Working in Angola with Express Support Services

By Sandra Lunn,

I have just spent five weeks working in Angola with the Express Support Services (ESS) team to train their staff.   The workforce of Express is 94% Angolan.  A project like this has never been undertaken in Angola and it is the intention to get all 2500 staff a qualification over the next 4 years commencing with Certificate I in Hospitality.   Due to an intense civil war from 1975 to 2002 a lot of Angolans have little or no education.

Angola, officially the Republic of Angola, is a country in Africa bordered by Namibia on the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the north and Zambia on the east; its west coast is on the Atlantic Ocean with Luanda as its capital city. Cabinda (northern Angolan province) has a border with the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Angola was a Portuguese colony from the 16th century to 1975. The country has vast mineral, oil and gas reserves.  Angola is remote and undiscovered with little or no tourism.  It is an eye opener with extreme poverty, corruption, poor infrastructure and is incredibly expensive (in Luanda four tomatoes were $US24 and a rockmelon $US80).

I worked in two sites in Angola: Soyo and Malongo (Cabinda) staying in the ALNG (Angola Liquid Natural Gas) camp in Soyo and Chevron camp in Malongo. I also managed to fly via helicopter to an oil rig 70 kilometres off the coast of Angola and Congo.  The travel door to door, between Soyo and Malongo was about 5 – 6 hours but only a 12 minute flight.  As Cabinda is landlocked you can only fly in and out.  It can be a very frustrating process going through security to get in and out of the camps and airports.  The Soyo camp at capacity has 6000 residents, coming from 54 nationalities and 1200 Express staff.  The Malongo camp has 1500 residents and 1098 (including 617 sub-contracted) Express staff.  There is also about 350 staff based in the capital Luanda and off shore on the oil rigs.

Working with the Housekeeping teams across both sites was both fascinating and challenging, due mainly to the language barrier and cultural differences.  Staff are very grateful to have a job.  This is a breakdown of both sites Housekeeping departments:

Soyo

Approximately 291 staff including management and:

• 175 cleaners
  • 91 laundry attendants

Approximately 6,500 beds (6,552) divided into blocks:

• A Block (for visitors and senior managers) – 11 blocks x 24 rooms = 264 rooms. 1 person rooms with private bathroom
• B Block (for managers) – 11 blocks x 48 rooms = 528 rooms. 1 person rooms with shared bathroom
• C Block (for supervisors and foremen) – 16 blocks x 24 rooms = 384 rooms. 2 person rooms with bathroom.  Total capacity of 768 persons
• D Block (for all other workers) – 39 blocks x 32 rooms equals 1,248 rooms. 4 person rooms with communal bathroom. Total capacity of 4,992 persons.

Laundry department consists of:

• 3 x 24 hour laundries in camp
• Clean 30 tonnes of laundry per week

Laundry services for camp including:

• Laundry of client and staff items (3kg per person) on designated days and will depend on which block you stay in
• VIP’s and visitors have daily laundry service where it is picked up from your room around 7am and delivered back same day

Malongo

Accommodation Services has approximately 112 staff including 90 cleaners who clean external and off shore sites

118 cleaners (on site) with approximately 35 cleaning staff used on a daily basis to clean 1,510 beds

Laundry has approximately 55 staff including 51 laundry staff

98 janitorial staff that are used to perform general cleaning duties

Malongo camp is full of monkeys and you have to be careful not to leave food out or have things hanging around your neck as they will take them.  They are all over the camp.  There was a lot of wildlife in this camp such as impala, wild dogs, snakes (cobra and black mamba) and cats.  There is also the largest colony of bats in the world in the camp and it is phenomenal to see the damage they have caused to the trees.  You have to be very careful not to be bitten by monkeys, cats or bats and other animals due to many diseases especially rabies.

The cleaning performed is of a high standard.  The rooms are very basic but spotlessly clean.  The American clients are very pedantic about standards with beds to be made to exact measurements. In Soyo the room cleaners use no trolleys, work in extreme heat in summer and have to carry some supplies up steep stairwells and with no cover.  In rainy season there are very heavy rains which cause issues with mud and just getting around the camp, which is not sheltered apart from inside the buildings.  They work in teams in each block so tend to leave their cleaning supplies on the landing half way up the stairwell.  The clients only have Sunday off so are generally out of their rooms by 5am each day.  Each block has bed linen change days where they place a large trolley outside the block for dirty linen collection.

All client clothing that gets processed through the laundry is individually tagged with a number and your items are placed in a bag that has your room number.  They have a staff member that looks after the pickup, processing and delivery for a block.  I was staying in A block and in one day the A block laundry processed around 4000 items of clothing.

Some of the challenges Express face is cultural with women in their communities carrying everything on their heads.  The company has strict OHS policies with manual handling and will not allow this practice.  So the company has ongoing training programs and tries to educate their staff on safe work practices.  The issue is that carrying everything on their head is natural to them and when they go home each day this is what they do.  I saw many cleaning staff carrying all sorts of different things on their heads.  The most unusual was a packet of 100 toilet rolls which was perfectly balanced on a ladies head.  Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture in time.   In the laundry women have a more traditional role with them doing the ironing where men tend to do the heavy lifting.  In rooms again women tend to do the cleaning where men do the more heavy tasks or have senior roles.

The Angolans learn best using music and dance as this is an important part of their daily lives.  Express hold a safety workshop, with a selected topic, once a month where they ask all staff and they encourage community attendance.  Everyone gets a can of Coke on entrance and it is like walking into a night club with music blaring.  The topic when I was there was personal hygiene.  It was nothing like I have seen before where the Express OHS team start with a song that they have written called “Safety, Safety, Safety Number One”.  Everyone knew the words and everyone was dancing and singing.  Then they do a 10 minute play and then there is more music and safety and employee awards are handed out.  It was a big deal to win an award where there were big celebrations.  There were about 350 people there all laughing, dancing and singing.  It was wonderful, very motivational and that song is still in my head.

This was an amazing experience and one that I will never forget.  I met some lovely people, saw some amazing sites, ate interesting food like kudu and impala and I was looked after incredibly well by everyone.  We had a little saying over there “TIA TIA”.  When things didn’t quite work as we wanted them to, which often happens in Angola, we would just say “TIA, TIA: this is Angola, this is Africa”.  It somehow made it okay.

First published in the Executive Housekeeper Magazine and reprinted with permission from Sandra Lunn.