I went to Florida for about 4.5 days. It was glorious, glorious, glorious. It was the first time in my life that I took a vacation and spoiled myself to death. Something I adapted to with surprising ease, although my bank account probably feels differently. It was also the first vacation I've taken in the States that wasn't home to Boston in...years. I don't even know the last time.
On Saturday I flew to Miami. Everyone wants to know how long the flight is for some reason, so I'll tell you: 1.5 hours. I flew an airline I've never heard of before, Insel Air. My organisation pays for one flight every three months to either Miami or the DR because with the visa you get upon arrival in Haiti, you have to leave every three months and come back to get it renewed. Insel Air was the cheapest flight, so Insel Air it was. That airline couldn't really seem to make its mind, cause on the flight to Miami there were no Creole or French speaking airline staff and everything was done in English, which was clearly not the first language of most of the staff either. On the way back I had some of the same cabin crew, but this time they did announcements in French. I couldn't really figure out where they were all from. The good news is that my flight to Miami was about half full and the flight back was practically empty.
The bad news was that on the way to Miami, as I was ready to collapse on the plane and sleep for the 1.5 hours, the guy behind me started asking me questions about the immigration forms. He spoke about 5 words of English and there was no way he would have ever figured out the forms on his own. So I told him to give me his passport and I was just going to fill them out for him, but apparently he took that to mean, "Come sit next to me and talk my ear off with your five words of English for the rest of the flight." Ugh. So Bruno is from Brazil, is 29 and single, had never been to the US, wanted to study English while he was there, and was very, very nervous. He was also very grateful for my help, couldn't believe the coincidence that we were both 29 and single, and kept kissing my hand in thanks and calling me The Princess of America. And he had terrible breath. It was....awkward, to say the least. He was supposed to be flying back on Thursday, which is the same day I was flying back, so I was worried about having to sit next to him again and hear all about his trip (I realise I'm a terrible person). But then I felt really bad when, on Thursday, he was not on the flight. I wonder if he didn't make it through customs or something. Oh well, I did my part.
Anyway. I got to Miami and then hopped a flight to Key West. I met up with my cousin who has lived in the Keys for 11 years and just bought a house down there. I hadn't visited in almost 10 years, we realised, and I forgot what a great little place Key West is. We bar hopped with some of her friends until 3:30am and even managed to take in a live concert and the last bit of a drag show. Oh, and I ate my weight in ice cream and waffle cones covered with chocolate and rainbow sprinkles. Good times.
My time in the Keys was mostly spent eating a lot of food, sleeping, relaxing, catching up with my cousin, and spending lots of money. It was great. We got massages and pedicures, watched football, ate smores and key lime pie next to the fire in her backyard, shopped, and drank a lot. The freedom of just being able to walk around on the streets was so liberating! And not spending hours in traffic everytime we got in the car was pretty awesome as well. Oh, and being able to drink the water right out of the tap. Totally underrated. Don't take these things for granted, people!
On Tuesday evening I flew back up to Miami and stayed with a friend from grad school for two nights. I think I was there for about 36 hours total, spent about 15 of them sleeping, and the rest shopping. My friend is in med school and so was nice enough to loan me her car (and GPS!) while she was in class and studying so I could go around and do all of my errands. That was very interesting in a city I am not at ALL familiar with! Oh, and did I mention I've never used an iTouch or a GPS before? Which were the two tools I had to work with that day to get around? I feel old, but also amazing cause I figured them all out like the genius I am. And I even managed to buy myself a new ipod nano which is all touch-screeny too. I'm not quite as much of a genius at that yet, but I'm sure I'll get there. I spent most of the day trying to fill the order the Cuban doctors had given me before I left. They're so sweet, so it's hard to say no, but I also just can't fit 4 playstation 2s and a laptop in my luggage, I'm sorry. I ended up getting them 3 playstation 2s and had to buy an extra suitcase just to fit those in! I was worried about somehow getting into trouble in customs because of some buying-electronics-for-Cubans law I didn't know about, but everything went very, very smoothly on the way back too.
