Archives de catégorie : Outlook

Sunday morning thoughts

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(This will probably be a rambling blog post following my train of thoughts this morning.)

It’s interesting to look back and think about how we ended up where we ended up. I was just reading my Kindle (a chapter on Ugandan authoritarianism and aid, co-written as it happens, by my master’s thesis supervisor. Yesterday I was thinking about the 11 years since I was at Oxford after seeing matriculation photos of a friend from Freetown who just started a masters there, choosing St Antony’s on my recommendation. I bought the book on aid after reading a review on the LSE Africa blog), switching on the wifi to download my latest book purchase, ‘The Places in Between’ by Rory Stewart.

I’d bought Stewart’s book after reading a blog post by Owen Barder on an event/discussion he’d held with Rory Stewart who is apparently now a minister in the new UK Government. I’d looked up Stewart’s profile on Wikipedia, as I like to see how interesting people get to where they are (perhaps to confirm my suspicions that it’s often a privileged path to the top), and I saw that he’d written a bestselling book about walking across Afghanistan (well from Herat to Kabul). That provoked two thoughts – firstly that in 2014 I was in Herat and Kabul, and that I’d been rather intrigued by the area in between, though sadly a planned trip had fallen through (I think principally because of heavy snow). Secondly, I recall reading a review in the Sunday Times when Stewart’s book came out, which must be over a decade ago, and I’d filed it in my brain as a book I’d like to read sometime.

Some time in my early teens, our family started to get the Sunday Times. I actually have no idea why this happened, but it quickly became a Sunday tradition after church, and each of us would have our favourite parts. It may have been that the first time we ever bought the paper was while on holiday in Switzerland, to get some news of back home, though this could be wrong. I was probably more thorough than most in flicking through every single part (job adverts aside), but my particular favourite bit was the book reviews (which later became a ‘Culture’ section as the paper grew exponentially in size and cost over the years). This led directly to my first book purchases on Amazon, which if my memory serves me correctly were a travel book (by another Stewart (Stanley) about riding across Mongolia on horseback. I recently recommended this book to a British colleague working in our Nigeria office who in August was riding across Mongolia on horseback) and Ryszard Kapuscinki’s Shadow of the Sun, a memoir of the Polish journalist’s time in Africa.

(The days before Amazon were distinctly odd. In my early teens I had an interest in the history of the Spanish Main after many hours spent playing ‘Pirates’ on our Amiga computer. I remember going to our local bookshop, and saying I wanted to buy a book on pirates. The old man fired up the computer and had some odd black and green database which showed up books with the word ‘Pirates’ in them. We chose one and ordered, though we can have had very little idea on whether the book was suitable. I don’t recall being too impressed by it. The two other books pre-Amazon I remember buying were a massive chronicle of the Second World War, which I received as a school prize giving gift (I had to combine several book vouchers from different prizes), and a book called ‘Darwin on Trial’ from an early flirtation with anti-evolution theory. The bookshop has long since closed.)

Shadow of the Sun is one of the books I think of when I wonder how I got this fixation with becoming a journalist in Africa (I read a blog post by ex BBC Angola correspondent Lara Pawson on this theme yesterday). Foreign correspondents often come from families with former colonial district commissioners, just like writers often come from academic/teacher/writer parents. In my case, it was a long time before I met an actual journalist or writer, so I think the encounter with Kapuscinski’s writings was formative. Other elements that I think pushed me in this direction were a Swiss friend I very much admired, who once suggested that he would give up teaching and do missionary work and freelance journalism in Africa (he did the former, I did the latter). I also knew from career books that journalism was one of the things that history graduates did after leaving university (the other main choice seemed to be teaching).

But I also think back to the odd sudden arrival of the Sunday Times in our lives, which actually later expanded into receiving The Times every day of the week (I think we got some extraordinary price for the paper through a mail offer). For several years, I would read the paper cover to cover after getting back from school. It must have pushed me to expand my horizons. Coincidentally this morning I had breakfast to a Tim Ferris podcast in which he was giving advice to parents that in their mid-teens, children would really benefit from becoming better at reading, good writing and public speaking – skills that pay off later on in almost every area of life.

Ramble over.

