Its been almost two months weeks since I moved to Noumea. It’s time for a bit of retrospection: what’s gone well, what hasn’t, what have been the obstacles, lessons learned, and the rewards gained.
What has gone really well
- The Organisation of Opportunity
The Pacific Community (SPC) is such an interesting place to work! Its like many New Zealand government departments rolled into one. There is so much variety in the work opportunities in this place that, if you get bored at work that’s on you. Across the organisation, they have their own Statistics division doing work akin to Stats NZ. They’ve got a Public Health division, doing similar work to the Ministry of Health. My area is up there with Ministry for Primary Industries. And each one these areas, engaging with our member countries, is doing work similar to Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
All of these areas, and functions all in one organisation makes for a very interesting work environment indeed! My work reminds me of being back at DHBNZ when I worked with 21 DHBs aligning their IT and workforce strategies. Those same skills of influencing without having any direct authority are back at play. The name of the game is convincing people and organisations to work together because collective activity is in their own best interests is back in fashion, as it was in DHBNZ. It feels very entrepreneurial (as much as a pseudo-civil servant like me can be…)
- Re-developing neuro-elasticity at 52
I first learned French in 1979 when we lived in Canada, and I was 7. Other than the basics of counting to 20, the alphabet, and (of all things) Jingle Bells, there’s not much which I remember from that far back. And languages are quite a bit easier to learn when you’re young.But now, at the tender age of 52, I’m actually pleasantly enjoying learning French. It’s not just that it helps when you’re ordering a flat white and a croissant (or “un cafe de lait et croissant” as I like to say), but there’s a feel that the more you learn about stuff which requires deliberate learning, the more your mind feels like it can learn a lot more.
And I’ve learned the word for this is neuro-elasticity. It feels good to genuinely be learning something brand new again. I still forget stuff – I forgot Jennifer Anniston’s name when I was trying to thing of Brad Pitt’s first wife – but I’m learning French, and mentally it feels good to be learning again 🙂
The pictures below are my actual brain scans by the way – courtesy of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Study 🙂
From the “that’s a bit bizzare” Files
- Everything closes on a Sunday
Noumea shuts down on a Sunday. Supermarkets and petrol stations are open, but everything else (everything else) closes down for the weekend.
Here’s a bar which looks pretty good: https://www.brasserie-village.com/ except:
- Banks close over lunch
Closed for an hour, Monday to Thursday from 12:00 – 1:00, and an hour and half on Fridays, from 12:00 – 1:30
But they do open at 7:35am
What’s not gone so well
- Its hot! Really Hot!
This post opens with a photo of my watch displaying the temperature inside my flat at 1:40pm. Its 33.5 degrees celcius!This place is hot – really hot. I’m pretty sure, since I’ve been here, the temperature has not dropped below 26 degrees. When I first got here, I had to have a sleepy byes byes when I got home from work. Even after becoming acclimatised to the weird things happen.Last week, both tires of my bike burst on the way home from work as I cycled in the heat. It turns out that heat expands bicycle tires.
Things I didn’t tell you about in the first apartment
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- Mosquitos at night and bloodied pillows from bites during night
My first apartment at Casa Del Sole was four stories up, and the sliding doors didn’t have any mosquito netting. It was so frigging hot in the place, and I was unacclimatised to the heat, that I slept with the sliding doors open. And then in the morning, my pillow was covered in little blood spots, as the mosquitos feasted at night. My choices were: sweat like a pig in the stifling heat of the apartment, or bleed out to the mosquitos at night.
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- Gendarmeries emptying clips at night
Fun loving, gun-totting, riot-gear wearing Gendarmeries cut quite the scene in the mornings and evenings when leaving from, and returning from duty.
They’re completely dressed in black, and they’re all look like they’re physically fit and hard as nuts. But when returning at night, despite being four stories up, I could smell them as they got out and unloaded their double-cabbed hilux utes. And then there was the routine, chink-chink, as they emptied their automatic weapons and made sure they didn’t have any bullets chambered.
It’s not something I’ve seen a lot of in New Zealand. Here they are having a big ol’ pool Fete de Saucisse:
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- Cockroaches
One of things I never mentioned is that first apartment had a cockroach problem. They used to come up from the kitchen sink. Once I figured this out, every night I’d put a couple of cups over the sink holes. That slowed them down, but they started turning up from all the places cockroaches find to live. Having spent time recently in Fiji, I just figured this was the tropics.
My new place doesn’t have a cockroach problem, so I’m starting to think it was a Casa Del Sole thing…
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- Latent building heat
The whole building was HOT!! Latent heat hot. The floor was hot, the walls were hot. And the whole place was hot.
Just what you need when you’re both not acclimatized to the heat, and suffering from fever from and infected leg.
Little lessons learned
- Get Sick, Get Yourself to Accident and Emergency 22km away. Now do it all in a Foreign Country, in French…
Back in 2021, I got a haemorrhaging on my leg which got classed as Cellulitis, but the doctor’s weren’t 100% sure. It was 14 days after my last covid-19 vaccination shot, so (for me) the jury on cellulitis was also out.
Anyway, here was me then.
The onset of the of 2021 was preceded by fevers and shivers, as my body was battling some type of god awful evil infection, and I spent the weekend in bed before the above haemorrhaging broke out.
And after I was released from hospital, the doctor warned me that now I have a susceptibility to infection in that leg.
Well the same fever and involuntary shivers started to happen a fortnight into my Noumea stay, despite the temperature being a solid 27 degrees plus here. Then this painfull red patch started at the top my groin, and went down my leg and well past my knee and my leg was fighting against some type of infection.
Great. Now sort out, in French, how to get yourself to Accident and Emergency, some 22 kms away, and negotiate the New Caledonian hospital system. And then get your way back, and medicated from a pharmacy.
All good learning experiences, and exactly what I felt like whilst feeling as sick as a dog.
All good stuff! As the heading of this post suggests, A Smooth Sea Never Made a Skilled Sailor 😉