0H for 10

It’s the afternoon on a perfectly warm and beautiful day in a bright European city, drinking a café latte in the sun while reading something equally impressive and in line with the picture in your head.
Maybe in my cracked out, jet lag dreams (also anyone who really knows me know it’s tea all the way) – it’s really 5 AM, pre-dawn in Groningen, a quaint little town in the northern part of the Netherlands.

Holiday? Nope
Quarter-life crisis? Maybe

Forget a steady job that pays cash money, forget Canada and its six month-long winters – I’m moving on to greener (windmill filled) pastures.
I’ve been in this idyllic European town for all of 24 hours for the start of a Master’s program in Humanitarian Affairs.

In a “not so long” story I started doing some development work after uni (as documented in my Under African Skies blog), become enamoured by the social welfare field, got an awesome job in Montreal working in federal government health research at McGill University, cozied up to some amazing humanitarians (Dr. Kirsten Johnson of HumanitarianU) and steadily decided to make moves into building myself up to have a career in this area. Easy right? Right.

My life and background has been extremely varied and I’ve been fortunate to experience beautiful people and places and hope to continue to do so. Growing up across Canada, Kuwait and Ghana has truly opened my eyes to the diversity of cultures that shape who we become and the challenges/opportunities that people across this world can face. The field of humanitarianism (in conflict and natural disaster) strikes a chord for me because at its basic level (layers of political agendas aside), it’s about people (despite the barriers that we believe separate us) sacrificing, surviving and striving for greater equality and freedom. I respect these people and hope to better understand the systems, organizations and nations that determine our reactions and responses to such crises.

As in my previous experience (Under African Skies) I am the absolute worst on reflecting on life/experience/change after the fact. I resort to the standard “It was interesting – it was great – good times” and could easily be describing going to a 3-day music festival (Osheaga shout out!) or living in the Middle East for 10 years or … washing dishes or something so far away from “Interesting, great or a good time.”

Needless to say writing has always been therapeutic and a natural way for me to be sincere and reflective about my life experience, more or less in real time.
For my famjam and friends all over, I wanted to create a space to feed your curiosity as well as give myself a place to direct people if ever I’m asked “What’s up? What’s new?” (just joking, I’ll be happy to copy/paste my blogs into chat boxes or read them verbatim if that seems like a more personal touch ;))

This blog is called “0H for 10” (0/10, 0h410) for a few reasons:

-         I’ll be talking a lot about life which at the moment will consist of my program/living in Europe – two areas where I don’t know jack. My stats are lowww in this area, but that’s alright because 1) I own it, 2) that’s part of the whole learning process. Things like #dutchlife, #dutchstyles will happen, let it be.

-          My goal over this process is to visit 10 new countries by the time I finish this program (2-ish years). And yes I’m going to count the fact that my program basically demands that I be in the Netherlands, Poland AND Ireland so I get three freebies - just let me have this people, I did pitch for NEW places so I have my work cut out for me. So country count is technically 1/10 at the moment. I’ll start putting my country counts at the start of future posts. #winning

-          Lastly, in order to maintain some shreds of sanity/regularity, I’ve decided to post (roughly) every 10 days (nyahaha “0H” the word play working in my favour). So minimum 3 times a month (***future me is kicking herself). This also puts the pressure on to be a somewhat interesting human being, augh it’s been so long since that’s been required, but I’m up for the challenge.

Thanks for reading and interested to hear any thoughts!