Here's the thing...

I had no preconceived ideas about Morocco except that there would be sun. It’s not that I wasn’t curious, or had gotten lazy, rather that the time before this holiday – like most every period before a holiday - required an intense, almost manic, attention to work to make space for time off from it.  Sun was promised. That is all that mattered. Google, the omnipotent god of our times to whom we bring all our supplications and in whom we invest an almost unlimited amount of trust, assured me that there would be sun. So, on faith, we abandoned the gloomy, January skies of England for North Africa. When we were growing up in California every winter we were inundated with people like me. We called them snowbirds. That was before we knew that the average person gets less than half of the daily vitamin D they need unless they use supplements. And, that this deficiency only increases in Northern climates where our skin isn’t exposed to the sun for much of the year.  ...

At the end of 2019, I spent some time thinking about our company. Partly because it was the end of the year and reflection always seems the right thing to do around 31 December but also because in 2019, the management assumed control of the company. In some ways there is no difference being the CEO of someone else’s company and being the CEO of your own company. However, in some ways it’s very different. Not the least of which is the stakes are a bit higher. If you make a mistake with someone else’s company there’s someone else holding the bag. If you make a mistake with your own company the blame is your own. In the words of Ben Horowitz (who has penned potentially the greatest book on leading a business ever written, The Hard Thing About Hard Things): “Everybody learns to be a CEO by being a CEO. The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company. You will face a broad set of things that you don’t know how to do that require skills you don’t have. Never...

Perhaps you have a healthier relationship between your mind and body than I do. Perhaps as a child you were taught to listen to what your body was telling you about the rest, food, drink and activity it needed. I was in yoga the other day when the instructor told us to spread our toes. ‘Spread my toes?’ my mind thought. And in that moment I realised that I’ve got no idea how to spread my toes. My mind has no idea how to talk to my toes. And in that moment I also realised that I’ve never been kind to my body – as I count kindness. By that I mean that my mind has never treated my body like it would treat any friend or family member. If I’m being generous, my mind treats my body as a child. If I’m being honest, a slave. Somewhere along the way I’ve learned that my mind is in charge. It makes the rules and lays them down. The body follows them. The body says, ‘I’d like a little more rest, please.’ The mind says, ‘The alarm is set for six, suck it.’ The body says, ‘I don’t r...

Starting January 2020 off right with a few days of vegetarian meals before a jaunt to Morocco for the real thing. Trying to make use of the slow cooker where possible to pre-cook / make life easy and delicious. 1. Ful medames, muhammara dip, falafal & pita 2. Slow cooker mushroom sauce & pasta 3. Spicy dal, naan, coleslaw 4. Vegetarian chilli & potatoes 5. Sesame rice with terriyaki mushrooms 6. Chinese noodles from the local takeaway 7. Spicy cauliflower, brussels sprouts with french bean, pea & tomato salad 8. Burrito bowls 9. Moroccan vegetable stew with couscourse Shopping List 3 kinds of mushrooms x 2 ginger coriander x 3 garlic red pepper yellow pepper fresh chillis tenderstem broccoli red onion x 5 yellow onion x 2 plum tomatoes x 2 cauliflower french beans butternut squash sweet potato can of tomato sauce can of chopped tomatoes x 2 egg noodles naan pita bread 2 cans of beans (for chilli - any type) salsa canned corn canned...

I was given this book for Christmas due to my ongoing battle with weeds on the allotment. Very enlightening and an easy read. Apparently nature abhors bare soil as much as it does a vacuum and hence: weeds. I have a much better understanding of the role of weeds, or, unwanted plants in both soil preservation and nutrition as well an idea of the most common weeds, if they're annual or perennial and what to do about them. 

This blog has been quietly resurrected. Let's see if anyone notices. Sure, it's been dead for seven years and I'm not even sure if anyone has blogs anymore but I miss it so why not give it another go. Let's see, what have you missed in the last 7 year? - Moved to Uganda - Started an online magazine called IN Kampala - Shut-down an online magazine - Moved to Pakistan - Got married - Did a Masters at Cambridge - Wrote a book called IN Lahore (notice a trend?) - Moved to the UK - Wrote another book called Staying Safe in Your Gap Year - Did a TED Talk - Started running a company called Safer Edge And that's pretty much it. You're up to speed. Welcome. 

