The strike is over now, new salary levels have been communicated and everyone is back at work, but that doesn't mean there is any let up in the pace. It has been good to get out of the hot-house of the Ministry and come here to Bo to help the team who have been touring the regions to recruit new staff. The recruits are mostly qualified and already working as 'volunteers' - with salaries so low, and the recruitment process so long and dificult, many didn't bother to apply for posts and have just relied on informal user charges for their income. There are many professional reasons why this must not continue, but most critical at the moment is the pratical reason that in less than 4 weeks, charging user fees to a large proportion of users will be regarded as fraud. We therefore need to get as many staff as possible onto regular contracts so that they receive a legitimate salary.
We arrived in Bo yesterday at 9.30am after a 3 hour drive from Freetown to be greeted by queues of candidates outside the District Medical Office. The process involves checking qualifications and candidate suitability, getting medical clearance, registering bank details, getting photographed and finger-printed, getting appointment letters and registering acceptance, allocating PIN numbers,completing social security forms, taking copies, filing and recording. This normally takes months, but the team is trying to complete it in one hit and showing amazing energy and commitment to make it happen.
In the second picture above you can just about see the queue of candidates waiting to be processed in the background. As the time has gone on it has grown and grown. A lot of them have travelled a very long way to get here and we are not sure how many are still on the way. My job is to prepare and print appointment letteres. I'm not sure exactly how many I did yesterday, but by the time we stopped at 8pm it was over 130. There was enough generator power for the computer and printer, but not for light in the room where I was working, so I now have typing by headtorch to add to the skills on my cv!
I'm writing this in a quiet moment, as the morning scramble has calmed down as people queue for other parts of the process, though I am expecting it to kick off again at any time. The other guy I travelled up here with is a management consultant who only arrived from the UK on Wednesday night on his first visit to Sub-Saharan Africa. He is stepping in at short notice to cover for a colleague and is finding it quite a baptism by fire, I think.
