I like that title, but I have no idea what it means.

So!  I’m still here, in sunny Cambridge, life is good finally despite me being beyond tired.  So here are somethings that have happened:

• My bike was stolen, but the thief won a bike worth about thirty quid with repairs amounting to several hours’ work and about fifty quids’ worth of parts.  I am satisfied that he lost the game.
• I have a new bike.  It is shiny and has possibly the largest, hardest, baddest chain ever seen on a fifty quid raleigh shopper.  Not losing this one, hoo no.
• My house is Full.  I now have housemates called Jackie, Tie, Lola and Sylvia, from a grand total of four countries and speaking at least six languages between us.  We are two support workers, one lawyer, one nurse and a translator.
• My boyfriend has a pet hedgehog called Badger.
• I need to buy old-granny support shoes today and have no idea where to get them from.  My feet are agony, and I have terrible back and knees today.  This weekend is rated Not Good on the pain-scale.  I was in bed all yesterday evening and removed the pain through the patented method of Drugs’n'Wine’n'Cheese(TM).
• My job is good, although it will get better once I start working.  The training is fine, as fine as daily seven-hour lectures on law and caselaw ever can be.  The people are good, and my office is the highest-performing one in the country.  I like my co-workers, I can wear batwing jumpers and jeans to work, and I get to use my brain and Previous Skills - which makes me feel good that I have some.  I am having to get over my snobbish fear of being a “lawyer”.
• I spent yesterday afternoon taking up, taking in, edging and mending dresses and shirts, and doing some sketching.  Today I am heading to J Lewis to pick up some backing fabric for a Plan that is hatching, which could possibly be something to do with an art exhibition for amateurs that may be held in September.
• I love living in Cambridge, I would never, ever want to live in London unless the job was un-doable elsewhere, and it’s so good coming home to a place that has no connection with stress of any kind and where there are no hills or tube systems or people who walk too fast.

I got an answer from Tesco, an identikit Mr Potatohead clunky thing that avoided most of my questions and fobbed me off with ETI and corporate responsibility.  They had no real answer to their Thailand litigation.  I may post my reply here, once I’ve got round to sending it - but I’m without laptop (in for mending) or internet (not set up yet) for at least a fortnight, so am just on internet cafes and can’t be arsed with Tesco emails at the mo.

My next email is to Lush, who I have been happy with until I realised all their soaps still have palm oil in them.  I wonder what they’re doing about it.

Does anyone know of a good eco-toothpaste?  One that actually does the job and doesn’t taste like chewing a bush?  I’m trying to go through all my house products and make sure they’re friendly, and I’m just down to that now (bar the Lush issue with shampoo/soap).

Anyway, I’ve been busy living in a hotel and having a lot of train trips in the evenings.  Hopefully, once this week is done, I’ll be on to a regular commute, which will be a heck of a lot easier.  I’m going to try to buy a Swahili CD for the train rides, for practice, and am ploughing through Good Books on the long journeys.  Although I am getting odd looks, what with my four-inches-thick Immigration Law Handbook and Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman (I alternate.  You can have too much anger.  When I get full of anger from one thing, I switch to the other).

That is all.

No it’s not!  I LIED
tee hee.

I am just about to head home from my last day working for this man.  A good job, since I’m pretty sure the experience got me my job here that starts on Monday.  The downside is that I now have no idea when I’ll be online again, since I have no internet access at home yet.  So consider posting suspended until maybe next weekend, when I might be able to fire one off from someone else’s house.

Otherwise, Things Of The Day:  the Salvation Army are possibly the best thing, in that they have sold and delivered me a chest of drawers and an old schoolteacher’s desk for a mere £50.  The desk is possibly as cool as me, in that it has a faux red leather cover and came with ensuite chewing gum and bent paperclips.

Otherwise, I have been Active - I’m heading to the Mill Road Social Centre, my local squat, for a hippie’s night in to see This Is England - something I’ve been really wanting to see.  (As well as the latest Dr Who, but that’s down to my lack of laptop/internet.)  I have also signed up to the Stop Tesco on Mill Road campaign, written to the council and written more generally to the Tesco director Sir Terry Leahy via here.  I rewrote Oxfam’s standard email to Leahy to include everything that has been p*ssing me off royally about Tesco lately:

• their lawsuits against journalists in Thailand, which are genuinely bizarre
• their aggressive land purchase policy in the UK, monopolising local business
• their worrying presence in the Hanley Grange ecotown proposals, making me nervous of a government/business link that I really wouldn’t want to exist
• their aggressive planning applications on Mill Road, and absolute lack of communication or representation to the local community
• their attempts to quash trade unionism in their new US branches

not to mention the general involvement with cheap labour that means farmers can’t send their children to school, and alleged links with forced and child labour workshops.

