It's been a long time....

Not really sure how come it's been so long since I last posted on my blog... it's not as if I've been run off my feet with all the thousands of different tasks calling on my time.

I suppose I just haven't had a moment when the desire to write something has happened to coincide with having the time and opportunity.

But, for some reason, today I feel like writing, and I also happen to have some time as well. So here goes.

Well we've been here for over a year now. Well over a year. And it's strange how time morphs. For me it seems to be accelerating, as if the last year was somehow much longer than the coming year.

In actual fact Mel and I came to a big decision just yesterday, which may be somewhat linked to my desire to write. We decided to cut short our stay out here, and come home a little bit early, by about two months.

Mel's trip home to Melbourne (which somehow managed to go via both the UK and France... which is a pretty skew whiff indirect kind of route!) was probably what it all hinged on. Way back before Christmas Mel was having a bit of a hard time of things... actually that's probably a fair description for pretty much all of her experience here unfortunately. So I suggested that maybe planning a trip home around or just after the one year / half way point would be good as something to aim for, and to mark the point, I hoped, that time would start to go by a little quicker - being able to say 'this time next year we'll be back in the uk' I reasoned, would make quite a difference.

The trip to Melbourne became a chance also for Mel to take her first exam for what will become a diploma in massage therapy - her new chosen career.

As it happened also, we moved to a new house at that one-year point. A lovely wooden one, upstairs from a Cambodian family.

So just after moving in we headed off to Kuala Lumpur for a weekend away, and I returned to Pursat while Mel continued on to the UK. Mel had to transit in 'KL' anyway, so it seemed a good excuse for a 'city break' (it felt more like 'escape to civilization' - never before have I enjoyed public transport systems quite so much as in KL!).

Unfortunately on her return, the new house and having passed the all-important '1-year-to-go' point didn't quite have enough of an impact to make living out here enjoyable for Mel. There are so many contributing factors, that it's hard to know where to start to explain why it's hard living here. I guess I can only sum it up by saying it's not a total breeze getting used to living in a developing country, and Mel (by her own admission) has tried with all her will to adapt but hasn't been able to.

The biggest factor is the heat, and I must admit that I felt like I was hanging on to my sanity by my fingernails only at the peak of the dry-hot season. The temperatures soar to around 40 centigrade around the end of February, and stay there till sometime around June when, to the entire nation's great relief the rains arrive and the hot-wet season starts.

We were dreading having to go through that again next year, and thus the reason to bring the end of my contract forward to the end of February (rather than circa 19th April).

Mel was worried I would be sacrificing too much at work, which is after all the whole reason we're here - albeit I was also hoping it would be an enjoyable experience. Actually I am kind-of enjoying being here, though there's a limit on how much you can enjoy things, when your partner slash love-of-your-life is feeling down.. it's a shared experience, so Mel's experience is also mine.

Actually it really isn't much of a sacrifice, as I've not really got any major projects etc that I'm working on that need me to be here right up to April. It's more just trying to help out where you can, without interfering too much or indeed even taking on too much responsibility. The basic mantra in development is that you want to 'build capacity' by helping people to see how they can do things better, but if you take on too much of the work yourself your colleagues come to depend on you, which feels great, and like you're really helping. But the problem is that when you leave, they don't have the know-how or even desire to keep things up, and you risk having done more harm in the long term than good.

So far there are precious few things that I can really claim to have changed for the better. Well, there are a few that I'm really proud of, but it's mostly quite modest. I did help them (along with a contact of theirs from the UK) to write a successful bid which brought in money to support half their staff's work for at least the coming year - the money of course is great, but its not really 'building their capacity'. I've built up the confidence of one of their female staff, so that she now not only feels confident to deliver business skills training on her own - she actually would like to make training a key part of her career in the future. I've helped them to structure some of their work better, and I've made a small amount of headway in helping them understand how to improve their staff recruitment. There are a few other things too, including things that I've actually done with VSO specifically rather than with my NGOs (I'm actually working with two NGOs at the moment).

Over the coming months I'm hoping, with the main NGO I'm supporting, to help them get a monthly management meeting happening regularly, and to use that as a basis for improving their forward planning. I'm in the throes of helping them set up a profit-making division, in the form of a college teaching English and IT skills, which should help give them an additional source of funding. And most importantly they have to get better at fundraising, so hopefully I can help them not only get some more money, but actually learn how to write bids.. though that won't be easy because they don't actually have any dedicated fundraising staff, so it's all work on top of the day-job, so (believe it or not) there's actually major resistance from all the key staff involved in bid-writing. They rather see it as a distraction from their 'real jobs' of going out to the community to help people put enough food on the table. Of course it kind of is a distraction, but one that makes the job possible in the first place... and of course without it they'd all be out of work!

So in a way that's the state of play. Now just 8 months to go. Then (with a little bit of R&R in-between) it's on with the rest of our lives... me setting up my new business as a wellbeing coach...and Mel as a massage therapist.. in Melbourne... I can't wait! (well, I'll have to of course)