Overall it was a perfect trip, just not long enough. It was very relaxing to actually be on vacation and to have felt like I earned it. It was so great to spend some time catching up with my cousin and meeting her friends and just seeing her life down there. My friend from grad school had had to leave London somewhat abruptly, so it was also really good to see her again and catch up on the year plus that has passed since we finished school. They were both incredibly gracious hostesses and I can't wait to take advantage of their hospitality again. :-)
So yeah, now I'm back. My contract was extended until November 24th, so I'll be here until then. We still haven't heard about whether or not we're getting our cost extension, which would allow my organisation to be here for another 6 months. If we don't get it then we also get to close the entire operation down here before the 24th. That should be easy. Not. I'm not particularly interested in staying with this job into the new year as the organisation is just much too disorganised and unsupportive, etc. I'm hoping to make it to a friend's wedding in India at the end of December, maybe hang out there for a month or so, and then maybe look for another job here in Haiti. I dunno, on va voir.
But in other news (which people have been asking about): there's a cholera outbreak here. The first one in about 50 years or a century, depending on who you listen to. It is currently in a region north of Port au Prince and so far has not spread. But as the Brits say, it's early days and it could quite possibly spread. The fear is that if it spreads down to PaP and makes it into the camps we could be in big trouble. I'm hoping that if it does spread we at least have had some warning and can/will be a bit better prepared than we were for the outbreak up north. I don't know much more than what you all do since my organisation isn't involved in this type of work, but if it spreads down here it will be interesting to see how it is dealt with. The precautions we take on an everyday basis (drinking treated water, being very conscious of hand washing, eating in very posh restaurants (ok, jk on the last one, but only sort of...)) are basically the same you would take to avoid cholera anyway, so don't worry. Hopefully they will contain it in that region, figure out/treat the source, and we'll be out of the woods. Hopefully. I'll keep you updated if things change.
Meanwhile, anyone have any questions for me? Not sure what you anonymous blog readers are interested in hearing about. Suggestions welcome.
That's all here for now! November 1st and 2nd are a national holiday here, so I'm looking for plans. Suggestions?
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Crazytown
Well I made it. My larviciding campaign officially ended on Friday and, after 12 hours of sleep on Friday night, I can say I'm still alive. Pretty much every wrench that could have been thrown in the works (and then some) was at some point or another, and I think one day I cried three seperate times, so it will take me a while to report it all. I will start with the much requested story of this past Tuesday, even though it technically relates more to Justine's project of indoor-residual spraying (IRS) than mine.
As you know, my counterpart for this project at the Ministry of Health (MOH) has been the 70 year old, toothless, pack a day smoking, impossible to understand and work with man, whom we'll call Dr. L. Dr. L and two of his colleagues were the ones who did the trainings for my larviciding campaign. And as much as I don't like them, I must admit that they did a pretty good job (from what I could understand of the Creole) doing the trainings (thank god). Dr. L also put the three of their names down on the list of 25 team supervisors for the larviciding campaign. I thought that was kind of strange since I didn't imagine they'd want to be tromping around on the ground everyday for 13 days supervising a team of 10 volunteers, but I thought that maybe they just really cared about the project and wanted to be there to oversee some of it. On the first day of the actual activity Dr. L called me while I was out in the field with one of the teams. He definitely did not sound like he was outside and proceeded to ask me if I was available for a meeting at his office the next day. I was confused and said, "You're not going to be in Fontamara with your team?" and he said, "Oh no. I told you that I wear three hats, and my first responsibility is to the Ministry." This immediately set off per diem bells in my head because in our budget we only planned for 25 team supervisors, and now he was telling me he had replaced himself with someone else, but I also know there was no way he would accept not getting a per diem anymore. Soon after our conversation I found out that another one of the trainers, let's call him Mr. S, was pulling the same story as Dr. L, and wanted to be paid to "generally" supervise the whole project, ie not being on the ground with a team everyday, as planned, meaning he would also need to be replaced.
I went to the meeting the next day with Dr. L and, after he listed all of the things that my organisation had done wrong so far, he actually brought up the budget himself. In a fairly nice, somewhat humble way, he asked if there was any way we could find more money for himself and Mr. S in the budget for this project. He wasn't at all pushy about it and said that he would continue to work on the project no matter what, but if there was any way we could find more money that would be great, too. My colleague was won over by his speech and said she would look for more money. Since she's in charge of the budget, I didn't really care and left it to her.
On Friday, October 1st, I received a phone call from Mr. S. In my past dealings with him he had always been very polite and soft-spoken, but his attitude on the phone was quite different. He was clearly unhappy about something, and from what I could gather he had learned about Justine's IRS project at some internal meeting and seemed very unhappy that he hadn't known about it in advance. I was confused as to why he was so upset, because the project had nothing to do with him and Justine had already been talking to other members of the MOH about her project. He wouldn't listen to me, though, and insisted on having a meeting "face to face" with us. Minutes later Dr. L called Geraldine and essentially it was the same story with him. After much back and forth over the course of a few days, a meeting was arranged for this past Tuesday at 10am.
