The last bit of paradise
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
Here I am. The end of my journey, the same place where I began in some 10 weeks ago.
So we left Vilanculos, the beautiful place where the seabed is so shallow that you can walk out to sea for meters and still have the water around your knees. The place where the sea is more like a bay and during low tides one looks out onto a view where bands of white sand interlock with bright cyans and turquoise of the sea.
Coming back to South Africa was actually pretty nice. I was awed by the airport, the 4-laned highways, the efficiency of the car-hire people, the different buildings – some old and crumbling and then also the new colourful blocks that is the urban revamping that is slowly but surely happening in this bustling city. Most of all, I was awed by the people – how different they seem compared to Mozambicans and Swazis. I thought they were edgier, more artistic, beautiful. And don’t even get me started on the internet. No internet access for more than 2 weeks until Vilanculos actually. Here, I get connected even when I’m in bed – quite the bliss actually. Right – I think I’m painting an entirely poetic picture of South Africa. Maybe it really is so, but I think its more so to do with the getting around these other African countries that makes me appreciate South Africa and look at it with new eyes.
Don’t get me wrong though. It wasn’t all smooth sailing coming back. Flying into South Africa from Mozambique in a little propeller plane and then having them loose my luggage was not that great. Seriously, just how many luggages do you load at the teeny tiny Vilanculos airport and yet the airline can STILL loose my luggage? I mean, you smell the gasoline from the airplanes which are parked behind the check-in counter and the airline can STILL loose my luggage? But being a seasoned person-of-lost-luggages, I got to talk to a clerk and told him my complicated travel plans and told him it was in the airline’s best interest to figure out my luggage’s location today and not going to the trouble to send it to Spain, Belgium or France where I will be in the next couple of days. I was actually incredibly calm and after several calls, I was reunited with my backpack a couple of hours later at the hotel.
And wait, that wasn’t the end of the adventures. After renting our car, just outside the airport going to the hotel, we were stopped by a cop. And of course he wanted to fine us for something stupid. 250 Euros. I was about to work up some tears, because crying helps sometimes. And I was in the mood for it, the flight, the luggage and now this. And of course, he so kind-heartedly relented, on the condition that, you know hilarious really, we had to “buy” him lunch. His exact words actually. And so we “bought” him lunch for 10 Euros. And we haven’t come across any of this bribery bullshit all these weeks till now. On our last day.
And yet despite it all, there is something about South Africa that I finally appreciate and like.
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So now, its back to school life and to figure out post-MBA plans. Yes, I am a broken record when it comes to talking about my post-MBA plans. But I’m so ready. I’m so ready for this next step in my life. So until my next big trip/ challenge/ move, its been quite the ride and see you the next time!
Heading towards the ocean
Dated 1 August
Location: Tofo, Mozambique
Tofo is chilly – for a beach. There are some pretty good hot moments but these are few and far in between. It gets quite windy but it is still warm enough not to put on a sweater for most parts of the day. And warm enough to swim in the sea for a bit. It feels like hanging about a tropical beach during monsoon season.
Days are languid. Typing up these couple of thousand words are happening slowly but at least it’s happening. Days are filled with strolls and getting bits of work done and the occasional dip in the sea. I also get a bit of reading done and thinking about my post-mba step now that 2012 is nearer on this side of the internship.
The sea shore is beautiful here. The seabed is extremely shallow and the tide recedes all the way out. It looks almost like a desert with all that sand out. The hostel has a beautiful terrace the looks upon the entire beach. It is low season now and there is hardly anyone about. The beaches are empty and so are the roads, cafes and restaurants. We are just here with probably 20 other tourists and we stop and chat each time we run into one another.
Today, 6 of the Emzingo crew will be hitting us up here on the beach. This is when the activities will start. The diving, the snorkeling, the BBQ cookouts from the catch of the day (I am however more inclined to believe in the forces of capitalism working in our favour for fish rather than our super fishermen-like fish-catching reflexes). There will be lots of laughs and I look forward to seeing the guys again.
Dates: 12 August
Location: Vilanculos, Mozambique
Days at Tofo melted into each other, one sunny day into the next. It was full of long walks, an occasional swim, a couple of dives and even a pathetic attempt at surfing. More of the emzingo crew came around and it was quite a pretty reunion. Even one of us, Michelle, got engaged right by the beach. So there was celebration and cheap champagne for everyone.
I turn into a darker shade of brown as the days go by. And I spend lots of time thinking about what I want once 2012 rolls around. I think about what kind of everyday life I see myself leading, what would excite me, where I see myself growing towards. The answers come, slowly and I am glad that I have this time to think, to reflect and to figure out the next steps.
