Tag: long read

Categories
movies personal writing

Why I love tick, tick… BOOM!

Murakami (image by wakarimasita)

Sometimes in life, you read or watch a piece of art that has a profound effect on you. For me, there’s been two, the first being The Wind up Bird Chronicle (and South of the Border, West of the Sun to a lesser extent), and it’s grim incorporation of magic realism and surrealism where the lines between real-life, imagination and memory are blurred so fantastically that you don’t know what is actually happening to the protagonist, Noburu. Thank you, Haruki Murakami, for influencing my writing style so heavily.

The other is tick, tick… BOOM!, directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, based on the life of Jonathan Larson, and expertly brought to life by lead actor Andrew Garfield. The latter, completely deserving of his Oscar nomination, is my personal choice to win this year (but then again, I’d have given it to him when he was nominated for Hacksaw Ridge).

Hacksaw Ridge (image from Netflix)

I’m going to be talking a lot about the plot of this movie in this article, so please go and watch the film if you haven’t already. It’s phenomenal, and I would hate to ruin some of the emotional moments for you. However, if you have seen it (or you don’t wish to heed my warnings), feel free to read ahead.

tick, tick… BOOM! is a special kind of film, and I don’t mean that lightly. It’s based on the late Jonathan Larson, of RENT fame, and his journey to get his musical Superbia picked up by a producer in New York City. Set in the early 1980’s, we follow Jonathan as he struggles to grasp with his upcoming 30th birthday, panicking at the thought that he’s wasted the last 8 years of his life writing Superbia, and that he’s chosen the wrong path by being a creative. All of this hinges on the workshop he has planned, this is his success or failure moment. This is all in comparison to his best friend Michael, who abandoned his own acting aspirations and now works a successful job at a corporate marketing agency.

The film does an excellent job at showing the stressful tightrope walk between creating art, having fulfilling relationships, and trying to keep yourself afloat by working, all at the same time. Creating is a full-time job, you never turn off, and sometimes it takes a toll living in your own world, not just to you, but for the people around you too.

For the majority of the movie, Jonathan is desperately trying to write a new song for his play, one that he’s been told by his main influence, Steven Sondheim, is missing. He toils over his computer, the flashing bar of his word document sat after a single ‘You’re’, unable to force anything from his mind to paper, all the while the time until the workshop, and his 30th birthday, ticks away. His girlfriend wants to move out of the City to a stable job, yet he can’t take his mind away from his work to discuss this drastic life change with her, his best friend, Michael, grappling with the HIV positive result he’s been given can’t catch Jonathan for a fleeting moment to inform him of his life-shattering diagnosis.

Summer 2022, mark your calendars. For dreamers, for explorers, for one-eyed bears.

Jonathan can’t do anything but work on his art, at the expense of him being present with the people around him. I’ve been there, the amount of times I got stuck writing The Toucan Man, and my sophomore novel (which is being released this summer by the way) and was unable to get out of my own head, for even a moment, just in case I lost the momentum I’d built up. I don’t talk about anything else when I’m like that, I recluse, and I work for hours at a time on my laptop, despite spending hours upon hours on one at work.

There’s a scene, where after a tense fight with his girlfriend Susan, she and Jonathan embrace, seemingly ready to move ahead positively in their relationship. This is shattered when she realises he’s mimicking piano keys on her back, seemingly putting their intimate moment to music with the intention of blasting it to the world within his musical. She fumes at him and ends their relationship then and there, baffled at his lack of emotional intelligence and inability to stop, even for just a moment.

There’s a quote director Lin-Manuel Miranda gave to the BBC that puts this better than I ever could:

“Because the dirty secret is, if you live with an artist, the microphone is always on.”

And on it is, so much of this movie has Jonathan taking notes from the world around him, from the treatment of the gay community by the government during the HIV epidemic to the words he sees sprawled across New York City. He never wants to miss a moment, a chance to perfectly word the perfect story. For Superbia to truly be the best it can be.

There’s a fear that I’ve got that I think backpacks off this, and it’s the same as the overarching theme of the movie, time. Artists are always recording for their work, because they want to get all of their ideas out before the time runs out. For Jonathan, sung excellently in the opening song ‘30/90’, it’s the thought of turning 30. For me, it’s not putting my ideas out into the world before the knell tolls. Jonathan Larson, died from an aortic aneurysm at just 35, the morning before RENT first previewed off-Broadway. He never lived to see any of his success.

The worst part of all of it is that it kind of proves his point.

He was the epitome of the tortured artist, he worked in a diner, not being able to bring himself to work for the man. He didn’t want to create for conglomerates who wanted people to buy what they couldn’t afford, or shove unhealthy products down their mouths in the name of money. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me feel guilty, wondering whether a past version of myself would shake his head in shame just as Jonathan would have.

