When I first told people that I was moving to Kosovo, the following reactions ensued:
- A look of surprise. Kosovo isn't exactly on anybody's radar when you're living and working in the Asia-Pacific region. I'm pretty sure most Australians wouldn't be able to name all the independent states that emerged from former Yugoslavia.
- Slight confusion. Why would you go there? Why indeed?
- Sudden concern. Is it safe? Most people associate Kosovo with the conflict in the late 90s.
In fact, when the opportunity presented itself, these were also my main reactions. Fortunately, my thoughts were along the lines of:
- I don't know anybody who's been there, so all the more reason to go. (This was also my reasoning for going to PNG. Twice.)
- As an Australian national in my 30s, it's pretty much my only chance to live and work in Europe.
- Finally, according to the Smartraveller website, travel in Kosovo requires a "High degree of caution". This puts it on the same level as Papua New Guinea, Myanmar, or Russia.
To be honest, I was a little apprehensive, and even stalled on making a final decision. I consulted a few friends who had been there, and the impression given by them was that it was "a bit of a shithole" (their words). However, in my travels in Laos, I encountered a development worker who had lived in Pristina, and she said that it was one of her favourite places in the Balkans, and the coffee was excellent. Furthermore, around that time, I read an article about the Most Beautiful Cinemas in the World, which included Dokufest - the International documentary festival - held in Prizren every year.
Good coffee and a documentary festival seemed like enough of an incentive to be flown across the world for a job. It would be my first foray into the thus-far undiscovered continent of Europe. I also knew that working for a high-profile international organisation would be excellent professional experience.
But mostly, I figured that this really was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and that I would regret passing it up.
So, I took it.
Sunday, 31 May 2015
Prepare for #blogjune 2015.
So, it's been a while since I've blogged. Not that this is a great surprise, as my level of discipline applied to such things has been pretty much non-existent.
But it's June. More specifically, it's #blogjune - where I will blog every day for a month.
Last year, #blogjune was a fantasticexcuse opportunity for me to reflect on my work and career, and put into writing many of my thoughts and ideas (some more eloquently than others). This in turn became the basis of much of the presentation that I delivered at the ALIA conference in September.
You can see the presentation below, but it won't make a lot of sense without having the words to go with it.
This year, my month of blogging will be quite different. It'll be a chance to recap the past six weeks, during which I've been living and working in the Balkans, and attempt to summarise my initial impressions, and attempt to make sense of it all. It will be interesting to look back on in a year or two from now and see how much my perspective changes through the years.
So... stay tuned!
But it's June. More specifically, it's #blogjune - where I will blog every day for a month.
Last year, #blogjune was a fantastic
You can see the presentation below, but it won't make a lot of sense without having the words to go with it.
This year, my month of blogging will be quite different. It'll be a chance to recap the past six weeks, during which I've been living and working in the Balkans, and attempt to summarise my initial impressions, and attempt to make sense of it all. It will be interesting to look back on in a year or two from now and see how much my perspective changes through the years.
So... stay tuned!
Monday, 20 April 2015
Let's do the time warp again...
My body is officially tired of me moving timezones. In the past few weeks, I have travelled from Hanoi (UTC +7:00) to Seoul (UTC +9:00) where I spent a little over a week. Two hour's difference weren't really noticeable, other than being able to stay up a bit later in the evening, which was useful for the purposes of social dancing and partaking in karaoke.
It was hardly noticeable stopping back in Hanoi for 24 hours, but that experience was semi-surreal in itself, going through all of the feels of making sense of the last 8 months of my life, and wondering if any of this meant anything anymore (see my previous post). Perhaps the two hours lost were subtly weighing on my emotional state, but I doubt it.
Then there was my whirlwind trip back to Melbourne (UTC +10:00), where I regained my two hours from Seoul, and added one more. But to be honest, the overnight flight via KLIA left me sleep-deprived enough to balance out the extra hours, which was then counterbalanced by the excellent Melbourne coffee that I had missed. Basically, it was five days of bouncing around town on a caffeine high, catching up with friends, swing dancing, and seeing comedy and arthouse films.