Enough activism for one day; I’m not going to Tesco’s again.

Well, I’m feeling more comfortable now I actually own a duvet and its attendant sheetings, especially as I’m now finally getting scary contract details and training programme pre-reading from my new job.  It’s quite exciting at the same time as being very unnerving, all these contracts and large sums of money.

I’m doing okay with the shopping, too - all my store-bought stuff is bought, and now all the odds and ends will be harvested from charity shops, probably on Saturday morning. It hasn’t been as hard as I’d thought it would be, so far; I’ve mentally compromised by buying the duvet from the Salvation Army in exchange for buying new saucepans. ‘Tis also absolutely and finally proven that charity shops are at least half the price.  I’m really looking forward to Saturday morning kooky-shopping; I don’t want any of my cutlery, bowls, plates or cups to match, and I can’t wait to buy the oddest-sloganed mugs that I can find.

This is the fun part!  I like this part!  I want the hard part to start soon.

I keep thinking about what Louise and I talked about on Saturday: how our jobs are actually the ethical, emotional, labour-intensive and thank-poor work we used to do for free.  I saw a card in an excellent shop in Bristol, which read

Stop me before I volunteer again

That’s about right.  It’s quite difficult to understand that my job is exactly what I wanted to do with my time this year; what I wanted to learn about, cry over, and get angry and active about.  I keep finding myself thinking, I should volunteer for the Refugee Council - oh no wait, you are going to work for one of their partners.  It’s a funny transition.

(more…)

I’ve got the greens at work.  Like the blues, with nothing to do, but green: absent-mindedly skimming over niblets of information on ethical living and campaigning.  Currently I can’t write to my MP because it would just give me more work to do.

As is, I’m doing a hit on the charity shops/Homebase tonight with Greg.  I’ve had a wonderful weekend with Louise over in Bristol, with her Own Life well and truly set up and running - and I’m quite jealous.  Actually, I’m also moving into Adult Life ™ as of Thursday, when I pick up the key for my new room down on Mill Road; the area of town where Tescos are fighting squatters, the grocery is run by dreadlocks with people attached, and all tea is fairtrade.  Oh, it also has all the charity shops and drugs help agencies in town, too.  I get on well with the squatters on the proposed controversial Tescos site.  It’s a good start.

In order to move in, though, I sort of need to buy Things - namely all the doohicks and knobbular devices that make up Living, like maybe a saucepan and a pillow and maybe bedsheets or even a towel.  It is a funny thing, starting relatively from scratch - what, no duvet?  So I’ve been casing the Salvation Army for a while.  Logistically, though, living out of a bag in your boyfriend’s room with only a bike for freedom means that carting a double duvet from Mill Road to Oxford Road back to Mill Road is not so practicable.  And I realise that life will be more complicated without cutlery (Sally Ann’s does a big crate of old silver knives and forks for 20p a hit, though, so that’ll be sorted.)

Basically, I will be adding all my purchases up, both in cost and green-ness, and writing it all down here.  I’m optimistic that I can get, ooh, over 60% of my New English Life second-hand, recycled and ethical, before I even begin.

nafikiri kwamba dunia yangu imekuwa kidogo kuliko mbele; ni takriban Julai na marafiki wangu wataondoka Cambridge baadaye kidogo. Watu wote ila Charlotte, yaani. Lakini pia, dunia yangu ni kidogo zaidi kwa sababu nimemaliza schule hatimaye. Nimejitambulisha kwamba hii ni dunia kweli - watu hawawekana nyumbani, hakuna miradi bila inayofanya pekee yako, hakuna watu wanaokuambia kuenda kufanya vitu. Nahisi huru. Naipenda kuliko kuwa chuoni; sasa, najua kwamba nikifanya jambo, nimelifanya pekee langu, na siwezi kujiambia eti silifanyi. Nimetaka hii kwa muda mrefu sana, tangu nilikuwa na miaka kumi na tano; na sasa, nahisi ajabu kutafuta uhuru uzima.

si mbaya! Nina kila kitu kikubwa sasa, bila gari; nina kazi, chumba changu Mill Road, na vitu nitavyopata wiki ijayo vitakuwa vikwachu sana - vitu kwa chumbani changu, labda deski, vitu kwa jikoni, khadalika.

Ni siku shwari leo kazini - nimemaliza kazi yangu, na labda nitaenda Tesco’s kwa chakula. Kiswahili changu si mbaya sana leo, lakini sijafanya mazoezi mingi - labda nitaendelea na kuandika hapani kiswahili.

nina siku huru kesho - nafikiri nitaenda kupata nguo kwa kazi, labda nitaogelea, na halafu kuenda kutafuta deski kwa chumbani Salvation Army. Poa.

In that, I got some. I got the job I wanted: asylum seeker caseworker.