I can see parallels between Superbia and my own teenage novel Pawns of the Gods, both ideas thought of out of teenage idealism, a product of their time, convoluted beyond belief just for the sake of being different, but the idea has been there for so long that it pains you not to see it realised. I’ve fought, and still fight with that novel, and I do hope someday I’ll be able to release it and do the story justice, not just for me now to be proud of, but for me all those years ago.

There’s a quote from this film that sums up being an aspiring writer so well that it makes me well up everytime I hear it. Jonathan’s agent, Rosa, says it to him after nobody is interested in producing his then life’s work, ‘Superbia’.

“You start writing the next one. And after you finish that one, you start on the next. And on and on, and that’s what it is to be a writer, honey. You just keep throwing them against the wall and hoping against hope that eventually, something sticks.” – Rosa, tick, tick… BOOM!

It’s a daunting prospect. Nothing of mine so far has taken off, but I do what I have to and I go back to the drawing board, and I start again. Maybe someday something will stick, maybe it won’t, but if I can look back on a bibliography that I’ve written myself, that I poured every shred of my heart and soul into, then when the knell finally tolls, I’ll die a happy and fulfilled man.

Categories
personal travel

How I Ended Up in Gibraltar

So, in case any of you hadn’t noticed I’ve ended up moving to Gibraltar. Typing it out cements its status as quite a bizarre thing that has happened in my life. It’s an odd feeling being honest, especially because of how bruised my arm is after pinching myself too many times to see if I’m dreaming – but I’m still here, or possibly in some deep Matrix-like coma. Maybe we all are, I guess we’ll never know.

The feeling being here is quite different to my experiences of going abroad to Spain and Tanzania, mainly because nobody is holding my hand during the moving process. Both of those relocations were through organisations, where they hooked me up with host families, jobs, and generally kept an eye on us all during our times there. Now it’s me and my girlfriend, all by ourselves and being honest, the freedom of being abroad and making everything work out yourself is probably the best part – if not highly stressful. Yet as they say, no risk no reward.

Made a friend at the top of ‘The Rock’ (September, 2021) 🇬🇮

The story of how I ended up in Gibraltar starts with a solid foundational plan; one that had been in place since November of last year. Charlotte and I had been working towards it since then, getting the necessary paperwork and qualifications together. The thing is, that plan was aimed at moving to Thailand, and moving to Gibraltar hadn’t even crossed our minds until about a month ago.

The initial decision to move abroad came around a month after we’d moved into our flat in Welwyn Garden City. It wasn’t that we were sick of the place already, more to do with the fact we’d been grounded for years and that we’d both developed itchy feet to live away again. That and the fact that we’d never intended to move to Welwyn Garden City, and you get the point.

We had settled pretty early on moving to Thailand as one of my partners’ best friends lived out there, who she hadn’t seen in years. I was just happy to be invited along for the ride. We had nothing in WGC worth staying for, so we got to work securing ourselves a qualification in teaching English as a foreign language (or a TEFL for short).

Ah, the TEFL qualification, the bane of my life. See, when I moved to Lleida, Catalonia, four years ago (four years ahh!!) a section of my contract guaranteed that I would study for and receive a TEFL at the end of my time there. Alas, life, with its giant spanner, threw it into the works and I had to leave my job in Spain earlier than I (and the programme) had originally intended – the chance of getting my TEFL for free while I worked went with it. Thus, I had to fork out £300 to do another one, which for a certified Level 5 qualification wasn’t too bad.

After that purchase I followed up by doing nothing Thailand related. Instead, I worked on The Toucan Man and got promoted at work – all the while the six-month time limit for completing my coursework ticked away. Diamonds are formed under pressure though. Right?

My word was it an absolute slog. After leaving it until the last possible moment to begin, I’d backed myself into a corner where I had to slave night and day on my TEFL. This was not only on my days off, but during work time as well when I could sneak off for 20 minutes at a time. It was horrendous, but I did it, and now I’ve got another shiny qualification on my resume. Even though I never actually used it to get my current job, who knows when it might come in handy in the future. Also, it’s always good to learn new things and add to a fresh arrow to your quiver. On a personal note, I was able to finally tick off something that I should have completed a while ago. So, go me I guess.

Brown on Seashore Near Mountain
Maybe someday… 🇹🇭

We decided that because of the disease that shall not be named we’d be better off booking flights as late as possible to get to Thailand, and that our best chance of employment was getting into the Kingdom first then figuring it out later as the normal recruitment drive for foreign language teachers online had dried up into a barren wasteland.

We didn’t think about it enough to be deterred, too busy building up our savings to fund the, what became increasingly evident, expensive trip. We were excited, passionate and determined to make it work.

This was when August hit and the murmurs coming out of Thailand about another lockdown started increasing in volume, there was talk about pushing back school dates, which meant no classrooms to be taught in, which in turn meant little to no jobs in the country itself as they could all be done over the internet. The October date we would be leaving our Welwyn Garden City flat on was fast approaching, and we were being told to wait for an opening as it might pass in a week or so. Wait we did, and we waited and waited. The good news never came, so we decided that we’d just book our flights and get there, everything else would surely fall into place afterwards.