Justine and I brought two of her national staff members with us to the meeting on Tuesday because they know the IRS project very well and have worked with the MOH before. We prepped them in the car and they were the first ones to tip us off to the fact that actually, these two probably just wanted to try and get more money out of us. Duh. Not sure why we didn't pick up on that earlier. I had their overly generous per diems for my project (that they weren't even earning, really) with me in my purse to give to them, and to then think that they wanted to implicate themselves in Justine's project for even more money made me angry. Our organisation is not like a lot of NGOs where we just have unlimited money. We are at the end of our grant and have to count every gourde. We still went into the meeting with an open mind, but also confident that we had covered all of our bases and that they would not get another per diem out of us.
We arrived at the office of Dr. L, who clearly had no idea what we were doing there. When we explained that Mr. S had told us the meeting was at 10:00, he made a phone call to Mr. S. Dr. L kept yelling into the phone, "They're here! They're here!" It was clear Mr. S had not informed Dr. L about the meeting and that Mr. S had not even left his office yet. So we waited over 20 minutes for Mr. S to arrive, and as soon as he did both he and Dr. L immediately stepped outside with no explanation to us. I can only assume they were planning their strategy.
When they came back inside Dr. L asked me how many people were here for the meeting. I said four and he said, "No, how many name of my organisation employees are here?" Confused, both Justine and I said, again, "Four." Mr. S started shaking his head and his hand and all of a sudden one of our national staff members, W, went straight over to the two of them and said, "Mr. S, Dr. L, what's the problem? Is there a problem?" in a very confrontational manner. Things got heated fast between the three of them, and meanwhile our other national staff member, M, was giving the play by play to some friend on the phone. It was clear the two MOH employees had a history with our two employees and that it was not a good one. Dr. L and Mr. S were in the middle of trying to refuse to meet with our two staff members when another MOH employee came over and chastised Dr. L and Mr. S for making such a big scene. She laid the smack down and told them that she could not have this kind of chaos in the office and that if they were going to have meetings with more than three people they were going to have to use one of the conferences rooms reserved for this purpose. S'IL VOUS PLAIT! This actually got us out of a direct confrontation about whether or not our two employees were going to be allowed into the meeting with us and we all walked over to the conference room together.
Once in the conference room there was a lot of awkwardness and face-saving as Dr. L proceeded to excuse himself to take a 10 minute phone call and Mr. S spent those 10 minutes looking through his briefcase for a pen. The four of us just sat there calmly as, again, it was the MOH who had called this meeting. Once Dr. L got back from his phone call and we just continued to sit there and not say anything, he attempted to start the meeting. It was clear he didn't really know where he was going with the meeting as, once again, he started with the laundry list of all of the things my organisation had done wrong so far with the larviciding campaign, but did not allow me to argue back at all by saying after each point, "But it's ok, it's not a big deal, we can move forward." He loves the sound of his own voice, so trying to argue back is a waste of breath anyway.
After about 15 minutes of insulting our organisation in relation to the larviciding project and of being as condescending as possible, he finally found his feet and managed to make his way to Justine's project. Again, in as rude and insulting of a manner as possible, he proceeded to all but yell at us about how we did not have the approval of the MOH to do this project, that they had not seen any of the planning, that we had not sat down and talked about the potential environmental hazards, etc, etc. Justine tried to respond to his accusations every once and a while, but Dr. L continued to talk over her and wouldn't allow her to get a word in edge wise. Finally I just told her, in English while Dr. L was still yelling, that she was just going to have to talk over him because he would never stop unless she stopped him. I am quite familiar with his routine. When the both of us together finally managed to get him to stop talking, Justine very calmly explained that, actually, she has been talking with their boss, Dr. P, and that Dr. P had been informed of everything. Justine had barely gotten the words out of her mouth before there was more shouting about how, well, they had not been informed. Whenever our national staff tried to jump in and help, Dr. L and Mr. S would put their hands up in their general direction, without actually looking at them, essentially telling them to "talk to the hand," and would signal them to be quiet. Our staff member, W, understandly eventually got quite upset and offended by how rude and disrespectful Dr. L and Mr. S were being. He stood up to ask if there was a problem and things escalated quickly with a lot of passionate shouting on both sides and lots of talking in Creole that left me and Justine somewhat out of control of the situation since we no longer knew who was insulting who. And that's when all of a sudden Dr. L threatened to call security on W. My first thought was, "This place has security!?!?" My second thought was, "I can't believe this is actually happening." My third thought was, "This is going to be great material for my blog." W, of course, was having none of that and yelled, "You're going to show ME the door?!?! Oh, no! I'll show MYSELF the door!" and proceeded to storm out of the meeting in a very dramatic fashion, never to return.
