Aid work is a bit like a drug. It keeps you high, it's addictive, and while there are people who run on it their whole life, for the majority it's not sustainable in the long term (and accordingly, there are even articles with advice on how to get out of aid work, such as this excellent one).
I love my work. I doubt that could be a better one for me in the whole world. At the same time, the thought of taking, at the age of fifty, the seventh mission in Sudan or a similar lovely place makes me profoundly scared.
Which is why I'm now in Rome (there you have it, news revealed).
Coming back to a more "normal" life is something I had been thinking about for a while. My 5-month break after Uganda was meant as a sort of reflection on where-am-I-heading, with the aim of coming up with a Plan. It didn't quite work out - three weeks after I officially concluded my break, returned from the last trip and started to (panic-)look for jobs, I was in Nepal.
Now I'm making a second attempt, a bit more serious one. As the how-to-get-out-of-aid-work article instructed, I tried to imagine what I'd like my life to be like, small things included. And considering realities, options and compromises, at the moment Rome seemed like a good place to be.
So what is it that I'm looking for? After years in warm countries, I need sun. Good food is a big plus. I prefer a degree of messiness and randomness (with the risk of growing to hate it) to too much order and predictability (with the risk of getting bored to death). I want to have the chance to build meaningful social relations with people I can relate to, and to grow and cultivate friendships. That, ideally, would go together with some degree of internationality (or at least an openness to it), and with warm-acting people (or how to describe the southern Europe social feel). Proximity to mountains definitely earns extra points.
Taking these criteria, Italy came out as a reasonable potential match (in addition, of course, to my beloved Spain). As good project managers, we then assessed the feasibility and possible modalities of implementation of a plan in Italy: Michele found a post-grad course in Rome (also as an aidwork-alternative attempt) starting from mid-February, and I thought that doing a super-intensive course of Italian would be a useful starting point in a place where... well, you just have to speak the language or die. And while it wasn't quite an easy choice to make the step into nowhere (consider the above-mentioned nature of aid work combined with some aidwork job offers), I think our analysis is good, and we're determined and enthusiastic about the new adventure.
I definitely don't exclude going back to the field at some point (actually, I'm rather hoping Nepal wasn't the end of it!), but I think it's a good time now to try to build some alternative first.
I have no idea where all this will lead to, but I'm not really afraid of that: like Mandela said, we either win or learn ;-) I suspect I'll suffer bouts of aidwork hangover, and this blog (if it continues) will become much less interesting, but all those are things I'm prepared to risk. So, go and get your tickets to Rome!
I love my work. I doubt that could be a better one for me in the whole world. At the same time, the thought of taking, at the age of fifty, the seventh mission in Sudan or a similar lovely place makes me profoundly scared.
Which is why I'm now in Rome (there you have it, news revealed).
Coming back to a more "normal" life is something I had been thinking about for a while. My 5-month break after Uganda was meant as a sort of reflection on where-am-I-heading, with the aim of coming up with a Plan. It didn't quite work out - three weeks after I officially concluded my break, returned from the last trip and started to (panic-)look for jobs, I was in Nepal.
Now I'm making a second attempt, a bit more serious one. As the how-to-get-out-of-aid-work article instructed, I tried to imagine what I'd like my life to be like, small things included. And considering realities, options and compromises, at the moment Rome seemed like a good place to be.
So what is it that I'm looking for? After years in warm countries, I need sun. Good food is a big plus. I prefer a degree of messiness and randomness (with the risk of growing to hate it) to too much order and predictability (with the risk of getting bored to death). I want to have the chance to build meaningful social relations with people I can relate to, and to grow and cultivate friendships. That, ideally, would go together with some degree of internationality (or at least an openness to it), and with warm-acting people (or how to describe the southern Europe social feel). Proximity to mountains definitely earns extra points.
Taking these criteria, Italy came out as a reasonable potential match (in addition, of course, to my beloved Spain). As good project managers, we then assessed the feasibility and possible modalities of implementation of a plan in Italy: Michele found a post-grad course in Rome (also as an aidwork-alternative attempt) starting from mid-February, and I thought that doing a super-intensive course of Italian would be a useful starting point in a place where... well, you just have to speak the language or die. And while it wasn't quite an easy choice to make the step into nowhere (consider the above-mentioned nature of aid work combined with some aidwork job offers), I think our analysis is good, and we're determined and enthusiastic about the new adventure.
I definitely don't exclude going back to the field at some point (actually, I'm rather hoping Nepal wasn't the end of it!), but I think it's a good time now to try to build some alternative first.
I have no idea where all this will lead to, but I'm not really afraid of that: like Mandela said, we either win or learn ;-) I suspect I'll suffer bouts of aidwork hangover, and this blog (if it continues) will become much less interesting, but all those are things I'm prepared to risk. So, go and get your tickets to Rome!
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