Then the bureaucracy kicked in, the amount of paperwork required to get into Thailand (at the time of writing) was too much. Each document required another form that couldn’t be filled in until the one we were filling in had been completed. It was chaos, seemingly designed difficult to dissuade people from travelling. In the end, it felt too much like swimming against the tide of a flowing river. We closed the laptop in defeat, the Thailand dream was dead in the water.

However, like a phoenix in the ashes, a new idea formed out of the old one. Our time in WGC was coming to an end, that was a guarantee. The world was now potentially our oyster, as long as it was situated on the UK green list.

This was when the applications started flying out, not for teaching jobs, but for writing positions I was qualified for in Dubai, Malta, and Gibraltar.

For the latter, I was offered an interview the next day for the following week, which I attended and was offered the role two hours afterward. It was mind-bending, we’d gone from fighting the current to being swept up by it, now eager to see where it would throw us off.

After getting off the phone and going hysterical with excitement it dawned on me, we had two weeks to get to Gibraltar. We sold all of our furniture and packed up our belongings, taking only what we could carry. Our backs becoming decimated from 4 days sleeping on the floor as we’d accidentally sent the pump for the airbed back up North with my girlfriend’s dad.

In a way it was the perfect storm. My partner’s job is home-based so she could move to the peninsula freely, combine this with the visa-free access and being on the green list made it a surprisingly simple move. Not long after our arrival we sorted out a flat too. It had all started to finally feel real. We spent our first few days in Gibraltar treating it as a holiday, something we had been unable to do since a trip to Glasgow in early 2020.

Gibraltar at night (October 2021) 🇬🇮

I’m not sure what the moral of this story is. Half of me thinks its knowing when to let go of a pipedream, when to realise something is implausible even if you’ve worked so hard for it – but its in letting go that more opportunities rear their heads, ones that you would have been blind to beforehand like a horse with its blinkers on.

On the other hand, it could be about not selling yourself short, that the opportunities to do what you love will come eventually as long as you work toward them. Being offered a job abroad as a copywriter is something I could have only dreamed of a couple of years ago – especially after working in marketing and my old manager deciding to go external with the company’s copywriting duties, even though that was my bread and butter. In hindsight that may have been the turning point where I started to take writing (and myself) seriously, as I started this website a month or so later.

As I sit here in a bustling café just off Main Street in Gibraltar, with a light lunch of a cortado and quiche, letting myself absorb the new surroundings I find myself in, I’m filled with excitement for the coming years. I don’t grieve a missed opportunity in Thailand, as it was never meant to be, and so in the end never existed.

Because if it had, I’d never be here.

Categories
philosophy

Optimistic Nihilism: Nothing Matters, Which Is Great

Have you ever made the mistake of believing that we are the main characters of the planet we call Earth? That every decision, mistake, or accomplishment you’ve ever made was your role in some divine Earth storybook that will be remembered for all time – where this planet and the rest of the universe is ours and ours alone for exploring.

Humanity as we know it today has only existed for around 200,000 years. Civilisation is even younger, an infant child in these gigantic milestones, being only 6,000 years old. Yet, compared to ourselves, aged below 100 in most circumstances, they are behemoths in time that we cannot comprehend.

Our universe, in comparison, clocks in at 14 billion years old. Our existence as a species is a fraction of a pixel of the 4K television screen that is our universe. We’re not even the protagonists of our own planet, if anything we’re probably the poorly received and short lived sequel a la Joey following Friends.

The dinosaurs dominated our planet for about 165 million years, a period which a lot of us are guilty of lumping together and assuming all of them existed at the same time. This couldn’t be further from the truth, for example, the Stegosaurus existed in the Late Jurassic era and had been extinct for 80 million years when the Tyrannosaurus (T-Rex) roamed in the Late Cretaceous era.

Dinosaur fossil on rough stone formation

Our Earth’s Mesozoic inhabitants only made way for us in the Cenozoic era after they were wiped out by a meteor that collided with Earth 66 million years ago, creating the Chicxulub Crater and kickstarting the age of the mammal – of which you dear reader, are a member of. Even before the dinosaurs, was the Palaeozoic era, an estimated 541 million years ago where arthropods, molluscs, fish, and amphibians ruled. They too only moved along after the Permian-Triassic extinction event, which was the largest extinction event in our planet’s long history – in which it took 30 million years for it to recover.

For both eras, it was only their destruction that gave way for the next wave to rise. As much as many try to fight it, the same will most likely happen to us some day. Whether our replacements are a master breed of self-aware baboons, another race of dinosaurs, or one of our own creation; such as mechanical robots or artificial intelligence, is for the historians of the future to figure out on their own. Maybe someday you’ll be in a museum like the Tyrannosaurus skeletons of the world, being studied by a race of silicon-based AI, that can breathe in the air we polluted our own world with. 

