Thursday, August 18, 2011

The story of Jingle continues...

Jingle went to MOFA yesterday together with their admin staff to submit all the requirements for her work visa application. The staff rejected the visa application form because it was not in A3, booklet format and the passport needed certification that it was authentic. They left and proceeded to the photocopying center and Jingle went to her embassy. Before leaving the MOFA Building, Jingle told her colleague, 'I hope, the same person would be around tomorrow when we go back; otherwise, rules may change".

The next day, Jingle and her colleague went back to MOFA to submit the requirements. Fortunately, Jingle's neighbor is from her embassy so she managed to get the authentication of her passport in one day which normally takes 2 days. Reaching MOFA, they found another guy. The person who attended to them yesterday was not around. This new 'man in the block' reviewed all the work visa requirements compiled in one folder, who rejected the application form on the grounds that it was downloaded from the internet! Her colleague then, asked to have the form that they require. While filling-in the form, Jingle noticed that it was exactly the same. Looking for logical and sensible answer, Jingle asked but did not get any answer. The staff from MOFA pretended not to hear. For fear that the documents might be marked PLEASE REJECT VISA APPLICATION (although this is the worst scenario), Jingle kept quiet. Only to find out later that the difference between the two is on the first page. Downloadable form has no stamp while the form from MOFA has a red stamp that reads: FOR SALE, 50 CENTS!

Does it make any sense? yes! downloadable is free and the one they have is for sale and they get money out of it without any receipt. In short, subtle way of corruption. Whew!

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Jingle and Rudolf...an interesting story

Here is how the story goes about Jingle and Rudolf. They are among those several expatriates in TL who are working in the development sector to contribute to the so-called ‘making a difference in the lives of Timorese’. Like most organizations in this country, expatriates enter TL on a tourist visa and arrange work visa/permits while in country. Common practice and also allowed by the immigration, tourist visa can be extended for 2 months while the work permit is being sorted out.

In preparation for arranging work visa, Jingle and Rudolf started gathering the documents required by the immigration; one of these is the medical certificate from a public hospital. To get this, one has to undergo laboratory tests and chest x-ray. Jingle and Rudolf sorted this out without the help of the admin staff from their organization, which ideally should not be the case. Since both of them are new-comers, a staff from their organization should have accompanied them. Nonetheless, both of them went to the hospital on their own. Rudolf is confident because he can speak one of the languages which are commonly spoken in this country. Jingle on the other hand, only knows English, so she left the transaction to Rudolf and she was just waiting for feedback from him. After filling-in the hospital form and submitting the required documents, Rudolf asked the guy at the receiving area called Mr. Blue (in blue hospital uniform) how much they need to pay for the medical procedures. He was given the price of USD100 each, which makes USD200 for the two of them. Short in cash, Jingle and Rudolf asked the driver to collect money from the office so that both of them could pay. After a few minutes, the driver returned with the cash and Rudolf gave it to Mr. Blue. Then, Rudolf told Jingle that they can already leave. Jingle was surprised of the speed of transaction, so she asked Rudolf why it was so fast and also reminded him of the official receipt since it would be liquidated at the office. Rudolf told Jingle that receipt will be collected the next day when both of them have to come back for the laboratory tests and chest x-ray.

The next day, Rudolf and Jingle went back to the hospital. Instead of being taken to the laboratory, they were ushered to a small conference room where Mr. Blue signed the medical certificate written in local language, and issued the official receipt for the payment. With a wide grin on Rudolf’s face, they left the hospital. Out of earshot, Rudolf explained to Jingle that they don’t need to undergo all the tests and the medical certificate was already issued. Jingle was speechless, Rudolf did all the transactions and in good faith, Jingle trusted him.

