Living for Disco

I departed from Birmingham early on Sunday, after having decided to skip the morning sessions, and turned on Radio 4. A serious sounding man was interviewing two members of the Zimbabwean diaspora about the current Mugabe shenanigans – a black doctor and a white farmer. So far, so interesting. He starts off by saying in a ‘I’m being very serious and political, hmmm, yes indeed’ voice “So, tell me about farming in Africa. It sounds so mysterious – almost impossible…”

I can only imagine the look on the farmer’s face. It must have resembled the look on mine – incredulity shaken up with contempt, and a splash of disgust. Do people actually do any research before they interview people? Do they actually know anything about Africa?

It was really the cherry on the cake of a most annoying weekend. The volunteers were all great, apart from the guy who insisted on telling me in minute detail about the trials faced by the Papua New Guinean people, when all I wanted to do was drink my wine and gossip about stuff unrelated to third world development issues. It was the VSO employees running the gig that really annoyed me. I just don’t understand why they would organise a weekend designed to address the complex issues faced by returning volunteers and staff it with non-volunteers with a collection of caring faces, and a tendency to say “I can’t imagine what it must be like”.

Bits of it were good, like the feedback to the Chief Executive, who actually listened and responded. Generally, however, I felt I really could have done with a bit more of the sessions about coming home, and less of the ones about how to use a photograph to tell a story.

It was a relief to get home, and do normal things for the afternoon, really. Being at the weekend was alternately unsettling, confusing, upsetting and encouraging, with rather too little of the latter. Could do better, VSO.

VSO recently asked me to give a talk to new recruits on why doing VSO is wonderful and amazing and everyone should do it. I wrote back to them saying that I’d be happy to, but was unsure as to whether I could actually be inspiring, given the sexual harassment/death threat thing, and the depression thing, and oh yes, the dashed expectations of sharing skills and changing lives thing, and perhaps they should think of looking for someone else for now?

I do think that VSO is amazing, and I would and do recommend it. It’s just that my experience was frustrating for many reasons, and it’s still very recent – although, frankly, the craziness of my current job is tinging my memories of my Namibian work with rosy gold. Ask me now! Ask me now!

Anyway, they seemed rather taken aback by my response and suggested a debrief, to take place at a returned volunteer weekend in Birmingham, this weekend. To whit, I will spend a weekend surrounded by people who have finally been let loose in an environment where they can say “When I was in Ethiopia/Ghana/India/Namibia…” until they are blue in the face, and no one will roll their eyes or glaze over.. Oh, the intoxication.

I received an email setting out the schedule for the first day, and it begins with a session entitled “Just one thing…” to which we are encouraged to wear our favourite outfit from our time overseas. I am now wishing that I had spent that vast amount of money on the Herero dress I saw in the window of a tourist shop in Windhoek. My favourite outfit from Namibia was a pair of cut off jeans, a khaki t-shirt from M&S, my Mr Price plastic flip-flops – now sadly defunct, and adrift somewhere in Malawi, and my Ray-Bans, which are so scratched I can no longer see out of them. I’m not sure I’m going to measure up. Perhaps I should take my red satin witch’s hat…

I’m alternately filled with horror and amusement at the idea of this session. I know what many VSOs are like, and they tend to go all gung-ho and dress in splashy African prints and styles that just look outlandish on middle-aged, middle class white women. Then I feel shame at being so bitter and twisted and not entering into the spirit of things as I should. It makes me feel like an errant schoolgirl. I expect I will sit there chewing gum, rolling my eyes, and flicking paper balls at the facilitator.

The scariest part of all is that when I go back to Harborne Hall, it will be over two years since I was last there, and it will feel like five minutes.

Just one thing… How did the time go by so fast?

I promised almost two years ago that David, the security guard next door, would have first dibs on my bicycle when I leave in September. I said he could buy it from me, but really I’m just going to give it to him. Anyway, since then he’s been in somewhat of a lather, asking me on frequent occasions just how long it is until I leave and the bike will be his. I give him the same answer every time. September 2007. I get various responses:

“Eish, that is a long time.”

“Oh, it is September next year not this year?”

“Oh ok. [counts months off in his head; looks dismayed] Don’t forget it is my bike!”

Usually while he says these things, he’s clinging to the handlebars and admiring the bicycle’s fine lines and extraordinary streamlining. Well, he’s admiring something anyway. He absolutely cannot wait until I leave.

So, last week I came home on the bike, and he said “So, I am going away. I will be here tomorrow, and then the next day, and then I will be away in the north for two weeks. When I come back you will give me the bike? And also you must tell me that place where you get the bike mended and their number*, and I need everything. OK, I must go now, I must open the gate for these people!”