It’s all quite a lot to take in when you really think about it, that in the grand scheme of everything we’re an inconspicuous speck at a very high risk of destroying itself through nuclear war or greed before our era truly got under way.

I think it says a lot about the delusions of grandeur that our species has that we think we are so superior to all the other inhabitants that once called this planet home, a lot of this is down to our own intelligence, in which we are genuinely superior. However, I believe we’ve all lost sight of the point of evolution, it’s not about intelligence, it’s about survival. The dinosaurs never developed consciousness or brain power equal to ours because they never needed it, they were big and strong, and needed body parts that could either destroy their foes, or ones that made it easier to run away. Our intelligence developed because we needed it to survive, as I previously mentioned, the dinosaurs lived on our earth for 165 million years. We might be smart, but we’re only 200,000 years in and are already at risk of destroying ourselves, so in hindsight intelligence might not have actually been the best call.

You’re probably asking at this point – if nothing matters then why bother? If I am a pixel of a pixel of a pixel and my significance is so minute in comparison to the rest of time and space, then what’s my purpose? Especially if we’re on a one-way track of self-destruction. Why shouldn’t I just sit and watch TV until I die?

I've remade "Come watch TV" gif: rickandmorty
Source: Rick and Morty

It’s a valid question, and one that I hope I have the answer to. Coming to terms with the chaos of everything can be the key to unlocking your own potential, because you can write your own story, within your own scope of existence and enjoy this small slice of consciousness we’ve been lucky enough to receive.

Optimistic Nihilism. Life is meaningless and that's exactly… | by Neeramitra Reddy | ILLUMINATION-Curated | Medium
Source: medium.com

Every regret, every mistake, every time you’ve made an incorrect decision doesn’t matter in the grand scope of the universe. There will come a time where nobody remembers you or anything you ever did, whether you’re Kim Kardashian, George Orwell, Attila the Hun, or Ramesh from down the road.

On the other hand, you can set your own goals outside of societal norms, because if you’re living in a way you enjoy and you’re not hurting anybody else, why shouldn’t you? Time is finite, spend it as you wish. Nobody asked to be born, but we can choose how we get to live.

If your life goal is to have a family straight after graduating from college, or to be a receptionist for a doctor’s office, or to be an underground musician, or to never have kids and travel the world, or to gather the world’s largest collection of beer mats – nobody is stopping you. That’s your truth, your enjoyment, your life, live it however you want – the dinosaurs did without questioning their social status, or maybe they did, not knowing proves my point exactly.

If nothing matters then neither should anyone else’s expectations of you.

Now, this isn’t saying you should go and murder everybody you know, or steal everything they own. If anything, take this as a sign that I’m strongly urging you not to do that. We still have laws and punishment to keep everyone in line, and rightly so (when it works properly at least). We’re all here for a short time and not a long time, and if you ask me, we’re all responsible for everyone else’s speck of existence to be that little bit brighter too. Be kind, be true to yourself, and why not hold the door open every once in a while, it can really make someone’s day. Love who you want, love what you want, love how you want – just don’t stamp on anyone else’s good time.

Just because in the grand scheme of things we literally mean nothing, doesn’t mean our feelings of love, admiration, and accomplishment aren’t valid. If anything those sentiments are more valuable because they mean something to you personally. You are the architect to your own universe, in that regard this slice of the cosmos is all you’ll ever have, or be able to remember depending on what you believe. Nothing outside of your universe matters, and in the same way nothing that matters within it matters to the forever expanding mass of infinity.

We’ve all been conditioned with movies, books and video games that life has some sort of ‘end-goal’, that when we reach a certain milestone that we’ve completed it and nothing else matters. That could not be further from the truth. We’ve all been in the position of gaining something we want, whether that is a move, a material object or a career milestone, getting it and then feeling exactly the same – then looking at the next thing and hoping that it gives us the satisfaction we were seeking the first time. It’s a fallacy, life as we know it is more of a creative sandbox where we can play to our hearts content until the game shuts off. There’s no instruction manual, so play the game how you want to play it.

Nothing really matters, which means there’s nothing stopping you from being you.

Categories
personal travel

Welwyn Garden City: A Town With Hert, Not History

I’ve been struggling with a way to start this blog post, I’ve played with the idea of using a quote or some grand metaphor about living somewhere new and exciting, but that’s just the thing, for the past year I’ve lived in Welwyn Garden City – a commuter town that’s only existed for 100 years more than I’ve been here. It’s no Paris, New York or Rome but that’s the beauty of it, that is why it has been perfect.

