Still feels like the first time...

Another song reference… The Rasmus’ ‘First Day of my Life‘.

Today marks five months since I started my internship at UNEP. And it also marks the end of my internship. I go back to school next week. And it has been an interesting 5 months. The weird thing is, I still feel like I did the first day I came here… Like all the while I’ve been here is one gigantic circle… I have come full circle.

I ahve met some interesting people, from all sorts of places, Siaya, Mexico, Ireland, just over there in Parklands, Machakos, Canada and all sorts of other places…

I was horribly awkward to begin with. This was an internship, not a real job. But that didn’t make it any easier to do. First, I imposed a dress code upon myself. Shirts and ties. So much so that it was generally assumed that that’s what they expected me to wear… Then there was the fact that despite being an environmental job, it just involved sitting at a computer all day, typing away, tagging documents to make a pretty decent output site for environmental assessment documents. And test-driving an eLearning system for the environment as well. Good stuff.

With time, I settled in, I learned the names of the guys in the office, and we even went out for lunch and *kinda* got drunk on day 1… There was wine, it had to be finished. That was quite a welcome.

On to the serious stuff, that was done with trepidation first. While I was jazzed to get my job description and having something to do, having just witnessed a strike from the inside that effectively ended my higher education, for a while at least, there was the sheer mass of unknown that came with this internship, like how I was to work right across the corridor from my mother, and how I was in a position of responsibility unlike any i have held before, a regular day job. So with the newness came the neophobia, the fear of all things new. But slowly, like concrete, I settled. And it felt… right. Like I was made for this gig…

So I left for 3 or so weeks to go back to school to do exams, and it was weird. Like I had worked, and I had found something I was good at. School was supposed to be the great unifier between what I want to achieve and what I have. Like my skills are what will put food on the table. but somewhere along the way, I realized I had found something I was good at, making a bit of money from it, and I realized I actually quite detested being in school. people I can’t relate with, a course that makes sense some times, other times it just contradicts itself, and other times it’s just plain boring. i get bored very easily. I need constant stimulation. And I found that school provides very little of that. So I got into other things, to challenge myself and get the gears in the old brain turning.

So I finally found something that gets me stimulated and thinking and using my brain, and now I have to say goodbye to it, as I go back to school… Alas, you can’t have it all, it seems. So it’s back to the books, back to the grind.

I shall miss this place.