 3 US Dollars. We reached at about 7:30am. We entered the building with our HQ badges hanging from our necks and were waved through the security door with a nod. From that point on, the guards knew us and even when, once, I didn’t have my badge on, I wasn’t stopped. It was security through recognition – the best kind.

Chrys Chenga, the IT/IRIS expert was already there, as was Anna Jacob, the Executive Assistant to the Country Director (CD), John McIntire (who happened to be on leave that week). Paul Kangele, the IT chief, came a few minutes later and was apologetic that he had got stuck in traffic. Oh no! So these people were really serious about the 7am beginning to their day!

We connected ourselves – our laptops, really – in the Visiting Mission Room, a rather roomy and comfortable facility with a 20-seat conference table and one wall of computers and two walls for laptops. There is wifi as well as network wires to connect to the world with. There is a printer and telephones and whatnot to make an excellent facility for even the most critical visitor.

Just when we were about to make ourselves at home, Paul came by to say that a conference room had been set aside on the 4th floor for us. We went there and soon the room was full. (I will introduce you to everyone by and by but for now…) Enid Kyomugisha and Rosalie Kigeme were there – the Executive Assistants from the Uganda and Burundi offices; the triad of TZ/UG/BI made up the missions under the CD for East Africa, John McIntire. These two were representing their entire offices while the relevant correspondence handlers and three other assistants in the Tanzania office were all present to listen to us and for us to talk to.

Our schedule for that day was:
Monday June 30
08:30am - 10:00am: EnCorr Overview
10:00am - 10:30am: break
10:30am - 12:30pm: EnCorr Overview
12:30pm - 02:00pm: lunch
02:00pm - 04:30pm: Workflow Discussion, and Observation of task sequencing

I presented an overview of EnCorr without yet showing them the system. I suspect some went off to sleep during it (I kid, but only slightly), but it formed a good basis for the next part. Which was: for them to describe to us their process for handling correspondence. (If any readers of this blog are unfamiliar with EnCorr and are interested in knowing, please ask and I will try and describe things a bit. You don’t know what you have asked for; I might even send you the PowerPoint overview! :-)

The most striking aspect of our mission was our observation that staff in Country Offices – at least those in Dar es Salaam – multi-processes many jobs.

Mail comes in to the Receptionist, Lizzie Mwakyami. She reads the mail and gauges how important and urgent it is, which project it is for and who needs to receive it and whether the whole document needs to be scanned into IRIS. She stamps the date on the front sheet and writes the initials of the recipients and those who should be cc-ed. She enters this information into an Incoming Mail Matrix in Excel. And she also, of course, receives people who come to visit the CD.

Then, the paper makes its way to the IRIS desk. Here too, there is multi-tasking. Chrys is the second in the two-person IT team in Dar es Salaam. Well, since a significant part of his day is spent on scanning into IRIS – sometimes hundreds of pages of spirally-bound bid documents – I think it is fair to say that Paul only has half of Chrys helping in keeping the IT up and running in Dar.

Did I say, half of Chrys does IT? Oh, but last week he was in Kampala, doing IRIS training. And then, Justina – whose day job is assistant to a Task Team Leader and who is about to have a baby – does the IRIS scanning. She has a degree in computers and so she also helps out with IT support when she can.

While we are realizing this complicated set of responsibility-sharing – because to show us how Chrys scans into IRIS, he had to move the scanner from Justina Kajange’s desk on the 4th floor, where it was being used while he was in Kampala, to his own on the 1st – it is almost lunchtime and we are told that we have been invited to lunch by Ralph Dagga, the Resource Manager. So we go to the Movenpick – it used to be the best hotel in Dar es Salaam until the Kempinski was upgraded to its current spectacularness in 2005. (That could be slightly off.) (Okay, I better say this right upfront. History was never my strong suit either. I have no head for dates. At least not those in the past, Nag.)

The meal is nice – buffet of fresh-cooked meals in many themes: pasta and greek are the choices I remember. So I got the open gyro (although it was called something else – help! someone) and a mango juice and I think so did Miyako (help! Miyako. What was the dish called?). We enjoyed the meal outdoors. And that’s when we realized: It was end-June and this was Dar es Salaam, about 7 degrees off the equator. And the weather was not boiling hot! It was winter, we were told. We were 7 degrees south of the equator.

