"Out of Office"

A beautiful mosque in the mountains.

Last week brought some welcome diversions from my desk, both work-related and ‘extracurricular’. Mid-week, I accompanied the director of our Middle East office and some visitors on a tour of some of the off-site service facilities that handle all the laundry and sterilization systems for Dubai’s hospitals. A major operation that is integral to patient care that certainly doesn’t get a lot of air time... interesting to follow the system from the plant processing to delivery at the patient’s bedside in the Trauma Centre. Lots of opportunities for Six Sigma projects and ‘crashing’ of network diagrams there... my operations class started flooding back to me! The tour also brought back strong memories of my visits to textile factories and breweries in Tanzania when I was showcasing the local infrastructure capacity to a representative from Danone and the Grameen Bank. It’s always astounding to see the scale of the work done in these facilities, certainly making me much more appreciative of the final products produced for my consumption.

Kelly and I at Chi, a new Dubai 'hot spot'.

I spent all of Thursday afternoon at the Trauma Centre, where I was afforded a private audience with the Canadian Hospital Director, who has an incredibly impressive C.V. with management experience across Canada and the Middle East. We discussed some of the challenges currently being addressed at the hospital related to quality management, personnel, change management, and implementation of the hospital’s strategic plan. An incredibly interesting discussion that was peppered with input from the company’s HR manager; the discussion eventually turned to challenges unique to management in the Middle East, which I’ll save for its own blog entry.

Off-roading!

My weekend plans to off-road and camp with the teachers across the border in Oman were thwarted by H1N1, or at least a closely related sister virus... thankfully, I wasn’t the victim of the flu, but the South African Tarzan/G.I. Joe/man-of-off-roading-legend who had taken responsibility for planning the camping trip (i.e. planning a packed itinerary of hiking and wadi swimming, plotting the non-marked roads that would lead us to the best viewpoints etc.) came down with a horrible flu and the trip was nearly cancelled.

Fujairah's local wildlife...

Thankfully, another couple stepped up at the last minute to spearhead an abbreviated version of the camping trip, so I set off as one of a group of eight Canadians (a bit of a fluke that it was such a homogenous group) driving up to the Emirate of Fujairah to camp in the mountains. We drove out of town, watching out the windows as construction sites melted into untamed sand dunes, patrolled by wild camels. Eventually, the landscape started growing vertically into rugged mountain ranges, which we promptly pulled the 4x4s into to start off-roading.

Sharon, dwarfed against the mountains.

After a couple hours spent bumping over boulders (everyone in two newly purchased Jeeps and one new Durango), we arrived at an isolated pitch of land surrounded by the hills. Not a ton of wildlife to contend with in the desert, save a few hundred flies who found us as soon as we turned off the main road, a couple hawks, and one lonely donkey who I found munching on leftovers off our dinner table when I woke up in the morning. All in all, a very welcome respite from the city with a great group of Canucks... complete with campfires, barbeques, and summery night skies. Not bad for the last days of October!

Megan, Sharon and I.