Back in Freetown

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Over the last few months, a lot of my expat friends on returning to Freetown from vacations have said with a sigh that it was difficult to get back on the plane and return. For my part, there was a part of me that stepped on the plane yesterday with a spring in the step. Considering I was leaving behind a two week old son and a delightful 21 month old daughter, that may seem a bit perverse, but for the time being Freetown is home in a way that not many other places are for me – we have a family house, a car, space, good internet etc.

Related to this, I remember speaking to a retired UN friend of mine who spent several years in non-family postings. He told me a few months back that he used to find it quite hard adjusting to life with his family in Nairobi during return trips. Suddenly there were responsibilities and family needs, when before he had plenty of personal time, and few jobs outside of work. There can be a certain claustrophobic-ness in suddenly landing in a space with loved ones, babies to look after, and little time to pick up a book. When you do this in a small packed flat, the feeling is increased.

But life without family loses much of the colour – and it becomes a life largely revolving around being the master of your own free time. I’m determined though to avoid a non-family duty station in future at almost all cost.

Depends how you look at it

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I had a feeling it’d be one of those days, and that’s kind of how it turned out. The fact that we had a major donor proposal due to be submitted by 5pm today rather spoiled my weekend. To start the last minute work on bringing all the contributions together, I skipped the morning exercises and left for the office at 615am. This involved going under the bonnet, as the car battery had been left disconnected overnight, as I seem to have an electrical issue with the car which is draining power.

Work was intense – seeking last minute contributions, working to a looming deadline that couldn’t be shifted, while at the same time fending off several really important things that will have to wait till tomorrow. At the same time, due to my issues waiting for a US visa waiver (I’m due to travel on 30 August, I applied for a visa waiver on 11 August, but everytime I visit the website it says ‘Authorisation pending’ promising a result in 72 hours after application), I’m rushing through an application for a standard visa at the local embassy. A guy who helps me out, Lamin, was at the bank first thing to pay the visa fee (you have to pay cash at the bank and get a receipt). After three hours queuing, they told him that he needed my passport, which he came to get. After three more hours queuing, the told him he needed my application receipt. As I explained on the telephone to the man, none of this information was detailed on the website explaining how to pay the fee. At least they accepted a photo sent via Whatsapp.

Work finished late, I squeezed a session in the gym, and then on the way back from work my car lost all power, and came to a stop just as night fell, about 200m from the office. The car was supposed to go to the garage today to fix a probable alternator problem, but it didn’t because my friend was tied up at the bank on the aforementioned duty. I sat for 20 minutes on an unlit street waiting for help, with the added bonus of having taken the electric window down to handover an office key, and not being able to get it back up when the power failed. Mosquitoes are not my favourite creatures.

So an expectedly bad day. But there were some bright spots. I was trying to remind myself all day that these momentary dramas quickly lose their stress after a few weeks. In the scheme of things, they don’t amount to very much. In fact something similar was said on a podcast I was listening to this evening.

The other positives:

– After all that stress, the day is over, and here I am in a comfortable house, with electricity, and the chance to write down these things down. Even if I got home late, I still have a good hour of free time before bed.

– I’ll write a blog post soon on ‘right hand men’, but Lamin was really the hero of the day – he spent a rotten day queuing at the bank, and then rescued me this evening – swapping batteries so that my car could be deposited in the work car park and arranging a taxi to take me home.

– At the gym, I was alone with the new gym instructor, so he led me through a one-on-one training session. My shoulder injury from May still doesn’t allow much weight lifting but it’s slowly healing. The session made me feel good about my fitness and core strength.

– When the car broke down, I was not far from the gate, so I asked one of our security guards to sit with me while I waited for my rescue. We had a nice conversation, including him telling me about his plans to study economics at university. He didn’t know a huge amount about the subject, so I took him through a basic explanation of the demand curve. It takes a car break down for me to have a proper conversation with someone I see almost every day and get to know his life story, dreams and struggles.

– The taxi that took me back home, stopping for fuel at the local petrol station at a busy junction I pass everyday. I realise now that I miss West African taxi rides – it’s one of the things you no longer have in your life when you own a car. You get to observe so much more – the main thing is not having to drive and concentrate on the wild driving. But there’s also the fact that the windows are down (no air conditioning) so you feel closer to things. A busy West African junction is always full of interest, even at night.

So, light and dark today, and one person’s drama, is another’s refreshing life experience.