Don’t ask me to explain that. Suffice it to say that this was a good time to be in Dar.

All too soon, it was time to go back to work. We continued by watching Chrys scan something into IRIS and then, based on Justina’s notes, put names into IRIS to notify them that the document was in IRIS. An informational email was received by all relevant staff.

But there was no task-assignment, or due-date tracking. And that’s where EnCorr could come in. Yess! Things were falling in place in our heads.

We re-adjourned in the conference room. We talked about the flow as we understood it and also found out that some team assistants do IRIS scanning using a common-use scanner on the 5th floor. We discussed how to configure EnCorr online. This seemed a bit bass-ackward. We had initially planned for this to be the last part of the training, but it fell into place.

It was getting late. We decided to call it a night and meet tomorrow. What time? someone asked. Uhhh. About 10? We hazarded. I think I heard a sigh of relief but I could be mistaken. So, with a promise to see everyone again at 10, but in the 5th floor conference room, we adjourned.

We caught up with our email and I sent off a barrage to the EnCorr team to make sure that tomorrow’s demonstration would go without a hitch. Kudos to them -- they took care of everything during our night.

We walked to the hotel rather than take a cab.

Miyako discovered the swimming pool that evening. Actually, we had discovered it last night, but she didn’t swim then. That and many evenings later, she would swim in the evening and go to the gym before I was even up. So that’s how she keeps so slim!

I, too, came down in my swimming trunks but after a few laps across the width of the rooftop pool failed to increase the temperature of the water, I got out. We tried to get a drink at the Citrus Bar but she was closed, she said. When did she close? At 8pm. What time was it? 7:30pm. Hmm.

So we went up to the Level 8 Bar. It was on the 8th floor – or 10th if you counted Ground as a floor and Mezzanine as another – and had a grand view of the ocean. Although it was quite dark, it was still spectacular. We wandered to the open roof and there were people there. A waiter walked by with wines and beers on his tray and offered us. I took a beer and Miyako a wine. As we stood by the parapet, we began to wonder if it was a private party of some sort since the waiter didn’t ask us for payment. We asked a gentleman who had stopped by to make a call and he said that it was a farewell for the ambassador from Germany. (It was just my luck to be coming so close to ambassadors who were German.) We looked at each other and snuck out. As we went back in, we saw the dimly lit “Private Party” sign. How embarrassing! World Bank staff bumming drinks from embassy staff.

At least it was all within the (quasi-)diplomatic family.

We had dinner in the Palm Restaurant. The place was laid out for an “International Buffet.” Good food. But before we ate, we asked for some drinks. Miyako asked for a martini. “Sweet?” the waitress asked. We didn’t understand, but Miyako said “Yes” confidently. She liked the drink. I ordered a Bloody Mary. Where was the alcohol, we asked each other after one sip.

Miyako and I had a bit of a heart-to-heart about our early days of working together when she started to work on EnCorr and how she thought I was a bit of an ass. But it is clear now that we are both happy that those days are behind us and we are working together extremely well (speaking for myself: I am very impressed with her and think that EnCorr is a much better product because of her involvement).

The food was pretty good – a mishmash of all kinds of dishes from everywhere. I think they had chicken samosas.

Day 3, June 1

I woke bright and early at 7am. And went back to sleep. I was wakened by the telephone – it was the hotel alarm which I had set for 8am. We had agreed to meet at breakfast at 8:30am so that we could go to the Bureau de Change (which, Miyako pronounced in a way that made by mouth wish it could do it too). But planning the day over breakfast delayed us beyond the 9am departing time. So by the time we had walked over to the currency exchange place – which reminded me of any area around Chandi Chowk in Delhi – it was almost 9:30. Then, when we handed over my travelers checks and passports (I have my Indian passport and UNLP stuck together by passing a rubber band through the middle sheets of each), the lady took it up the spiral staircase behind the back door and then came back down without my travelers checks and passports. We waited. And waited some more. Finally, when I asked, she said that they were verifying. While I pondered that and tried to figure out what they could be verifying, another lady came down with my passports and checks and the first lady made copies of my passport and handed us Tanzanian Shillings -- 1000 to a dollar. Miyako and I split it. So even though the rate I got today was better than the rate she got on Saturday, it evened out.