No, the fun times really began at 11:30pm on Monday night, where I departed on a 9.5 hour flight to Bangkok. This was me before I left. Excited and ready for adventure!
Of course, I am terrible at sleeping on planes, especially when they insist on serving dinner and drinks at 12:30am. But what could be worse than being an insomniac on a 9.5 hour flight? That's right, my in-flight entertainment screen was also malfunctioning, so I couldn't distract myself with awful films.
So, after 9.5 hours of failing to sleep more than 20 minutes at a time, I arrived in Bangkok (UTC +7:00), sleep-deprived and feeling slightly icky.
I also had five hours to kill at the international terminal. I was exhausted enough to manage an hour and a half of quality napping, even though it meant waking with an indent in my spine from the uncomfortable metal furniture. By the time I boarded my next flight, it was almost 11am local time.
Ten hours later, I arrived at Istanbul (UTC +3:00) it was 5pm, though in my brain, something didn't feel right. Maybe it was the fact that I'd experience 21 hours of daylight, and the sun still hadn't set. Or maybe it was the decision to indulge in a Hobbit marathon on my (working) in-flight entertaining, which certainly didn't make the time pass any quicker. However, there was one thing to do. That's right, eat Turkish ice-cream.
Two hours later, it was time to board my final flight. Fortunately, this flight would only last 1 hour and 40 minutes, and so it was time for my fifth in-flight meal for the "day", followed of drifting in and out of consciousness. I was fast asleep when the plane landed.
After 30 hours in-transit, I collected my luggage, and stepped into the arrivals hall of Pristina Airport, with no idea what time it was anymore.
It was hardly noticeable stopping back in Hanoi for 24 hours, but that experience was semi-surreal in itself, going through all of the feels of making sense of the last 8 months of my life, and wondering if any of this meant anything anymore (see my previous post). Perhaps the two hours lost were subtly weighing on my emotional state, but I doubt it.
Then there was my whirlwind trip back to Melbourne (UTC +10:00), where I regained my two hours from Seoul, and added one more. But to be honest, the overnight flight via KLIA left me sleep-deprived enough to balance out the extra hours, which was then counterbalanced by the excellent Melbourne coffee that I had missed. Basically, it was five days of bouncing around town on a caffeine high, catching up with friends, swing dancing, and seeing comedy and arthouse films.
No, the fun times really began at 11:30pm on Monday night, where I departed on a 9.5 hour flight to Bangkok. This was me before I left. Excited and ready for adventure!
Of course, I am terrible at sleeping on planes, especially when they insist on serving dinner and drinks at 12:30am. But what could be worse than being an insomniac on a 9.5 hour flight? That's right, my in-flight entertainment screen was also malfunctioning, so I couldn't distract myself with awful films.
So, after 9.5 hours of failing to sleep more than 20 minutes at a time, I arrived in Bangkok (UTC +7:00), sleep-deprived and feeling slightly icky.
I also had five hours to kill at the international terminal. I was exhausted enough to manage an hour and a half of quality napping, even though it meant waking with an indent in my spine from the uncomfortable metal furniture. By the time I boarded my next flight, it was almost 11am local time.
Ten hours later, I arrived at Istanbul (UTC +3:00) it was 5pm, though in my brain, something didn't feel right. Maybe it was the fact that I'd experience 21 hours of daylight, and the sun still hadn't set. Or maybe it was the decision to indulge in a Hobbit marathon on my (working) in-flight entertaining, which certainly didn't make the time pass any quicker. However, there was one thing to do. That's right, eat Turkish ice-cream.
Two hours later, it was time to board my final flight. Fortunately, this flight would only last 1 hour and 40 minutes, and so it was time for my fifth in-flight meal for the "day", followed of drifting in and out of consciousness. I was fast asleep when the plane landed.