When I say that I ended up in this corner of Hertfordshire by complete chance, I honestly mean it. Me and my partner had dreams of grandeur when we moved out of our flat in Bamber Bridge just over a year ago, dreaming of the late nights and bright lights of London Town – but sometimes pipe dreams are just those, pipe dreams. Two months was how long I drifted through the capital, unemployed, bouncing between Airbnb’s, but that was enough for me. Using the 20/20 vision that hindsight brings, London was never right for me.

Not that it isn’t a fantastic city, it really is and I’d highly recommend a visit if you’ve never been. It just never felt like mine, I always felt like a stranger, always feeling the urge to look over my shoulder after finding myself in another area I didn’t know at dusk. That’s just the way in London I’ve found. The streets change personality from one to the next, you could be on a road that houses the rich and famous in one moment, before finding yourself on the next street that’s full of high-rises where the inhabitants can smell the outsider on you. I think it was this juxtaposition that kept me on edge and kept me from truly wanting to stay. London is perfect for a lot of people, just not me, but I’m glad that I tried, and I know that for definite now, instead of spending a lifetime yearning for it.

The move to WGC came about through a connection I’d made in Tanzania, believe it or not, whereby he’d offered me a job role after a few too many pints in Camden Market. I’d applied for over 100 writing jobs, become far too accustomed to the word no, so decided to say yes. I’d never heard of the place outside of it being the birthplace of Alesha Dixon, but I needed the money and I had nothing keeping me in London. So, we booked a hotel for six weeks and started looking for a place.

As it turned out, I did have a prior connection to Welwyn Garden City. The place had given me an eerie familiarity when I’d entered the centre for the first time, and it took having a drink in the Doctor’s Tonic pub to figure it out.

It was Newton Haven, from The bloody World’s End. What a great movie, I’d thought to myself, and now I got to live where it was filmed. Being a massive Edgar Wright fanboy, that fact gave me more satisfaction than the job I was working – but being on a COVID test site I’m sure you can let me get away with that.

Historically, the confusingly named town of Welwyn Garden City was founded in 1920 by a bloke named Sir Ebenezer Howard and quite liked the idea of cities but thought they were a bit too grey, so decided to mix in some trees and fields to spread everything out. He’d tried it in Letchworth first, but I guess he’d decided that he’d failed and fancied another pop. If you’re from LGC don’t @ me, I’m just stating facts you know, second the best and all that.

The man himself, Sir Ebenezer Howard (Welwyn Garden City, 2021)

It was an odd place to end up by chance, it wasn’t somewhere that you’d ever move to the otherside of the country for, but that was what we’d ended up doing. There was an odd melancholy in getting the flat we’d end up spending a year living in, a feeling that we couldn’t go back up North out of pride, but also the feeling that we’d ended up somewhere we’d never wanted to be in the first place, forced into stopping our couch-hopping by the impending second UK lockdown.

Jerk chicken from That Picnic Brand (2021)

It’s been nearly a year since that moment, and I’ve decided that moving to Welwyn Garden City was one of the best things I’ve ever done. It’s an odd feeling finding yourself stuck somewhere with no network, no nostalgia or passion to stay in the area and no attachment to the job that keeps you there. However, I think that’s what made the place perfect, there was nothing to take care of other than ourselves. There was no local drama, no pre-emptive impressions from people who had heard of you at school. We were unknown quantity, it was great, freeing if you will.

Gradually you build a network over time, and I’ve been honoured to make some great friends who I hope stick around for the long haul. On top of that, you learn the lay of the land, you pick up on shortcuts, find the best eating spots (I’d recommend That Picnic Brand in the Wheat Quarter, it’s incredible) and the excellent places to go for long walks.

Welwyn Garden City can be seen best in the dilapidated Shredded Wheat factory that stands dormant over the train station, using its time still standing as a monolith long lost to another era. Yet there are plans to revitalise it, to bring it back as something fresh, new, and exciting. The building blocks are here for Welwyn to turn into something great, it has a history it will grow into, a commute into London that lasts only 25 minutes and the feeling that some culture is going to start rearing its head through the rows of corporate shops that run up and down Howardsgate.

The Shredded Wheat factory in the snow ( Welwyn Garden City, 2021)

I’d be lying if I said that living here has been wild, but it’s been an experience that removed the fog from everything, it made the next step much clearer and much easier to work towards. Pressing the reset button can help you become yourself again, and I was lucky enough to do it for a year during a pandemic which has crippled so many people mentally. For that I count my blessings, I really do.

The coat of arms for Hertfordshire predominantly features the stag, an animal that symbolises instinct, maturity, regeneration, and spiritual enlightenment. I’m not sure if everyone else’s stay in the Hert of England has been the same, but the symbolism seems awfully apt and poetic to me.

Cheers for the memories.

Coat of arms of Hertfordshire County Council
Categories
travel

The Politics of AID Work in Rural Tanzania

This blog was originally written in October 2018 and submitted to Raleigh International to be published on the blog section of their website. It was at their request that I wrote this blog, they never got back to me.