By the time we got to work, the team was waiting in the 5th floor conference room. This room was set up for Video Conference and we heard that although we had the room for the entire day, that excepted the period from 3-4pm when there was to be a VC there.

Today, we showed them EnCorr. I was on tenterhooks. We had accessed the system from other rooms, but Murphy’s Law being so omnipresent, I was afraid that EnCorr might misbehave just when it least should.

To cut the drama: EnCorr behaved itself like the good baby that it is! (Of course, it rides on the shoulders of giants! Thanks, Syed, Murali, Hugh and the bunch from offshore from way back when.)

Based on the workflow that we had understood so far and based on the fact that from Country Offices, IRIS has a replication option for uploading files while EnCorr does not (yet), we recommended that all attachments be first uploaded to IRIS and then attached to EnCorr. (This brings up an interesting possibility that we haven’t really talked to Oleg about: of having a “Create EnCorr Log” action in IRIS.)

The attendees seemed impressed with the system. Besides the ones I have already written about, the attendees included Mary-Anne Mwakangale, Faith-Lucy Matumbo and Faustina Chande. They are assistants to operational staff in the Dar office.

The team understood most of it at first sight. I think it was this initial introduction which removed some of their apprehension at having to learn yet another new system and they were excited by the possibilities of using the system to help their work, not detract from their productivity. This was encouraging. Either we were doing an excellent job or we were doing an excellent job. :-)

After a successful morning session, we broke for lunch. Anna and the two of us went to the Holiday Inn nearby. The walk was pleasant and I was again struck by how clean the city – or at least this part of it – is. We were told that a recent mayor had taken upon himself the onerous task of instilling in the citizenry a sense of pride in keeping the place spic-and-span. I wish other cities would follow suit. How about it, Mayor Fenti; can you get Washingtonians to take pride in keeping their city as clean as Dar es Salaam, Tanzania? Dar es Salaam is a good place to visit – maybe you can throw in a safari vacation. (When I mentioned my observation about Dar’s cleanliness in class one day, Enid told me that Kampala is even cleaner!)

Over lunch, we discussed with Anna the flow of work around correspondence in Dar es Salaam that Miyako and I had been conjuring over dinner last night. Anna was agreeable with the principles. So we decided to suggest it and bring it up for discussion in the afternoon session.

We got back to the 4th floor room, albeit a bit late. Everyone returned soon enough and we talked about how to use EnCorr to advantage in the Dar es Salaam office. We were impressed at how much of the work was already being handled, between Lizzie – in terms of assigning responsibility – and Chrys – in scanning into IRIS and notifying the responsible parties. We didn’t want to add to their already busy workloads. Perhaps someone else could take on the job of creating EnCorr logs?

Paul made a rather impassioned speech at that point which laid a strong foundation for laying the final brick in the wall. (Great mixed metaphors, what?)

He said to everyone there that this was a good time to think about having redundancy built into the process. He asked Rosalie and Enid to train backups in their offices in Burundi and Uganda to make sure that EnCorr would continue even if they were to take leave. He looked at everyone in the room and said that they all needed to contribute to making EnCorr a success. (I might be paraphrasing a bit here, I didn’t have my tape-recorder on me at the time, Paul, but I wish I did.)

I think it was Miyako who made the excellent suggestion: that the responsibility for creating EnCorr assignments should be shared by all in the room, in a round-robin arrangement. This would ensure backup responsibilities; that EnCorr did not take up too much of any one person’s time; that the training wasn’t forgotten by those who were less-frequent users; and would demonstrate that the group as a whole had taken on the role of EnCorr evangelist. (No, Miyako didn’t say that last word, being something of an atheist.) There are some additional advantages to that arrangement – no one individual can get blamed for being an EnCorr czar; and best practices would be likely to evolve from the diversity of practitioners.

