27/5/83

Been leafing through this journal of 6+ months. Our 6-month anniversary is next Saturday and I've been trying to get a handle on the goods and bads of this experience. It's a difficult process simply because good and bad are relatively subjective. My goods and bads are different from Debbie's and from everybody else's for that matter. Even my ‘standard’ continues to evolve over time so that I'm not even sure what's good and bad at least outside of God's moral will. Now it's time (or almost time) to do a quarterly evaluation since we are 1/4 through our 2-year commitment. I've been holding off on our newsletter just so we could spend time (Deb and I) sharing the pluses and minuses of being here. Reviewing this journal, one stark reality has hit me. In terms of being able to deal with being here, I haven't changed much. That in itself is a bit depressing. I have changed, but not much. And certainly the transition hasn't been as easy as it appears for some others. This place is a shock. Not just visually or viscerally but psychologically. I'm really feeling it. Deb and many others say that I am too analytical. That's true. But what I'm trying to do is to determine the source of my psychic discomfort. Would I be as overwrought over my job if I was stateside? Would I handle my frustration in the same way? Would I be as reluctant to get on with it if I was in a stateside organization? What is it I don't like anyway? I could go on. It would help me answer a big question: are your feelings and frustrations the same as they would be at home? Perhaps it's unanswerable. Since I don't have much of an HR job history in the states, the answer is at least difficult. Maybe I'll never be able to answer it. That in itself is a question.

Yes I'm feeling bleah and strung out. Maybe it's the full moon. Perhaps lunacy is my problem. Perhaps I need to learn to take things more lightly. But that's difficult to do since I condemn Vincentians for not taking the situation here seriously enough. If there were more thinkers like me, perhaps things would improve. The people would all be near crazed like me, but things might improve.

As a release, I've been thinking about writing a book (seriously). Something I could look forward to doing on a regular basis. Maybe my anxiety would find a healthy outlet in such an endeavor. My biggest problem is that I don't know how to write or even begin such an ambitious endeavor. Well, it's always a thought.

Job change is a very real possibility and something I might lobby for when and if this job switch of my boss takes place and I meet with Mr Marshall. I'm hoping something positive happens on that front because when this CIDA project is done I'll be back to square one on my job description endeavor.