Bwawani is a village situated in the Kilombero area of Morogoro District, Tanzania. It was formerly a part of the much larger Nyamweze township. However, leadership issues in this very large community led to it breaking off into three separate villages – Bwawani, Nyamweze and Kiberege – back in 2013, with no jurisdiction over each other.

The border gore that exists between Belgium and the Netherlands in Baarle-Nassau-Baarle Hertog.

Now the village is stuck in a strange border situation where on one side of the road you’re inside one village, but when you cross it, you’re in another. An example I could compare this to would be the strange borders between the Netherlands and Belgium at Baarle-Nassau/Baarle-Hertog, where some houses are even split between the two independent nations. Luckily, the Schengen area allows this to be a non-problem, but my thoughts go out to the homeowners if the EU ever disbands.

Back to Bwawani, and these fledgling villages that were struggling to rally behind their new leaders. The group of volunteers that I worked in, Charlie One, worked in the ‘Kiberege School’ – which itself was a source of conflict between these communities, as both the schools namesake and Bwawani claimed ownership of the establishment. The school was initially built as a teaching and rehabilitation centre for the nearby Kiberege prison, but a government decree turned it in into a place of education for children. The school still had memories of prison ownership with its iron barred windows and chicken wire but was juxtaposed by the vibrant nature and creativeness from the excitable children. It is worth noting that the 40-minute walk from Bwawani to the school was through the prison fields where the inmates worked, fields that my Charlie walked through from Monday to Friday for five weeks. Most days there were no inmates working, but when there was, they would often shout, beg, or attempt to run over. Interacting with prisoners is illegal in Tanzania, so we just had to keep our eyes forward and walk. This was made all the more difficult as prisoners were hired to actually dig the hole for the septic tank of the new teachers’ toilets, little more than five metres from a classroom of bustling children.

Our toilets halfway through the project. Bwawani, Tanzania (October, 2018).

A village that formerly had two cycles of volunteers, the community of Bwawani was already educated on the benefits of hand washing and hygiene, with the Village Executive Officer (VEO) enforcing a TSH50,000 fine if your home did not contain hand washing facilities with soap.

The school was also well versed on the dangers of poor food preparation and personal hygiene. Countless songs regarding these important messages could be heard echoing from the classrooms. Strangely for Kiberege school, the toilets Raleigh had spent six months and two volunteer cycles constructing remained unused and were beginning to fall into disarray.

We in Charlie One believed this to be strange. The children, so excitable and informed on the issues of hygiene were still using the old and decrepit drop-hole toilets that lacked any sort of sanitation. All the while the new and freshly built, flushable latrines fell to the wayside, it made little sense. Why were we here?

After a week in Bwawani things became increasingly clear, we had heard murmurs from the students that the teachers were not allowing them to use the toilets. This was despite the teachers informing us that the opposite was true, that the students were refusing to use them due to being “intimidated” by their new and shiny design. Which was strange considering the students had been using them daily since we had arrived.

Charlie One with their host families in Bwawani (October, 2018).

The day of our first School Management Committee (SMC) meeting arrived, and everything came to a head, like a lifting of fog. The headteacher and the committee denied all knowledge of an opening ceremony for the new toilets and claimed that they had never received ownership of them, despite being in the presence of our District Operations Manager Kim, a team leader on the last cycle who had worked on these exact toilets.

This was all in-fact false information. Infuriated by this, Kim informed the red-faced SMC that she was present and led those events herself. Faced with this, they admitted their defeat and confirmed that they had not touched the toilets in one year (the reason for this was unclear and lost in translation, and I do not wish to assume incorrectly – but we were building a set of teachers’ toilets for this particular school so I will leave the assumptions to you dear reader). As a result of this, the toilets had become infested with maggots and were slowly reaching the point of becoming unusable. In the end, after the previous (and supposedly final) cycle had left, the SMC had virtually disbanded and the district leaders that were bestowed with checking up on the cubicles had failed to do so. The school had not been held accountable for their lack of toilet maintenance and they had essentially been left to rot.

We were all gobsmacked at this revelation, but we were on the ground here for another four weeks and work had already started on the new toilets. These kids could not be left with the toilets in the state that they were, and the surrounding community were still engaging in traditional acts surrounding women’s menstruation that no longer had a place in modern society (one of which will be detailed later). Whatever the motivations of the school organisation we still had a job to do.

We held a community ‘Action Day’ to discuss issues surrounding water and sanitation hygiene, with particular focus on the normality of women’s menstruation health management (MHM). Over 300 people attended and backed the cause. Epitomising this was our men’s MHM corner; we had the idea to have two ‘corners’ during our Action Day and take shifts occupying them. The purpose of these were for men and women who had questions on MHM to come and privately ask us advice and guidance.

Action shot of me very stressed at the Action Day – Bwawani, Tanzania. (October, 2018).

