Thought Picnic: Homing in on relocation turmoil

An apparent suddenness of circumstances

As the day nears the seriousness of the situation gets even more acute, not even two weeks ago would I have considered I would be making this momentous and life-changing decision.

In some cases, I doubt I am ready for it at all, it is looking like a classic case of being guided or even forced by circumstances rather than creating the circumstances in which you want to control all the events and issues around you – it is a very unfamiliar place.

However, in the last two years I have been in the most unfamiliar places of vulnerability, disease, lack and apparent lack of direction. It would appear there is an agenda only that it is scheduling the chaos that swirls around me without my having the control of the matters it presents.

Questions to ask

The countdown now is 11 days to my new job in England and I have to ask myself if I am asking the right questions and thereby getting answers to the things that should be managed, under control and sorted out.

There is no doubt that any move is stressful and disrupting, some friends have seen it as a new beginning too; I seem to have the 180 degree gaze of the extremes of the best and worst of the situation because I am in the centre of it all.

That question is how do you package a 20 year existence into a kind of storage whilst you find your feet, find your level and find your grounding in a new environment?

As I attempt to distance myself from the rut of it all to hopefully have an unbiased view of the matter, I recognise that the job opportunities seemed to be showing up more in the UK that in the Netherlands and I was pitching for those offers as they came.

A foreigner of sorts

The fact is, though I am a UK citizen with all the eligibility of working back at “home”, my home for the last 11 and more years has been in the Netherlands and essentially I am being employed by a global company to take up a permanent role away from my current domicile.

I suppose, the question I have not asked is, do they have a relocation package that includes, advice, help, assistance and reintegration programmes for returnees because if I am to be the most productive in my new role the last thing I want and they will want on my mind is the turmoil of settling down enough to settle properly in the job and make a good fist at it.

Somehow, I feel a bit relieved about having thought it through to this and it will be my first email out on Monday, the situation with them will now be if it matters that much to them to help – I should spend the weekend reading the contracts and terms as I hope to find some resolution to this interesting dilemma.

The fact is sometimes; your answers are framed by the questions you ask. As a friend shared, these trials are not beyond the realm of resolution.

Teenage mules caught in Ghana

Girls being girls?

News that two 16-year old girls of British citizenship but of foreign descent were arrested in Ghana for attempting to traffic cocaine to Britain has been greeted with interest and interesting commentary.

However, before we get carried away on the deception of the moment we need to examine this case deeper than the superficial.

The words of the girls are a damning indictment of either the youth in general or the circle of friends that these girls might keep and none of it is good.

The words

"There were basically two boys over here who gave us two bags and told us ... it was an empty bag.

"We never thought anything bad was inside ... and they told us to go to the UK and drop it off to some boy ... at the airport."

"It was basically like a set-up. They didn't tell us nothing, we didn't think nothing, because basically we are innocent.

"We don't know nothing about this drugs and stuff."

Having the time of their lives

Now these are two girls of 16 who were offered £3,000 to travel to Ghana, their accommodation was paid for by two Ghanaian men who presumably then gave them two "empty" laptop bags with £300,000 of cocaine to carry through Ghanaian customs and then U.K. customs to give to some other boy in the U.K. - 5% tops investment to cart the goods to the market.

These girls were having the time of their lives as they dreamed of what they would do with £3,000 where many know the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Anyone who has finished secondary school and is about to start A-Levels should have been aware in some way that West Africa was now the drop-off point for mules to bring drugs into Europe - in fact, some of this was in the news only too recently, if the youth could ever deign to be weaned off their PlayStations and iPods to find out what is going on in their world.

The protestations recorded on the phone of their innocence are bunkum for all I care, innocent, my foot; these girls were willing to take large sums of money, deceive their guardians or parents that they were off to France when they were really off to Ghana and they cared nothing for the fact that they might have ended up in the hands of even more unscrupulous people who could have sexually abused them amongst other unprintable things.

Confide and confidence

One would expect when children of that age are met with such serious situations, they would intimate their parents or relations who should be close enough to confide in about what could turn out really nasty.

Their language of expression was appalling to say the least, double negatives do not make positives in English language - in place of 'nothing' they should have used 'anything', if they could ever muster any sensible expression in their distress.

One cannot say if the girls were just plain naïve or exercising brazen bravado in willingly allowing themselves to be used in this rotten scheme and deception.

If they succeeded

But one thing is clear, if these girls had succeeded they would have had to explain to their parents where they got money for their new kit from - more lies, how their passports got to have visa stamps of Ghana - even more lies, they might have persuaded other colleagues and friends to get involved in this racket and they probably would have repeated the unassuming offence again and again.

Meanwhile, all the boys - the givers and the collectors would have now gone to ground without an iota of conscience for the trouble they have gotten the girls into - that is business; an occupational hazard for them and lives destroyed for the girls.

Let me correct that, it was the love of money, the root of all evil that consumed the girls that they allowed themselves to be easily deceived and lured into this deception of their parents to acquire unwarranted riches.

Raising kids properly

What do kids get taught at school today? No dignity in labour, no honesty in the acquisition of wealth, no knowledge of ensuring that the art of making money should be transparent, above board, auditable and worthy of example. Am I being just utterly old-fashioned here?

One does feel a tinge of sympathy for the girls, but the fact that they were caught would hopefully alert others to the danger of this get-rich-quick scheme.

Meanwhile the girls, who were told nothing, thought nothing and knew nothing would be on a crash course of learning something pretty damn quickly - never trust men who offer you riches for "nothing".