Becoming

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I mentally pulled myself up short this week in a meeting at work, when I realised how much I behave like my dad. I can’t really remember ever being in a meeting with my dad, but perhaps we pick up more than we realise through osmosis. My dad could have a reputation of being ‘the difficult’ one in business meetings, by which I mean, asking the awkward question, taking singular stands, trying to be the practical one, but sometimes getting people’s backs up.

I can’t say I’m all of those things (or perhaps I like to think higher of myself than I deserve and cherry pick the more positive elements). Certainly, I often find myself being the one who calls for realism, practicality, and is fond of asking the bigger questions, particularly if something is really worth all the effort, or might be hindering our ultimate objective.

I wonder if it’s something that’s come to me through nature or nurture. Or perhaps, it’s simply a role I’m playing. This afternoon I was reading a book about team meetings, which talked about the different ‘games’ (or roles) that people play in meetings – the peacemaker, the encourager, the initiator, the humorist, the onlooker, the side-tracker, the monopolizer, etc. Maybe, I’m play-acting the role of my dad.

 

Drinking cultures

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For reasons that will be explained in another blog post, I’ve suddenly got quite a bit more free time on my hands, which has given me the chance to head out for drinks with some of my male colleagues on Fridays. It leaves me again reflecting on the role of alcohol and drinking.

Firstly beer. I can’t say I’ve ever enjoyed drinking beer and so I only do so very occasionally. I’ve probably drunk less beer in my entire life than others drink on a heavy night at the pub. Un-needed calorie consumption turns me off a little bit, but the fundamental truth is that it just tastes bitter to me, and not in any enjoyable sense. So, I find myself a little jealous of the beer drinkers. I can’t reward myself with a beer at the end of a hot day. Beer isn’t the wonderful refreshing and relaxing drink it is for others. I don’t have a liquid item that I can keep in my fridge and break out when the good times roll.

Then there’s wine, which I do drink – I suspect part of that is making a statement that ‘I’m not morally against alcohol, and let me show you’. But when I think about it, the plain truth is that wine leaves me almost entirely neutral – it’s an unusual taste in my mouth, neither bad nor particularly good. It certainly doesn’t set the pulse racing.

As we left the bar last night, a friend lined up some strange flaming shots, which in following the lead of others, we knocked back. I’m not sure rationally what this was about either. Did any of us enjoy the taste of the shot? I suspect not. Did it come at a financial price? Yes. Did it give us more alcohol to make us relax more? Perhaps marginally. But I suspect the main reason behind why this act was done, was to do with male bonding, a shared experience, and overcoming a difficult challenge.

It all still leaves me thinking about what all this gives us. Some clearly find drinking pleasurable, which I’ll just have to accept as true. Alcohol seems to help relax as well; stories start flowing (there’s a tipping point in any night (from the perspective of a sober listener) when they become rather too long and without a point), and there’s a sense in which a good time is had. For some people, it might also encourage them to switch off, dance or speak to the opposite sex. It seems like a lot of effort for very little gain, and that if you pursued the same goal through other means (say hiking up a mountain, or playing sport), you could get better results.

Going back to drinking though, there’s almost no drink – alcoholic or not – that can reach me. I enjoy tea, and drink a lot of it, but I don’t need it in my life like others seem to need coffee. It’s a British treat – a mild subtle pleasure but not something to excite. Beyond that, I’d almost me tempted to say water or sometimes a smoothie or milkshake can give me a degree of refreshing pleasure. But liquids just don’t do it for me. This is rather odd, because when it comes to food there’s no shortage of pleasure to be had. So now, when going out, I regularly order water – something that would be unthinkable five years ago. I think part of this, is that natural process in your mid-30s, when you come to accept who you are, give up trying to be something else, and for you drinking just doesn’t do anything magical.

So perhaps while others drink, I should just order a Tiramisu.