During my shift, a man approached me and my Team Leader Sarya and asked us whether female periods were healthy. We explained to him their normality for all girls around the globe. His face was visibly shocked; he informed us that he had been locking his daughters in a ‘red-room’ for seven days a month and not letting them out until their menstruation period had concluded. This is because in certain segments of rural Tanzania there are beliefs that ovulating women can make men impotent. These opinions are influenced by decades of enforcement, tradition and cultural differences. It was not his intention to mistreat these young women, but to protect the ongoing heritage and future generations of his family. It shows that even a simple conversation can make a massive difference to a domino effect of people. He swore to us that he would never do anything like that again.

With this fresh in our minds we took this to the SMC at Kiberege school, we told them the importance of MHM, and they allowed us to teach it in their school with the additional support of the parents. We also stressed the importance of a consistently clean and monitored MHM room (one was constructed with the toilets) and the importance of hygiene materials in the schools such as soap, toilet brushes and bleach, to which they agreed. Things were finally beginning to look up.

It was around this time that nearly all of my teams work boots were stolen. During the night they were kept in the locked storage room of the school. Fortunately for me, I had taken mine home that evening to clean them. The next day we returned to see no signs of struggle or forced entry, the padlock was still on the door and all the school’s belongings were still in place. Many of these boots were purchased by both my British and Tanzanian counterparts, and work had to stop for about a week until we could get replacements.

Community mobilisation meetings followed, we gathered up groups of elders, women and young adults to conduct in-village surveys on their current knowledge. We contacted local businesses to see what stock they supplied regarding hygiene. In Bwawani, there were few shops that supplied sanitary pads and puritabs, yet all of them stocked bars of soap and its powdered variant. We then invited all of these business leaders to a meeting at the school and openly encouraged the SMC to pursue business relations with them to keep their toilets stocked, because, and this was stressed – we were not coming back again.

The efforts we had made finally started sticking in the final few days of our project.

The opening ceremony of the new teacher’s cubicles – Bwawani, Tanzania (October, 2018).

This was worth pursuing at Kiberege school for the benefit of the children who studied there; the next generation always deserves a chance. The opening ceremony of our very own teachers’ toilets followed and was a complete success. We ensured that they had the keys and could not claim that they “didn’t have any”. We left Bwawani truly feeling that we had made a difference against all odds. We headed into our next adventure after a quick recharge in Morogoro. The next stop was Chimlata School in the Kongwa district of Dodoma.

Upon re-reading and re-editing this article I find myself frustrated at myself for not further pursuing what was going on under the surface at Kiberege School. However, the situation me and my colleagues were under was very difficult both physically and emotionally. After the departure of my team, the School Management Committee fell back into old habits, however this time there were repercussions from the now rejuvenated district and their passionate Village Environmental Officer. The headteacher of Kiberege school has since been sacked and replaced. Here’s hoping that their new hire places the children first, investing in their futures – rather than insisting on ‘business as usual’.

I truly believe that Raleigh International does fantastic work, but it does highlight the difficulties of AID work in third-world countries with regards to potential corruption. That is not even touching on the ‘white-saviour complex’.

But that is a topic for another day.

Finally, I just want to give a massive thank you to Amy Pragnell, Phoebe Nelson and Bryn Williams for their invaluable assistance in writing this blog post. You guys rock.

Categories
philosophy tv

Nick Miller: A Modern Example of Taoism

Jake Johnson speaking at the 2018 San Diego Comic Con International, for "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse", at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California.

After two months stuck in Coronavirus induced lockdown, I, like many others have binge watched the series ‘New Girl’. The series was long forgotten to my pubescent memory. As a 16-year old during its run, I saw the words; ‘Adorkable’, ‘Girl’ and ‘Zooey Deschanel’ and gave it a hard and closed-minded pass. Only for it to be pushed so heavily on the home screens of Netflix and Amazon Prime eight years later.

Succumbing to the corporate media machine, I decided to do as I was told. I ended up bingeing all seven seasons in a single week. My actual review of the FOX series could be a separate blog, but to limit the word count here – it is a fantastic show that deserves your viewing. I highly recommend it (Note: there are going to be some spoilers in this article, so here is a heads up if you’re planning on watching).

However, I’m here today to write about my personal favourite character, Nick Miller. Schmidt is a very close second, he is hands-down the best part of the first season. Admittedly, by the actor Jake Johnson himself, the character did not come into his own until the second season. This was because the writers weren’t sure how to write his character yet. But I digress. Outside of the kooky wackiness of ‘New Girl’, the character of Nick is an unorthodox and frankly great example of the effect that the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism can have on our lives.

“Excuse me?” I can already hear you ask through your screen. How is this relevant to Nick?