Well, it's hard to know how to recover a meeting after an incident like that, let me tell you. Justine, bless her, didn't miss a beat and continued to, very calmly, repeat that all of this information they were claiming to never have seen had already been given to their boss. Coincidentally their boss was away in NY for a number of days, so Dr. L kept conveniently reminding us that in her absence he was the one who gets to make decisions. We went around in circles for appoximately a (very painful) hour with them saying they hadn't received any information and us saying we had already given it to their boss. At one point I finally said, "There's clearly a lack of communication between you and your boss, and that's your problem, not our organisation's problem," to which they said, "Voila!" as though that somehow proved a point of theirs. ??!?!? During all of this time they refused to let M, our female staff member, say a word. Whenever she tried to speak they would do the palm thing and actually said, "Attention, Madame, attention." Which is more or less a threatening way of telling her to be quiet.
So basically we held our ground and just said that maybe when their boss returns we should all sit down together and we can show them all of the planning we've already done for this activity. They clearly wanted to take advantage of their boss being gone and force us into some sort of agreement at the meeting itself, but there was no way that was happening. Eventually we basically just had to get up and leave while they were still trying to bully us into getting their way, saying we had other meetings we had to go to.
In the car on the way back home there was definitely a bit of a dazed feeling and a what-the-heck-just-happened-there sentiment. Justine and I finally managed to get the history between our two staff members and the MOH staff members. Apparently after the earthquake the MOH called our two staff members (this was before they worked for us) to be volunteers for some project. Even as a volunteer in this country, though, you usually get a little bit of money. Apparently Mr. S was in charge of the project and kept all of per diem money that was meant to go to the volunteers. A pretty impressively evil thing to do immediately post earthquake. Knowing this made the whole incident back at the MOH make a little more sense. Of course Dr. L and Mr. S didn't want to deal with our two staff members who were going to call them out on their intentions of just trying to get more money from us. Once they were somewhat forced to meet with all four of us anyway their only choice was to do everything in their power to try and keep our staff members from actually talking.
Afterwards Justine wrote an email to their boss, Dr. P, explaining what had happened and saying that, while we're very happy to work with the MOH, we expect it to be done in a professional and respectful way. We haven't heard back from her because we're not even sure anyone at the MOH knows how to use those fancy new computers some foreign government provided them post-earthquake, never mind how to check their email. So it's all a bit up in the air right now. Needless to say I walked out of that meeting with their per diems still in my purse as I just couldn't stomach the idea of giving them money after that meeting. What's most interesting to me is that none of us have heard a peep from them ever since. I know they're eager to get their money, so I'm just waiting to see which one of them will have the guts to call me and ask for it. And since my campaign is finished now, I could quite feasibly never have to see them again, meaning that for all they know we might be keeping their money. If I never see them again it will be too soon, but I know I will. I dread going to that place like a trip to the dentist. After that meeting I said that I honestly think getting a cavity filled would have been less painful, because at least at the dentist they give you novocaine.