A morning stroll

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I was up country this week. After rising early, I took a stroll out from the hotel while awaiting breakfast. It was before seven but you already had the feeling a hot day was coming – far hotter than what we get on the coast. The hotel itself was Lebanese-owned and the separate bedroom blocks around a narrow quad each had a large 4×4 parked outside.
Outside the gate, the high wall, and the G4S security guards, the mud road was wide and looked like it had recently been flattened. The ground was moist with dew yet to be burned off, and the majority of traffic outside was schoolchildren walking in all directions, and the odd dog shuffling around. The hotel was on the outskirts of town, so the land in the vicinity was a mix of small homes and fields. There was green space. A stream with croaking frogs ran through fields a short distance from the hotel, and I picked one of the mud crossing paths and headed to a small bridge. Children said hello as they passed. Around homes, kids were washing themselves from buckets, lathered from head to toe in soap. Parents were sitting on their front steps greeting passers-by and exchanging news with the rest of their families. There was often laughter in the air.
I’m sure they knew I was from the hotel. They probably considered I was one of those crazy people who’d waste $80 for a bed for the night. I obviously had more money than sense.
An idea came to me to make a little video one day juxtaposing the start to the day here, and then with some busy professional in the West. Emphasising (unfairly, but for a point) how the latter could go to work without anyone saying hello, and never sharing a joke. At the end they would both see representations of the other – the westerner would say a charity advert showing a miserable African, and the West African would see something aspirational showing the apparently glamorous life in the paradisiacal west.
In less than a month I’ve been in deep snow in the foothills of the alps, spread out on perfectly cut lawns at an English country house on a warmish Spring day, and here several hours from the coast in Sierra Leone. It’s a privilege.

Money

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Isn’t money one of those strange concepts we live with but don’t think much about? [Not that we don’t think much about money, but that we don’t think much about what it means.]

Every now and again I have the reserves spare to invest my monthly pay cheque entirely in savings/shares etc.. What I get at the end of the month are numbers on a (virtual PDF) pay slip, that then appear as numbers on my online bank screen. These I then transfer (thanks to websites and email) into investment accounts. At no point (at least at my end) does the money materialise itself even in the form of printed numbers on a real piece of paper.

Then what happens? Well the investment in say shares/savings will continue for many years and in itself only ever ‘appears’ on regular electronic statements. The sum will hopefully earn interest/dividends/capital gains, which will increase my financial value, and perhaps one day give me the security to retire (hopefully early) (when I say retire, I really mean, change careers to something I’m 100% passionate about for which I do regardless of financial gain).

But there’s probably a good chance that the initial investment will never be ‘cashed in’, i.e. transferred into something material like a house, car or holiday. Instead, it’s quite likely that what started as payment for a month’s work, will in its entirety be handed over to my descendants upon my death, who may well finally convert it into something physical. [If I was in the mood of the writer of Ecclesiastics, I might speculate about the pay cheque eventually being meaninglessly wasted by descendants :-)]

Looking at this whole process, doesn’t it seem rather strange how much power virtual numbers on a page mean to us? Perhaps the power they have is the potential they embody. But it still seems that this month’s pay cheque makes almost zero difference to my life. Of course, I could simply head out and spend wildly – but for some reason I’d prefer seeing the value of the pay cheque as numbers in a virtual online account, rather than materialised in a new car or a few foreign holidays to far-flung destinations.

My personal SDG

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The world is currently going through the process of ratifying the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are the new development targets to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which end in 2015. The SDGs are even more ambitious, with a set of goals and targets (more than a hundred I think) to be reached worldwide by 2030.

By coincidence, and slightly tongue-in-cheek, I’ve been projecting my own finances forward, and 2030 looks to be a time in which on current trends, I might be able to ‘retire’. My definition of ‘retirement’ is having a decent income regardless of work income, and so being able to prioritize my working efforts around motivations other than earning money.

If for the next 15 years I save around $XX each year (roughly equivalent at the moment to a quarter of my salary), and that grows at 15% per year over the next 15 years, then I should be able to live off my investments, and leave the 9-5. The idea would be to dedicate more time to things that seem personally important even if they don’t pay the bills – personal writing, church work, photo/video, spending time with family, studies, and travel.

It’s of course pretty fool-hardy to project forward over such a long-term period, so everything must be taken with an extreme pinch of salt. There are major upheavals up-ahead that none of us see coming (Black Swans), and also some fairly obvious other risk factors, including (in rough order of significance as they appear to me):
– Staying in good health
– Maintaining employment with my current employer (or a similar employer) over that period
– Seeing 15%+ investment returns on my shares (I’ve always had more than that in five years on the West African stock exchange, but nothing is certain)
– Being able to save that much each year (particularly with two girls in higher education, and one starting school in a few years). Expenditures have a nasty habit of expanding to gobble up income.
– The stability of the Euro or the CFA Franc (pegged to the Euro)
– Being able to afford the rest of my children’s education post-2030.