Taoism is a way of thinking about life that dates to at least 2,500 years ago. Tao is the name given to the ‘way’ or the force that puts everything in life and existence into motion. Words themselves are claimed to be unable to correctly describe what ‘Tao’ is. However, a key belief in Taoism is that of ‘flow’ – that actions should not be forced. You should not strive in existence. You should live with the least amount of effort, prioritising what you want to do and investing your all into it.

When we are introduced to Nick, his friends see him as a lazy, alcoholic law-school dropout working at a dive bar claiming to be a writer. He is not taken seriously and is seen as a bit of a failure. Nick is a character I am sure many, including myself, can identify with. That is the core pull of the show ‘New Girl’ – most people can see themselves within one the shows characters. Middle-to-late twenty somethings who haven’t grown up into stereotypical adults yet, without kids or a family and are desperately trying to find their calling in life.

Despite his perceived shortcomings and lazy behaviour, Nick is just following the ‘flow’ or ‘Tao’ of his own existence. He is not forcing the things that don’t come naturally to him so he can be perceived as more well-off or successful, if he doesn’t actually want them. Many people in modern society chase jobs that they don’t actually want deep down, they just want the finances and the status that comes with it. I don’t recall ever talking to a child who yearns to grow old and become an Investment Banker. They want to drive trains, write stories or fly to the moon.

Nick actually did pass his bar examination while at law-school, yet instead of dropping out because he couldn’t – he decided being a bartender was more ‘him’ and chased that avenue instead. After sharing this advice with his friends, Winston leaves his job at the radio station and eventually becomes a cop. Jess decides to stay on as a teacher instead of taking the fundraising position, even though it pays more. Schmidt even visits the Christmas tree farm that he loved working at before getting a career in marketing – which he only has for the money, status and power.

Nick Miller at Law School. New Girl. Clavado En Un Bar ( Series 3, Episode 11)

This is averse to what most young adults are taught nowadays. I’ve worked in retail and catering and actually quite enjoyed them. However, I have always been taught they were bottom of the food-chain, despite both my parents working for decades in these environments. The definition of success and status in the western world right now is wrong. We should be praising these types of character decisions, not looking down on them with a sigh and an utterance of ‘lost potential’ at a family dinner.

If you need another example, it is Nick’s writing career. When he is teased by his loft mates for calling himself a writer and not writing anything substantial, he forces himself to stay up for 14 hours straight and churn out the last half of his first err… novel, ‘Z is for Zombie’. In his book he misspells the word ‘rhythm’ no less than 38 times and adds in a wordsearch that does not actually have any words hidden in it to ‘subvert the readers expectations’. Winston dubs it the worst thing that he is ever read but is proud of him for finishing it.

There is an argument that the metaphor here is, your first draft is never your best, but you learn from it and try again. I am not fighting that at all. I truly believe this is what the writers were going for, but it is a testament to the show and its writers that we can look further into their work. Taoism teaches that the act of ‘flow’ is a means to all things. We should not focus on the end-product of our workings, nor the potential reward, only the act of enjoying the things we do.

“He gives but not to receive

He works but for no reward

He competes but not for results

He does nothing for himself in this passing world

So nothing he does ever passes.”

(Verse 2, Tao Te Ching)

Like an athlete entering the ‘zone’, Nick taps into his creative energy during his stay in New Orleans with Reagan. He claims that the city resonated with him and he was able to tap into something special. The result? As he claims himself in his third person ‘About the Author’ page:

“He has also lived in New Orleans, [although] that was mostly a frenzied barely remembered fever-dream, during which he wrote the majority of his magnu[m] opus the Pepperwood Chronicles.”

Bourbon Street, New Orleans, Louisiana (Mark Souther, Wikimedia Commons)

The accidental pre-teen masterpiece about a detective wresting with his inner alligator was not a forced piece of fiction. It is unique and he wrote it because he wanted to. Not because his actions were forced by external influences such as his friends or societal pressure. He pretty much let the book write itself and found success. This is because his end goal was not to write the book, it was to get his story out into words.

This can be seen again when he attempts to write a sequel to ‘The Pepperwood Chronicles’ in the final season. His publisher tells him in no uncertain terms that his new material is garbage. It is because it is forced, he is writing Pepperwood to fill the criterion of a book contract, not because he wants to – he’s going against his natural flow.

The point of this article? I think Taoism is more useful now that it has ever been. We all need to be more like Nick Miller. He disregards modern society as egregious and does his own thing because it makes him happy. Sure, in his case it is beer for breakfast and refusing to pay out for repairs of the loft, but he gets where he needs to through innately being himself. If we all just did what we enjoyed, we would all live much happier lives than we do striving for something perceived as ‘greater’ by someone else. The current COVID-19 pandemic has shown us more than ever that every line of work is important, we should be celebrating the character of the people we have become instead of the number on our payslips at the end of every month.

Check out New Girl on Netflix or Amazon Prime here:

https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/70196145

https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Girl-Season-1/dp/B00G11IHVQ

Or read the Tao Te Ching: