16 deuan leo

I was walking through a rice field yesterday when I noticed two things.  Firstly, my bare feet were being slowly torn to shreds by the prickly weeds growing along the margins and the formic acid sting of red ants.  Secondly, it occurred to me that this month marks the point at which my current job, working for the Lao Government, has become my longest period of continuous employment with any organisation, anywhere in the world.

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.

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.

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. 

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.