That is all, for there is a bottle of wine saying: I am merlot, tasty deep merlot, let me make your liver into fine brussels pate in celebration.

do you think three job applications in a day? enough? I think so.
I’ve done all the filing here, they can’t complain.

(more…)

My last full day on Zibbular, and I’ve spent most of it eating excellent food, reading PD James, doing my homework and talking to the Swarm O’Men ™ that haunt single white girls, probably in roughly the same numbers as mosquitoes.

I’ve had a fantastic two weeks.  Like any tourist destination, Z-Flangibule got me down after three days, and then has spent the rest of the time getting me up again.  From sussing out the posh hotels’ happy hours - it’s entirely possible, each evening here, to have an extremely happy 2 1/2 hours, if you know the route - to finding the best thali I’ve ever had, the best samosa I’ve ever had, and the largest prawn I’ve ever had.  Things are not just food-based (although I am in that respect a very happy girl) - I’ve taken my day trips to Matemwe and Kendwa, run about the island in a car, and gone on a mass tailoring binge, buying fabric from the market and using my tailor next door.

I hasten to add that everything has been done in Swahili.  I can actually speak it, relatively fluently and off-bat, without thinking about it anymore.  My speaking is as ever three paces behind my writing it, and my understanding it is still hampered by the speed at which people speak here - but I know that’ll get better, and that Zibb*ping*bar is known for fast swahili.  Nairobi, in retrospect, was a lot easier.  But if I can debate the European Union, explain social problems in England, and argue about Kenyan politics with my teacher, I doubt I’m so awful now.

It’s definitely been a two weeks of tiny successes; a lot of reading, some nice dresses, being able to say “despite being a developed country as people say, England has some gun crime, drug problems and homelessness”, home-cooked prawns, and no Mills and Boon.  Nothing desperately earth-moving, but I’ve been very happy.

Now, I have a lesson soon - I think my last, and then I’m going to the tiny Omani restaurant I found, and having a glass of cold white by the sea.  Tomorrow I head back to Dar, whenever I’m ready - afternoon, I think - and jump about in excitement due to Louise’s arrival on Friday morning.  After that, I don’t know.  I’m not making the plans.

I’m just going to rewrite my Znamularian first post.  I am trying never to spell Zann*gonnng* the same way twice, which is proving exciting.

So, it’s my sixth day on Zzuuuup-lar,or specifically Unguja.  It’s hot here, especially in the alleys where the breeze doesn’t reach.  I’m on friendly terms with most of the guys down the main tourist tread, except the pushy few, and have set myself up cosily in my room in a flat (for directions see title.)  I’m having two hours of lessons every morning with Mohammed at SUZA, who is a very good mwalimu, and I think I’m being an alright mwanafunzi, too.  Sitting at sunset every evening doing my homework, reading with a rum and ice, and I’m going swimming most afternoons after the hot bit.  I’ve bought prawns in the market and tomatoes from the shop, and tonight I don’t know whether to treat myself to dinner out or batter some aubergine pieces and whack them in the pan at home.  I also found a brilliant thali restaurant last night, and ate all their chutney.

So, salaama tu hapa - a peaceful existence.  On monday I met a great guy called Gene, who I spent all yesterday with driving about the island - now pretty determined to rent myself a vespa and get down south, where we didn’t manage.  I obviously have a lot of time to think here, and am gradually making myself a map of sudan history/politics from my bevy of overly academic beach reading - that’s a fun little project.  (I’m playing “spot the Maadhiyya,” “hunt the slave,” and I haven’t even got to Gaddafi yet.)  I’m going to have to make up little projects for myself, especially since I have lessons over the weekend - I think Sunday I’ll go to church (a usefully free way of getting past the entrance fee otherwise) and tomorrow, I’ll wander about looking at the outsides of mosques and watching the people about.  I’m hardly bored, just aware that if I spend all my time on the beach cultivating freckles, I’m gonna run out of new body parts to collect them on.

I should not travel on my own, I create a monologue.  Currently, in my mind, I am a pirate.  d-ARRR.

I’m in Dar, yes, after the longest bus-ride in the history of bleh.   I was also a little post-tipsy from Yolana’s birthday party at simmers, which was enjoyable until my alarm went off at 5am.  But I’m here, I have a hotel room, I’ve discarded the damn lonely planet and am currently wandering the town practicing my “ASK DIRECTIONS” lesson.  I am working my way through my vocabulary - cathedral, bank, internet cafe, cafe (”na air conditioning” was an interesting phrase, it’s stupidly hot here, why is it this hot? make it stop.)  I am excited, I have a flat in Zanzibar, swahili lessons, and sunscreen.  I also have a safari booked to Ngorongoro, Ulduvai and Manyara, and both lodges have swimming pools.  No!  The hedonism!

Right, I’m off to the museum.  makavazi!