I think this scheme set the team’s mind at rest. I am sure they were all wondering how the responsibilities would be divided up among the group. This was a good day; things were beginning to jell. They had seen more of EnCorr and were beginning to like it; it was less conceptual than yesterday and we all had some buy-in to the way EnCorr was to be deployed.

I needed to talk to India that evening – my Baba (father) had been feeling unwell but had improved and I had been relaxing a bit until now. My brother, Tutul, has been with him but now he had been re-admitted to the nursing home. I needed to find out what was going on. Paul promptly set me up with means to call India. But it wasn’t easy to call and we got cut off a few times and then I just couldn’t connect for an hour of trying. So what with that and sending emails to HQ, I kept Miyako in the office till about 8pm. We asked one of the security guards to find us a taxi and took it back to the hotel.

When we came back to our rooms, there was a card on our table: We had been invited to the General Manager’s Cocktail Reception at the Level 8 bar from 6:30pm to 7:30pm on Wednesday night.

We ate at the Oriental restaurant in the hotel and I think we forgot to tip the waitress because we signed the bill to our room. Or maybe we didn’t – we couldn’t both have made that mistake, could we – but we felt somewhat guilty about it the next day.

Day 4, Wednesday, June 2, 2008

The schedule for the next few days was:
Wednesday (5th floor small conf room)
10:00m - 12:30pm: EnCorr Advanced Training (with exercises)
12:30m - 02:00pm: lunch
02:00m - 04:30pm: EnCorr Advanced Training (with exercises) - continued
Real logs will be created and assigned.

Thursday (1st floor main conf room)
09:00am - 10:00am: Staff meeting to present EnCorr concepts and demo

Friday (5th floor small conf room)
Discuss recommendations.

Today was hands-on day. But there is some other, important, business. Miyako is the Client Connection guru and she had taken the opportunity to ask Anna to schedule a CC demo to interested staff and that had been scheduled for 3pm-4pm. She has been wanting to show e-signatures and e-forms to clients, but CO staff is as close as she can get for now. (She had demonstrated CC to delegations from Samoa and Vietnam – did I get that right, Miyako – when they were in Washington for negotiations and their unanimous reaction was “Where do we sign?”)

So while I worked with the team and they created logs and delegated and so on, Miyako worked on her Client Connection presentation. I think there were some bumps along the way, because she seemed a bit worried at times.

We took some photographs during a small break. As luck would have it, Anna was out of the room on an emergency call at the time. Sorry, Anna, we forgot to make up for it and take more photos later!

The training went well into the lunch hour; before we realized it, it was 1:15pm. Miyako was looking more relaxed and I suggested that we break for an hour and maybe get together a little before the 3pm CC presentation. I asked Paul and Chrys to join us for lunch – I had the sense that they did way more than mere IT support and wanted to get a better sense of it – but Paul demurred and delegated lunch to Chrys. He said he wanted to finish some things that needed doing.

We drove in Chrys’ nice SUV-esque, but little, car to Holiday Inn. We ate upstairs where you choose the ingredients you want for lunch and it is stir-fried and delivered to your table. I took some seafood. But the pre-lunch appetizers and soup filled me up. Besides, I ordered rather late so by the time I finished, Miyako and Chrys had finished. While we ate, we got to know Chrys - he told us that his name, Chrysanthemum, was Greek in origin - and we told him a bit about ourselves.

We hurried back but it was quite close to 3pm, so we came to the 1st floor conference room. This is the big conference centre in the mission. It is a long room with a hollow rectangular table with seating against the table and lining the walls, for about 50 people. Only three sides have seating so that the projector can be used for presentations on a screen.

A handful of staff came to the Client Connection demo; the table was quite full. While Miyako pitched her spiel, I listened with one ear and prepared the presentation for tomorrow. Miyako was pleased with the turnout and the interest shown and the questions asked, I think.

Back in the 5th floor conference room, we continued with the training but had more conversation than training; the mechanics of EnCorr seemed simple; the principles bore repeating. When we had set the schedule, we had thought that we would assign real tasks to operational staff, but we reconsidered; it would probably be better to do so after tomorrow’s presentation to them.