Michelle, Luis, Maggie and I head to Vilanculos from Tofo. A journey that took us 9 hours and a lot of haggling. I turn aggressive and trite and morph into a creature that hates-all-humankind. I assume the worse from people and I flight over a couple of euros in the course of taking the various transportation in our 9 hour journey up the coast which consist of 3 minibuses, a ferry and a taxi. It cost us 8 euros each and yet I fight for the prices for the sake of fighting I guess. I even fight for a proper seat. Its a real battle out there. Its like being in India all over again.
But here I am, in Vilanculos (or Vafanculos as Luis or Luigi calls it) and its all peace and serenity again. Alls well in the world.
Mozambique, the African country with the touch of latin
Dated: 27th July
Location: Maputo, Mozambique
Here portugese fills the air with its musicality and almost poetic aftertaste. It sounds slightly lyrical. And yet its tones, when spoken fast becomes less musical, like notes stop short, un-allowed to resonate. It is as though the gritty undertone of the everyday life here in Mozambique has permeated into the language and given it a metallic edge.
Maputo is Africa. I have been waiting for Africa to pop up these weeks. Apart from the hakuna-matata-esque of the plains of Kruger Park, I have been in an Africa of MBA students and business plans and nice restaurants and hotels and shopping malls. This city is messy. It’s full of unfinished buildings, with menacing steel rods arching into the sky and old buildings with rusty grills and soot-covered exteriors with clothing drying from windows. Hawkers line the road with their wares and batik-swathed women carry goods stacked atop their heads. Barefoot children play soccer in a dusty field next to busy streets and intersection where all sorts of transportation go honking by.
This city also smells of the sea and glorious seafood. I rounded a corner to smell grilled fish cooking in delicious spices. Yes, I see the sea. I see the ocean. It’s warm and salty and on the other side of it lies Asia. Yes, it’s the Indian ocean. Even though its winter, the water is refreshing and not at all freezing cold.
I look forward to heading out of the capital city and going to the sea.
Stopover Swaziland
Date: 26th July
Location: Mbabane, Swaziland
The 6 weeks are over. And I’m heading for the beach. That journey if not taken with a plane is quite the ride involving 2 border controls and time getting there and having to wait for a visa. Yes, Mozambique is my final destination but before I get there, I have to pass through Swaziland where I have to await my Mozambican visa.
Swaziland is a sleepy little thing. It has one of the highest HIV/AIDS infection rates in the world and the average life expectancy hovers at 32 years of life. Is there hope for a country like this, with such a high infection rate and a short lifespan? With an almost terminal disease like this, almost rampant in the country, if I was a swazi and infected with HIV, I wouldn’t care about my education or saving up money. I would live each day with as little income as necessary to sustain my activities of seeing friends and family and basically having a good time as possible throughout my short life. With up to a third of the country thinking like this, I don’t know if Africa can count on Swaziland for spurring on the forgotten continent.
So the battle is half done
Here I am, done with the big presentation to an audience of 16.
2 hours and 30 slides.
And its done. Just like that.
Well, not that its all over right now, there is still lots to do, like ensuring all the go-lives of the little projects take place and ensuring all the necessary tools and schedules are available, all the administrative blah blah has to be in tick-tocking shape before I go. And oh yes, write a document for to sum up all recommendations by the audience at our big presentation.
But yeah, in the existential sense, its over.
At least the accountable part is over. I still have zilch on my 6,500 word report for the school but I have a month to pop that out. And for Client 2, I have to work this weekend, and they like how the work is going on so far – we have tested our amazing framework for measuring social impact in the very projects that we are doing here and all there is left is putting this concept into a beautiful consulting paper.
And yet, I feel my energy dropping as we reach the end. Which is strange. This is the validation, the apex, the cream – where the fruits of our labours get laid out and zoomed out and peeked in with help from our friends who put together this nifty little thing called microsoft powerpoint. I am supposed to be exuberant and basking in the afterwaves of congratulations from the Board and thumbs up from our mentor and our fellowship directors. Yes, we did get the heartfelt thanks and the excellent job done and I even have it handwritten on my personal feedback form.
Instead, I feel vague, disillusioned and slightly confused. I ask myself if I have really made a difference. I was interviewed today (yes, for the new Emzingo video – look out for it) and I said that it was an interesting experience for us because we had an opportunity to actually execute something. Our deliverable was tangible. We were fortunate enough to have followed 2 rounds of fellows and saw our work with the organisation evolved from a strategic plan – a popular MBA concept and vernacular into actually doing the groundwork of writing grant applications and formulating these workplace policies. And now at the end of it all, I ask myself if that was the right thing to do. You know, to provide the muscle for the execution of it all. I can’t quite help but wonder if there could have been more that could be done or if we could have facilitated the entire process much better.
Anyway, its back to reality here. We still have a bit of time left. Its not that bleak as I probably made it out to be. We still have these days to ensure whatever is implementable is put in place and whichever percentage of the work that lives on after we go – we better well make sure that its good.
