And when I start I cannot stop!

Caus things have gone down in the city lately. I have secured myself an (unpaid) internship in an NGO, where my professor from uni is the director. I will be in once or twice a week, or as often as I please and for the next few months, and if luck wants me to stay in this city I will stick to it longer, caus all experience is good experience and as my career adviser uttered, though in slightly more professional terms “ the market sucks big time right now”. What he actually said was that he was impressed of how I had used my network to get this internship while he had, just some days ago, a girl crying in his office caus she was rejected from so many positions and NGOs, and in fact many people are struggling to get unpaid (!!) internships these days caus the organizations cut back, and credit crunch etc etc. So I am satisfied with my achievement. Still, I need to get paid work as well, but when you got a foot inside development there are doors, many doors, that leads to many places and positions if you are good at what you are doing. Praise be to Allah, hamdulilah, I will be. Oh wait a second, I don’t praise to Gods do I? It just sounded nice. Nicer than other phrases tonight.

I am just about to start my dissertation, while I cannot or simply don’t want to reveal the thesis, or perhaps it has not even been formulated yet, I can reveal the area of which I am researching; the Sudan. More precisely Darfur! This area concerns me a lot, reading about it generates feelings of discomfort and anger. I see the evil in human at its worst and get an urge to do something. I have to start somewhere and writing about it, talking to people and so on will help me understand, anthropologically and with my mind focused on development, what, why, when, who, where and how! My limits here is the word count but I suspect that this topic will reoccur on my paths in the future.

I survived all of my exams. With some cold shivering at night, sleeplessness and other exam-animals in the house I managed. The only exam I actually felt good about was my Arabic grammar one. Then you are not supposed to feel good about exams, they are designed to test you under stressful conditions, like as under Chinese torture, waterboarding or some other absurdity going on in Guantanamo Bay. Three hours for three essays. The state you are in for those weeks can wreck your health for unforeseeable future. No, I am not exaggerating, a good friend and probably the best student I know around here suffered several panic attacks during the last few weeks. The scary thing is that she had never had a panic attack before, she didn’t even know what it was, and now she suffered from many. In one case she could not take her exam and now has to take it next spring, a year from now, because the English system has no room for failure.