Career Guidance & the Bits I Don't Say

Many of my mid-life expat career guidance clients have had very negative experiences with career guidance - 'career advice' as it was in the 1970s and 1980s.  Computer programmes, tick boxes and prescriptive answers which didn't fit.
'Things have moved on since then' I say,
'Now we're about a space to address what you want to.  A one-off to practise for an interview - or a place for you to reflect, to download, to debrief. To hear yourself without being judged. To polish your words on what you offer. To maybe see your life at work from a different angle, to ask yourself different questions, to see your experiences and expectations afresh. To plan a path forward which is effective and feels right for you.'

Career guidance is secular. And it matters that it is, that I don't foist the bits which nourish me on the deeply held, different truths & experiences of others.  But in this land where the working lives of many are deeply insecure, deeply unprotected, deeply oppressive, some of my clients have a great deal to struggle with.  Plodding on still seeking work after seven years unemployment, when the extended family depends on you finding work, and there is no social security. Or moving on from a job, where you've been working alongside the most precarious in this society, a job which has taken your all, so you no longer see who you are, or what you offer in this world.  Or the pressures that you place on yourself when good grades, a small toehold of a job, are the way out of the tin hut in the slum, shared with the alcoholic father who drinks what little money there is & who terrorises the family.  The support and listening they need is different from that of the vast majority of my student clients in SmallTownUK. And there aren't other peers, other guidance professionals here, to swap notes on how to do this best in an African context.

Sometimes it reminds me of the not-knowing-a-way-forward I felt as a 19 year old working on a ward of a German hospital. An internship I'd found to improve my language skills and because I didn't want to be an au pair. But I was placed on the cancer ward, and so my first extended stay abroad was alongside others who were scared, were dying, were in pain and sometimes were isolated, overlooked by families who were too scared to be with them.

I'm grateful I've found an experienced supervisor to help me adapt my practice to the needs here. I'm putting more limits on what I offer and on what I expect.  But I feel it matters to be present alongside what my clients describe. They deserve more than glib answers, prerehearsed tactics which hold true elsewhere, but not here.  What are the bits I hold to be true for me, whether I say them at work or not? 

For many career guidance is about logic, about clearcut paths to the next job. That's great if that's what you want. I support that too. But which are the poems which are too quirkily off-beat to place on my professional website - but which for me are part of this work too, if they speak to you?  Where am I amidst all this?  Yes lots of my clients are getting jobs, good jobs. But how do I define what I am doing for those who don't, who maybe won't ever in this society, what do I trust that this service maybe offers them at this stage?  What are the bits I want to say to myself, but it wouldn't be appropriate to say to my clients?

'[...] This working implies an engagement which allows the [client] to experience levels of interest, sympathy, intimacy and rich conversation which are profoundly nourishing in themselves and do not require an end product to validate them.'
Clarion

'My ministry is about listening, affirming, encouraging and supporting (..) This is a ploughing ministry, an attempt to help turn the soil, so that God's seeds waiting within can sprout & grow in each of us.'
Michael Wajda

'Trust the story that you are in... Trust that there is also great freedom to grow in this stage of your story and that it will nurture what is to come next.'
Nancy Bieber

'Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun & the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes, over the praires & the deep trees, the mountains & the rivers
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean, blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely
the world offers itself to your imagination,
Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting
Over and over announcing your place in the family of things.'
Mary Oliver

'It is not a place that claims to have all the answers but one which rather encourages questions.'
B P Dandelion

'True faith is not assurance, but the readiness to go forward experimentally, without assurance. It is a sensitivity to things not yet known...'

You'll Never Walk Alone... You'll Never Walk Alone

Some songs just hit a deeper level. Rugby stadia full of deep male voices singing You'll Never Walk Alone are one of them for me.  And today it was part of my mental backing soundtrack as the evening unfolded.

We've had six weeks of torrential rain. The main waterpipe from the reservoir feeding 10% of Nairobi's homes - including ours - has been washed away, leaving tens of thousands of people without water. People and homes have been swept away.  A friend's guard came tearfully to work last weekend. His whole house had disappeared. On our drive up-country at the weekend we passed several hundred people trying to pick up a church which had been swept from its concrete foundations onto the main TransAfrica Highway. It wouldn't seem possible in UK, that several hundred people could lift a church back to its foundations. But on our way back home a day later, the church had gone.

It was 8pm. I was snug in my dressing gown infront of a roaring fire when I got a phonecall from Tom.
'I've driven into a large hole. Can you come and tow me out?'
He'd taken a shortcut home, not far from our front door. It's a road he drives regularly, though not for a while. When I got to him, in the pitchdark on the dirt track, our 4x4 was resting on its bumper, front wheels stuck in a newly hatched four foot chasm.  No warning, no nothing. Urgh.

