Hey There Square One

I quit my job last Thursday. Well, not the whole job – I am still employed by Princeton in Latin America to be in Santo Domingo and to work in the non-profit, non-governmental, public service field, but I am no longer working for Censel.

I haven’t talked about this on here much, but I assume that through what I did say and through other conversations, most of you were aware that I was having some serious difficulty with my job. While I thought (and continue to think) that the work done by Censel is of the utmost importance, the organization is undergoing something of a financial and administrative crisis and the truth is that they don’t have any work, or that they are not set up at this time to be able to find work for me to do. They’ve been attempting to find new sources of funding for quite some time and they’ve been mostly unsuccessful, leading to major cutbacks of educational and promotional programs, and a loss of staff members, which has curtailed their legal program as well.

Because of these factors and a number of others, there really wasn’t anything for me to do. I’m not a lawyer and my language skills are not good enough to take statements from generally emotional Dominican women about the legal difficulties they face. There’s a small amount of grant applying happening, and this is what I’ve spent time doing in the last two months, but even that is slow and small and not enough to sustain the number of women working there.

So, I quit. I…well, I feel pretty conflicted about this – have since the moment I walked out of my boss’s office and a week later the confliction has subsided somewhat, replaced by the firm reasoning I am trying to do and by the really incredible support so many of you are offering me. I don’t like the fact that I wasn’t able to make that situation work – it was, and is, an incredibly interesting organization with some simply amazing history and I wanted to be a part of what they are doing and I wanted to learn from them. But, I couldn’t. And I don’t actually think that’s my fault, although it’s easy to let that little doubting voice pipe up with other opinions when I’m feeling low.

I am currently working on researching other opportunities for myself here in the city – as I said, I am still employed by Princeton in Latin America to be here, working on something in the same range of non-profit posts, and I’ve thought it through and I’m committed to staying here if at all possible. I have a little while to work on communicating with contacts and researching organizations and I hope to find a number of promising organizations to examine in depth. I’ve started with that process a little, but was thrown off track a little by the storm – as I know some of you have read, there has been some pretty intense weather around these parts recently – Tropical Storm Noel blew through and although it has been seriously impressive to watch, and somewhat inconvenient as everything has been closed and the electricity has been going out for days, I am very safe.

It’s amazing however, how much a storm can throw something like this off. Unlike the States, the DR basically closes down when hit with serious weather. The infrastructure is simply not strong enough to handle the wind and water, and pretty instantaneous flooding and power outages result, leading to a standstill for most industries. It’s been a little like having a string of snow days as a kid – the first day or two are really fun and feel like a reprieve from life, and then as the days go on, people start getting cabin fever – no where to go, nothing to do. Today is bright and dry, although still a little cloudy, and although I’ve heard rumors that another storm is going to blow through this weekend, I’m choosing to hope that it’ll pass us by.

In the meantime I’ve been spending a lot of time with friends – my friend Rachel (who is now reading the blog (well, maybe), despite my intentions to be all sneaky about blogging to real life friends here - hi Rachel! Hope you don’t mind how much I talk about you here!) introduced me to a wonderful new café (with WiFi!) where the hipster crowd all congregates, and I’ve spent a couple of days there with her, and we also went to the ballet last weekend – Sleeping Beauty :). We’ve been doing movie nights and making brownies ala mode, and going to the gym a lot. It’s funny – I was so worried about the friend issue, much more worried in fact, about the friend thing than about the work thing, and as my life seems to like to do to me – the very opposite is true.

I feel like I’ve got a somewhat cemented friend thing happening – there are a group of kids from a study abroad program who I see very regularly and really like, and although they leave in December, it still feels like enough of a social life to sustain me. And I feel like I’ve found a real friend in Rachel – so often these situations quickly and artificially bond people to one another (not that that’s bad – just that it might not happen in different circumstances), but I feel like I would like to be friends with her in real life, and I feel incredibly lucky that that’s true. So…I’m starting to feel like not only do I have a social life, I also have someone to have a deeper friendship with too, and that’s pretty much having a magical, no-calorie, but tastes like normal, cake, with butter cream icing, and eating it too.

So, as usual, things are a mixed bag and I’m going to try to keep on keeping on. Oh, and I think if the weather holds, I will definitely be going to the beach this weekend. The beach solves career worries, right?