In the meantime, Meena was working in Washington to reroute my return to DC via Calcutta. American Express had made the requisite changes and bookings. When I saw the itinerary that evening, I was worried. They had booked me to leave Dar on Saturday on Ethiopian to Addis and then to Mumbai with an hour in transit. Based on our earlier experience with Ethiopian, this could be dicey. I didn’t want to miss my connection and be stuck in an early leg of my journey. I needed to rearrange the return. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day.

Tonight, we need to think about the big day tomorrow – we had to make that presentation to staff. We asked Anna to introduce us and maybe do a bit of the presentation itself. We stayed till late; and so did Anna in her office, practicing EnCorr. But we didn’t get to a script for the presentation and I needed to have a script – at least in my head. I am not very good at doing this kind of thing unprepared.

By the time we left, nothing had come together. We were late. It was already 7pm and the General Manager's party was till 7:30pm. Not willing to give up freebies, I hurried to the 8th floor after a quick dash of water on my face. The party was petering out. There weren’t too many people left. We met a British gentleman who seemed quite familiar with Tanzania. He didn’t think very highly of America and Americans, it seemed. Then we met two young ladies – one from Wellesley in Boston and the other from Duke. The first was the daughter of Michele – the CEO of Global Action, an NGO, while the other, Katie, was interning at the NGO. We chatted with them awhile and also Michele, but she was rushing off somewhere and she took her wards along. We, too, decided to go to dinner; the party was long over; the waiter had poured the last glasses some time ago. As we were leaving, we were met by Sam, the Director of Marketing and the gentleman who had made the recent deal with the World Bank for room rates. I was glad to meet him. I told him to please make sure that our rooms were charged at the agreed upon rates because AmEx had booked them at some higher price. He said he would take care of it.

We had dinner at the Palm – they had a nice Indian buffet – and tossed some ideas around. At the end, we decided that we would “keep it simple”. Make sure the message was “it’s no big deal”. We charted out some basic principles for tomorrow’s presentation.

Then, I could relax and enjoy the evening. Which involved having dinner and then ..er.. sleeping. I think.

Day 5, June 3, 2008

The next day, bright and early, we proceeded to office. We made sure our laptops were both connected to the projector and we knew how to switch from one laptop to the other on the screen. Miyako put a EnCorr notification email on her computer and I put a version of Monday’s overview presentation on mine. Then we put the projector on mute and waited.

Promptly before 9am, people started to trickle in. Anna made a PA announcement to remind staff about the staff meeting. Soon, the room was full. Dieter E. Schelling, the Acting Country Director, welcomed us and then listened attentively.

Anna introduced us to the room and talked about the week that we had spent on EnCorr and that 10 staff had attended our training. She then passed the baton to Miyako.

Miyako lead off with talking about how easy it all is: starting with the email notification that a Task Team Leader might get from EnCorr. After scanning the information in the email, they would click on the link to the log and get detailed information there. They would do their normal work and place the work-product in IRIS (like they presumably already did). And then they (or their EnCorr Assistant) would close the loop on the EnCorr task by completing it. Any questions?

“Your use of EnCorr will be very simple,” I said, “but there is more to EnCorr.” I then showed my ppt – the first few slides were the photographs of the training in the 5th floor room. At the end of describing EnCorr basics, I had an animated workflow thing with logs starting with EXC assignments through delegation by AFRVP and then by John McIntire and finally arriving in a TTL’s email and how each log would get closed to close the loop. It looked easy and complex at the same time.

The questions that they asked were quite pointed but seemed to imply that they were not too worried about the extra workload EnCorr would put in already-stressed lives. So the presentation went rather well, we thought.

We spend some time finalizing the design of the “Certificate of Achievement… for successfully completing EnCorr Training” that we thought might be a good idea to present to the hard-working and attentive staff we had had the pleasure of speaking to for the last week. We printed ten certificates on the color-printer on the 4th floor and then we left for lunch.

