Ministry meetings

It had already been an eventful morning. Starting with a long queue at the bank, several unsuccessful phone calls to my manager, and a strange experience in a poda. (Strange experiences in podas are a daily happening, but this was the first time that a poda decided to change its final destination half way to work). I finally made it to the office at 11:00.

Alhassan looked up as I pushed open our shared office door. Alhassan is my line manager - a quiet man, with a slight build and a constantly amused expression. (I like to believe that the constant look of amusement has been a feature of his since birth, but I’m increasingly concerned it may just be a look he saves for me and my odd Western ways. He looks even more amused whenever I try to talk to him in Krio, or I ask him if he knows the exact time, or even date, something might happen.)

“How de bodi?” Alhassan greeted me.
“De bodi well. How yu sleep?” I responded.
“A tell God tenki.” Krio small talk over, Alhassan moved on to the day ahead. “We need to go to the steering group meeting at the Ministry.” I narrowed my eyes and thought back to the unsuccessful phone calls I’d had with him earlier that morning. The phone calls about whether or not we needed to go to the steering group meeting at the Ministry. The phone calls I made from the bank practically next-door to the Ministry building. The phone calls I made one hour, one poda ride, and one long walk in a rain shower ago – practically next-door to the Ministry.

I could have turned this situation into a long conversation about communication, and how we both needed to get better at it. But I knew from experience that this conversation takes a lot of time and has relatively little impact, and besides – we were about to be late for a meeting at the Ministry.
“We really need to go?” I asked. “Because this morning you said we didn’t”.
“We need to go.”
“But I thought it starts at 11:00?” Alhassan and I both glanced at the clock – it was now 11:05. Alhassan shrugged.
“It starts between 11:00 and 11:30.” This isn’t true. The meeting starts at 11:00. It only starts between 11:00 and 11:30 because people like me and Alhassan never arrive on time. In the end we arrived at about 11:45 because the traffic was bad and we stopped to look at a couple of tellies on the drive over (don’t ask – I didn’t).

The Ministry of Health and Sanitation is housed on the fourth and fifth floors of the impressive nine story Youyi Building - a 1970’s, white concrete gift from the Chinese Government to the Government of Sierra Leone. Each floor houses a different government department; making its complete lack of security all the more surprising. To say that the Youyi building has seen better days is a bit of an understatement. When I first arrived I wrongly assumed that the building had been caught up in the crossfire of the civil war. Once it must have been bright, grand and imposing. But now its crumbling façade of mildew green and concrete grey is a sad shadow of the architect’s original dream.

We were dropped off at the entrance by Ibrahem, the Health for All Coalition driver. (A young smiling man with little English, an encyclopaedic knowledge of Freetown, and friends on practically every street.) We walked into the ground floor lobby which presents the visitor with two options – the lift, or the stairs.
“Lets take the stairs.” I said, at the same time as Alhassan said,
“We’ll take the lift.” My heart sank, the Youiy Building lift is more packed than a northern line tube in rush hour. Not only is it unbearably crowded, it also comes with the added excitement of breaking down every time there’s a power cut – and there are lots of power cuts.

We stepped out of the lift onto the fifth floor, a little more squashed and a little more grateful to be alive. We negotiated our way past ‘security’ (a group of friendly guys sitting at a reception desk who occasionally stop people for a chat, but never actually stop people walking into the Ministry). And slid quietly into the Free Health Care Steering Group meeting taking place in the conference room.

The meeting is held every other Tuesday and brings together all the Government officials, Donor Organisations, NGOs and Civil Societies involved in the Free Health Care Initiative. The Initiative was launched in April with the promise of free health care for all pregnant women, lactating mothers and children under five. It’s an ambitious project, made all the more ambitious by the fact that, at launch, the Government had neither the money nor the infrastructure to enable them to fully support it. Health for All Coalition (the civil society organisation I’m working for) has been awarded the contract for the independent monitoring of the free health care delivery. (This in itself is another ambitious project, given that the coalition was only founded in 2008 and the monitoring programme is only one sting of its over-stretched bow.)

Both fascinating and frustrating, the meetings are great opportunity to find out more about the health service in Sierra Leone, and the politics of international funding from giants such as UNICEF, DIFID and the World Bank. Dangerously dependent on international aide the Free Health Care Initiative is vital, but worryingly fragile. Progress is made, but so much progress is needed.