After 30 hours in-transit, I collected my luggage, and stepped into the arrivals hall of Pristina Airport, with no idea what time it was anymore.
Tuesday, 14 April 2015
Homelessness and homesickness.
It's been quite a week.
Last Monday night, I packed my bags and headed off to Korea. I made new friends, explored new places, and learnt new things. I won't go into details, but I had a wonderful time, returning to the life of being a traveller.
And then I returned to Hanoi, and the reality of leaving tomorrow has finally sunk in. I am leaving the place that I have called home for the past eight and a half months. But I also realised that, in spite of all the awesome and challenging experiences that I've had here, it's never really been my home. I've met plenty of ex-pats who love it here, and don't have any immediate plans to leave. For them, it's become the place that they call home, and I envy this. I don't feel bad about leaving - I feel indifferent, and that makes me feel bad.
To be honest, I worry that I won't ever be able to call a place my home anymore. I've lost that feeling of belonging, and I'm about to embark on another extraordinary journey that will take me to new and interesting places, and the wonders and challenges that they will present to me. The knowledge that I'm unlikely to feel "settled" for at least a few more years scares me.
At the same time, I feel like I've been away from Melbourne for too long to ever feel like it's really my home anymore either. To be somewhere where I can just be comfortable being myself, and surrounded by people who "get" me. I do miss that, and crave it often - such is the nature of homesickness.
But maybe homesickness is like nostalgia - a yearning for something that isn't there anymore - and the best thing I can do is just to keep moving forward and build a new future for myself. Be the perpetual traveller, and don't settle, until the time is right for me.
Last Monday night, I packed my bags and headed off to Korea. I made new friends, explored new places, and learnt new things. I won't go into details, but I had a wonderful time, returning to the life of being a traveller.
And then I returned to Hanoi, and the reality of leaving tomorrow has finally sunk in. I am leaving the place that I have called home for the past eight and a half months. But I also realised that, in spite of all the awesome and challenging experiences that I've had here, it's never really been my home. I've met plenty of ex-pats who love it here, and don't have any immediate plans to leave. For them, it's become the place that they call home, and I envy this. I don't feel bad about leaving - I feel indifferent, and that makes me feel bad.
To be honest, I worry that I won't ever be able to call a place my home anymore. I've lost that feeling of belonging, and I'm about to embark on another extraordinary journey that will take me to new and interesting places, and the wonders and challenges that they will present to me. The knowledge that I'm unlikely to feel "settled" for at least a few more years scares me.
At the same time, I feel like I've been away from Melbourne for too long to ever feel like it's really my home anymore either. To be somewhere where I can just be comfortable being myself, and surrounded by people who "get" me. I do miss that, and crave it often - such is the nature of homesickness.
But maybe homesickness is like nostalgia - a yearning for something that isn't there anymore - and the best thing I can do is just to keep moving forward and build a new future for myself. Be the perpetual traveller, and don't settle, until the time is right for me.
Friday, 27 March 2015
On achievement...
The last post was definitely a bit of a downer, so before people start telling me that I'm being too harsh on myself, I should also add that just because I failed doesn't mean that I haven't had a sense of achievement. In the past eight months, I have:
- Learnt to read and hold basic conversations in Vietnamese.
- Confidently navigated the Hanoi traffic by pushbike on a daily basis.
- Learnt heaps about ethnic minorities in Vietnam and the many challenges that they face.
- Edited a whole bunch of English language documents.
- Designed and organised content for a newsletter and brochures, along with templates.
- Delivered a bunch of training and wrote accompanying notes and manuals.
- Improved the way that my organisation manages its knowledge and information, and facilitated public access to its data repository via the website.
- Travelled quite a bit.
- Made a lot of new friends.
Most importantly, I've managed to line up a new role which is a step up from where I am now, which is something. I'll be starting in about four weeks, but more about that later. Onward and upward...
- Learnt to read and hold basic conversations in Vietnamese.
- Confidently navigated the Hanoi traffic by pushbike on a daily basis.