But the guards from the surrounding houses and various passersby had gathered round and were lending a hand. Around ten men pushed as we reversed. And eventually, to much jubilation, out the car popped.  And as we shook hands all round one said,
'Hello, its me, Samuel.'
And so it was, not that I'd recognised him in the pitchdark. One of our previous guards, now posted to a house along this road, had been first on the scene.  And the passersby and other guards had been willing to get their hands dirty, literally, to do something practical, to earn an extra penny, to offer us a kindly hand. We couldn't have done it alone. And we didn't have to.

Arriving in Kenya everyday life is overshadowed by dire security warnings. After three years here, maps have become pinpoints of friends' houses and errands run, life has become a patchwork of relationships and linkages. We weren't far from home. But a guard who had shared our bread three years ago remembered us, when he could have chosen not to, and rallied his mates to lend a hand.  In my head the home rugby crowd roared as we drove slowly home.

Change is in the Air

It's that time of year, when normally stoic, stolid, resilient expat women adopt a wild-eyed manic expression. Coming to the end of the school year, and it's the madness on the merry-go-round, when expat families moving to new posts, move.

A new friend of mine was talking when I first met her, two weeks ago, of moving to (Spanish-speaking) Mexico.  This week I bumped into her again. The organisation's plans have changed. Now they're off to (French speaking) Mali. In six weeks. Different continent from where they'd envisaged till so recently. Different school system. Need to sell and declutter a completely different set of articles from the Mexico scenario. And they've got two school age kids, and her husband is travelling for the next week of the rapidly elapsing time left in Nairobi.

In the butchers I bumped into the other member of the remedial stream of the slick Latin American salsa class. We had howled with laughter at the back, as the sleek class rotated one way, and we, fumbling, stumbled the other. We hadn't seen each other for over a year. Barely have a language in common. But as we spoke very slowly together, out her story tumbled. Her daughter, 18, Italian, is about to go to university in UK. And it's a long way from Kenya, from their relations elsewhere in Europe, and from Mum. Their international school has just organised an evening for the parents of nearly adult children about to move to university in third countries, to lead the parents through the stages of supporting a child in a third country. How to underwrite a phone contract or rental agreement when you don't have a bank account or residence in that country.   Why it matters to have more than one sole piece of photo ID. 
'One of the teachers spoke. Her son had washed his passport twice in the washing machine in his first term. He couldn't get it sorted in time to come home for his first Christmas.'
It gives me goosepimples just to think of it.

There was a time, not that long ago, when organisations sending expats gave you a while to come to terms with the idea and to sort yourselves out before you boarded the plane. That was then. This is now. Several of my career guidance clients are only being interviewed for jobs in another country, another region, two months before the post is due to start. Two months is no time at all to sell your car and your generator, research another country, get far enough up the waiting list for a school, find willing homes for the chickens and the dogs, pack your stuff, sort out your tax affairs, maybe squeeze in a quick break and be off. Even if there are two adults in this relationship and one of them isn't in paid employment and can devote herself to it full time. If you're single, or worse, a working single parent, well get burning the midnight oil.  I see the stress of it, on the faces of my clients, the ones in employment, under pressure to find a new job in time in a new country where the family wouldn't mind being too much. Researching new issues and roles and how your skills are relevant to a different context and preparing for interview in a new country. Or, most likely, in multiple new countries. And I see it on the faces of my mates, the spouses, seeking to gallantly support, but not push, to say in a bright, brave upbeat voice:
'Hm, well it would be very interesting in Moldova wouldn't it. Or Machynlleth.  They've both got lots to offer.'

One of my mates described having packed up the family's stuff in Japan, and sent it shipping freight back to UK, where her husband was next to be posted. But even before the freight had arrived, his company had changed its mind again, decided actually, South Africa was where he was needed. And by default his family too. There was no way to divert the shipment on the high seas, so months and months later it arrived, all wrong for the season, wrong for the circumstance, packed for another parallel life, which wasn't now going to happen.

So if you stand in a supermarket this summer and watch someone, distrait, buying 30 coathangers, seven light bulbs, two dustbins, a machete and some chickenwire, smile kindly, hold her list safely as she seeks to stuff it all in the trolley, and maybe buy her a doughnut to keep her sugar levels up. 

Six Word Saturday

'All present and correct? Cwtch up.'

It's been a twitchy week for a Mum who basically likes having all the chicks around her, where they can be counted. 

Nine year old SecondBorn and his classmates have been off at the coast, six hours away, learning more about this term's slavery topic in Mombasa.  They had a ball and he DID take his malaria tablets daily, did put on suncream and repellents, might even have brushed his hair once or twice.  But any independent trip started by writing our air ambulance reference numbers on the security form is best for me when its over and the chick is back home.

