Archives de catégorie : Work

Christmas far from family

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I had the horrifying thought yesterday that I haven’t spent a Christmas with my daughters since 2010. That’s worrying. This year was no exception. Here’s a look back on the last few Christmases.

25 December 2010 – I’d spent the previous couple of weeks in a hotel in Abidjan because of an intimidating phone call my wife received after one of my reports during what was the start of the Ivorian post-election crisis. I was sleeping in the office anyway because of the curfew, insecurity and an immense amount of work (I ended up doing 330+ separate news reports that month). The threat accelerated our plans to move house, which my industrious wife arranged during my absence. The BBC newsroom allowed me to have most of Christmas day off, and I traveled to our new house and had Christmas with the family. I can’t remember if I slept in my own bed that night.

25 December 2011 – My first holiday back in the UK since 2008. Work paid for my trip to spend Christmas with my parents. My wife and daughters stayed back in Abidjan and held a Christmas party for the family at our home, with 50 people sleeping there on Christmas Eve. That says more about how people were squeezed in than the size of the home.

25 December 2012 – I’d moved to a new job in Dubai the previous month, and my wife had stayed behind in Abidjan while the daughters finished school and I set-up our new life in the Middle East. Went to church in the morning, and then a British family invited me to their place for Christmas dinner, for which I will be forever grateful. In the evening I celebrated Christmas with a work colleague and her friends (I think everyone else was Muslim and had never celebrated Christmas before – they were confused by simple things like Christmas crackers).

25 December 2013 – My wife got her first visa for the UK, and we traveled back for two weeks to have a wonderful Christmas with my parents. It was poignant as the last Christmas we would enjoy together with my Dad.

25 December 2014 – My baby’s first Christmas and one month birthday. Wife and three daughters were together in Abidjan, I’m stuck in Freetown. Church in the morning, and then a dinner of sardines, boiled egg and instant noodles followed by custard creams. Worked in the afternoon and popped into the office in the evening, before finishing with a film.

25 December 2015…

A time to leave

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I’m definitely in a season of goodbyes. Before heading to CAR, the office held a moving leaving party for me (I found the balloons still there when I returned (some thought I wouldn’t), which I ended up taking down myself). While away, one colleague left. Yesterday, another left. I leave Dubai for good in two weeks. I still have my leaving ceremony from Bangui fresh in my mind. I also happened to stumble on the opening scenes of About Schmidt recently when it was shown on tv here, in which the Jack Nicholson character retires from his long career in white collar work.

My colleague yesterday said she didn’t want a present (who needs more stuff to fill suitcases?) but insisted on the leaving card. This is right – the expressions and photos in a good card are extremely precious. I like reducing my possessions as and when I can, but some objects – leaving cards included – are in a magical category that are worth keeping. I still have my first leaving card from when I left school in Salford, Manchester, aged eight.

The ceremonies around the day itself can frequently be a disappointment, something that’s brought out well in About Schmidt. When you’re full of the sadness of saying goodbye, it’s easy to feel that others aren’t treating the moment with the same seriousness. Words frequently fall short of the beauty of certain experiences. The great risk is that things fall flat, and you’re left thinking – is that really all they thought of me? Or, did it all just amount to that? Behind much of this is the fact that at the end of the day, few things we do are of lasting significance – we can put so many hours of our days, and stress over office tasks, that on reflection quickly lose their importance.

Starting anew

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There is something creative about moving job, country and city. It’s like the start of a new year multiplied by a factor of twenty. Out comes the notepad for resolutions. During this month of goodbyes, you have so many opportunities to reflect on what was good, what was special, what was worth doing, and also where you should have done things differently. In short, it’s a time for resolutions, reflections, and sometimes regrets. My arrival in Dubai is in the not so distant past, so I still have a sense of how I felt on arrival, what I’d aimed to do, and how things worked out.

Moving around so much really helps you to auto-correct and be self-reflective. I certainly have quite a few ideas for my new life in Freetown; two years down the track it’s almost déjà vu, and when history repeats, we can seek to apply lessons learned. Perhaps it’s even a life reborn.

Leaving Bangui

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I’m writing this on a plane over the eastern end of the Central African Republic. I left Bangui this morning at the end of my three month posting, crossed west over to Douala, and then caught this plane which is heading back over CAR at 39,000 ft to Addis. Then it’s on to Dubai.

I’m looking forward to getting back home, though tinged with the sadness that it’s only for a month or so, and a month filled with wrapping up my life and work in the UAE. Sadly that’s been the story of Dubai – somewhere where life has been good, but always only just starting, or on the long road to finishing. I sincerely hope my next post will have more of a sense of permanence, at least for a few years, and the ease of changing jobs when I decide to, not when I need to.

This plane ride is also a chance to reflect on this posting. It’s something I volunteered for and which I knew would give me valuable and interesting new experiences. It has done both those things, but trying to think about things neutrally I realise it seems pretty crazy to be paying incredibly high rates for a luxury apartment in Dubai, while slumming it in Bangui. Why do I do such things? Part of it is force of circumstance – the need to gain all the advantages possible in the transition to the next step. But it’s also about getting new experiences – another three months in Dubai would have been forgettable. Now in five years’ time when someone asks me what I did between May and August 2014, I’ll have a keen recollection of what happened.

I’m sure I’ll write more about leaving Dubai in future posts. I actually feel slightly bitter about it – though that’s probably influenced by nostalgia as I return there now. And of course compared to Bangui – life is so full of ease, luxuries, and freedoms.

The experience in Bangui was ideal though, and shouldn’t be unfairly tinged by a very stressful end. I’m sure looking back, I’ll see it as just what the doctor ordered – three months testing the water in communications. Taking my baby steps, and making mistakes there before I make them where I’ll be permanently based. It’s also confirmed in my mind that this is a good next step. Yes, on one side I’ll admit to being attracted by the financial benefits and the stability. But there are two other key things as well. Firstly, this work gets you a free (or rather well salaried ticket) to live and work in some of the most interesting places in the world. Secondly, I have had a feeling for a while that I had some skills that are not being used in journalism and that I’d like to develop and profit from. Key among these is team work and leadership – working on projects, motivating staff, doing things as a group, strategizing and building for the long-term.

At the same time, I hope I can find the time to work on other personal goals, linked to my journalistic life; improving my multimedia (particularly video and photo) skills, and working on my long-form writing (fiction and non-fiction).

Musings in Ibn Battuta mall

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On Saturday evening, I dropped a hire car off at Ibn Battuta mall, and was surprised by a strong feeling of nostalgia. In my first few months in Dubai, when I arrived ahead of my family, I rented a studio in Discovery Gardens, and several times a week walked the length of Ibn Battuta mall (that is from Andalusia to China) on the way home. On Saturday I was reminded of my feelings in those times, feelings that have since been lost. I was excited by the adventure of a new job, a new city and new possibilities. My bank account was fuller than it’s ever been, and the next few years looked great and comfortable. In some ways, I was also hypnotized by the glamour of Dubai – I would have a nice car, new clothes, a lovely apartment and settle down to a period of stability, treating my family to a whole array of new experiences. Sometimes I can be very shallow.

That all feels like another era, though it was at most 1.5 years ago. My time in Dubai has genuinely been enjoyable, I’ve lived in two wonderful homes, and I had a few adventures. But things didn’t quite worked out as expected. It took six months for my wife and girls to arrive, and several months of stress after that for them to get their residential papers. The summer was spent chasing education opportunities/uncertainty, which finally left both girls studying elsewhere (and on different continents to ourselves and each other). Barely had my wife arrived and the house filled with furniture, when it became apparent that my entire division would be shut down, and we’d have to move on. Dubai rents took up a large amount of my income, as did air travel. And on the personal side, I’ve been disappointed that dreams of writing music and fiction, having children and improving photography and video work have come to little. Arabic has been largely a failure despite costing numerous hours. Much is personified by my little used iMac.

Still, it’s been a good period. We’ve settled into church quicker than expected and the last six months has seen some wonderful opportunities to serve there. We’ve made good friends, some of the best in years, and my wife’s English has gone from zero to decent. The girls have made progress in their studies, I’ve been able to pay back a good chunk of my mortgage, and running the marathon was a high. At work, it’s been both enjoyable, and my writing/editing skills have improved considerably (despite what regular readers of this blog may think).

The next job posting will be an adventure (they always are). But hopefully we can settle down in some form as well – more personal productivity on my side, more stability and less travel on the family side. And a baby wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

Platforms

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In my job, every couple of weeks or so, I get unsolicited pitches from freelance journalists asking if I’d be interested in commissioning certain stories. I often am. These emails generally include social media and website links for people to show off their published work. I was really blown away in the week by someone’s personal story portfolio on a site called Jux. I haven’t really explored the platform much myself, but the presentation is breath-taking, and I bet it’s just superb on an ipad.

It’s actually amazing now that regular folk can set-up their own content platforms that look so much better than the biggest names in the news media. The web is opening incredible possibilities now, and at some point I hope to explore more. It’s like the old media is a black and white newspaper, while your free personal site is a glossy magazine. Maybe being based on an old-school institutional platform is going to become less and less important, and the new key differentiate-r will be the quality of the content.

The morning routine

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This week I was chatting with a friend of mine who works in finance and who takes the same work-bus as me in the morning. We got into a conversation about sport and I mentioned that I tried to do some sport every morning before coming into work. He said ‘I used to be good at doing exercise, but I struggle to find the time.’ I said that I was able to make the time by getting out of bed just after six o’clock. He replied that he gets out of bed just after five o’clock. But when I asked what he does before catching a bus in the morning, he said that he basically just had a cup of coffee.

Recently a friend posted something on Facebook: « You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine. » For me, getting a morning routine hard-wired into the day makes for a great start, and a good way to fix some basic things into the weekly programme. By putting quite a few things into the morning routine, I can take the stress off weekends and evenings and just allow certain things to just happen naturally.

At the moment, I’m waking up at 610. We don’t have curtains, so in the summer that means waking up with the sun, but at the moment, it’s just a bit before sunrise. I’ll check whatsapp and then head out for some sport. When I was training for the marathon, this was almost always running, but now I’m putting the emphasis on working out with weights, and a more varied set of aerobic exercises on alternate days (running, cross-trainer, cycling). I have a small breakfast (2 Weetabix, 1 piece of fruit and a cup of tea) either before or after the exercise. If I’m working out in the gym, I’ll go down with my tea. While cycling or cross-training I can read my Kindle (Bible reading (3 chapters) + another book); I just find you need to increase the font size. Other exercise is done to podcasts.

I need to be in the shower by 730, and then out the door by 745-755, after a short prayer with my usually-sleeping wife. It’s a 5 minute walk to the metro, two stops on the train, and then a bus to work that leaves at 820 to arrive at 900. Taking the bus is something I find a key part of organising my mornings: I can just switch off and concentrate. On the walk to the metro I listen to podcasts. Then, when I’m waiting for the train, I’ll take out my phone to surf. I’ll quickly check Facebook and Emails (though only to browse quickly as I prefer emailing on a laptop at work). Then I’ll open the BBC News app to read some news stories/headlines, and then open Feedly to clear my RSS feeds. i can finish with these main two phone tasks in the train, or waiting for the bus, or on the bus.

The next step is to pull out my Kindle. The first priority is to read my three Bible chapters, which I’ll generally follow by a short prayer. Then I’ll do other reading. I’m reading the Qu’ran at the moment, though I tend not to segway between the two religious books without something in between. The morning is often a time to exchange whatsapp messages.

The result is that every time I arrive at the office in the morning I’ve done some exercise, eaten, washed, caught up on the news, cleared my blog inbox, advanced in my reading and podcast listening, and read some of the Bible and prayed. This all helps to advance a number of core life objectives, and make sure that important things aren’t being neglected.

I don’t think such things are for everyone, but I’m very much a morning person, and I feel I can thrive where things are very regular like this (bus always leaving at the same time, etc).

Managing the inbox

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I saw a colleague’s work email inbox the other day, and was astonished to find that he had 2,000+ unread emails. For me that’s almost an automatic heart-attack. But everyone has different strategies. For me, I like to keep as few emails in my inbox as possible – this extends to my private inbox, my blog roll (Feedly), my work RSS feeds, my iTunes podcast list. If I have nothing unread/un-listened then I feel on top of things.

Of course it’s probably a bad strategy. I probably spend too much time managing the inbox rather than achieving the big things. But somehow it makes me feel in control, and I prefer to only keep things in front of me that can’t immediately be batted into touch. My inbox is my to-do list.

Freelance dreams

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Last week I met up with a young British journalist who was in Dubai after just giving up a good editorial job for the freelance life. She was looking for advice on working in the region, and where to be based. I have to say that it did give me a new enthusiasm for my options in the future, and in particular a more concrete sense of how I could perhaps live in Abidjan and cover the West African region as a freelance reporter. Such a life would have enviable freedom in terms of reporting on what I wanted, in the form I’d want (e.g. photos / video) and with time to follow my nose/curiosity, and do other stuff in the working week. Abidjan has good connections to the region, and hopefully within the next few years low-cost airlines will have arrived. With my Ivorian passport, there’d be no visa trouble, and unless things change dramatically, West Africa is one of the most unreported regions in the world, so there’d be little in the way of competition.

My beef with the freelance life is that I tend to stress about income. But my dream is that in 5-10 years’ time the mortgage will be paid off, I’ll have a pension secured, live in my own house, and ideally have some guaranteed income (e.g. from renting out a house or two). That way, I’ll be a bit more secure and can get a little income security and a lot of adventure. I could also run businesses, private projects, farms, blogging, teaching, write books, etc. One can but dream.