Crunch time
So, its been a week and not a peep.
Well, this little bird is working rather hard on her client deliverables. Worked through the weekend, holed up in the conference room, preparing lots of handover stuff and dissecting the strategic plan made a year ago and re-evaluating some of the previous recommendations into simple short term wins. Yes, lots of MBA speak here. Even I am boring myself when I hear myself speak nowadays. Tomorrow, we hold a workshop, and I am going to try to steer away from using words like value offering and funding landscape.
Right. Talk about uninspiring. I’m talking about work!
By Thursday, all things with my first client – PUSH will be done!
Oh yes, I do have more than 1 client here during this stint here. I didn’t mention that earlier? I don’t really know if I am all cut out to go all consultant and managing multiple clients and projects at the same time and waltzing into a room and make presentations.
Anyway, enough of this talk about work. Next week this time, I promise to be more exciting.
Uninspired.
Writing policies has now transformed me into a boring writer. I can’t bring myself to write once I get home.
Now that its on to the second work-stream, now that we are wrapping up the funding bit, the policies creation part is a juggernaut of complexity and tediousness.
I start my day at around 9am. By 9.30am, I am up to my eyeballs in boredom. My mind darts in a million directions, not really focused on the task. And to emphasize the point, Marcel, my project partner, starts singing. And the tediousness of reading lines and lines of ”law-speak” – which is what I call English written to sound profound and law-like, is starting to get to me.
I think the source of this is coming from the belief that I think our work here will not be of much “use”. By that, its policies. Its going to be filed and chucked in a corner. So there goes our “value creation”. I would much rather work on funding and continue getting ‘no’s from people. Yeap, in a heartbeat.
The more I dig into this, the more I see that policies are just that. Because things that are written in right there in front of my eyes are not really applied in the everyday life at my workplace. Its a vortex of de-motivation as I get more reassured that the work I am doing here isn’t going to be that practical.
But maybe its finding that balance between purely administrative blah blah and something practical. To put it simply of course.
So there. And with that, we wrap up the day, got into our Chevy Spark to drive home. And we actually got lost. After 5 weeks of going to and from work. So at least I got a chance to roll my eyes and have some entertainment for the day.
So, Kruger Park and Nelson Mandela. The two things I knew about South Africa when I was a wee little girl. Since there has been lots of talk about Nelson Mandela already, its time to hit the other big guy – the Kruger National Park.
We packed our bags and head out of Joburg at 6pm. Me and the boys. We had a pretty entertaining ride – lots of ragging on each other, lots of extremely rude jokes, lots of laughs. We arrived at the world’s possibly worse hostel ever. The proprietor smelled of beer and the room was spartan, the blankets were slightly musty and there was no water supply at all. I opted to sleep in the car. Still we were all in a good mood. We asked, politely, if there was a slight chance that there was a stiff drink one could procure on the premise. Well, as luck would have it, there was (no surprise, really) and yes, he could bring us a drink. We drank it down and hopped off to bed (for me it was to the car). The boys checked that every single surface of their skin was covered before crawling under the sheets. Morning arrived soon enough and I awoke everyone up at 6.30am. And as there was no water, it meant no shower, no breakfast, nada.
That was fortunately, the end of our misery. From this point however, the trip only got better.
We saw an incredible number of animals. Impalas, antelopes, ostriches, giraffes, hippos, crocodiles, zebras, warthogs, eagles, baboons, kudus and all sorts of bucks spotted regularly throughout the day. We even saw 4 out of the big 5! The buffalo, rhinoceros, elephant and lion (short of the leopard). A herd of elephants crossed the road right in front of our car just 30mins into the park. Around lunch, We saw a gigantic herd of more than a hundred buffalo grazing next to the road and one came up to the side and stared at us straight and unflinching. We saw a couple of giraffes munching next to the road, their long tongue reaching for whatever it is it eats on the top most branches of trees. One even crossed the road, its spindly legs in its slightly awkward gait was quite mesmerizing.
Then, we spotted lions.
In the afternoon, the excitement cracked up a notch when we came up to a pack of lions just 100 meters ahead in the grass, lying under the shade of trees. We parked and stalked them for a bit but they didn’t come any closer as the lions were content to laze about. It was all quite exciting, just sitting there and observing them. Wow – a pack of lions. We thought that with that sighting, our luck would have been pretty much used up.
But there were more adventures to come.
Soon after that while on the road again, we saw 2 animals walking ahead. Its quite rare that animals walk on the road, so we drove up quite quick and they were 2 lionesses! We followed them, literally on their tails, for 10 whole minutes. We were just 5 meters behind them. We saw each flex of their muscles with each step they took and the distinct clarity of the shades of brown of their fur in the sunlight. They turned around and looked at us a couple of times and then continued on, quite nonchalant as they went about their stroll. Their gaze was always straight, almost like royalty. We were in the car the whole time, windows rolled down. It was like we could almost touch them.