It's been overshadowed too by our realisation that three months from now, FirstBorn will be starting boarding school in UK, thousands of miles away. We knew it with part of our brains, but now the school is sending letters about nametapes and language choices, and suddenly it is imminent and feels far more precarious.  So its been a clingy week, with discussions covering a whole range of eventualities, and ending, inevitably, with another tearful hug.  Tearful for the mother that is.

It's the season of the long rains here, winter approaching. And the rains have been monsoon torrential this week, leading to trees down over main roads all over, gridlock and very long journeys.  Tom took three and a half hours home from work on Monday, a trip which takes 20 minutes at 630am. Some of his colleagues took five hours. And one poor man died in his car in the gridlock, and wasn't noticed till considerably later, as the hooting, opportunistic Nairobi traffic just diverted round his stationary car.

Last night, driving ten minutes to retrieve SecondBorn from the school bus, they were the worst driving conditions I've ever driven in.  The fourth day of torrential rain, rocks and rivers pouring down suburban streets, grateful for the high clearance of the car. And the bus arrived safely, and the rain stopped briefly, and we all huddled infront of a roaring log fire at home.

'And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.'
Lady Julian of Norwich, thirteenth century mystic

And what's this cwtching? To cwtch is a South Welsh term. You have to picture a cold, drizzly, damp scene. To cwtch is to snuggle up your baby under your wool shawl. To hug your child on a warm lap. It's got overtones of damp wool, and deep emotional warmth and comfort. Cwtch up.

This is part of a global blog hop, Six Word Saturday, describe today in six words.  To see the others in the series look here:  http://www.showmyface.com/

Bribes and Beyond

Chatting with a mate today, she described her husband's deep weariness at dealing with corrupt authorities. He's Kenyan born and bred, an ethical professional who is hired by many organisations. But when there's a difficulty, authorities in his field come, and say:
'You owe [a massive sum], several million shillings.'
'No the organisation doesn't.'
'Well how much do you think you owe to put it right?'
In his view, its getting worse.

Jobseekers I've interviewed have told me about the 'presents' they've given, that they couldn't afford, to hope to get their CV before the gatekeeper to the employer.  It's documented that the going rate for a place in the armed forces during the last recruitment exercise was 50,000 KSh, a month and a half's wages in a very well paid job - say as a bank cashier - three months' wages for your average teacher. But it varies wildly by sector and applicant's skills level, and my clients are getting jobs on their own merits, with never a mention of a 'small present'.

Friends have had summary traffic fines levied for no valid reason and been forced by errant officials to drive them to a cash machine to get the money, over a hundred pounds a time.  It's happened to at least five friends over the last three years.  And I've also heard firsthand from the drunken rugby tour coach which picked up a hitchhiking official on their way back to Nairobi.  They shared some beers, and in effusive fellow feeling swapped coats and dropped him off near his home.  To discover, in his swapped new coat in the morning, several million shillings in cash - tens of thousands of pounds - a sum no one has in cash unless from bribes - forgotten by the bevied up official.

I've got to say it hasn't been my experience.  Yes it was laborious and cumbersome to set up a company and gain a work permit, but so too is the UK DSS, and while the papers weren't ready when they should have been, it only took persistence and several repeat visits and no requests at all for anything else.  But I'm one of a privileged few.  And prices for all kinds of things here are on hidden sliding scales, what the market will bear, according to streetsavy of the buyer, sense of urgency, scarceness and the like.
'ALWAYS ask, Is that your best price' said my mate WorldyWise soon after I arrived.  And I've got rebates on hotel rooms, bike repairs, hay for the guineapigs and market wares.

But I'm thinking back on the conversations I've been part of since coming here. With the scared expat arrivees, who worry how to find a way through this. With some upstanding Kenyan friends, who are clear they won't be paying a bribe, no matter what the consequences. And I remember the safety advice tendered by the experienced police officer when I was a freshfaced student twenty years ago.
'If you think you're being followed, obviously try and get away.  But if you can't, I'd advise doing something odd.  Attackers don't want to deal with the unpredictable.  I know one young woman who was sure she was being followed, when she picked up the lid of a steel dustbin and started talking to it.  She then climbed into the dustbin.  The attacker ran away.'
And where possible, I think changing the narrative might work here, sometimes. The story I love best is from friends who were Christian volunteers in Cameroon.  When stopped by police for a bribe they got out of the car, stood with the police.
'Well we don't know what to do. Let us pray together for guidance.'
Police and friends stood together by the vehicle for an impromptu prayer.  And shamefaced, the police finished the prayer, and told them to drive on, no payment this time.