And he’s gone before I have a chance to argue. He’s trying to wrest the bike from my posession a full six weeks before I’m actually due to give it up – that’s how excited he is about it.

I feel a bit bad that I’m going to make him wait even longer for something that has been the object of his desire for almost two full years, but I reckon it’s character building. I mean, I’m going a bit frothy at the mouth waiting for my placement to be finished – it feels so close now, I just feel a bit limboish – but I’m going to have to learn to be patient. Some might say that if I haven’t learned how to be patient by now, I’m a lost cause, but it’s never too late in my opinion.

God, is it only 11.25? Sigh.

*It’s these people. They are wonderful, and have a really interesting bicycle ambulance project going on. You might want to give them some money. They’d really like it if you did.

I have been attending a VSO meeting over the last couple of days, one of the components of which was assessing gender in the context of HIV. Gender is a big buzz word these days in the development community. All sorts of people are now requesting that you have gender as a ‘cross-cutting issue’, and that it be taken into consideration in your programmes. I’m not sure all of them know exactly what they mean themselves. I mean, I can see the point in addressing gender issues in a country where 44% of men feel that it’s acceptable to beat their wives, but how to do it is the real challenge.

And who am I to try? I’m a white, middle-class English woman for God’s sake. Could I understand less about cultural mores in rural Namibia? I’m happy with the idea of training people – of developing concrete skills – or with challenging someone who’s views have an affect on me personally, but I’m uncomfortable with imposing my own cultural beliefs on other people. I believe more and more that that change can only come from within.

So, we spent a morning looking at common gender stereotypes. After identifying more of a few of these, e.g. men don’t cry, women should not tell men what to do, blah, blah blah, we debated them. As you can imagine, some of the women* were getting a little huffy about the more blatant ones.

Then we broke for lunch. Unconsciously, we segregated ourselves by sex, women on one table, men on another. The conversation on the women’s table proceeded thus:

“You don’t own an iron? I didn’t think anyone didn’t own an iron.”

“I just can’t bear ironing – I don’t see the point.”

“But in Zambia, every Sunday afternoon you’ll find women ironing everything, even the underpants. This is because of the flies. But I like ironing. I can iron for five hours in a row.”

“Me too! I find ironing very therapeutic.”

“But do you iron your sheets?”

“Of course I iron my sheets!”

“Well, I only iron certain things when I’m going out.”

Then we started talking about washing machines.

I still have no idea what the men on the other table were discussing. Probably stock market prices, or football.

*for ‘some of the women’, read ‘me’.

You must excuse the number of times I will force you to read the words Honours Student Loans Company in this post – I am ignorant of how search engines work, but I would truly appreciate it if this post came up first on any search made for this bunch of incompetent, waste-of-space, goldfish-memory shysters who are wasting my time with their idiocy, and giving me an ulcer.

So, I don’t know how many of you remember this post, about the rudeness and ineptitude of the customer service department of The Honours Student Loans Company. This is a continuation of that saga of pig-thickery.

Fortunately, I thought that after a series of approximately 25 emails exchanged with the Honours Student Loans Company last month, which wasted a vast amount of time I could have better spent picking my nose, or cleaning the dirt from beneath my fingernails, I had the whole thing sorted out. They led me to believe this by sending me this email (which, conspicuously, did not have the words ’sorry’, ‘apology’, or ‘fantastic incompetence’ in it at all):

“A deferment form was requested for you yesterday and I can confirm that a hold has been placed on your account until it has been deferred. Once the deferment is accepted we can backdate the deferment start date by a period of 3 months but on this occasion I will note the account that we will extend this period due to the fact mail was not sent to the address that you had specified.”

Lovely.

So, this morning, I receive an email from my friend, with this attached. It is from the Honours Student Loans Company:

I don’t know if you can read it, but the Honours Student Loans Company are telling me that my account is now 340 pounds overdue, and that if they have to send me any more letters, they will be charging me for them. And, mind-bogglingly, they have clocked that I am overseas, because this letter comes from the overseas collection department.

They obviously have not taken in the information that I earn approximately 210 shiny British pounds every month, and that I occasionally have sleepless nights because when I get back home, this experience will have plunged me even deeper into debt than I was before.

I have written to them, with the message that I expect an apology very shortly. I absolutely cannot wait to receive their first email this morning. I am hoping beyond hope that they get on their knees and offer to clean the ground beneath my feet with their tongues for the foreseeable future. I doubt it though, and right now, I’m in the mood for a fight. I have all my words lined up, ready to march into battle.

They are fuckers (the Honours Student Loans Company, that is, in case you hadn’t picked up on that).