Is this fun?
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 04/Jul/2011 12:50, 34 days ago
I wonder how much I enjoy doing this.I don’t mean being in Nigeria.I love that: always have, maybe always will.It’s a joyous, infuriating, vibrant, magical place which makes me feel at home and endlessly exhilarated.I mean my role out here.Huge swathes of it are brilliant fun: I love the problem solving of planning; the delicacy and strangeness of building key relationships; the joy of delivery; the thrill of interacting with children and teachers in their own settings.They all have the pleasure of being able to do something well– in a sense, I’m perfectly built for this kind of work – and the intricate complexity that demands creativity, flexibility, and a perpetual sense of more being possible.On the other hand, I still don’t know to what extent I believe in it.With previous (broadly similar) roles in the UK, that hasn’t vastly mattered to me: if some fool chooses to pay for me to work out how the Second World War should be taught more effectively, that’s up to them.Here it feels like it matters more: if I don’t believe this is going to work – if it’s not going to have long term impact – or if I don’t think it’s the right thing to do, then I feel like I’m compromising something.As if, somehow, taking advantage of the opportunity to live in a different country means that I endorse this kind of development work (which I increasingly don’t).Maybe that’s because the rewards aren’t as obvious with this kind of role (by obvious, I mean financial) and the assumption has to be that volunteering includes some kind of belief in what you’re doing.I also loathe the lengthy periods of time when I don’t have much of anything to do.Days like today, when no-one I wanted to speak to is in the office, no-one’s done anything in the two weeks since I left them with different tasks, and there’s no training for me to plan for.It’s a largely reactive position and I miss the total control over my own workload that I’m used to.Most of all, though, I don’t know if I can bear long periods away from my wife.Which I think are pretty much an integral element of this kind of work.It’s bad enough when all’s well with the world – but if anything goes wrong and I can’t see her then it’s nightmarish.Last week, with her in the“pain [which] is perfect misery” and essentially being traumatised by hospital procedures, I was hundreds of miles away and incapable of effectively communicating with her unless MTN (the network providers, living proof that a free market doesn’t result in effective service) deigned to allow me to.That leaves her in an utterly grim position, and me in an emotional state where someone in the office telling me about how much she loved Birmingham when she was there made me cry a little bit.That can’t be the basis for any form of future.And yet, if I were offered the chance to return and work here– for a month or so at a time – could I turn it down?I hate the thought of never coming back after December.I love the thought of being able to do some of this work alongside studying– of continuing to provoke myself in this way.But I think I can’t really stand the idea of leaving my wife alone if anything like that could ever happen again.