On the way back to the office, Jingle was still speechless, she felt guilty for being an accomplice to corruption. They paid four times the real amount for the price of a medical certificate without going through all the tests. Jingle was put in the middle of choosing between doing good and thinking of the embarrassment Rudolf would face if she didn’t leave him to transact with Mr. Blue. In the mind of Jingle, it was really wrong but to emancipate her from guilt, Jingle said to her friends as she was narrating the story, ‘was she the only person who did it? Or were there other more and probably many times did it for the same purpose?’ It’s a question which is difficult to answer. It was also difficult to judge Rudolf for being trapped in that situation. But this gives us, development workers here to think and ask, is capacity development and assistance really helping this country and more specifically, is it worth our effort? It could be yes or no, but in the end there are innocent people, the most deprived and vulnerable that needs us most, not those who are in the mighty confines of the huge public offices in the city and roaming around in their ‘kareta estado’.

Moving On...

One of the most difficult things to do in life is moving on from the past, past life, past relationships, past situations, etc. Admittedly, I am one of those who really takes time to move on from any past events, it takes me long to move on from a failed relationship, living in a place which I have grown to love but I have to leave, things with sentimental value which I cannot just let go and so many other things.

I am following Paulo Coelho's blog and this is one of his posts which I like so much because it is grounded on reality and something which not only me has experienced in life but true to most human beings I know. I want to keep this in my blog that's why I am re-posting it here. It touched my life like no other article did.


Closing cycles


Illustration by Ken Crane

(a version of this article circulates in internet having me as its author. In fact, I did not write it, but I made a few corrections and decided to republish it here)

_________________________
ESPANOL AQUI: CERRANDO CIRCULOS
PORTUGUES AQUI: ENCERRANDO CICLOS

__________________________

One always has to know when a stage comes to an end. If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through.
Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters – whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished.

Did you lose your job? Has a loving relationship come to an end? Did you leave your parents’ house? Gone to live abroad? Has a long-lasting friendship ended all of a sudden? You can spend a long time wondering why this has happened.

You can tell yourself you won’t take another step until you find out why certain things that were so important and so solid in your life have turned into dust, just like that. But such an attitude will be awfully stressing for everyone involved: your parents, your husband or wife, your friends, your children, your sister.
Everyone is finishing chapters, turning over new leaves, getting on with life, and they will all feel bad seeing you at a standstill.

Things pass, and the best we can do is to let them really go away.

That is why it is so important (however painful it may be!) to destroy souvenirs, move, give lots of things away to orphanages, sell or donate the books you have at home.

Everything in this visible world is a manifestation of the invisible world, of what is going on in our hearts – and getting rid of certain memories also means making some room for other memories to take their place.
Let things go. Release them. Detach yourself from them.

Nobody plays this life with marked cards, so sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Do not expect anything in return, do not expect your efforts to be appreciated, your genius to be discovered, your love to be understood.

Stop turning on your emotional television to watch the same program over and over again, the one that shows how much you suffered from a certain loss: that is only poisoning you, nothing else.

Nothing is more dangerous than not accepting love relationships that are broken off, work that is promised but there is no starting date, decisions that are always put off waiting for the “ideal moment.”

Before a new chapter is begun, the old one has to be finished: tell yourself that what has passed will never come back.
Remember that there was a time when you could live without that thing or that person – nothing is irreplaceable, a habit is not a need.
This may sound so obvious, it may even be difficult, but it is very important.

Closing cycles. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because that no longer fits your life.

Shut the door, change the record, clean the house, shake off the dust.

Stop being who you were, and change into who you are

Friday, August 12, 2011

My Cab Adventure


So far, in all the countries I have lived and worked, I was always privileged to be taken and dropped from office to work. Taking cabs was only during personal trips to the supermarket or dining out or occasional visits to bars. Though on some occasions, I still have the privilege to be driven by friends except in VietNam where hailing a taxi was not difficult (apart from the reason that this was not part of the benefits from my giant organization), but hold on I was not spared from an interesting cab experience there.


The shopaholic in me motivated me to visit ‘Leader’, the biggest supermarket in town where you can find most items for individual's basic needs. The main reason for going there was to buy a water dispenser which I will be using for cooking because I don’t like the smell of the water coming from the tap. Also, to buy mop and broom to complete the stuff I basically need in the house I moved in 3 weeks ago.