Paul and Chrys took us in a Bank vehicle for lunch. Mihali was our patient driver. We went to the “Hunter’s Pit” (I don’t think that is quite the name, my memory is going) and, right next to it, the “G8 Summit” (that is really the name, though) for some authentic Tanzanian cuisine. Paul ordered food from Hunter’s and asked for it to be brought to us at the G8. We met Ernest, the chef at G8, who, we learned, goes by “Chef 'Nest” and has an email address! Paul’s instructions evidently carry some weight there because we got quite a welcome and the royal treatment. At a few tables over, Paul introduced us to an official from the Tanzanian government who said he comes to Washington every year. He later sent over an open bottle of French wine. Miyako was amused to be drinking home brew so far away, in Tanzania.

The food from Hunter’s was lots of roasted meat – tasty and in chunks. Very appropriate, then, the name of the restaurant – probably the kind of fare that hunters eat when they are in the wild. To go with it, there was this glob of steamed powdered wheat – sort of like idlis but made of wheat. Chef Nest made some nice soup and then flavored rice and fried fish. All in all, it was an excellent meal with a nice variety of fare. Unfortunately for me, I had to borrow some money from Chrys to tip the chef :-(.

Then they took us shopping for handicrafts to take back with us. The prices were quite reasonable -- not tourist-trap prices. I wish we could have spent some more time there, but we got the feeling that Paul and Chrys had work that they wanted to get back to. (I don’t understand people wanting to work, do you? :-)

When we returned to our usual 5th floor haunt, we decided to get started on the Back-to-Office Report because Miyako would be going on home leave a few days after returning from the mission and I would be rerouting to India and unable to work on it. Also, we thought we should write a Terms of Reference for a “Correspondence Assistant” so that any Country Office that wanted to hire someone for EnCorr work had something to guide them.

In the midst of all that, I called AmEx in HQ and rerouted my trip to Calcutta via Delhi instead of Mumbai; this gave me a little over 3 hours in Addis Ababa and ample time to not miss the flight to Delhi from there.

After writing the ToR, we presented and discussed it with Anna, Enid and Rosalie. We then started to write some of the BTOR, but we didn’t get much done. It had been a tiring but fruitful day and we wanted to enjoy the rest of it. We asked Paul and Chrys to join us for drinks and food at the Kempinski.

Chrys took Miyako back in his car and Paul took me. Paul had previously been to a VIP suite in the hotel – when Mr. Wolfowitz had stayed there and they had had to set up the technology and be around in case something went wrong. Chrys had had a room but he hadn’t slept in it. So my effort to show them my cool room fell a bit flat :-).

We had a few drinks in the Level 8 bar. We talked about all kinds of things. We got to know them and their family quite well, although only second-hand, as it were. Although Dar was home to them now, they came from less urban parts of the country. They drive many miles to work; Chrys leaves really early to avoid the traffic.

We had dinner at the Oriental restaurant. (They make a tasty drink called the Tokyo which I liked.) I think it was all a bit foreign to Paul. I hope they enjoyed themselves.

Day 6, Friday, June 4, 2008

Today was our last day here. We think that we had made a few friends and imparted some know-how. We hope it will be sustainable, this drive to use EnCorr; but with John’s help we see no reason why it won’t evolve into a very useful tool.

When eleven of us met in the familiar 5th floor room, we welcomed them back, for the last time. (Justina was on AWS.) We thanked them for their attendance, attention and attentiveness over the last week. We had a token of appreciation – a nice Certificate printed in color. They seemed happy to receive our small gift and each was applauded by the rest of us as she or he received the certificate from Miyako while I took a photograph. We were happy that our certificate was important to them.

We said that it had been easy to teach them. Although we were not trainers, we had felt like we were. The room was agog: They could never have guessed that training was not part of our jobs. Miyako and I were, of course, very pleased with this reaction.


We then had a wrap-up discussion on EnCorr starting with what NOT to do in the system. (Do not forward a notification email; use the browser’s back-arrow to avoid having to re-query the data; and so on.) It was a lively discussion – mostly in the form of questions from us; sort of like a quiz. We didn’t have to explain too much. Someone or other knew most of the answers. The class passed with flying colors. Miyako and I were very pleased with ourselves!