Here's the latest from the Hoppe Studios... Chasing Misery

I have to take back everything that I've said about Dubai. For those of you who hadn't heard of my dislike for the place the feelings went a little something like this: "There are two things in this world that drain my will to live faster than anything else. Those are: 1) airports, 2) shopping malls." Dubai is, essentially, nothing more than a combination of those two and, therefore, one of my least favourite places on earth." Mind you it also has something to do with how it's a hot, dry, dustbowl and the airport usually looks like a morgue with bodies sprawled all over the floor sleeping through their 10 hour layovers. Well, I gave my friend James the challenge of changing that all for me and he did an excellent job. First, I received an e-mail that contained those 9 little words that thrill me like no other: "I'm having a car meet you at the airport". Seriously, if . Next, when I disembarked from the plane there was someone standing there w...

After sitting in my little tukul almost all day on Saturday I had enough. I needed to get out and so I went for a walk. And once I started walking I was overcome by the strangest urge to just keep on walking. I mean, just keep going. Now, I’m the person who coined the phrase, ‘if God had intended us to walk he wouldn’t have given us cars’ so I’m not normally a fan of ‘footing’, as they call it here. I think of walking as a means to an end, just like driving - only the latter is more expedient. You walk, or run, or hike, or trek, or drive in order to 1) get where you’re going, or 2) exercise, or, 3) see some beautiful mountain/hike as the case may be. That’s it. I have never gotten some high or endorphine rush from either walking or running. That’s why I found it so unusual that on Saturday I just felt like walking. It might have something to do with being in the middle of nowhere and I was on a dirt track that goes somewhere. It wasn’t to get anywhere, it wasn’t particularly beautiful...

"Careening," I thought putting the New Yorker down on my lap. That is the word for what we are doing right now - in this taxi - through the hills above Nairobi. Careening. Under the heavy grey sky, over these pot-holed roads, between the jungle threatening to come over the garden walls. It struck me as funny - or funny enough to stop reading a magazine - that the word just came to me like that. After so many months of having no words pop into my head to describe anything. After years of not having really anything to write. Having no words compose themselves in my head. One just pops up. Just like that. Careening. I guess we are all careening in life - which is a great metaphor for life if, in the words of someone famous, you're stupid enough to want more metaphors for life - careening along roads on high mountain cliffs, over hills, being shifted in our seats from side to side by bumps and turbulence. We rarely, if ever, just stay perfectly still. Not even wh...

It’s a strange thought, isn’t it. I’ve thought about it for the past few mornings when I took the road the opposite direction into town. It’s a flat and dusty road – fairly good by South Sudan standards and, if you take it in the opposite direction, it passes through some oil outposts, dry flat bush occupied by a mud tukul here and there, and the army’s checkpoints. You make a left at one junction and then you’re headed straight into Mayom County. I went there a few weeks ago because I had destroyed my computer (another tedious story involving my falling through the floor and spilling tea on it) and some friends were on an official visit and it seemed like something interesting to do with an otherwise wasted day. Apart from a couple of buildings, a bunch of tukul compounds surrounded by dried reeds, a broken tractor - there’s not much to Mayom town. There’s just a bunch of people living out there with their kids running around playing with tire rims and trucks made out of tin. Ou...

I like to think of myself as a fairly 'tough' person. I'm not afraid of snakes, scorpions, spiders, or other animals in general. I like to think that if you leave nature alone it tends to leave you alone. But then I came to Unity state and am living at the UNMIS team site. Within the chain link and barbed wire fence there is a strange ecosystem of animals and insects that seems to have gone crazy. I'm afraid that nature is considering not keeping up its part of our little bargain. What makes me think this? Well, nothing in particular but let me give you some examples: There are packs of mongoose (mongeese? mongi?) roaming the grounds. I like mongoose (singular). I've never seen them (plural) travelling in packs but the team site is ridden with them - they travel in packs of 40-50 and have been seeing taking on the packs of feral dogs (will get to that in a moment). Now, in general, they stay out of my way and I stay out of theirs but when I go out for a run ...

I think that if I pretend that I haven’t ignored this blog for an exceptionally long time and just start writing again that no one will notice… Today I was struck by several acts of generosity that were conveyed to me for no apparent reason by people who stood nothing to gain by giving them. Let me back up… I am in Bentiu, Unity State – a state that was ravaged by war, dominated by oil, and is, still, as close to the wild west as you can get in the world today. Different political factions swagger around town with their bodyguards (read: private militias) in shiny suits and land cruises with guns pointing every which way out the window. It is hot, and dusty. At just about any moment you expect a show down to in the open street complete with tumbleweeds and that classic western music. It’s not a place where you expect extreme civility but one is always surprised. I am helping the Ministry of Labour and Public Service to implement an HR system. That might seem like a mundan...

