Hello.
Blogging seems to feel completely inappropriate to me right now but I am fed up of face-booking and twittering so for my last hour in work today I have decided to add another well anticipated post to my hugely successful and well maintained blog.
On the 5th Feb I will have been out here for 2 years. Blimey.
Job wise things are going pretty well for me. I'm slowly picking up the language (Portuguese) and I have met some good people, ex-pats and nationals alike. When I got here we couldn't rely on the nationals to boil an egg without someone watching over their shoulder and although some have proved to be a lost cause, we have unearthed some great characters who hopefully will one day go on to run this operation themselves. (Which is ultimately the goal of the Angolan government).
So basically we are training these guys to do ourselves out of a job! Fortunately we are some way off that yet. It takes a lot more experience to do what we do of course. I mean, they don't even know how to use facebook yet so I'm safe for now!
A mark of how much things have progressed here is the amount of time we don't have to spend supervising our guys. I take great satisfaction with this as it was one of the first things I identified when I got here. Previously we had ex pats dotted about the place in key roles such as Chef de Parties (CDP's) and Kitchen Supervisors. The nationals weren't trusted, or were simply not able to lead their own teams and didn't have the skills or knowledge to operate to the levels that those of us with professional training do. But after the efforts of the management team here we now have several key individuals who can not only produce the food here to safe and desirable levels, they can now also manage their own teams to do the same. That is no small achievement believe me. We have been able to release ex pats and replace them with Angolans. In actual fact in the two years I have been here we have gone from 7 managers and around 16 ex pat CDP's to just 4 managers and 3 CDP's! That's a lot of experience to lose but we have progressed more than any other unit in West Africa because of it.
Those of us that are left still get stuck in and always have one eye on whats going on but one of the reasons the staff here took so long to develop was because they were not allowed to. I have worked with people (and still do!) who cannot stop themselves from stepping in. That's ok at times if its needed but here it got to such an extreme that people just weren't learning because they weren't allowed to. We've now watched and coached these guys as they've made mistakes, begun to run out of food, lost power, not have staff turn up, have accidents etc etc. They have had to take responsibility and ownership of these day to day problems and deal with them. They are better for it and the more we let them get on with it the better they will get. Hopefully. One day.
That's enough for tonight. I quite like this recap so tomorrow I will put some photos up of what some of the facilities used to look like and what they look like now. You will be shocked.