MEANWHILE....(yup, it's not over yet)
While Justine and I were almost getting escorted out of the MOH by security, poor Geraldine was having her own adventure. Remember the assistant I told you about, who we had to fire after 10 days? And remember how I said she wouldn't take the money we owed her because she thought she should be paid for her entire contract of 1.5 months? And how she was on the phone with her lawyer? Well, it turns out she took us to court. But we didn't know we were being taken to court. We received a letter summoning us to something, but Geraldine (who is French and studied law) thought it was a meeting with a work inspector who was going to advise us on what the next steps in the process would be. When she turned up for the meeting it turned out that, nope, it was the actual court date. Our former assistant was half an hour late and when she saw Geraldine she tried to be like, "Hi!!! How's it going?!" and Geraldine was like, "No. First of all you took us to court. Second of all you're half an hour late. Let's get this show on the road." Well, that's my paraphrased version of what I imagine the French was like. The former assistant's lawyer hadn't arrived yet, though, so she called him and he advised her to start without him. Yup, that's right, to start without him. Great lawyer. So basically, according to Geraldine, two Haitian lawyers acted as judges and heard both sides of the story. She said they were very cool and very fair. Geraldine had brought the contract the former assistant had signed along with the email she wrote refusing to do the task that is written in her contract. After about two hours the lawyers ruled in our favor and we won! Geraldine's victory came right as we were getting out of our meeting, so that was some welcome news as I was still trying to stop shaking from anger. Apparently the former assistant was genuinely shocked that she lost, which is further proof of her craziness. And now not only does she not have her money from her whole contract, but she also has to pay her lawyer who advised her to start without him. Ooooh karma. Thank you.
Ok, longest entry ever, but that's just a taste of some of the incidents from the last 3 weeks or so. Some great material if I ever do write a book. You cannot make this stuff up. Hopefully I'll be able to fill in some more sooner rather than later.
As you know, my counterpart for this project at the Ministry of Health (MOH) has been the 70 year old, toothless, pack a day smoking, impossible to understand and work with man, whom we'll call Dr. L. Dr. L and two of his colleagues were the ones who did the trainings for my larviciding campaign. And as much as I don't like them, I must admit that they did a pretty good job (from what I could understand of the Creole) doing the trainings (thank god). Dr. L also put the three of their names down on the list of 25 team supervisors for the larviciding campaign. I thought that was kind of strange since I didn't imagine they'd want to be tromping around on the ground everyday for 13 days supervising a team of 10 volunteers, but I thought that maybe they just really cared about the project and wanted to be there to oversee some of it. On the first day of the actual activity Dr. L called me while I was out in the field with one of the teams. He definitely did not sound like he was outside and proceeded to ask me if I was available for a meeting at his office the next day. I was confused and said, "You're not going to be in Fontamara with your team?" and he said, "Oh no. I told you that I wear three hats, and my first responsibility is to the Ministry." This immediately set off per diem bells in my head because in our budget we only planned for 25 team supervisors, and now he was telling me he had replaced himself with someone else, but I also know there was no way he would accept not getting a per diem anymore. Soon after our conversation I found out that another one of the trainers, let's call him Mr. S, was pulling the same story as Dr. L, and wanted to be paid to "generally" supervise the whole project, ie not being on the ground with a team everyday, as planned, meaning he would also need to be replaced.
I went to the meeting the next day with Dr. L and, after he listed all of the things that my organisation had done wrong so far, he actually brought up the budget himself. In a fairly nice, somewhat humble way, he asked if there was any way we could find more money for himself and Mr. S in the budget for this project. He wasn't at all pushy about it and said that he would continue to work on the project no matter what, but if there was any way we could find more money that would be great, too. My colleague was won over by his speech and said she would look for more money. Since she's in charge of the budget, I didn't really care and left it to her.
On Friday, October 1st, I received a phone call from Mr. S. In my past dealings with him he had always been very polite and soft-spoken, but his attitude on the phone was quite different. He was clearly unhappy about something, and from what I could gather he had learned about Justine's IRS project at some internal meeting and seemed very unhappy that he hadn't known about it in advance. I was confused as to why he was so upset, because the project had nothing to do with him and Justine had already been talking to other members of the MOH about her project. He wouldn't listen to me, though, and insisted on having a meeting "face to face" with us. Minutes later Dr. L called Geraldine and essentially it was the same story with him. After much back and forth over the course of a few days, a meeting was arranged for this past Tuesday at 10am.
Justine and I brought two of her national staff members with us to the meeting on Tuesday because they know the IRS project very well and have worked with the MOH before. We prepped them in the car and they were the first ones to tip us off to the fact that actually, these two probably just wanted to try and get more money out of us. Duh. Not sure why we didn't pick up on that earlier. I had their overly generous per diems for my project (that they weren't even earning, really) with me in my purse to give to them, and to then think that they wanted to implicate themselves in Justine's project for even more money made me angry. Our organisation is not like a lot of NGOs where we just have unlimited money. We are at the end of our grant and have to count every gourde. We still went into the meeting with an open mind, but also confident that we had covered all of our bases and that they would not get another per diem out of us.