There’s a fund in Southern Sudan which is something everyone calls a ‘pooled fund’ and that means that instead of donors giving their money to whatever they want they put it into a big fund that is run by the government and the UN. The problem with this particular pooled fund is that it’s been badly managed and manipulated by the powers that be and so has actually delivered practically nothing. This is nothing surprising here where funds frequently don’t actually disburse money that has been committed to the people that need it. It sits in bank accounts in New York, DC, and Nairobi and accumulates interest (to the tune of $1 million dollars in the case of this fund) and no one is really the wiser nor upset by the matter. Which makes me ask: why? And that niggling question led me to think about the economics of aid about which already volumes have been written so I won’t bore you with too many details however, if we think of aid as an economic transaction where someone is giving mone...

I was reminded this week that I used to be an interesting person, to whom interesting things happened, and I used to write about those things in this very blog. This week, however, when I received an email from a former avid blog reader reminding me that I have an interesting and 'adventurous' life I decided to look back over the past week and figure out why I don't blog as regularly anymore. One look at my schedule told me why: Monday: 10am: Meeting with ODI 11am: UN Country Team Meeting 12.30pm: Meeting with NGO 2pm: Meeting with Budget Sector Working Group Co-Chairs 3.30pm: Meeting with DevInt 6.30pm: Handover meeting between Steering Committee Chair and Deputy Tuesday: 11am: Security Management Team Meeting 1:00pm: Meeting with UN Agency 3:00pm: Meeting with Swedish Donor 5:00pm: Meeting with an NGO 7:00pm: Dinner with National NGO Bored yet? Wait for it...the week only gets better! Wednesday 1:00pm: Meeting with Pooled Fund Managing Agent 2:00pm: ...

I would like to apologise to all those who might be reading this and are aware of this purely fictional incident and may not find it as amusing as I do. Any resemblance to characters living or dead is coincidental...although all of them lived, for the record. Once upon a time I got a phone call from an NGO who had people involved in a security incident in which there were reports of heavy gunfire. Their field compound was smack in the middle of the action and their HQ located in a town - let's call it Luba - called me to see what can be done. Now, everyone knows that you shouldn't call me unless you want me to do something and, after more unsuccessful attempts on their part to get someone mobilised in the field area to go check on their compound, they gave me permission to do this. Well, low and behold, we (note: change of pronouns not related to disseminating blame) managed to get the 'army' mobilised to go and check the area. Unfortunately, they found themselves ...

My brain is too small to chock it full of the miscellany that flies at me everyday. Hence, I would like to make a list of all the things that I refuse to remember: 1. When the rainy season begins and ends in Sudan. 2. People's names if I've met them only once or twice. Or, anyone who has a contract shorter than six months. Or anyone I find immemorable. 3. Anyone's birthday. 4. Any phone number. 5. Most meeting times. 6. Sphere standards humanitarian indicators. 7. Anything told to me before I've had enough coffee in the morning. 8. In what state Kwajok is located. 9. Where Nigeria is located. 10. On which border Pakistan neighbours Afghanistan. 11. The type of printer cartridge my printer takes. 12. How much wine costs at Logali. 13. The fiscal year of the U.S., Canada, UK, or any other donor country. 14. How to make excel spreadsheets do just about anything nifty. 15. Flight times. One can simply not save the world and remember all the details. So, i...

Over the course of my life I have seen any number of looks of terror. The incidences usually begin the same way, as they did this morning. People just standing around some place - including bystanders such as myself - an unmarked vehicle with no license plates pulls up and men jump out. They are usually armed...no, I take that back...they are always armed. Menacing, threatening men. They always act with an air of importance, impertinence and swagger. Sometimes they have uniforms, sometimes they don't, depending on the state sanction of their activities. They wave the guns and point them at nearly everyone in the vicinity. They begin beating someone - also usually either a bystander or someone unimportant until they get the information they want. Others who try to intervene also get beaten or a gun pointed at them. There is always yelling. Eventually, the people they want are dragged out to the car. Sometimes they are fighting; sometimes they go quietly. But they all, and alw...

“There’s a truth that’s deeper than experience. It’s beyond what we can see, or even what we feel. It’s an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We’re helpless, usually, in the fact of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn’t always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart.” - Gregory David Roberts