post-employed

Okay, am not having luck calling people so let's do it this way.

Lots has happened. Or have happened? Before Christmas, around my birthday, I has a wonderful few days in Blava, spending a lot of time with people here who I value. I went and had a wicked holiday in Macedonia and Turkey, making a new friend and learning the truth about good strong coffee in the process. Back for ten days, and then went to Albania with UNIFEM for a staff retreat at which the year's planning was done in earnest, people laughed and cried and got angry at me* and made up with me. We established that I should be thanked for all I had done and back in Bratislava my bosses and I would talk futures. Turns out the futures won't materialise for a while. The future police went through my papers and found something missing.

*Conversation somehow turned to my children, three and five, who live with their mother in London, and I thought "why not?". The truth came out the next day and the screwface was like nothing I've seen for years.

This is from 15th january and forgotten:

So yes, I am back in Brat, as noted, and my luggage has also turned up, wine intact, Spoon present and unharmed. For all that next year I want a family Christmas with pudding and Turkey ice cream and a bottle of fine muscat from the Maghreb, with conversation that sparkles like fizzy wine in candlelight and a homemade tree, I look back on my mini adventure with a big smile. And it was a mini adventure, really.

I wrote briefly about the sadness that pervades Skopje, and while that is all true, it's only part of the story, and written by a privileged Westerner whose birth he doesn't recognise. There are a lot of very attractive cafes and bars, and a noticeable cultural life (Iggy Pop and the Stooges played six dates in Macedonia in December, which in population terms equates playing six dates in south east London...). But there is also massive poverty (following a period where poverty was a very different phenomenon, not to mention inequality), and unemployment is also very high - the situation isn't helped by being a country where politics are to a great extent run along identity lines.

Good news from Northern Ireland, whoknowswhat from Kosovo, and it looks like I'll be going back to Macedonia sometime later in the year. For all that nice hotels are by definition nice, and it's Proper tourism to see things dating from times whose exploitations, slaveries and inequalities are lost in the beauty of what remains, I haven't really been to Rome or Paris like I feel I went to Skopje or Bitola (or even Istanbul, with one whose time of is spent there) - being with a local who can explain things, and going for long enough to walk enough of the town to get a sense of how people do what they do all day. Easier to be a tall man, for sure. Thanks for that. Both types of going-to-places have their place, each offering their own educations. But there's an understanding I get from the Skopje-type trip that I have no feeling of with regard to Paris, say. Just this evening I was talking to my flatmate about the class education I realise I got from going to Deptford Green rather than Askes, and there's some analogy to be made. The hotel staff in Ohrid were very nice to me, and the breakfast was generous and tasty. The best thing about town though was the handmade paper shop. When I grow up, I want to make that luxury consumer item. The paradox of the socialist kunstler.

There's been a lot going on in the last few days in respect of which the next few days will be a heads-down big-paper-out thinkfest focused on master's courses and where-what-when between now and the autumn. The soundtrack to all this will be the avalanche of compilation CDs which greeted me on my return from Tirana, which continues to leave me speechless. But luckily there's music to fill the space.

Soin brief: this week I pick the master's course most relevant to my goal of being someone who knows what gender-responsive budget analysis is, how it works and how to use it for advocacy; may also go to prague for a couple of days, and will prepare to continue the work on youth policy which I was doing previously and which has received funding to be expanded and deepened.

This gender-responsive budgeting, GRB, is an increasingly important tool for gender equality advocacy by Unifem and others. (By the way, the Unifem thing is over now - I have sent my boss on a mission to Turkey, planning and organising which has been my swansong, and I am currently unemployed. Will be coming back to London for a bit at some point, possibly at the 2015 end of March.) Very basically, it works at two levels, the obvious and the difficult. The former is provision of funds for services and programmes for women (e.g. domestic violence shelters, entrepreneurship training schemes, making sure there are functioning toilets in girls' schools and someone checking); the difficult is trying to get gender implications of policy-making more generally considered by those making the policy - benefits, labour, health and education policies of course, but also things where gender-specific implications may be less clear (or where, on consideration, there may not be any), such as road-building schemes or energy policy, say. Yes, in practice the line will be drawn somewhere - perhaps policy-making would stall if every minority, vulnerable or excluded group had specific consideration in the formulation of every policy - but that shouldn't stop you doing the best possible (and gender equality should, in my mind, be a fundamental cross-cutting aim of policymaking). Hopefully my understanding will be better in the future. I reckon the number of people who properly get this are triple figures worldwide. Maybe that means it's cultish and pointless, but stepping back from perfectly understanding it, anything that enables women/women's groups to influence policy in favour of gender equality (and women's access to the labour market, anti-discrimination, stopping violence, promotion of sexual and reproductive rights, implementation of laws...) is a Good Thing and a good use of my time.

The structure of this post may not be clear, it isn't to me. I will post it now, but maybe add/subtract in coming days, put a couple of photos in. If you got this far, well done. Also, please go to the gig by The Middle Class Bastards at the Hope and Anchor in Islington (!) on Sunday February 18th. I can't, but counting both the MCBs as people whose vanishing would devastate me, and independent of that liking their music, I wish to promote this gig. Go.

Chris Grollman
Hired Goon
Bratislava
Mobile: +421 9085 70878
Immobile: +421 2544 ___ (email me).