FAO Low

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FAO Low

How delicate of me to use the FAO color as background

When you are an International Civil Servant, your status is immense.

You are entitled to a car with CD plates, you get tax free gas tickets, you can buy item in the Commissary Tax free.

Working conditions are optimal.

You are usually a desk Officer which is a phrase which is much misleading, as it give the impression that you have a desk, while in fact you have half a desk.

Originally, when the FAO was created, Officers had huge Offices which, time going, were divided, subdivided.

If on you CV you could give your body measures and show that you were very slim, your chances of getting half a desk were much increased.

Secretaries used to have their own Offices which were divides, subdivides, found conveniently for the copying machine, for the computers, for the storing cupboards, as a result, secretaries became typists, cramped typists. As a result, junior Slave Officers became Secretaries. As a result, seasoned Officers, became Junior Officers

You have two types of Officers in the FAO Main Office.

Directors of all kind.

Technical Officers

Slaves of all kind that do not count as Officers. I started as low level slave.

Little by little, as a desk Officer, receiving each day reports from a country and projects, even if you were at the start famous for not being able to indicate the geographical location of Lusaka, you become a knowledgeable Officer, knowledgeable Officer of Zambia, its policies, its politics, its habits.

After two or more years, even a low level Officer, when running his Desk has a plan. He has made friends in the country, he has made friends with other low level Officers both at FAO and in the Country, you know what can be done, what cannot be done and what should not be done.

The problem of being a low level Officer (below the level of Professional Level Four) is that you have a boss. This boss, by the virtue of being your boss is convinced that he knows much more about the country, project, people, than you do.

So you end up managing two very difficult children, one being the Project which you must protect from all those who want to pinch its funds at each fund scarcity period (every second month) and the Boss which is really the worst problem.

Some low level courage Officer waited for the Boss to be on leave, on vacation, on a seminar, on a trip, to get all the papers signed by the acting Officer who at least had the virtue of acknowledging that he knew nothing at all.

If your heart was full of courage, you learned to manage a boss. It is not that difficult, in my case I had been trained by my father and my mother so it was like swimming for a fish, swimming in molasses.

Above Directors you have another strata, VIPs that had been nominated by their Governments, either because they were so troublesome that it was the easiest way to get red of them, or because they had lost an election at home, or they had been preferred another candidate by their own party. As a result these very exalted personages were bitter (and rich).

These personnages had a strange physical defect, they could only look upwards;

At the top you find the General Director. To indicate how High a General Director is, his signature is never followed by any title as the whole world is expected to know who he is.

We, very low level officers, were like these fishs swimming in the depth of the Ocean, without never seing daylight, one wondering how they can survive and on what they survive.

At our level, the noises and movements made by theExalted Persons were of no and total indifference, our only hope being that they would not get into their mind to come and meddle into the affaires we were running from our desk.

They would suddenly come and meddle, like a hurricane hitting the American East Coast, when they got into their head to make a diplomatic tour and visit all potential electors for the next elections or for the allocation of the annual budget.

A political Tour is not a very difficult exercise. The General Director and the Sub General Director (his worst enemy) and all kind of other Directors would visit very Influential Persons in the voting countries. When received by the VIPs, some junior officer would take aside some junior officer from the venue of the Director General and point out the worries of the President about his nephew, his daughter, the Minister he wanted to sack, and the deal was made.

The General Officer would also visit the Field Staff Officers. Her I am going to surprise you when listing the complaints of the Field Officers: You would never have guessed that they would point out that:

They were underpaid

Their Rent allocation was too low

Their Home travel was too infrequent.

Their use of the Duty Vehicle was too limited.

It would be appreciated if the Provincial Governors stopped pinching the duty vehicles every time they had to travel to the Capital or to see their second desk.

The Project was excellent thanks to their devotion to it but would even be better if Head Quarters could take less than a year to unfreeze the annual funds and if the General Director could kindly point out to the local authorities that these funds were not to be considered as some kind of personal revenue for them.

But, except the interferences from these Very High Placed Super Gods, running a project was not too difficult.

I greatly enjoyed the hunt for funds even if the game was getting scarcer and scarcer and you had to write one hundred letters and meet ten Funding Agencies were previoulsy ten letters and two funding Agencies was satisfactory. The bad part of it is that some idiot got into his mind, if he had any, that they had a right to demand what we had done with the funds entrusted to us.