So, I’m sure the picture in 2030 will be far from as foreseen. Nevertheless, I think it’s useful to have a long-term version, even if it’s understood that this is only very approximative. I have other goals for 2020, and even for the next quarter which sets my eyes on different horizons.

There are other dangers, in doing this sort of thing:
– I definitely come from save-for-tomorrow rather than spend-today parents. Perhaps one should spend a bit more in the present rather than straining every sinew to leave as much money as possible to your descendants.
– You can end up ‘living’ for the future – putting off life until retirement. Many people do this, and then end up being disappointed when they get to the destination they’ve been dreaming about. I enjoy my life and job, so hopefully I can avoid this ‘tomorrow’ syndrome.

Nos ancestres

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I tend to perk up when I listen to or read interviews with leading thinkers, writers and journalists, especially when they talk about their families. I admit that I sigh slightly when I hear the comment that their parents were professors, writers, teachers, diplomats, journalists etc. While it shouldn’t take away from their achievements, how many from the intellectually elite were in fact born into this life? Could Dietrich Bonhoeffer have been anything other than a successful leader, thinker, scientist, or doctor depending on his choice?

But perhaps this is just confirmation bias. I’m remarking when academics beget academics, and not noting the counter examples. I just finished a biography of Martin Luther, whose father was a coal miner. My youngest brother has been spending time researching our family origins. They can best be described as humble – the word ‘labourer’ crops up a lot, and in the 19th century it seems our ancestors moved from a poor part of Wales to Manchester for work. We’ve come up with little colour so far – it seems the poor leave less trace than those a little higher up the scale, as noticed by my brother’s girlfriend as she also researches her family tree. Where we do know details, the news is inevitably bad – alcoholic, orphan, mistreated, etc.

In some ways, our family history is similar to many who benefited from the dramatic social change of the 20th century. Labouring / mining / fishing jobs have all but disappeared. A government training scheme mid-career changed the prospects for my unemployed father, backed up by a move to the south of England for work with a bank. University education became far more accessible, and the three sons ended up in respectable white collar work (journalist, pilot, teacher).

We like to look at the elites and feel that they got lucky at birth, though we rarely apply the same question to ourselves. A friend on Facebook recently joked that in job interviews, in America they ask ‘what can you do?’, in France they ask ‘what diplomas do you have?’ and in Cote d’Ivoire they ask ‘who do you know?’ (lit. who sent you? (Qui t’a envoyé?)). How would it feel to work hard and show talent but be in a society in which only those with connections could succeed? A society in which it might be hard pressed to dream at all?

Coincidences

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Coincidence can be a remarkable thing, with the most significant cases making the hair on your neck stand on end, and some having the appearance of divine intervention. However these things can often be quite commonplace.

Three examples from this Sunday. In the morning in my quiet time Bible reading before church I read two chapters from Jeremiah recounting the persecution of the unfortunate prophet including when he was thrown down a well in Jerusalem because the king didn’t like what he was saying. Two hours later the same passage – not one which I recall ever being read out before – was read in church.

In the afternoon, a colleague’s washing machine breaks so he comes over to wash his clothes. As he’s on his way, I start a new chapter of the book I’m reading (‘The Art of Travel’) in which the author journeys to Israel. My colleague is Israeli.

Later on, the same chapter, discussing the concept of ‘The Sublime’, quotes from a traveller describing his journey in the Alps to the Grand Chartreuse monastery, which I visited last month with the family and which was just a few miles from where we stayed.

Today, Tuesday, I woke up early and read a subsequent chapter in the book which concentrated on Van Gough. This afternoon on the way back from work I start a new podcast episode from the London Review of Books, which is almost entirely concerned with…Van Gough.

The book then discussed a French author De Maistre who lived in Chambery. Ten minutes later I was having a shower and realised I was using a scented soap that had been bought the previous month in…Chambery.

I don’t put much store by these things, except to take pleasure in having ideas and information coming in from a variety of sources which then often resonant in conversation with each other and bring out unexpected fresh thoughts.