Later that afternoon, we came across a big bull of an elephant walking down the road as we rounded a corner. We inched forward. The elephant continued walking. We inched forward. And still he continued towards our car. We eased to a stop. At that point, the elephant flared its ears and raised its trunk over its tusks. And he gathered speed. It took us about 30seconds to realise that he was charging towards us! Toshi (our driver at this time), pushed the pedal to the floor and reversed. It was only then that the elephant decided to change paths and left the road. We were just about 20meters apart – car and elephant. It was pretty scary actually. I was in the passenger seat and caught the action on camera – along with a generous amount of swearing from the boys.
Along with the animals, there were spectacular views. It was as if the place was right out of the Lion King. Rock outcrops and vast plains as far as the eye could take you.
So here we are – done with the park. We rested the night in a beautiful hotel overlooking the park, had breakfast while viewing elephants in the distance, came back via a beautiful drive over the mountains through pine forests and fruit farms. And so the weekend concludes. Its back to work and its going to be full steam ahead the next 2 weeks. My project is due soon and I fear that next weekend, I’ll spend it working, but I think the excitement from day I had at the park will more than make up for the next 2 week’s worth of work.
And on to Kruger
So here we are on the road again. It seems like each weekend, I’m on a mad rush out of Joburg – and its been a month already that everyday and moment is filled with activity. Now that I think of it, I’ve not had a day where I hadn’t done anything.
Normally, I would think I would be dead against anything like that – and yet there is something about being here that excites me. Maybe its the fact that everything is so new – its south africa and being in africa and that I’ve had little contact or motivation to even get to know this country and continent before. And now that I’m here, the newness is energizing, everyday I’m discovering something. Maybe its the fact that I’m breaking the routine of studying (yes, I’m going to shamelessly admit that I love work) that is making this experience so novel.
Still, I do realise there has to be a balance in this manic living. I think its here, that I truly see that -it’s because of my pursuit of this balance that I’m doing this today. Because one day, I would want to be in a single place and truly savour that stability.
Well, that’s the theory for now at least.
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Now, we are in the car on the way to the all-famous Kruger Park. Its all dark outside. And the guys in the car are cracking me up with the remarks about temperature control, music selection – I feel like I’m in a mega-club with this omf omf dance music, directions (really, we got the gps and we still discuss about directions), breakfast plans, how to eat our mega sandwich between the 4 of us (yes, its kinda like camping on wheels here with the dinner prep going on while in the car), dissing the driving skills of each other, what to do if an elephant decides to sit on our little jellybean of a chev spark – basically lots of discussions about everything happening at the same time in this tiny space.
Its going to be a good weekend. I just hope to spot some animals. And that my camera has battery left.
Mid project reviews underway and other shennenigans
So, I have been incognito for a while but I’m back.
Today, I just had our project’s mid-way review and it went ok I guess. Still lots of work ahead of us. Still looking on the bright side of things – and getting funding is turning into an obsession (more for my other project for IE – the Singapore trip, but still the getting funding is addictive). So work is chugging along. I don’t even want to talk about the other workstream which is policy creation. That’s pretty much of a pain one can imagine policy writing to get. But hey, I can’t get the best out of both worlds I suppose.
And it has been cold. A little word about insulation in the fine environment I operate in. Well. Nonexistence. That’s a word. So when its 8 degrees outside, its 8 degrees inside. It’s not that cold, one would think, but that for hours on end, it can get pretty much like Siberia. Well, for the sake of not getting too technical, it feels a heck a lot like Siberia. Luckily, compared to our fine comrades who work in the other offices in the neighbourhood, we have a heater and it feels a little less like Antarctica or Siberia or whichever arse freezing place. So there we are huddled with coats and scarves with our laptops right up to it. If Marcel and I get any closer to the heater, we might as well be sitting on it. So we get by alright.
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The last weekend, we went to Cape Town. We saw the Cape of good hope and its beautiful. I don’t think there are many places in the world as beautiful as that. Cape Town has a different feel. It has the sea and the atmosphere of the city takes on this coastal vibe. It almost relaxes me. We stayed in an amazing suite to top it all off. Pretty much living the high life – without the shoes to go with it – I live out of my meager 13kg backpack worth of gear I brought from Madrid to Joburg – the lightest packer in the entire crew.
The nightlife was pretty awesome too. It involved us getting thrown out of clubs, threatened by tasers and lots of mischief that I will not repeat on this public (ish) space. Fortunately, I stayed out for the most part of it. So essentially, all the fellows went absolutely nuts. I guessed we needed it – some more than others. It has been an intensive month, and here, for the first time, we could let it all come out – not think about everything.
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And now, the week has started again and its time to plod on.
