Our time in Ranchi deserves a post all to itself. Maybe even
just for our adventures getting to and from our hotel and our training venue!
After returning from Goa, we had two days to prep for the following week’s
training in Ranchi, Jharkhand, and relax a little bit. My colleague Iggy from
our Washington office and I met our India office colleague, Vijay, on Sunday to
take the hour and 45 minute flight to Ranchi.
The state of Jharkhand has a population of 30 million
people! That’s the size of some countries! It’s rich in minerals and natural
resources. I packed more conservative clothing to wear (long pants and longer
sleeves) and upon boarding the plane, I looked all around…I was the only
Caucasian and one of maybe two women on the flight. Iggy, who is from Zimbabwe,
and I were quite the sight.
We arrived in Ranchi to conduct a three-and-a-half day
training in supply chain foundations for thirty Ministry of Health staff. I
won’t bore you with the content of our training…I thought it would be fun to
share some of the idiosyncrasies of conducting a training in a lower income
country. Ranchi proved to be quite the typical training adventure. Fortunately
Iggy and I are used to it and can roll with it. Here are a few of the perks of
training in this kind of environment:
- Power outages- At any moment your power could go. The venue where we were having the training did have a generator, but every time the power went, so did the A/C, fans and LCD projector. On average this probably happened maybe 8-10 times per training day. Iggy and I would just keep on facilitating the sessions in the dark. No one was really phased by any of it- so on we went.
- Do-it-yourself-electrical-work- Our training in Ranchi was the
first in my book where we almost had a fire under one of the tables due to
faulty electrical wiring. And that not the wiring of the outlet itself,
but the two wires of the extension cord that were plugged into the outlet.
Fortunately we heard and smelled the sparking before anything big came of
it! But check out our A/V set up:
- Ministerial big wigs coming in mid-session- India is a very hierarchical society and so when a Ministry Official (in our case the State Health Mission Director and Deputy Director) everyone stops what they are doing and stand up. Then he has the floor for however long he wants. This happened a few times during our short 3 day training, including on the last day where the Mission Director cold-called participants to give him a summary of each and every session we had led! Eeks!
- Starting sessions late...sometimes two hours late. The start
time of the first session of the first day of a training in many of these
countries is a crapshoot. For a 9:30 published start, our participants
rolled in between 10:15 and 11. We finally started at 11:00 a.m. For some participants just getting to
the training venue is an adventure in traffic. Take a look at Santosh, one
of our DELIVER State Advisors, who rides a motorbike to and from work to
weave between thick traffic. He’s even prepared with a full body slicker
to protect him from the rainy commutes!
Overall our training went really well. We oriented some key
stakeholders in Jharkhand to the basics of supply chain management for health
commodities. Here are a few pics of our venue and training adventures.
Now on to traffic in Ranchi. Iggy and I were just getting
used to the white knuckle experiences in Delhi and prolific use of the vehicle
horns. Well, little did we know it was actually worse in Ranchi! We drove each
morning from our hotel to the training venue- probably about a 20 minute drive
with minimal traffic. Traffic also included a wide variety of animals…cows, of
course, but also goats, lots of dogs, pigs, and maybe even a monkey. I wish I
could have captured a picture of the chaos! Picture cars, motorbikes,
tuck-tucks and bicyclists all on the narrow road with a few cows laying right in
the middle of the mess. These animals were also usually pawing through the
heaps of trash on the side of the road for their breakfast. We were so
surprised that the animals seemed so nonplussed by the traffic. Though one
morning we laughed as we saw a small goat kid hop up on a makeshift cement
median and looked like she was about to dive into oncoming traffic. We called
her the suicidal goat and kept an eye out for her every morning. Additionally the prolific use the horn was downright ridiculous. Iggy counted one day- 200 counts of use of horn by our driver. 200 in 20 minutes! And multiple that by all the cars, tuck tucks and motorbikes!!
Imagine being a pedestrian in all of that! Well, our first
night in town, Vijay, Iggy and I went for dinner at a small restaurant not far
from our hotel and got a little taste of
that. Vijay held my hand as we crossed the super busy street and took refuge
for a moment at a break in the fence separating the lanes. No pedestrians
having the right of way here. Eeks. My friend James warned me about this but
geesh. Seeing a dozen headlights of motorbikes, cars, and tuck tucks coming at
you definitely makes you move fast. We survived our journey to the restaurant
and braved the way back in the rain. Fortunately for me, I had Vijay as a
“protector” and hand-holder…though I’m pretty sure any one of those vehicles
could have taken us both out!
We returned back to Delhi on Thursday after our training
ended at lunch. Two more colleagues from DC arrived as reinforcements since I
was going back to the States that weekend. I’m jealous of the other states that
they will see…Uttarakhand, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh. India is so
incredibly diverse. More than I ever could have imagined. And I’ve just had one
small taste.
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