Picking up from my very limited Tetun, I told the car driver where I will be going and the fare. We agreed on the price of 3USD to my place. Mid-way to my place, the cab driver asked how much I would be paying. I mentioned the amount agreed then, he reduced the accelerator as if stopping in the middle of the road and telling me, USD5. Instinct told me that he might harass and drop me off right there and so I told him that he just continues driving and I’ll pay him the amount he was demanding but behind my head, I knew that there would be people in our compound when I reach my place.


As I was getting off, the land-owner of my house who is a Timorese approached us while I was busy unloading my shopping bags, of course the driver did not help me. I took this opportunity and told the land-owner the demanded fare of the cab driver. I left the two of them arguing and I can figure out that because I cannot speak Tetun and I am a ‘Malay’, the driver was over-charging. Initially, the driver was insistent that he should be paid US$5 but the landowner also insisted maximum of US$3. I don’t want to put the landlord into trouble because of me. I told the taxi driver that I am willing to pay US$5 dollars but I will get his cab number. While I was writing the taxi number, he grabbed the US$3 from the landlord and drove away!


This experience is an addition to the list of my not-so-good-cab experience. Should I be taking public transport, buy a car?, because for some strange reasons I always have nightamarish experience with cabs wherever I live or, it’s just because I am a foreigner in their land and seeing me as a stupid bideshi, mzungu, ngưi nưc ngoài, malay who cannot speak their language would be a good victim of harassment and instant robbery. This is one of the things you have to bear when working away from home, maybe to be more specific, in the these typesof countries where I carry out my mission.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Speech delivered by J.K. Rowling at the Annual Meeting of Harvard Alumni Association

This is re-posted from http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/06/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination. A speech delivered by the author of the famous Harry Potter film. It's very moving and inspiring. Ate Azl is blessed with good writing skills that's why she is fond of browsing the net for similar articles. I would like to thank her for finding this and sharing it on facebook.

J.K. ROWLING, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

Text as delivered follows.
Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.

So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.


I wish you all very good lives. Thank you very much.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

One month and still counting...

Thirty days ago, I set my foot at Nicolao Lobato International Airport to start a new life and face new challenges in Dili, Timor Leste. Moving from one country I realized is never easy but this is the nature of my work, the road less taken but I did. Looking back, let me just recount the good things that happened since I arrived in Dili.


With the help of a friend, way back Bangladesh time, establishing friendship was not difficult. In a week’s time, I made friends who are really new to me because I have never met anybody from these countries. One of them is from Peru, another one from Indonesia, a lady from Germany and the rest are Filipinos. They have a group called Casa Quinta Girls who are doing different work in development organizations. Each has its own expertise when it comes to development work. This support group made adjustment easier.


In a month’s time, I managed to find a place. A house which may not be the best to my standards but it is, for Timorese standards. It is located in a compound of four houses which are occupied by Filipinos as well. It feels more homey when you reach home just knowing that in your neighborhood are people you can rely on. Moreover, they are all from my region back in the Philippines. It’s a 15-minute drive from the city center but the comfort of the house is more important to me than being in the center. It limits mobility but there are always ways to make things possible. Just to add, one good thing though in Dili is the willingness of those who have cars to give you a lift whenever you are out with them.


Work shows real challenge as I have to start from zero as regards to M&E. There is no system in place though monitoring in an informal manner is carried out. However, with the complexities of the projects, it really keeps my brain working as I think of ways to satisfy the needs of the staff without disregarding the ideal from real, what is workable and not. Things have been slow but I always remind myself about the nature of the country and the character of the people with regards to capacity. It’s not easy but I have to. Slowly though I have started my work at a slower pace.


This is just the beginning but now I am less 1 month from the 24 months I would be here. Not that I am counting but it keeps me moving while keeping in mind the reason why I am here.