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| Careful |
I’ve been working here for 16 months, excluding orientation,
so I won’t be asking for a carriage clock or gold watch but I’m quite pleased
to have made it this far, particularly considering one of the primary elements
which attracted me to the placement in the first place was the stability offered
by a two year fixed term.
The rice project is going quite well this season and my
water ferns are thriving in the stock pond alongside the plot we’re working
on. The azolla still won’t persist in
the field but I can worry about that another time; for now the farmer is happy
and getting interested enquiries from neighbours. That’s enough of an achievement.
Things are also going quite well in the lab and despite a
few recent setbacks, it looks like the programme to ameliorate the durian
dieback situation in a nearby district might be significantly expanded before I
leave.
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| It's alive! |
If I can make a difference to the lives of both water ferns
and durians, then I really will be chuffed.
Anyway, the point is, I’d assumed that I was really quite
flaky when it comes to jobs but if I can work for the Lao Government and enjoy
it, surely I can work for anyone. I’m
not sure what I’ll do when I finish my placement and get back home. I’m not even entirely sure where home will be
but it’s quite heartening to know that I’m probably not as bad an employment
prospect as I’ve sometimes considered myself to be. The top three tips for working with me
successfully seem to be:
1.
Buy me breakfast every morning for the first
month.
2.
Talk a different language.
3.
Ask me to
do a job I know absolutely nothing about (plant pathology, growing rice,
teaching English etc) and I’ll be so desperate to try and work out what the
hell I should be doing that I won’t cause any trouble or make any smart arse
comments.
I recently confided
to a friend that I quite liked the fact that I’d had some tricky work
experiences early in my career, as it means I know I can put up with anything
for at least a year. She seemed to think
that was probably not the way to start thinking about a new job but I think it
gives me the acceptance that things won’t necessarily go to plan and that has
undoubtedly helped me to be flexible and adaptable here in Laos.
In the past week things have changed quite a lot for me in
Pakse, leaving me to once again reassess how things are going and whether I
made the right move coming out here.
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| VTE leaving party no.1 |
Basically, I now have nae mates.
My erstwhile housemate has headed home after spending two
years demonstrating his frankly amazing capacity for patience. This leaves me all alone in an unfeasibly
enormous house. The next nearest
volunteer has also gone home, having decided to give the last 6 months of his
placement a miss. The planned Australian
volunteer placement which should have begun in November also looks to have
fallen through, so it seems I’ll have more time to spend in solitude over the
next few months. It’s probably no bad
thing, as having got back from a rather extended weekend in Vientiane, I’m
still knackered after three nights of being in bed by nine and eating only abstemious
meals of lentils and rice.
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| Dirty, hurty feet |
I’ll have to get back on form fairly quickly though as I’ve
got friends coming to stay in under a week and the house needs a good old clean
in the meantime. I’ve got a few other
visits and trips planned in the next few months so I don’t think I’ll have too
much time to worry about loneliness but I do think it’s quite telling that both
recent departees gave me very similar advice, albeit couched in rather
different language. I won’t share it here
but as they probably know me better than any other folk in Laos it would seem a
little churlish to ignore them both.
I’ve no doubt I’ll see the two of them again, especially as I told the
housemate he could make up for any missed bills by buying me beer and roasted
goat in his home town, so it’ll be interesting to see if they think I’ve
applied their advice and whether it’ll help me to stay in one place for longer
than 16 months. Considering the last
piece of advice I had was not to walk through rice fields with bare feet, it
might be an unlikely outcome.
