Day 339 - A Failure to Communicate

by  P Shanks  My time in Zambia was short, but I was not the first TDY general services officer there. In contrast to Madagascar where the gap I filled was the result of a normal transition between management officers, in Lusaka, the gap was the result of the previous GSO being medically evacuated from post well before her tour was expected to end. A successor had been named, but the gap before he could arrive was three weeks longer than any of the available WAE TDYers could stay. I couldn't go earlier because my TDY in Madagascar was already underway. I was at least the third TDYer in that position. Everyone was tired of the rotating GSOs, but they were close to the end.

The deputy chief of mission in Lusaka was very pleased at my arrival because he felt I could do more than the WAEs previously there could do. That was my introduction to the Rover advantage. However, it didn't turn out to be the advantage he cared about in the end.

The embassy in Lusaka was larger than the embassy in Tana in terms of the number of staff. The building wasn't large enough for all the staff so the GSO operations were at an offsite location, a 30-minute drive from the embassy when traffic was good. Traffic was almost never good. The DCM charged me with evaluating the GSO staff capabilities since there had been many complaints. He hadn't asked the WAEs for their assessment because he wasn't confident that they were current with all the regulations.

I had my orders. And I set off with a motorpool driver for the GSO annex.

The annex included a carpentry shop, a welding shop, an automotive shop, a warehouse with a supply room for office supplies, in addition to the motor pool and procurement office. Inside the GSO office area there were phones, a fax machine, and a photocopier in addition to the PCs in my office and the outer office of the GSO's secretary. 

The communication matrix   by  oscarberg  And none of them worked, at least not consistently. The phone lines were unreliable. Sometimes calls went through. Sometimes they didn't. But phone calls were the least used method of communication between the embassy and the annex. Instead, the embassy relied on e-mail. And that almost never worked. There was a wifi link for the annex, but since wifi was not approved for use at that point, getting it working was not a high priority for the IT staff. They didn't like coming to the annex because it often meant they would lose a half-day.

When e-mail was working, any message that arrived from the Marines would take 20 minutes to open because they all used a stationery style with the Marine Corps seal as a watermark. Any attachment would take 20 minutes to open, so I got into the habit of calling the management officer's secretary to find out what was in attachments instead of trying to open them. Sometimes the phone call saved me time. Sometimes not.

The real problem was that no one in the embassy seemed aware - or cared - that their messages sent by e-mail weren't getting through. I missed meetings because the invitation didn't get through. No one knew now many messages never reached us, or reached us well after we needed to see them. The attitude seemed to be a message sent is a message delivered.

Sometimes the management officer's secretary faxed the messages to us. But the fax machine never worked during the three weeks I was there. Because of the problems with the telephone lines, they bought digital senders, combination photocopiers and scanners that could send a PDF copy of a document as an email attachment. The digital senders hadn't yet arrived, but I predicted they wouldn't solve the problem. They would just add to the technological non-solutions.

Once a day interoffice mail from the embassy was delivered. Sometimes someone had thought to print out a copy of what was sent as an attachment via e-mail, but that was rare. They were trying to save paper.

It was clear to me that there was a communication problem.

I turned next to the work. Since the majority of the complaints had to do with the GSO's procurement section, I started looking there first. What I found was a group of local staff trying to process purchase requests by following the regulations. But when they didn't act as fast as the requesters expected, the requesters went out and purchased what they wanted or made commitments that required a contract which they expected the GSO to sign without regard for the required process. I found stacks of improper procurements that needed to be ratified, a fancy word for reviewing the steps to identify who failed to follow the procurement process and then get someone in the Office of Acquisition to sign off to indicate either the procurement would have been proper had the steps been followed and that the government received value for its money or what the penalties would be for whoever took improper actions. That meant a lot more work for me. It also made clear that those who requested procurement actions, nearly all from agencies other than State, did not understand the requirements at all. Again, the bottom line seemed to be that lack of adequate communication was behind the problems.

