An interview to remember

I have recently had the pleasure of being involved in recruiting the latest fantastic addition to team ANDY. During the process, I was reminded of a conversation I once had with senior manager in an organisation I used to work for after identifiying recruitment as an area in which we could potentially make huge savings.

No day-long, multi-room recruitment with lunch thrown in, said I. ‘Well, good luck recruiting me then’, said the colleague. The theory is that for some positions the company has to sell themselves to the candidate as much as the candidate sells themselves to the company. A slick, professional recruitment at a posh hotel indicates that we mean business and that this is a comfortable working environment.

In the case of the organisation we worked for it was also borderline fraud. The people and work were both wonderful, but your next taste of the organisation after interview was a long wait for a lift which (most of the time) creaked and jolted its way to an open plan office which was either far too cold or far too hot. You only return to the plush hotel when you in turn try to recruit someone else to join you in the office block which architect and building firm had conspired to make totally future-resistant; trapping those within it forever in the decade of its construction.

Our compound's security is unconventional

I wonder how this individual would have reacted to the pressures placed on our recent interview candidates. The path to our Kibera office is adjacent to an abandoned, vandalized garage which has become the fly-tipping capital of an area which has no waste collection arrangements and no public bins. Visitors are just getting used to the smell when they are required to negotiate the collection of ducks, dogs and a group of horned goats which scavenge through the litter and trot in an intimidating fashion around the driveway. Thankfully none of the group around on the day were with newborn calves or we may have seen some action.

The interviewees arrived to find ANDY already falling behind its rather ambitious schedule, so wait with other gathering candidates in our cyber café, mingling with paying surfers and their potential colleagues- exiled from the main office by the interviews - excitedly playing traditional Luo music, bought during a recent work visit to Kisumu.

Some kids scavenge for valuable refuse

When the candidates did take the hot seat to be grilled by Fred and me, they were interrupted by various noises from our visiting beneficiaries and the activities of our neighbours, including a man showing off his bike, a group of women arguing, colleagues who had not read the sign on the door walking in and chatting away, and just to add an extra test the men who compete with the animals for the pick of the litter occasionally set fire to areas to clear it, prompting the lovely smell of burning plastic to waft through broken windows and fill our interview room.

Be grateful that computers can't process smells

Not discounting the fact that the fumes could have caused us to be high as kites for the whole thing, the interviews went very well and none of the candidates were horrified or walked out. More to the point, they got a realistic view of what life could be like in the office: a bit hectic, baffling and unpredictable, but always worth being there and never far away from the lives and experiences of the people we work with and for.

My old colleague back in the UK may never have reached the interview, but judging this book by its cover would be a huge mistake.

On the right track

I posted a couple of weeks ago about a capacity-building exercise I'd introduced at work, and how I was unable to work out how it had been received.  I concluded that only time would tell, and while one swallow does not make a spring, the follow-up meeting this week contained plenty of encouraging signs.

We'd spent the last meeting considering how to form the right partnerships to help our programmes benefit as many Kenyan persons with disabilities as possible. We're initially looking for organisations which can distribute our simplified introductions to the rights of persons with disabilities, and how to make them a reality, as well as provide fora for the outreach workers we are training to deliver the same messages.  

Geoffrey (l) sits a lap ahead of Max (c) and Rafa in joint 2nd

It's all part of Action Network for the Disabled's (ANDY) strategy to have a national impact while retaining its key strength; a close relationship with the people we're developing programmes with and for. We introduced a couple of visual elements to the programme – an Olympic running track that we’re ‘racing’ round, with team members moving further along as we produce active partnerships, and maps on the wall where we’ll be marking the growing influence and reach of ANDY. 

So a lot rested with the follow-up meeting this week, which was basically a feedback session on the work each member of the team has been doing; a chance for them to report back on their experiences and the partners they'd secured. Thankfully, they've thrown themselves into it with great gusto. We have secured around 40 relevant new partners to work with, with successes ranging from arranging outreach workers to attend small self-help groups through to international NGOs incorporating our work into their national programmes.

Geoffrey in action, meeting a local kids and youth club

This is massively extending the originally defined reach of the programme, supporting our desire to consistently provide value for money and to maximise impact.
The star of the show so far is Geoffrey, who used all the contacts he has made over the last couple of years as a field worker and running our sports programme to firm up a partnership approach with 10 organisations. It shows that while we're not coming here as volunteers with any magic formulas, we do have the time, the brief and the external perspective to help develop colleagues' natural instincts and talents into work focused on realising an organisation's programmatic and strategic aims.

We're having another follow-up in a month, which i will not be running, so I'll have an idea if this is going to sustain itself after my departure. But I am not going to worry about that now - I am going to go away for my easter holidays on Thursday happy that the signs are there that something is sticking.

How not to get a white girlfriend

 

One question I am often asked here in Kenya is ‘how can I get a white girlfriend’?

Coupled with the amount of times I have heard female volunteers complain about persistent and bizarre advances by young Kenyan men, I feel there is clearly a need to for somebody to fill cupid’s role.

I know that anyone who has seen pictures of me or been spellbound by my Clinton-esque charm will find it hard to believe, but I am no expert in the matter. I’ve had long and incomprehensible spells during which I’ve been unable to secure a girlfriend of any shape, age or race.  

So I decided to consult with a cross-section of the Kenyan man’s target audience in order to provide a selection of hints and tips to aid them in pursuit of their date. This is what they report:

1)      Even if it does not mean a lot to you, the fact you have a wife or girlfriend – or they have a husband or boyfriend – will most probably mean an awful lot to them.

2)      White women, like all human beings, want to feel special and that your attraction to them is something personal. Telling them that you really want 'a white girlfriend' is a mistake – this reduces them to one of about ¾billion women who share their skin colour, rather than making them feel like one in a million.

3)      There are undoubtedly many white women happy to be reduced to the role of fashion accessory, but you’ll have to travel to the nightclubs of Britain to find them and compete with professional footballers for their attention.

4)      If they tell you they have a boyfriend or husband, they mean leave them alone.

5)      If they tell you they have a boyfriend or husband and your response is ‘do you know any other white women I can go out with?’, I refer you to item 1).

6)      It is not a cultural norm in Europe to look for love on your commute to work. Very few romances emanate from this situation, and even fewer from the relationship between passenger and bus driver/conductor.

7)      Under no circumstances call the girl you want to impress ‘Sister Rooney’.

A compliment, honestly?

 8)      Finally - and I suspect that this might horrify many of those who seek a ‘white girlfriend’ rather than an individual -  if you are successful in securing a date there is still an age-old tradition in Europe where MEN PAY FOR THE DATE. At the very least, modern European women would expect to pay no more than half of any bill.

To redress the balance, I feel duty bound to point out that there are a lot of very old, very ugly white men here with impossibly beautiful young Kenyan women, and an increasing trend for more mature white ladies romancing young, athletic Kenyan men. Perhaps a young, good-looking Kenyan man or woman can provide a guide for the older white man or woman looking to join them?