We arrived at the office of Dr. L, who clearly had no idea what we were doing there. When we explained that Mr. S had told us the meeting was at 10:00, he made a phone call to Mr. S. Dr. L kept yelling into the phone, "They're here! They're here!" It was clear Mr. S had not informed Dr. L about the meeting and that Mr. S had not even left his office yet. So we waited over 20 minutes for Mr. S to arrive, and as soon as he did both he and Dr. L immediately stepped outside with no explanation to us. I can only assume they were planning their strategy.
When they came back inside Dr. L asked me how many people were here for the meeting. I said four and he said, "No, how many name of my organisation employees are here?" Confused, both Justine and I said, again, "Four." Mr. S started shaking his head and his hand and all of a sudden one of our national staff members, W, went straight over to the two of them and said, "Mr. S, Dr. L, what's the problem? Is there a problem?" in a very confrontational manner. Things got heated fast between the three of them, and meanwhile our other national staff member, M, was giving the play by play to some friend on the phone. It was clear the two MOH employees had a history with our two employees and that it was not a good one. Dr. L and Mr. S were in the middle of trying to refuse to meet with our two staff members when another MOH employee came over and chastised Dr. L and Mr. S for making such a big scene. She laid the smack down and told them that she could not have this kind of chaos in the office and that if they were going to have meetings with more than three people they were going to have to use one of the conferences rooms reserved for this purpose. S'IL VOUS PLAIT! This actually got us out of a direct confrontation about whether or not our two employees were going to be allowed into the meeting with us and we all walked over to the conference room together.
Once in the conference room there was a lot of awkwardness and face-saving as Dr. L proceeded to excuse himself to take a 10 minute phone call and Mr. S spent those 10 minutes looking through his briefcase for a pen. The four of us just sat there calmly as, again, it was the MOH who had called this meeting. Once Dr. L got back from his phone call and we just continued to sit there and not say anything, he attempted to start the meeting. It was clear he didn't really know where he was going with the meeting as, once again, he started with the laundry list of all of the things my organisation had done wrong so far with the larviciding campaign, but did not allow me to argue back at all by saying after each point, "But it's ok, it's not a big deal, we can move forward." He loves the sound of his own voice, so trying to argue back is a waste of breath anyway.
After about 15 minutes of insulting our organisation in relation to the larviciding project and of being as condescending as possible, he finally found his feet and managed to make his way to Justine's project. Again, in as rude and insulting of a manner as possible, he proceeded to all but yell at us about how we did not have the approval of the MOH to do this project, that they had not seen any of the planning, that we had not sat down and talked about the potential environmental hazards, etc, etc. Justine tried to respond to his accusations every once and a while, but Dr. L continued to talk over her and wouldn't allow her to get a word in edge wise. Finally I just told her, in English while Dr. L was still yelling, that she was just going to have to talk over him because he would never stop unless she stopped him. I am quite familiar with his routine. When the both of us together finally managed to get him to stop talking, Justine very calmly explained that, actually, she has been talking with their boss, Dr. P, and that Dr. P had been informed of everything. Justine had barely gotten the words out of her mouth before there was more shouting about how, well, they had not been informed. Whenever our national staff tried to jump in and help, Dr. L and Mr. S would put their hands up in their general direction, without actually looking at them, essentially telling them to "talk to the hand," and would signal them to be quiet. Our staff member, W, understandly eventually got quite upset and offended by how rude and disrespectful Dr. L and Mr. S were being. He stood up to ask if there was a problem and things escalated quickly with a lot of passionate shouting on both sides and lots of talking in Creole that left me and Justine somewhat out of control of the situation since we no longer knew who was insulting who. And that's when all of a sudden Dr. L threatened to call security on W. My first thought was, "This place has security!?!?" My second thought was, "I can't believe this is actually happening." My third thought was, "This is going to be great material for my blog." W, of course, was having none of that and yelled, "You're going to show ME the door?!?! Oh, no! I'll show MYSELF the door!" and proceeded to storm out of the meeting in a very dramatic fashion, never to return.
Well, it's hard to know how to recover a meeting after an incident like that, let me tell you. Justine, bless her, didn't miss a beat and continued to, very calmly, repeat that all of this information they were claiming to never have seen had already been given to their boss. Coincidentally their boss was away in NY for a number of days, so Dr. L kept conveniently reminding us that in her absence he was the one who gets to make decisions. We went around in circles for appoximately a (very painful) hour with them saying they hadn't received any information and us saying we had already given it to their boss. At one point I finally said, "There's clearly a lack of communication between you and your boss, and that's your problem, not our organisation's problem," to which they said, "Voila!" as though that somehow proved a point of theirs. ??!?!? During all of this time they refused to let M, our female staff member, say a word. Whenever she tried to speak they would do the palm thing and actually said, "Attention, Madame, attention." Which is more or less a threatening way of telling her to be quiet.