I wasn't in Lusaka long enough to observe whether the staff in the many workshops were taking longer than necessary to complete their work. Or if there were possible improvements in filling supply orders. There were no complaints about those operations.

On my final day at the embassy, the DCM called me to his office to hear what I had learned. I explained how I concluded the lack of adequate communication between the staff of the embassy and the staff at the annex was the source of the problems. I recommended that the GSO staff be included in meetings with the rest of the management section. I recommended that the rest of the embassy not rely entirely on e-mail when communicating with the GSO staff. I recommended that non-urgent information be sent via interoffice mail and that urgent information be conveyed by telephone as redundant means to ensure the messages were received.

by  michaelseangallagher  And as I spoke, I saw the DCM's eyes glaze over. He did not want to hear my message. Maybe he had heard it before, so it wasn't really new. When he finally replied, it was with questions about the local staff, questions that each contained an implied criticism of a specific staff member. I didn't confirm his assumptions. And in a moment, the meeting was over. I was dismissed. So ended my TDY in Zambia.

Day 338 - The Real Africa

Madagascar didn't seem like Africa. My house in Tana had a large map of the continent of Africa on the staircase wall that didn't include Madagascar, possible evidence that most Malagasies also did not think of themselves as Africans.  So as much as I enjoyed Madagascar, I looked forward to seeing the real thing.

  by  virtualwayfarer 

After four months in Madagascar, I moved to my next TDY assignment in Lusaka, Zambia.  Zaire was clearly Africa. There were safari parks within an hour's drive from Lusaka with lions, elephants, antelopes and all the other animals I thought of as African. And there were lush gardens reminiscent of jungles throughout the city. Unfortunately, my stay in Lusaka was very short, just three weeks, so I didn't get to see much.

I had just two weekends to explore.

tea bag art

The first weekend, I visited the once-a-month craft market that brought together vendors from Kenya and other neighboring countries as well as Zambians. The range of items on sale was much broader and impressive than I had expected. As I saw in Madagascar, there were many items such as cars, trucks, and even animals, constructed from intricately cut and assembled pieces from discarded aluminum cans, some very detailed. There were many woven items, including clothing, scarves, and purses. But what caught my attention most were note cards with stick-figure drawings drawn in black ink on used, but emptied, tea bags. I was impressed that what we would think nothing of throwing away became raw materials for artists in Africa.

The second weekend, I attended a fund raising event hosted by the Canadian and American Women's Clubs of Lusaka. The event included a barbecue and an auction, billed as a pound auction with every item to be auctioned brought in as the price of admission. The items were to be brought wrapped, and every item was to weigh just one pound. The host had a kitchen scale at the door and weighed items as the guests arrived. A small penalty was charged if the items weighed more or less than one pound with the results going to the same cause as the auction proceeds. Every item was either more or less than one pound. The clever folks who thought they could beat the penalty by buying something that weighed exactly one pound were caught because of the additional weight of the wrapping paper.

tea bag art

As the auction began, I knew that if I didn't win an early bid, the chances were good that the winning bids would be much higher later in the evening. So I bid early on a package that looked to be about the size of three paving bricks. I was curious how it could be so big without weighing more than one pound. I won and everyone watched as I opened the package. Once I got the wrapping paper off, I could see there were three identical green boxes inside, but I still didn't know what they were. A few people sitting near me asked, but I pointed to the writing on the boxes, all in Chinese. I took the three boxes apart to see if there might be English or French or Spanish or even Russian on other faces of the box. After very close examination, I finally found some English in tiny letters at the bottom of one side of the boxes. I had won the bid for three boxes of Chinese green slimming tea.

My assumption about the final price for later items turned out accurate. I know my bid was for much higher than the price of the tea. But others won items including a battery powered fly swatter with bids that would be considered extortion under other circumstances. Watching the winners as they opened their packages was well worth the price of admission.