Archives de catégorie : Work

Thoughts on the way back from New York

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When I was in New York last year, I came away thinking it would be a good place to work in the future. I’m currently on my way back from New York after another week there, and I fly back with a different feeling. My over-riding sense is that New York isn’t a city that corresponds closely with my values. Perhaps three things can be taken as examples to illustrate (which are far from unique to New York):

  • In Freetown, people like looking at their phones, but you certainly don’t see the constant fixation with being online, the walking the street looking down into a phone not ahead. Perhaps influenced by my recent reading of Cal Newport’s ‘Deep work’, I’ve become much more negative about smartphones and social media. I really believe time spent on social media gives very little of value, so to see a society obsessed with this is worrying.
  • Yesterday, I had a day free, so bought a few high quality magazines and newspapers and spent several pleasant hours in Central Park. Living outside the West, and then returning to it like this, draws into sharper contrast the consumerist messaging of ‘products you need to be happy’. I felt this last month, having my young daughter suddenly exposed to all the clever marketing of attractive things for infants in the French supermarkets. She was suddenly wide-eyed with all the wonderful things on offer, and begging her parents. In the magazines and newspapers, the message is that you need an expensive over-sized watch or a luxury car to really achieve success or be a true adventurer/hero. I can just about ignore the adverts, but it permeated the writing as well. For instance, a magazine about being in nature and exploring the great outdoors, was heavily focused on ‘amazing gear you need to buy’.
  • Style is much more polarised in New York. You get a large segment that is super stylish, tanned, extremely well dressed, and clearly gym regulars. Then you get another segment that is obscenely overweight and carelessly dressed. It’s very different from France, where a pot belly or a large bicep are both much rarer.

So, I like my New York trips, and perhaps later in life I can find a three month contract in the city to really explore with my wife. But it’s not the place to be long-term I feel.

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.

 

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.

Looking for a house

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I’ve started looking for a new house to move into in mid-October. Hopefully it will be second time lucky for property number two in Freetown, with a slightly higher chance of the family being reunited and enjoying some time together. With the Ebola crisis, they’ve reduced the posting time to two years, which means I could be halfway through. But I think they generally let people stay several more years, so I think four years would be a good shot.

Looking around properties in Freetown, the first remark is just how expensive things are. The limited land in Freetown and extremely poor roads off major routes make it difficult. The top end of the market is almost entirely run by the Lebanese community who generally know what expats want and need. Despite clear indications to a housing agent as to my budget, I was shown a couple of apartments that turned out to have an asking price of $50,000 (annual rent). It’s amazing that people can pay so much for property.

What more do you get at the top end of the market? Basically giant hall like bedrooms and lounges. In my view you reach a point where you really can’t add much more of value, especially if you’re not going for beauty/charm/gardens/pools, which surprisingly doesn’t seem to be in the mind’s of retail developers. Instead it’s simply ‘bigger rooms’.

In the end the property I think I’ll go for is a simple detached house in a secure compound with two bedrooms and two floors. It’ll be the first time I’ve lived in a house with internal stairs since 2007.

The height of the crisis

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I remember the end of 2014 like a crazy dream. Hundreds of Ebola cases a week, the stress of constant 7-day work and pressure, and above all, the existential menace that this deadly disease could catch any one of us. I say a dream, because almost everyone I was close to at the time has left. Many had families and could no longer bear being apart. Others were only there on surge, destined to leave after a few months. The dream is no more.

But I’ll always remember that surreal time, including the very regular visits to the bathroom to wash hands; scrubbing hard just in case. Most of all I think of those evenings at M’s with colleagues in which we struggled to talk about anything else. We were all suffering from extreme fatigue – but the wine, the dancing and the attempts to discuss other matters (or at least life before Ebola) were like a caffeine boost to keep us going through the hardest times. It was winter in more ways than one, but somehow we survived, if only to go our separate ways.

Like any crisis, there’s an indelible mark left behind and you consider those times in all the richness of the experience. In many ways, these are the standout moments, the story of what was going on when your first child was born, the world events that you saw firsthand. Like war, they are terrible in their time, but memorable ever after, and something remarkable to have experienced. When we danced like 14 year olds and when we played card games, daring that most remarkable of feats in Ebola times – the human touch.

Radio and me

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I won’t always be able to say this, but up to now, I’ve spent most of my working life predominantly producing radio reports. Those early days travelling back from university to read the weekend news on Rugby FM (in the town of Rugby), to that first job as a local BBC reporter (and some time news reader). It was what I spent most of my time doing in Congo and Cote d’Ivoire. I think I got pretty good at it – one of the comments I’ll most treasure after leaving the BBC was that my reports had really given people the sense of being in Cote d’Ivoire. I wasn’t a great investigative reporter, and perhaps I sometimes pulled my punches, but I did like creating a multi-layer soundscape and making radio that was about sound rather than recorded studio scripts.