And then it was time to say goodbye. Enid and Rosalie repeated what they had said before – they wished we had spent some time in their Country Offices as well; we would have been more successful teachers than they, since they were so new to it. Mary-Anne said we should have a refresher in Zanzibar soon.

We returned our door-opening badges to Chrys and said goodbye to 50 Mirambo Street. I think we took a cab back; my memory’s a bit foggy.

In the morning, before leaving for work, Miyako had checked out. When she checked the room rate, it was still the higher, un-negotiated rate. We called Sam and he and Albert (the man in-charge of reservations and rooms and such) talked about it and when they surfaced, they said that AmEx had not mentioned that we were to get World Bank rates and had booked us at the full commissionable rates. That meant that even when the hotel billed us the negotiated World Bank rate, The Kempinski would still be liable to pay commission to AmEx for the full rate. In any case, they would adjust the rate somehow. For Miyako, instead of charging her for 6 nights, they would charge her for 5. This was okay, as long as they wrote that the discount was for a rate adjustment, we said. They were quite amenable.

Miyako had a plane to catch and wanted to leave by 8pm.

There wasn’t too much time for dinner so we spent some time on the 8th floor. There we met Michele and her two girls again. But they were rushing off for dinner. I said I’d meet them later.

I apologized to Miyako for leaving her to wrap up the Back to Office Report and other things (like training Joyce, John’s assistant in HQ, on EnCorr). I then saw her off in a taxi.

I had dinner by myself at the Oriental (again!) and then listened to a live band perform on the 8th floor. I sat with Michele and her daughter (I wish I could remember her name)-: and Katie for a while and then with Ralph from DC who was vacationing in Dar. He was later joined by a family of Tanzanians. Turned out that they were brothers – one of them worked in the accounting firm with Ralph and they had a brother in the World Bank’s legal department! Small world, indeed!

The next morning, before breakfast, I checked my bill and the room had been charged at the Bank rate. Hurray! I told the man at the desk that I would be checking out late: around 2pm instead of noon.

I was just sitting down at a table for breakfast, when I noticed, seated at a table by himself, an Indian gentleman who I had seen around the hotel previously. I went up to him and introduced myself and apologized for intruding. He looked like someone I had seen before, I said. He introduced himself as Trevor Saldanha. I said I had known some Saldanhas in my time: did he go to school in Mount Abu, by any chance? He looked surprised and said that his sister was married to David Coelho (?). The name seemed familiar – he must’ve been a young lad when I was in St. Mary’s. Mr. Saldanha was the Executive Assistant Manager at the Kempinski!

I joined him at his behest and we talked: he told me a bit about the history of the hotel and that the Kempinski chain managed their hotels and owned very few. Soon, we were joined by a lady who was introduced as Lena, the General Manager. They gave me their cards.

For some reason, she asked me to guess her nationality. Maybe she had an interesting accent and I had asked her where she was from. I asked her for her last name. Kasfiki-Livanidou, she pointed to the card she had given me. That held no great clues. I gave up. “I am Greek,” she said. Hmm.

A little before 2pm, I went to check out. I gave the man most of the TSH I had on me, leaving 30,000 for the cab fare and some sample currency for my collection. Mr. Saldanha came by to say bye. When was my flight? At 5:30. Why was I leaving so early? So that I wouldn’t be late, in case there was traffic. Today is Saturday, there is no traffic. Leave at 3pm; that should be more than ample time. I asked him if he was free for lunch but he was meeting some clients. I decided to eat a snack at the Oriental (where else?) and suddenly realized that I had kept no change for the waitress, nor for the bellboy who was holding my suitcase. So, I went back down to the checkout desk and asked for some of my cash back. He was amused but compliant.

At 3pm, just before checking out, I went looking for Mr. Saldanha. I wanted to ask him if he knew Rohan. But I couldn’t find him anywhere. He wasn’t even with Lena who was lunching with some people who looked like clients.

I got into an Avis rent-a-car-and-driver to go to the airport. The driver told me that the fare was 30,000 TSH. I know, I said. In spite of Trevor’s assurances, I was a bit concerned when the driver put the car in park in the middle of a roadful of equally stopped traffic. What’s up, I asked. A policeman is directing traffic – we don’t have traffic lights – and we will be here for a few minutes. (I hope not too many minutes, I said to myself.)

