Update and New Things

New job.  New jobs are tough.  I have only been at this one about 8 weeks, and I feel like I am just starting to know what questions to ask, when to ask them, and why I should ask them.  The next step is knowing what to do with the responses.  I catalog them in various ways.  I scribble them into a note pad, then I type them.  Then I look through them again.  They strain through my consciousness as though my brain were cheese cloth. I know I retain something but what is it that passes through the fine mesh?  That is the next next step--I need to figure out what I don't know I am not retaining.

Good people at this new job.  I love working with the Forest Service.  It is a totally different atmosphere than VE.  I miss my VE friends and family dearly, but I am excited to be in a new venture.  International Programs at the Forest Service sometimes has the feel of a start-up.  It is frenzied, fast-paced, high demand, and involves a lot of marketing and relationships.  Then sometimes you run into the standard government barriers: i.e. 3 weeks to get fingerprints to and from the FBI so I can get an ID badge with a chip that will allow me to log onto my computer outside the office.  There is a lot of papeleo that I am learning to process.  I have to be both flexible and detail oriented; I am standard form driven and able to improvise--or at least that is the goal I am shooting for.  In any case, it makes for an exciting work place.  Many of my colleagues are former PCVs and thus know the realities of living abroad for several years on end.  Many have lots of development experience, and love IP for its ability to eschew some of the rhetoric fatigue and get down to solid programming.  It is a very cool place.

I am loving living with Lee.  It has been the rightest move I have ever made.  I love to know what she thinks, what she does when she thinks she isn't doing anything at all.  I love the routines and the new types of adventures.  I love 9:00 pm after work when we decide to go to Mexico City for the hell of it.  We can, we do, we are learning together what works.  It is pretty remarkable.

All the while, DC is cooperating too.  The weather has not turned its back on us yet.  It is a bit of an Indian summer with warm temperatures, soft breezes and pleasant attitudes.  I love re-learning a place, and still having solid friends around with which to accomplish that task.

Certainly there are moments when I catch myself staring off and thinking of Uganda.  I miss it.  I miss the light there, I miss the smells.  I long for easy evenings on the porch with the dog and the donkey.  I even miss the loud neighboor up the street with his loud parties that I still was never invited too.  I miss the thrum of music, the whine of boda bodas, and the orchestrated semi functional calamity of the place.  Every day brought something unexpected and outside my frame of reference.  I think I feel that space in my day to day at times.  I don't need to go back right away, but it feels nice to think about it.

I was just in Chicago and New York, and I am headed to Peru at the end of this month.  I will certainly write between now and then.  And I hope to update from Peru this trip, too. The last trip was too busy to take time to write from there.

So, I guess all this is to say that I am happy and I am grateful.

More soon.

Keep Travelling.

Back to the Grind

After a lovely weekend in Paris, I am back to work in Sousse.  I had a meeting with my boss the day before I left which was actually very helpful, and provided a lot of direction for what I need to be doing this week.  I was relieved because I have, at various points, felt very much without direction.  I was able to cobble together what I was supposed to be doing, but I felt a bit lost as this is my first real internship abroad.  While I have not had a lot of homesickness or overwhelming culture shock, there are many little things that slowly pile up and end up creating a cluster of thoughts that I could broadly label as culture shock.  I try to read a lot and stay active in work, but as I said sometimes it feels a bit directionless, and so it is tricky.  I found this list of tips for working abroad that are generally helpful.  They are largely more geared to people who have never worked abroad, which I have, but they are good nonetheless.

This week is doubly busy as I am doing a bit of catching up for missing Friday and Monday for my trip to Paris.  So I have lots to do, and a real to do list, and if nothing else I feel like I make forward progress when I cross things off a list.  But I do wonder, is that what I came here to do?  Cross things off a list?  I had definitely romanticized what I would be doing as visions of community meetings and village mapping on dusty village meeting hall floors danced through my head, but I didn't expect to be so connected to the internet, doing so much grant-related writing and research and generally staying in so much.  I guess it is normal for an organization that is trying to get off the ground.  They need help both with their projects and with their development of the organization.  So I am here doing a bit of both.

Needless to say, as much I as am able to get good experience just from being in an internship, it is also highly dependent on how much I put in.  My boss encouraged me to ask more questions to make sure I am targeting the right information when I putting together grant proposals and projects.  She is right.  It is time to step it up, ask more questions, be more forthright and be more of a go-getter.  Just being in Tunisia will not provide experience through osmosis.  I need to be an active learner and employee.  It makes no sense to try and make excuses for what I didn't learn if I know I didn't push to always learn more.  So that is what I am working on starting this week.

Paris was a great little refresher.  It was nice to see a good friend, nice to escape the heat for a weekend and so much fun to go back to a city I love.  We strolled the streets, ate too many delicious pastries, ate baguettes and cheese, walked the city in the evening with daylight until 10:15 pm, ate foie gras and drank white wine.  It was so lovely.  We spent one afternoon in Versailles in the park and gardens and sat outside and had a crepe and shared a pitcher of cider.  It was lush and green in Paris and the city was alive and sparkling.  I was happy be back.  It was nice to have a little adventure, to take the train in Tunisia for the first time and see a bit more of the capital city in my travelling, too.  So I am back this week refreshed and ready to try and bite of a bit more and throw my weight into this internship.

A + (a plus)
AJ