Work in Ethiopia

Evening comes –and Ethiopia is close enough to the equator so that it falls basically at the same time all year around– and there is a general move to head out the door led by the kids from the family homes where we’ll be eating dinner. Feeding us is evidently part of The Mom’s job description, and all of us foreigners who work here are grateful. It gives us a chance to sample the various every day dishes served at Ethiopian family tables and meet the people served by the Selamta Family Project.

Days are punctuated by the Muslim calls to prayer at 5am or so, then the smell of coffee (coffee and breakfast has been my adopted community contribution.) We’re working on the boiled camp coffee model– no fancy electric coffee makers here. That would be something of an affront– coffee here is made starting with green coffee beans, roasting them (in the family homes, on an open brazier), grinding them, and THEN boiling the grounds in a special coffee pot. Our camp coffee, while humble, is still culturally respectful.

Then Cori O’Brien Paluk and I start on our Salesforce work. She loves Trailhead, the innovative Salesforce training program, and has been working with two members of the staff here, Ethiopian Director Abel Solomon and Assistant Director Dureti Dede, to get them into Trailhead and working on their badges.

We spent the first couple of days listening to everybody involved about what they want Salesforce to do for them, and trying to get a feel for why the database has not been as intimate a part of their lives as the architects of their Salesforce had hoped and expected. Ah, user adoption! The very words strike fear in the hearts of System Administrators over the world. If nobody’s using the database, somebody might start wondering, “Why did we spend time, lots of energy and MONEY to get it done?”

We found lots of enthusiasm on the staff for Salesforce, though some told us they felt a bit intimidated by it, didn’t really know where to go to find what they needed, and have slipped back into tracking their information through spreadsheets.  The requirement to create a chatter post for every field update was daunting them (and we never did find out exactly why they thought they had to do that. Imagine the extra work!)

We did get a clear request for two kinds of systems that would support their mission and their programs. The Nonprofit Starter Pack in Salesforce is mainly focused on fundraising for nonprofits, and the Executive Director, Marisa Stam (here at the same time with us and with her lovely 11-year-old smart-as-a-whip daughter Lily) is keen to use it for that. But first and foremost, they want to be able to better follow their Forever Family kids and their Outreach kids– the idea here is to provide a stable home, prepare them, and then get them into good schools, give them the space to aim high for themselves and their country, and guide them toward realizing their dreams.

We began work on a comprehensive student tracking system. They will log the academic results of each child in a separate object. They already have the young people in the system, as well as getting a collection of “SMART goals”– long-term and short term goals that the kids set themselves and then work toward achieving. Now they will need to upload their student grades each semester.

We have also set up a health care tracking system. This was the most challenging because the Selamta clinic nurse has been keeping all the information about her visits with the children, the referrals to doctors and hospitals in a spiral notebook, on a light card-weight sheet and in notes on paper. We have scheduled a training with the nurse on Thursday, and are hoping that we can begin to ease her journey away from scraps of paper to a formal health care tracking system.

The Ethiopian Director wanted to know much more about reporting…he wanted to learn to better create the reports he wants, and has been thrilled with the Perkins Method (I just made that up!) of dealing with developing country issues — especially in the nonprofit sector– of intermittent internet and electricity blackouts.

The Perkins Method involves working with the staff to fashion templates in Excel that have all the contacts with their Salesforce IDs AND all the fields that are on the Salesforce pages they want to update. Once we get this working, we’ll teach them about an application called Apsona, which works within Salesforce to make importing data incredibly easy.

We’ve simplified and streamlined the data collection and import. This makes the process of getting the information that the staff and administration and donors — just everybody! — needs so much more likely to happen.  Instead of taking away the spreadsheets, we aim to tame them for our Salesforce purposes.

The soft Ethiopian air wafts into my office (shared with the Selamta Ambassador who’s been coaching the kids in taking the SATs for application to American colleges.) Because we’re at 7500 feet here, it’s Africa, but a cooler, fresher version.

I’ve still got a to-do list about a mile long…We have office staff in tomorrow and Friday, and then they go off to their family lives on the weekend. Our team will board a bus and go down to Awasa on the shores of Lake Awasa in the Great Rift Valley.  From this video, it looks like a city with wide streets and a kind of laid-back beauty.

Especially since our visit to the National Museum, we never forget this is the probable birthplace of Homo Sapiens, our people.  There is something awe-inspiring about being here, and also about being here doing this humble little task: building a Salesforce database and providing training for a nonprofit that works to build and support families and kids at risk of ending up on the street.