Of silver and gold

When I was a child, I had a song book called Sing around the campfire. Riddled with songs like Michael row your boat and Kumbaya, I have no idea how it ended up in my distinctly secular home yet somehow it did. It came with a casette which I played over and over until the tape wore thin. To this day I can still sing along to the mournful sounds of Nobody knows. There is one song in particular of which the refrain dug itself into my memory:

make new friends
but keep the old
one is silver
and the other gold

As I child you think friendships are forever. Nothing or nobody can drive you and your friend apart. You share the good, the bad, the secrets and giggles. You solemnly promise each other in your poesiealbums that you will be best friends forever. But then one day you go to different schools, different universities, different lives. You try to keep in touch but eventually they become people you once used to know.

As you get older the duration of friendships tends to decrease. Very few people nowadays work in the same place for more than a couple of years and we change countries almost as easily as we do underwear. My friends live in half a dozen different countries or so. It is difficult to keep friendships alive when you live far apart. Even when neither of you has really changed since the days of your friendship, everything else has. You don't know the same people anymore and don't share the same present so instead you fall back on your shared past. Friends for old times' sake. It is heartbreaking to realise sometimes that time has eroded the foundations of your friendship. Keeping the golden glow on old friendships takes a lot of dedicated polishing.

New friendships can also be fragile. Over the last year I have met many new people some of whom I would now consider friends. But already I have lost some as well. For a year we have worked together day in-day out but when the final term ended we all went our separate ways again. Sure, we can send each other emails and virtual Facebook presents but experience has taught me that we are more likely to remain friendly acquaintances than friends. Only the alchemy of friendship can turn silver into gold. Whenever it does we should cherish it for the rare treasure it is.

Ingeburgerd

Inburgeren: "to get accustomed to a new place of residence"
(van Dale Dutch dictionary)

More commonly interpreted as knowing and respecting the habits of your new country after emigration. Well, it's been 12 months and 19 days since I arrived so it is a time to take tally of how well I have been ingeburgerd into British society. A quick summary on some key indicators:


Five out of ten ..., not a very good score. Then again, inburgering doesn't dictate adoption of foreign habits, merely understanding and respect for them. That, for the most part, I can do. I don't think I'll ever stop being amazed about carpet in the toilet or separate faucets for hot and cold running water but it is such peculiar differences that make it interesting to live abroad.

It's hard to say here in London whether or not you have been accepted by the English. The truth is there hardly are any around. Almost everybody is a foreigner. I have met more Chinese, Germans and French than I have English. My accent, for one, still does not fool anybody into thinking I'm English though lately I have been getting "Canadian?" a lot . I'll consider that a step in the right direction from earlier accusations of sounding American.

This weekend was a clear reminder that I am far from being assimilated. Those of you Dutch like me may not know this but for the English this was a BIG weekend. It was the final of the Rugby Worldcup and England was in it. I watched the match in a pub full of rowdy fans looking at a scrum of rugged looking men having absolutely no clue what was going on on the field. Out of a sense of solidarity, mixed with an instinct for self-preservation, I decided to side with England. They lost and now the English are in mourning. I, on the other hand, am completely indifferent. My support for England was only skin deep. Maybe that is the true touchstone of inburgering.

Growing pains

When I grow up I want to be
The little girl dreamt
An interpreter for the UN
To help the whole world understand

When I grow up I want to be
The teenager then pondered
A doctor, a psychiatrist maybe
Or perhaps a GP, she wondered

When I grow up I want to be
The student then resolved
A researcher of biochemistry
Deduct how life on Earth evolved

When I grow up I want to be
The PhD envisioned
Working for the vulnerable and sick
In countries far and near to which I'll be commissioned

When I grow up I want to be
The woman suddenly thought small
Mumbling softly so no one would hear
Do I have to grow up at all?

Lost in translation

O my, will I indeed be looking forward to that weekend! Only two days into the week and already I am feeling knackered. It's been a while since I was a nine-to-fiver, let alone a 8.30-6.30er. It's tough, getting back into the rhythm.

My supervisor clearly does not belief in easing into the job either. I have had to hit the ground running and running fast at that. I shouldn't be surprised as this is the man who once told me we "could not afford to be average". It is what makes working in this group both a wonderful opportunity and a daunting challenge.

My first project is immediately a meaty one. It is my job to take inventory of the different so-called performance measures for healthcare in no less than 42 countries. Draft results to be deposited on my supervisor's desk by the end of the month, please! I am not sure whether this is an acid test of my abilities or simply business-as-usual. I am inclined to believe it is the latter. As if the scope of the work wasn't testing enough in itself, the work comes with a substantial catch. Performance measures are usually set by some sort of governmental or professional qualifications body and, as such, they are not to be found in the standard scientific literature. Instead, I have to dig through websites and policy papers. Naturally these papers are written in the language of its target audiences. Well, with 42 different countries you might see why that could be a bit of a problem.

I am rather pleased to find that, despite my schoolgirl detest of German, I can still understand a fair bit of the German, Austrian and Swiss papers. After all, qualitätsindikatoren is not that hard to comprehend. Also the indicateurs de qualité I can still more or less handle. And for once even knowing Dutch comes in good use! The difficulties begin with the literature on kvalitetsindikatorer and indicadores de calidad.

So here I ask you, my wonderful international group of friends: those of you proficient in Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, Chinese, or Arabic: may I perhaps invoke your services?

Leaving limbo

The vast majority of people will have gotten up this morning thinking to themselves "aaah, it's Friday. Only one more day of work and then it's weekend!". I, on the other hand, woke up thinking "aaah, finally I get to go to work!". After weeks of sitting at home I have at long last started my job at the university.

At first suddenly having no deadline hanging over my head was a welcome relief. Then it became a nice opportunity to catch up on my reading, correspondence and ailing social life. Another week later it turned into a maddening nothingness. A big empty void of days with no purpose other than beating random strangers at online scrabble. I would make one desperate housewife!

Thankfully as of yesterday I am put out of my unemployed misery. I have rejoined the ranks of the working masses to become a good little worker bee. A poorly paid worker bee without a desk to call her own that is. It doesn't matter. I am just so pleased to be spending my days usefully again. Soon I might even start to longingly look forward to weekends again for at least I will have earned them.