Charlotte's Web: Post-its!

Yes it's true. My name is Charlotte Crowe and I have an addiction to post-its.

Many of you have written to me, apparently concerned about my attachment to these little yellow sticky notes, so I thought I owed you a bit of an explanation. When I first arrived in Sierra Leone, it took me a while to adjust to the challenges of power cuts, intermittent internet access and the many other things that just don't work. In our London office, I take it for granted that I can get multiple photocopies, access to working projectors and continuous power all without batting an eye-lid. In the week before I left for Sierra Leone, I attended an event at DFID where we even had multiple screens to video conference with international offices. So it really was like going from one extreme to another.

When prepping for and facilitating my first training workshop here, I must have spent a good half day fighting with photocopiers and printers that didn't work, power that kept going on and off and even marker pens that had dried up (happens quickly here). I had grand plans for fancy power-points and aesthetically pleasing hand-outs. But just about everything that could have gone wrong, did. I think that's when my love affair with post-its began. Don't get me wrong, it took me a while to find some good ones (the first lot didn't stick to anything, which kind of defeats the purpose) but now I am completely sold and I really don't know what I'd do without them.

So today I was back in the zone and able to satisfy my addiction with a stakeholder analysis and power mapping workshop. Just before I left for Tanzania, I did a half day workshop at the National Stadium to build our staff capacity for policy influence and advocacy work, and identify some of the main policy and practice issues affecting young people in Sierra Leone. So today was a follow-up from that, structured around one of those issues (the fact that private sector companies do not have youth-friendly recruitment policies and practices) to identify and analyse various stakeholders and brainstorm strategies to influence them and shape their policies and practices.

The next stage is now to turn all this information into an actual programme model and create an operational plan for the next 18 months. So that's what I'll be focusing on, working closely with the Programmes team over the next couple of weeks before I leave.

Quick update on ear. Went back to the hospital today and apparently it's still infected. I've been referred to an ENT specialist and have an appointment on Monday. In the meantime, I still can't hear anything in my right ear (which made today's workshop particularly challenging, much to everyone's amusement) and am keeping going with the antibiotics. Thanks for all your messages. It's not much fun being sick here.