Chapter 66...The end is near!

It's been a long time since my blog and I have been connected and for a while I thought we never would be again, but I have woken this morning with a knot in my stomach and a need to express...

My placement with VSO is soon coming to an end and as a result I have recently found myself in that void between the chapters that make up my life. I am left evaluating what has been my life for the past year and somehow planning what I want from this World and myself in the coming year. This is the first time that I feel a number of things are out of my control, and being a control freak 'I do not feel comfortable' (that one's for you Stumps) with that! Whenever I have made one of those 'life changing decisions' in the past they have only involved me, but this time it is all change! Someone else's 'life changing decisions' are driving the steering wheel of the brightly coloured, bubbly car with a dark grey interior that is my life.  I am left trying to figure out how I feel about it, but then I question whether I have to figure that out at all, because I have committed myself to another human being and now we ride that huge break of a wave together. Sometimes we sail over the top of the wave smoothly with a soft floating motion of ease, other times we misjudge and the wave sidesweeps us completely, turning us under the water so we don't know which way is up, then eventually when all hope is lost, yet sheer excitement is felt, we surface again to the calm of the World and life, together as one...!

So for the time being I lack an element of control over things I am usually 100% certain of and that is fine and settled within me. The knot comes from finishing what has been a turbulent ten months (by the time I step onto that flight home) with VSO and figuring out what my next calling in life is. One thing is for sure, it is not International Development and after a few hours lying in bed this morning debating how comfortable I am with that, I feel fine! Because it is some people's vocation in life to fall hard into the International Development World, but is evidently not mine. Firstly I do not have the patience for it, which will come as no surprise to most of you, I want the change now, in fact yesterday is when I want it! I want people to be committed to change, to work hard for it, to be hungry for it. I want to work for an organisation where the cards are laid out on the table, where the money is evenly and fairly spent and where the people on the ground working are a collective whole. I am not well placed in this arena, because I accept things as they are one minute then get wound up by them the next. I struggle to be consistent with my level of flexibility and understanding versus my need for the Western World. When seeing a 'street boy' shovelling food into his mouth while trying to keep empty plastic bottles securely stuffed up his winter jumper and asking what his story is, my heart bleeds (this will never stop) to hear that his father died and his mother left him for a new life elsewhere. Yet other times I can be so cold-hearted and controversial and take this unfair, ill-balanced World for what it is.

By now I am sure we are all agreed that International Development work is not for me! And this is a good thing, because it allows others to fill the role that I cannot. Everyday my eyes see and my ears hear the heart-felt, phenomenal, committed work that others are doing in this field. The drive and determination they feel to make a change, however small. These are the people who should be working in International Development and I am so thankful that they are. But for me the big question is...what next? The paths ahead are all sign-posted with my name and one is slightly more illuminous in the African sun, but not quite fully lit up! My heart thinks it knows exactly what it wants and am I doing it an injustice by not following it, or do I make a compromise, for once, and tell my heart that it will eventually get what it wants, but for now it must hold off! Yes, this is the decision I have made.

So in the next two months I have plenty of time to detach myself both mentally and physically from the World of International Development and to figure out, at the very least, the synopsis for the next chapter, whatever possibilities that may bring...