- Learnt heaps about ethnic minorities in Vietnam and the many challenges that they face.
- Edited a whole bunch of English language documents.
- Designed and organised content for a newsletter and brochures, along with templates.
- Delivered a bunch of training and wrote accompanying notes and manuals.
- Improved the way that my organisation manages its knowledge and information, and facilitated public access to its data repository via the website.
- Travelled quite a bit.
- Made a lot of new friends.
Most importantly, I've managed to line up a new role which is a step up from where I am now, which is something. I'll be starting in about four weeks, but more about that later. Onward and upward...
Thursday, 26 March 2015
On failure.
Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans...
Next week, I will be finishing up in my role here in Hanoi. It will have been over eight months since I commenced what should have been an eighteen-month role - with scope to extend, if possible.
I knew within three months of starting that I wouldn't be staying for my full term. This was for a number of reasons, but it became quite clear to me that there was a distinct gap between what my organisation wanted to achieve through my position, and my professional experience, knowledge and abilities. And then there are all the other challenges that come with working in international development, such as language and cultural barriers, and the availability of counterpart staff.
Of course, the reality of development work is that one should leave one's expectations at the door, and for the better part, I have done this. It didn't take long to realise that my supervisor didn't really understand the duties and outcomes that were listed in the role descriptions, and nor did I. So, it was clear to me that failure was already inevitable - at least in terms of achieving the prescribed outcomes.
However, this also prompted the opportunity to take a few months to monitor staff activities, and constantly ask questions, in order to understand exactly what it was that my organisation did, who their stakeholders and clients were, what their information and knowledge needs were, and the kinds of services and products we could deliver in order to meet those needs. As fundamental information and knowledge management practice, this was an excellent opportunity to scope the landscape and document my findings, with a comprehensive powerpoint presentation and list of proposed projects to develop over the following fifteen months.
But the other important thing about development work is that it's not about me. It's about the organisation, and whilst my role is to advise, they are the ones who ultimately make the decisions. As as important as my proposals were to me, there are people suffering from extreme poverty, poor sanitation and farming techniques, deforestation, and the social impact of being a disempowered ethnic minority. That's at the heart of the organisation's work, and being as under-resourced as they are, the focus of most of their energy is in the field at the grass-roots level.The fact is that whilst the activities that I propose would definitely add value to the organisation, they are not as important as the ever-arising immediate issues that the organisation faces.
This is something I must always remind myself - it's not about me, or my work. I am not necessary in the same way that other staff are. If anything, I'm often a burden, requiring a counterpart to act as translator and facilitator for my work. That's not to say that what I have to offer isn't appreciated - it absolutely is, and every contribution I give is warmly received. However, as a change agent, I feel like a failure. Even though I understand that change is a slow process, I need to first be able to see the scope for change - a commitment to achieve common outcomes as a team.
The problem is that, as much as I intended to suspend any expectations of the role, I still had the expectation of myself that I would have some quantifiable achievements to show for my time here. I can confidently say that I've done a lot of good work here, and helped where I can. To use that cliche, I've made a difference. But the reality is also that I am simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. I am taking the place of somebody else who, with the right skills and knowledge, can be the change agent that I have failed to be.
So, I've already persisted longer than numerous friends and peers have advised me, but I'm stubborn like that - unwilling to accept failure. Perhaps the best lesson learnt here has been to know when it's time to accept it and move on. That time is now.
Next week, I will be finishing up in my role here in Hanoi. It will have been over eight months since I commenced what should have been an eighteen-month role - with scope to extend, if possible.
I knew within three months of starting that I wouldn't be staying for my full term. This was for a number of reasons, but it became quite clear to me that there was a distinct gap between what my organisation wanted to achieve through my position, and my professional experience, knowledge and abilities. And then there are all the other challenges that come with working in international development, such as language and cultural barriers, and the availability of counterpart staff.