Radio is an interesting beast though. It is at once incredibly influential (certainly in this part of the world), but also strangely undervalued. Most people can’t name their favourite radio journalist, but tv journalists become celebrities. A radio report is almost impossible so share on-line, and when was the last time a radio piece went viral? A beautifully crafted television report can get incredible plaudits, but who appreciates the beauty of good radio reporting? You get the sense of creating beautiful pieces that vanish into the ether, never lasting any longer than the news programme itself. I never got the impression my Ivorian friends and peers were paying attention either.

Now I’m in communications, I still get the chance to make use of a variety of multimedia skills; video, photography, and of course writing. But radio is the one muscle that no longer gets exercise, unless it’s sync-ing audio for a video project.

To finish on a slight tangent, radio no longer has much of a place in my media consumption either, depending on how you define it. I listen to a lot of podcasts, especially while driving or exercising, and many of these are simply radio shows that are downloadable (‘Start the Week’, ‘In our time’ etc). But the broadness of broadcasting doesn’t much appeal to me anymore. My particular tastes and interests make me unlikely to find something on the radio at the particularly moment I tune in that I find interesting, or pitched at the right level. I also have less interest in ‘news’, which sensationalizes the ‘latest thing’ even if we don’t have a great understanding of its causes or long-term impact. I’m aware that serendipity is important (we should leave room to be surprised by things outside our narrow range of hobbies/interests), but there seems too much chaff in with the straw. Online news sites mean you can get what you’re interested in extremely fast, and click away as soon as your interest has been exhausted (or research more if you want to go deeper).

I do miss radio. It’s simplicity seemed to approach a level of purity – a cheap recorder, getting into the midst of the action, and then rushing back to the computer to edit. You could create a good mixed report in around an hour, fighting the clock to get it sent to London and on the air. I’m not an amazing photographer or video-maker, but this is where I now need to focus my attention.

A bi-polar life

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Back in Freetown after another intense week with the family in Abidjan. I don’t think I’ll ever be used to this slightly schizophrenic life separated by a two hour flight. As soon as I get to Abidjan it’s all about my wife and baby. In Freetown, life largely revolves around work.

In the latter I have good internet, hot water, a spacious apartment. I survive on sardines, I exercise regularly, I don’t spend much, and I have a car. The opposite is true in Abidjan where we squeeze into a small studio, eat well, and the city is choc full of friends.

It’s actually difficult to imagine these world’s coming together, and it’ll be a radically new experience later in the year when they do, as Ebola fades.

Home is where the heart is

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You could make the case at the moment that although I’m physically in Freetown, I’m actually really living in Abidjan. For many reasons, that’s not a good situation to be in. I have some great colleagues here, but it’s hard to claim that I have a social life, much activity out of work, and much in the way of soul mates. My wife, my baby, my daughters, many of my friends are in Abidjan. Even my mum is there now for a week. When I go online almost all my contacts are in Abidjan. If there’s a car crash in Abidjan I’ll hear about it, but if there was a similar event in Freetown I would barely know. Every day I read my copy of Abidjan’s Frat Mat newspaper delivered to my inbox. In Freetown I’ve only ever once skimmed through a local paper. I couldn’t name a single government minister in Sierra Leone. In 12 months’ time hopefully my family will be here and I’ll have some sort of life. But for the moment, my heart and body are separated.

Looking back and forward

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Before looking forward to the coming year, it is of course important to look back. This might be boring for you, in which case skip this post, but for me it’s a useful exercise to reflect on my 2014 resolutions to see how I did.

The short round-up, posted as a comment on Facebook, runs as follows:
#my2014 The joys and sorrows of a birth (daughter), a death (father) and a wedding (brother). Travel to Afghanistan (2 weeks), Jordan (1 week), UK (3×1 week) and Ivory Coast (3×1 week). Changed job, organisation, profession and continent. Moved house twice. Finished reading the Bible, the Qu’ran and the Symposium. Ran a marathon. Didn’t write fiction, learn Arabic, master Lightroom & FCPX, lose weight or pray enough.

I started the year with the growing stress of facing unemployment at the end of the year when my department’s future looked uncertain. But in the end things worked out almost perfectly (both for me and my department). It’s important at this time to look back with gratitude at how worst fears weren’t realised (I guess they almost never are). There were significant amounts of travel, though not much within the Middle East patch, and a lot more time spent in Africa than envisaged.

If you went back through the past years you’d see that some resolutions are definitely easier than others. For instance, I’ve consistently met goals for saving and giving. Same for fitness/exercise, reading, academic study and blogging. But other elements appear in the resolutions list year-on-year without any progress being made – notably fiction/book writing, increased prayer times, writing music and improving my photo/video skills.

