Since I don't like to a) sit around b) be prepared, I decided not to spend this last month making the necessary arrangements for an international move, but instead took my mind off all that stressful stuff by volunteering at the support office of a big charity that focus on community development through child sponsorship. This is what good expat wives are supposed to do when they're not at the pool/ salon/ having babies and I am now determined to save the world in whatever capacity I can (whilst remaining in relative comfort myself and drinking cocktails, of course).
Mostly I have been attached to the Big Boss doing very administrative and drawn out tasks with policy, but for any of you English teachers out there, I have been putting the APP grid in action by selecting and retrieving information (name that assessment focus) and then answering an IGCSE language paper question 3 by summarising all that I have selected. So, there we go. What we teach in schools really does come in handy later in life.
In amongst all the policy summaries and chronological logs, which I'll agree with you, was mad fun times, has been lots of chatting to office staff about Big Scary issues like trafficking and extreme poverty and micro finance and floods and donor transformation (not what you think it means) and basically, what I have figured out is that if we don't really understand how poverty works, yo, it's difficult to do anything about it, so now it is my ambition to just be one of those awareness raising people and do a masters in Gender and a Development Studies. Ooh. Interesting.
I have also learnt the very important skill of using a franking machine (genuinely exciting) and nodding quietly and discreetly, so that nobody notices you, when it breaks and it's your fault. The nodding has to be done from your own desk whilst a permanent member of staff is sighing at the franking machine or looking confused because it has never done this before so that it doesn't count as face-to-face lying about whether or not you broke the franking machine because it's a charity, after all, and lying to someone who works in the charity sector would be really wrong.
Another bonus of these four weeks of volunteering, other than the fact that I didn't become an alcoholic or buy a cat or impregnate myself for want of anything else to do, was that I got to pretend to have friends in Singapore for a little while. I even went to lunch at the weekend with one of them and now we are even registered in that official friendship bureau known as Facebook, so it must be real. Luckily, I'm not sticking around long enough for her to realise that when I stand around casually making 'mmm', 'yeah', 'I know' noises in response to conversations about community development I don't actually have any idea what I'm talking about but have mastered the art of asking clever-sounding questions to keep me afloat in the conversation: 'and is that something you've been involved in?' 'How interesting, what was it like?' 'Is that something that happens often?' She'll forever think I'm highly informed and not a complete fraud.
Other than that, when Frenchie left me to attend to his other love (crocodiles) in Australia, I amused myself by seeking out the Singaporean countryside and went to an organic farm in the middle of Singaporean nowhere. Whilst here, I was reminded that we have absolutely zero reason to complain about the weather in the UK because it rains for a significant proportion of the year in Singapore and most of the tropics and whilst, yes, it is warm rain and the sun does immediately come out after all the deafening thunder and forked lightening, I'm not sure this is much of a consolation as the heat means growing a sweat moustache between the MRT station and the office and the sad experience of being able to smell yourself at around 10:30am when the air con has dried you out and given you a cold nose. And of course, there's Vinegar Bra to contend with when you get home.
So, in summary, it has been fun, Singapore, and the people in recent weeks have been among the most welcoming I have ever met, but I am very, very, very, very much looking forward to some smart Alec friend or family member reminding me of this post when I start complaining about the London weather some time in late October. Home time!
My next post, once on UK soil will be my first domestic blog entry and thus a tester to see if it will garner as much popularity as anecdotes about my exotic travels. As a marketing strategy, I will be writing about breasts. Yes. Breasts. Juicy, juicy breasts.
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