Of course, the reality of development work is that one should leave one's expectations at the door, and for the better part, I have done this. It didn't take long to realise that my supervisor didn't really understand the duties and outcomes that were listed in the role descriptions, and nor did I. So, it was clear to me that failure was already inevitable - at least in terms of achieving the prescribed outcomes.
However, this also prompted the opportunity to take a few months to monitor staff activities, and constantly ask questions, in order to understand exactly what it was that my organisation did, who their stakeholders and clients were, what their information and knowledge needs were, and the kinds of services and products we could deliver in order to meet those needs. As fundamental information and knowledge management practice, this was an excellent opportunity to scope the landscape and document my findings, with a comprehensive powerpoint presentation and list of proposed projects to develop over the following fifteen months.
But the other important thing about development work is that it's not about me. It's about the organisation, and whilst my role is to advise, they are the ones who ultimately make the decisions. As as important as my proposals were to me, there are people suffering from extreme poverty, poor sanitation and farming techniques, deforestation, and the social impact of being a disempowered ethnic minority. That's at the heart of the organisation's work, and being as under-resourced as they are, the focus of most of their energy is in the field at the grass-roots level.The fact is that whilst the activities that I propose would definitely add value to the organisation, they are not as important as the ever-arising immediate issues that the organisation faces.
This is something I must always remind myself - it's not about me, or my work. I am not necessary in the same way that other staff are. If anything, I'm often a burden, requiring a counterpart to act as translator and facilitator for my work. That's not to say that what I have to offer isn't appreciated - it absolutely is, and every contribution I give is warmly received. However, as a change agent, I feel like a failure. Even though I understand that change is a slow process, I need to first be able to see the scope for change - a commitment to achieve common outcomes as a team.
The problem is that, as much as I intended to suspend any expectations of the role, I still had the expectation of myself that I would have some quantifiable achievements to show for my time here. I can confidently say that I've done a lot of good work here, and helped where I can. To use that cliche, I've made a difference. But the reality is also that I am simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. I am taking the place of somebody else who, with the right skills and knowledge, can be the change agent that I have failed to be.
So, I've already persisted longer than numerous friends and peers have advised me, but I'm stubborn like that - unwilling to accept failure. Perhaps the best lesson learnt here has been to know when it's time to accept it and move on. That time is now.
Wednesday, 31 December 2014
2014: the Year of Making Life Difficult for Myself.
For me, 2014 has been a challenging year - no doubt about
it. It's been a year of taking risks, pushing boundaries, and taking myself far
beyond my comfort zone, both personally and professionally. It's been a year of achievements, but also about
discovering limitations, and coming to terms with them. They've been
valuable learning experiences, if frustrating and discouraging, but I have no
regrets.
And so, next year, things are going to be a bit different.
It's going to be a year of refocusing on my personal strengths. Return to my
comfort zone, and concentrate on being awesome at the things that I am experienced
and passionate about.
So, here's a list of my personal goals, as one does on New Year's Eve:
1. Reconnect with the literary world. Don't just read books
- share my experiences with other readers, attend literary festivals, get back
in touch with those who I've lost contact with in the past couple of years.
2. Reconnect with the library and information industry. Put
aside some time every week to read blogs and articles and reflect on what the
real issues of the moment are.
3. Write. Write, write, write. Stop thinking and planning,
and just write. Especially performance material. I only wrote one thing this year,
and it was awesome. Next year, I will write a whole new show (which I have already started planning). There, I said it. Now you have to hold me to it.
4. Perform more. Whether it's karaoke, or finding an open
mic night, get back out there.
5. Dance more. I've got YouTube and floor space at home, so
use it. Go to exchanges and workshops and keep learning.
6. Travel more. Because I can. Because I should. Because the
whole world is out there.
7. Make real plans for the future. Yes, serendipity is all
well and good, and it's given me some wonderful opportunities to experience new
things, but now it's time to get back down to earth.
8. Be kind to myself. I am often my own worst critic, but
rarely my best advocate. I need to be both.
2015 will be the Year of Being Awesome.
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