Less seriously I always seem to have ‘play Volleyball’ in there somewhere, which never happens. I even once gave my best friend a volleyball for Christmas but nothing came of it. Is there any reason to believe things will be different in future? Certainly blogging, reading and exercise have started well in Freetown. I think there are reasons for confidence that my photo/video skills will improve significantly this year, as I’m doing a lot more of it, making some investments in equipment, and using more of my free time for photo/video activities. I am writing more than usual (especially blogging) though whether this will ever translate to a book, I don’t know. I’m beginning to think I should stop stressing out about book writing.

Will 2015 be the year things finally settle down? Sadly this is unlikely at least in the first six months. My wife and new daughter are unlikely to be living with me in Freetown before the summer – perhaps they will never see the current home I have rented for us. At least work wise, I am on pretty safe ground now in terms of job security – I’m likely to grow a lot professionally and enjoy my time here. I’m a bit worried that the church I’m going to is not as good as previous ones, but the important thing I guess is that I can contribute. Exercise wise, I had thought of 2015 as a year to work on being stronger and slimmer, but I was recently attracted to the rather different goal of doing a triathlon in Assinie (Cote d’Ivoire) which would be fun for a number of reasons – jogging-wise I can already do the running section (10km) reasonably comfortably, and the swimming is fortunately only half of the usual Olympic distance (it’s 800m rather than 1.6km). The off-road cycling will be new, but that’s actually something I’m getting excited about. Cycling might be a good way to go – something one can do in later years, and a good way to see a lot of scenery. In my early teens I used to pour over Mountain Biking UK magazines, and now finally I could conceivably get a decent bike providing I can find a way to ship it out here. On the overall objectives, this year I’m trying to bring greater focus to my resolutions which come in five priority areas: CHURCH – WRITING – EXERCISE – PHOTO/VIDEO – FRIENDS.

Three months in

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Before looking forward to the coming year, it is of course important to look back. This might be boring for you, in which case skip this post, but for me it’s a useful exercise to reflect on my 2014 resolutions to see how I did.

The short round-up, posted as a comment on Facebook, runs as follows:
#my2014 The joys and sorrows of a birth (daughter), a death (father) and a wedding (brother). Travel to Afghanistan (2 weeks), Jordan (1 week), UK (3×1 week) and Ivory Coast (3×1 week). Changed job, organisation, profession and continent. Moved house twice. Finished reading the Bible, the Qu’ran and the Symposium. Ran a marathon. Didn’t write fiction, learn Arabic, master Lightroom & FCPX, lose weight or pray enough.

I started the year with the growing stress of facing unemployment at the end of the year when my department’s future looked uncertain. But in the end things worked out almost perfectly (both for me and my department). It’s important at this time to look back with gratitude at how worst fears weren’t realised (I guess they almost never are). There were significant amounts of travel, though not much within the Middle East patch, and a lot more time spent in Africa than envisaged.

If you went back through the past years you’d see that some resolutions are definitely easier than others. For instance, I’ve consistently met goals for saving and giving. Same for fitness/exercise, reading, academic study and blogging. But other elements appear in the resolutions list year-on-year without any progress being made – notably fiction/book writing, increased prayer times, writing music and improving my photo/video skills.

Less seriously I always seem to have ‘play Volleyball’ in there somewhere, which never happens. I even once gave my best friend a volleyball for Christmas but nothing came of it. Is there any reason to believe things will be different in future? Certainly blogging, reading and exercise have started well in Freetown. I think there are reasons for confidence that my photo/video skills will improve significantly this year, as I’m doing a lot more of it, making some investments in equipment, and using more of my free time for photo/video activities. I am writing more than usual (especially blogging) though whether this will ever translate to a book, I don’t know. I’m beginning to think I should stop stressing out about book writing.

Will 2015 be the year things finally settle down? Sadly this is unlikely at least in the first six months. My wife and new daughter are unlikely to be living with me in Freetown before the summer – perhaps they will never see the current home I have rented for us. At least work wise, I am on pretty safe ground now in terms of job security – I’m likely to grow a lot professionally and enjoy my time here. I’m a bit worried that the church I’m going to is not as good as previous ones, but the important thing I guess is that I can contribute. Exercise wise, I had thought of 2015 as a year to work on being stronger and slimmer, but I was recently attracted to the rather different goal of doing a triathlon in Assinie (Cote d’Ivoire) which would be fun for a number of reasons – jogging-wise I can already do the running section (10km) reasonably comfortably, and the swimming is fortunately only half of the usual Olympic distance (it’s 800m rather than 1.6km). The off-road cycling will be new, but that’s actually something I’m getting excited about. Cycling might be a good way to go – something one can do in later years, and a good way to see a lot of scenery. In my early teens I used to pour over Mountain Biking UK magazines, and now finally I could conceivably get a decent bike providing I can find a way to ship it out here. On the overall objectives, this year I’m trying to bring greater focus to my resolutions which come in five priority areas: CHURCH – WRITING – EXERCISE – PHOTO/VIDEO – FRIENDS.