After a couple months off from blogging, I recently started feeling like writing again. What better time to start than a return trip to Somaliland, the country that inspired this blog to start with? And, of course, a well-timed conversation about bushmeat that reminded me how fun blogging can be.
This morning, for the second time in my life, I woke up long before dawn and rode through a cool, dark, empty Nairobi to catch a flight to Hargeisa, Somaliland. After two hours of flying across miles of empty desert, we came in low over dozens of camels and touched down on the bumpy runway. I paid the $20 landing fee and the $3 something fee and headed to the hotel where my organization's Hargeisa office is based. The same, and yet so different, and it made me think.
When I came to Hargeisa last time, in August and September 2010, I was nearing the end of nursing school. I knew that nursing school had been a good decision, but I had also just come to the conclusion that I probably not really cut out to be a floor nurse in a hospital, even for a relatively short period of time. I knew I either wanted to go back overseas to work or into a full-time masters program in midwifery, but was having trouble deciding which would do a better job of getting me where I wanted to go (and be more fun).
I'm a big believer that what's important in life is knowing where you want to go, more or less, but being willing to be pretty flexible about your route and the interesting opportunities it might bring, and this last year has really emphasized that. I ended up taking a job as Monitoring and Evaluation Adviser with my current organization that I actually interviewed for while I was in Hargeisa (over the phone). When I left, I didn't particularly imagine that I would be back, or that before I came back I would see a glove compartment full of bushmeat, take a speedboat down the Nile to visit clinics, cross Angola off my list of places to visit, get headbutted by a dik-dik, take a ferry across Lake Victoria, or help build a new refugee camp from the ground up, AND get to both work overseas and do a midwifery masters full time, thanks to Frontier Nursing University.
I learned a tremendous amount, and got the chance to take some really interesting trips. I wouldn't trade either, but the job ended up not being what I really wanted to do, for a variety of reasons simple and complex. And then, when I went to Dadaab as part of an emergency response team at the height of the famine in the Horn of Africa, I worked for the first time on actually developing and implementing humanitarian response programs, as opposed to the program support and technical backstopping that I had been doing (and what I thought I wanted to keep doing). In Dadaab I realized that program implementation was far more interesting than I had given it credit for. But, more importantly, I realized that a big piece of my frustration in my original job was that I wasn't necessarily comfortable telling people how to run their programs when I had never run my own. My conclusion? That I really wanted, and needed, to run my own programs as the next step.
After spending several months working as part of the emergency response team in the Somalia office, in mid-November I was offered and accepted a new position as the Somalia Programs Coordinator, overseeing all of my organization's programs in Somaliland and Somalia and helping develop new programs. As opposed to being based in DC with travel to various country programs, I'm now based in Nairobi with travel to Somaliland and Somalia (security permitting and agreed on by a team of regional security advisers, Mom!). Thus, this trip to Somaliland, where my organization runs emergency nutrition programs in the famine-stricken semi-autonomous Sool and Sanaag regions in the east of Somaliland.
So here I am, back in Hargeisa where this whole thing started. I've signed a year contract, so I have a bit of an idea of what the next year holds, but I'm sure there will be lots of surprises along the way. But for now, it's dinner time and something I am 100% sure of: it will be goat.
This morning, for the second time in my life, I woke up long before dawn and rode through a cool, dark, empty Nairobi to catch a flight to Hargeisa, Somaliland. After two hours of flying across miles of empty desert, we came in low over dozens of camels and touched down on the bumpy runway. I paid the $20 landing fee and the $3 something fee and headed to the hotel where my organization's Hargeisa office is based. The same, and yet so different, and it made me think.
When I came to Hargeisa last time, in August and September 2010, I was nearing the end of nursing school. I knew that nursing school had been a good decision, but I had also just come to the conclusion that I probably not really cut out to be a floor nurse in a hospital, even for a relatively short period of time. I knew I either wanted to go back overseas to work or into a full-time masters program in midwifery, but was having trouble deciding which would do a better job of getting me where I wanted to go (and be more fun).
I'm a big believer that what's important in life is knowing where you want to go, more or less, but being willing to be pretty flexible about your route and the interesting opportunities it might bring, and this last year has really emphasized that. I ended up taking a job as Monitoring and Evaluation Adviser with my current organization that I actually interviewed for while I was in Hargeisa (over the phone). When I left, I didn't particularly imagine that I would be back, or that before I came back I would see a glove compartment full of bushmeat, take a speedboat down the Nile to visit clinics, cross Angola off my list of places to visit, get headbutted by a dik-dik, take a ferry across Lake Victoria, or help build a new refugee camp from the ground up, AND get to both work overseas and do a midwifery masters full time, thanks to Frontier Nursing University.
I learned a tremendous amount, and got the chance to take some really interesting trips. I wouldn't trade either, but the job ended up not being what I really wanted to do, for a variety of reasons simple and complex. And then, when I went to Dadaab as part of an emergency response team at the height of the famine in the Horn of Africa, I worked for the first time on actually developing and implementing humanitarian response programs, as opposed to the program support and technical backstopping that I had been doing (and what I thought I wanted to keep doing). In Dadaab I realized that program implementation was far more interesting than I had given it credit for. But, more importantly, I realized that a big piece of my frustration in my original job was that I wasn't necessarily comfortable telling people how to run their programs when I had never run my own. My conclusion? That I really wanted, and needed, to run my own programs as the next step.
After spending several months working as part of the emergency response team in the Somalia office, in mid-November I was offered and accepted a new position as the Somalia Programs Coordinator, overseeing all of my organization's programs in Somaliland and Somalia and helping develop new programs. As opposed to being based in DC with travel to various country programs, I'm now based in Nairobi with travel to Somaliland and Somalia (security permitting and agreed on by a team of regional security advisers, Mom!). Thus, this trip to Somaliland, where my organization runs emergency nutrition programs in the famine-stricken semi-autonomous Sool and Sanaag regions in the east of Somaliland.
So here I am, back in Hargeisa where this whole thing started. I've signed a year contract, so I have a bit of an idea of what the next year holds, but I'm sure there will be lots of surprises along the way. But for now, it's dinner time and something I am 100% sure of: it will be goat.
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