Tag Archives: learning

Honouring Fridays: July 31st, 2009

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So, I am actually rambling away on a Thursday evening writing this blog.  It is the eve of my first all-nighter in Nepal.  A proposal so flawed it needs its own reality TV show must be perfect by tomorrow morning.  So, to warm up the writing juices getting a jump start on the blog seemed like a good idea – especially because it reminded me to be grateful, as Fridays always do.  Now, with a better, healthier, and more positive outlook on this all-nighter I am going to get to it.

  • Naspati.  Another week, another magical fruit season.  New to markets these past two weeks are naspati, the ubiquitous asian pear/applepear/Pyrus pyrifolia.  These round and crunchy fruits are kin to the pear and while expensive at home, come at a ridiculously affordable price here.  Last weekend for our regular Saturday gathering (where I have found my niche as honoured dessert maker) I made a poached version with a few tweaks to this recipe from Marvin at Burnt Lumpia.  Instead of wine I used pomegranate and grape juice to poach, meaning I skipped the additional sugar in the poaching liquid.  Served cold with fresh cinnamon cream, the reduced poaching liquid, and homemade cashew and almond granola they were delicious!  Perhaps if you get yourself over here in the next month I could make you some…provided they are still in season…oh who am I kidding…if they aren’t in season something else delicious will be, so get the heck over here!
  • Girlfriends.  Hard to imagine life without the care and love of a good group of girlfriends. But this week I think I realized just how much I miss those friends who are simultaneously an adviser and empathizer.  They help sort out the myriad of emotions and yet somehow manage to remain both level-headed and compassionate – feeling what you feel but not getting so deep into the crux of it that they are no longer able to help dig you out.  And they know you well enough to know when to challenge or to simply agree, when to pour a glass of wine or reach for the gin and tonic, and when a little laughter is better than tears.  They just know.  Thank you so much to all my girlfriends who have reached out over the past week with emails, snail mail, packages, and good thoughts.  It was just the love I needed this week.
  • Knowing that I still have lots to learn. I guess this is not a new revelation.  No thunder crashed or lightening flashed when I told myself this afternoon that I still have so much to learn.  Because I actually don’t think this state of mind ever really changes.  I always think I have much to learn, but the harder part is being grateful for it.  It isn’t about being young or old, schooled or unschooled, experienced or unexperienced – it is about curiousity – about retaining that curiousity when you are learning something you maybe don’t want to learn.  And that is something I still have to learn…to appreciate the lessons that are the hardest to appreciate.
  • Randomwebsitegenerator.  Sometimes I need inspiration.  And I read this article just the other day that suggested using randomly generate websites to inspire solutions to problems (they called them probortunities…don’t even get me started!).  And I remembered a number of years ago this website that helped generate random URLs.  So I tried it and found inspiration here, and here, and here, and here…places I may never have found otherwise if it wasn’t for my trusty randomwebsitegenerator friend.  Thanks for the randomness friend!

Honouring Fridays: March 20th, 2009

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The march of the week days continues on.  One thing that I can confidently say about working in a new country is that work is still work is still work, any way you slice it.  I had kind of thought (naively) that somehow working overseas would feel not like work!  But who am I kidding really – it is still fraught with the same pitfalls as work anywhere – overtime/weekend work may be expected, office politics still run rampant, not everyone loves their job and it is still hard to get people to work together and collaborate.  All that said, work in Nepal is nothing like work in Canada 🙂  Yes, it still feels like work and still has many of the same pitfalls, but …it is indescribably different.  So, to honour this particular Friday some things that I am grateful for at work 🙂

  • Talented and wise colleagues. It is often the case that I seek the wise council and advise of my “supervisor” R.  I have found myself a bit stumped this week on how to address some internal politics and clearly unethical behaviour within the coalition I work with.  What I am continually so impressed with is R’s ability to read a situation for the subtle and often incredibly sensitive cultural messages that I so easily miss.  He understands so well the dynamics of human behaviour within the Nepali context and can so easily and gracefully adapt his own communication to these complex social situations.  Hi wisdom and talent is impressive and I have so much to learn from him.
  • The official VSO Library. Not everyone knows this, but one of the simple pleasures of being at the VSO office is that I can sherpa back to my apartment every day a couple of books from the VSO library.  These are years and years worth of books collected by various volunteers and left for the enjoyment of continuing volunteer generations.  All free and totalling about 1500 books in total.  From the obscure, to the mundane, to the breathtaking one can find just about anything.  And I have also discovered that there is a point after which one will read ANYTHING simply for the sake of reading.  So far I have read books (fiction and non…you decide) on the following topics: British culture, tennis and drug addiction, incest in frontier France, the Nepali civil war, walking the Appalachian Trail, lesbian love in the early 1900 British theatre scene, down’s syndrome, the life of a writer, the culture of a small fishing village of the coast of france…and I have only just dipped a toe into the literary excitement of the VSO library.
  • Riding on the back of my boss’s motorbike to get to meetings.  It is hard to imagine how I would have reacted in Canada to the suggestion that I hop on the back of a bosses motorbike and zip off to a meeting.  But, today, that was exactly what happened.  Indulge me for a moment and just imagine your own boss riding a motorbike.  Now, imagine yourself, dressed in traditional Nepali clothes but topped off with a black motorcycle helment and hopping on the back.  Weaving in between cars, traffic, and bicycles, balancing precariously on the back, trying to make your body flow with the bike rather than against it.  After the meeting, we debrief the meeting while whizzing through the streets….incredible!  I must admit that I loved it and hope we have more meetings we need to get to where we will need to take the motorbike.
  • Meetings where a mutiny occurs! The above mentioned motorbike trip took us to the first all-members meeting of the Global Campaign for Education-Nepal.  About 15 people in total attended but the big news, and something I was considerably grateful for, was the fact that a mutiny occurred!  The chair was essentially kicked from his position by both his organization and the rest of the members.  There was a reshuffle of the steering committee which hopefully resulted in renewed focus and energy.  AND, all this happened while the (ex) Chair was not in attendance!  He wasn’t even there to defend himself.  Bizarre to think that he was part of the coalition a day ago and now is no longer involved…and I don’t even know that anyone has told him yet…yikes!  But I must admit it was a step in the right direction – and it was just such a interesting process to observe.