Recruiting up-line
on Freetown Blog (Sierra Leone), 02/Apr/2010 13:22, 34 days ago
It was good to get out of the hot-house of  the Ministry yesterday and come here to Bo to help the team who have been touring the regions to recruit new staff. The recruits are mostly people who are qualified and already working as 'volunteers'. By reporting for work, nurses can benefit from income from informal user charges, although they are not on the payroll (with salaries so low, and the recruitment process so long, many didn't bother to apply).We arrived at 9.30am after a 3 hour drive from Freetown to be greeted by long queues of candidates outside the District Medical Office. The process involves checking qualifications, getting medical clearance, registering bank details, getting photographed and finger-printed, getting appointment letters and registering acceptance. How easy that sounds! 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 well over 70. 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.