So basically we held our ground and just said that maybe when their boss returns we should all sit down together and we can show them all of the planning we've already done for this activity. They clearly wanted to take advantage of their boss being gone and force us into some sort of agreement at the meeting itself, but there was no way that was happening. Eventually we basically just had to get up and leave while they were still trying to bully us into getting their way, saying we had other meetings we had to go to.
In the car on the way back home there was definitely a bit of a dazed feeling and a what-the-heck-just-happened-there sentiment. Justine and I finally managed to get the history between our two staff members and the MOH staff members. Apparently after the earthquake the MOH called our two staff members (this was before they worked for us) to be volunteers for some project. Even as a volunteer in this country, though, you usually get a little bit of money. Apparently Mr. S was in charge of the project and kept all of per diem money that was meant to go to the volunteers. A pretty impressively evil thing to do immediately post earthquake. Knowing this made the whole incident back at the MOH make a little more sense. Of course Dr. L and Mr. S didn't want to deal with our two staff members who were going to call them out on their intentions of just trying to get more money from us. Once they were somewhat forced to meet with all four of us anyway their only choice was to do everything in their power to try and keep our staff members from actually talking.
Afterwards Justine wrote an email to their boss, Dr. P, explaining what had happened and saying that, while we're very happy to work with the MOH, we expect it to be done in a professional and respectful way. We haven't heard back from her because we're not even sure anyone at the MOH knows how to use those fancy new computers some foreign government provided them post-earthquake, never mind how to check their email. So it's all a bit up in the air right now. Needless to say I walked out of that meeting with their per diems still in my purse as I just couldn't stomach the idea of giving them money after that meeting. What's most interesting to me is that none of us have heard a peep from them ever since. I know they're eager to get their money, so I'm just waiting to see which one of them will have the guts to call me and ask for it. And since my campaign is finished now, I could quite feasibly never have to see them again, meaning that for all they know we might be keeping their money. If I never see them again it will be too soon, but I know I will. I dread going to that place like a trip to the dentist. After that meeting I said that I honestly think getting a cavity filled would have been less painful, because at least at the dentist they give you novocaine.
MEANWHILE....(yup, it's not over yet)
While Justine and I were almost getting escorted out of the MOH by security, poor Geraldine was having her own adventure. Remember the assistant I told you about, who we had to fire after 10 days? And remember how I said she wouldn't take the money we owed her because she thought she should be paid for her entire contract of 1.5 months? And how she was on the phone with her lawyer? Well, it turns out she took us to court. But we didn't know we were being taken to court. We received a letter summoning us to something, but Geraldine (who is French and studied law) thought it was a meeting with a work inspector who was going to advise us on what the next steps in the process would be. When she turned up for the meeting it turned out that, nope, it was the actual court date. Our former assistant was half an hour late and when she saw Geraldine she tried to be like, "Hi!!! How's it going?!" and Geraldine was like, "No. First of all you took us to court. Second of all you're half an hour late. Let's get this show on the road." Well, that's my paraphrased version of what I imagine the French was like. The former assistant's lawyer hadn't arrived yet, though, so she called him and he advised her to start without him. Yup, that's right, to start without him. Great lawyer. So basically, according to Geraldine, two Haitian lawyers acted as judges and heard both sides of the story. She said they were very cool and very fair. Geraldine had brought the contract the former assistant had signed along with the email she wrote refusing to do the task that is written in her contract. After about two hours the lawyers ruled in our favor and we won! Geraldine's victory came right as we were getting out of our meeting, so that was some welcome news as I was still trying to stop shaking from anger. Apparently the former assistant was genuinely shocked that she lost, which is further proof of her craziness. And now not only does she not have her money from her whole contract, but she also has to pay her lawyer who advised her to start without him. Ooooh karma. Thank you.
Ok, longest entry ever, but that's just a taste of some of the incidents from the last 3 weeks or so. Some great material if I ever do write a book. You cannot make this stuff up. Hopefully I'll be able to fill in some more sooner rather than later.
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