We got to the airport in time. A VIP was arriving and no cars were allowed to stop near the curb. My driver parked in the car-park and wanted to help me with the luggage. I won’t have any trouble, I said and walked off. I wish I hadn’t; I couldn’t find the “Departures” gate and had to ask somebody to point me there. My suitcase was scanned at the entrance and I was asked to remove my cap (I will never get used to that, it seems) as if I could be smuggling an elephant under it. I checked in and walked to the gate.

Remember Nancy – the young DGF lady who sat with me from DC? She had also impressed me by having picked up a bunch of water bottles at the Business lounge in Dulles. I had, brightly, followed suit and had filled my backpack with bottles of water from the Kempinski. Of course with my luck, there was a sign at the security/scanner place: “No liquids allowed. This means water and juices.” They took the water from me but told me that I could drink up before leaving the area. Yeah, right; and look for a bathroom for hours afterwards.

Now here’s a strange thing – I didn’t think of looking for the Business Class (called Cloud Nine on Ethiopian which doesn’t have a First Class, it seems) Lounge at Dar es Salaam airport. Much later, on the plane, I thought about it and was aghast at my amateurness (Spellcheck wants to replace that word with ‘immatureness’, maybe rightly so :-).

You know how I had rerouted the route through Delhi because I didn’t want to risk the flights being delayed? Well, my apologies to Ethiopian Airlines. The flight was exactly on time into Dar from Zanzibar and left on the dot from Dar es Salaam. It was even a few minutes early into Addis. And the Mumbai plane, I am sure, was catchable in Addis. But, I console myself, if I had not changed the route, the flights would not have been so perfect. No way to prove it, hmm?

Arriving at Addis Ababa was interesting. It’s not like they don’t have those airbridge thingies from planes to the terminal; I saw some KLM planes on them; but the Ethiopian plane landed on the tarmac and we waited for the stairs to arrive to take us to the ground where we had to load into a bus to go to the terminal. Talk about el cheapo airlines – they can’t even afford VIP treatment on their home turf?!

I had a few hours to kill in Addis airport. I went looking for the Cloud Nine Lounge. I showed the pretty, smiling young lady at the counter my boarding card and told her I needed to catch the New Delhi flight and asked that I be woken up in case I was asleep. She smiled, “Sure”. I went looking for a seat/recliner. Tried to nap but really, there was no hope that I would be able to. I got up and walked around the lounge; picked up a glass of tomato juice and saw that there were three computers being used by patrons. I asked the pretty, smiling young lady at the counter (same one) if they had wifi. She smiled even wider. “Next week,” she said, “we will have wifi here.” Fat lot of good it is to me this week, I thought. “You were going to sleep!” she reminded me. I smiled at her and shrugged a I-can’t-sleep shrug.

I waited for a seat at one of the computers. After some time, she stopped smiling and got up from behind her counter and said to the computer users, “You are supposed to use only for 20 minutes and then give others a chance.” It didn’t work. She was too pretty to look strict.

Finally, one man got up and I took his seat. Chatted with Kumar for a little bit. He remembered coming to Addis Ababa in his early days to ‘inspect ramps,’ I think he said. I chatted with Appa and I wanted to know if Meena was around. “We are in LA,” he wrote. Oh yes, they had gone to visit Aprotim and Lauren. They tried to get Meena to sign on in Burke but I think I missed her. I sent off some gmail and, when my 20 minutes were up, got up from my seat. But now there was nobody in queue and my gesture went unnoticed; except by the pretty, smiling young lady who pursed her lip at the rest of the users who had been sitting there for ever.

At a little after 11, she came to find me – I think I was sitting with my eyes closed in a recliner – and told me that my plane was boarding; I should hurry. Her smile didn’t fade. I wanted to take her photo, but was too shy to be so forward. But I had gotten one of the attendants there to take a photo of me.

Soon I was airborne again and on to Calcutta and an altogether different experience – making sure Baba was well and stayed so. Actually, Tutul had done all that was needed; only a little more was needed to make sure Baba was again able to tend to his beloved students.