MY LIFE WITH THE UN - ARTICLE 2

COTE D’IVOIRE

As I said in my first article, I started with the UNHCR office in Tete in 1989. By 1991, I was already being enticed to apply internationally. And I did, and I received an immediate positive reply. Off I went to a Sub-Office called Danane, In Northern Cote d’Ivoire, at the border with Liberia, to deal with Liberian refugees.

I started at the very bottom of the international Professional ladder as a P1, a field Officer then called Assistant Programme Officer. I was very well received by the Representative in Abidjan (Nguyen Tang), by a Secretary called Beatrice Amani, who took me on the administrative rounds, through the banking registry and all, and sent me off. On the way, I was immensely impressed with the view of the Yamoussoukro Cathedral and the superhighway, one of the rare ones at the time. In Danane, where I met Jules Beda, another lively character dealing with administration, Andrew Maine, Head of Office, British, with a very British accent, a British sense of humour and a big heart. He taught me how to fully automate Lotus 123, the precursor of Excel. Cote d’Ivoire is made of very nice people, has a very nice cuisine, and the country is endowed with an excellent natural environment.

This is where I learned that refugees need not be in a camp, and they were received in the local villages, so much better, because we were digging latrines for the entire village, furnishing drugs to the local clinics and food also included the most destitute Ivorians. That lesson never left me, although everywhere else I went, camp was the default response to a refugee influx. I will come back to the issue of camps, because in Africa, we (our governments) are stuck with the same idea sixty years on! The same responses produce the same results, we (governments in the Continent) do not seem to have the courage to learn.

Then my wife got pregnant and I had to take care of her condition. We came to Abidjan for the more sophisticated ante-natal services, we were invited to stay at the residence of my Head of Sub-Office, Andrew. The wife, from Thailand, received us very well and stayed with us the entire week. The second time, I stayed at the residence of an Ivorian colleague. In Cote d’Ivoire, the warmth of the team remains ever in my memory. I stayed in Cote d’Ivoire less than 2 years but in that time, I learned one major lesson: The food we were giving the refugees was not in line with their tradition: at one point, bulgar rice was distributed, and it created a riot that forced us to sleep in the office for 2 nights surrounded by angry hungry refugees. My very first indication was that the assistance we were providing to the refugees was not in line with their tradition, and most of the assistance was carried out without even stopping to understand their culture.

Lessons

From Cote d’Ivoire I retained firmly, without knowing then that I was building my own interpretation of the organizational culture, and that I would be plotting my career in accordance with this my perception:

1. UNHCR operations take place in an environment of automaticity; over time, that automaticity was dropped with dynamic planning processes. Still (until I retired from active duty) there has been no effort at carrying a sociological study of the refugee group composition, so as to adapt the response, both to sustain life and to invest in human capacities, and to actually realize what we professed: involve the beneficiaries in the protection and assistance programmes. Instead, we were treating refugees as “caseloads”. Big English that hides contempt, load.

2. For the second consecutive assignment, I met a Head of office that insisted on the quality of reports. I came to understand that the quality of my performance would define my image and career progression. And it did. You see, in the over three decades, never have I applied to a position that I was refused. Never either have I applied to a position beyond my capacity before the appointed time.

3. I met a Head of office who explained to me what UNHCR was: we were all part of a Secretariat of the High Commissioner to enable him/her to carry a unique mandate received from the General Assembly of the United Nations, and to enable him/her to report back to his/her appointing authority. Therefore, a very personalized office and a very personalized pyramidal authority, all other authorities deriving from him/her, including any authority I was going to ever exercise in this organization. I came to appreciate the value of an early understanding, which allowed me to adjust my ambitions with the type of employer I was working for.

4. I met a Head of Office that explained why we needed to submit reports of our work regularly. I came to espouse his following philosophy: a report is an invoice of my work, which I issue and present to the office, against which I receive a monthly salary. So, the invoice better be professional, credible, and not fake.

Jose 06 May 2023