It has been some years since I received a message like this morning's email from the U.K.:
| "Dear Peter, I work for WYG International, a leading British consultancy firm working on development projects worldwide. We are currently preparing an expression of interest for the Asian Development Bank’s “Strengthened Public Financial Management Project” in Kiribati – please find attached the Terms of Reference for your information. I have found your profile online and wondered if you might be interested in one of the positions. We are currently looking for a Treasury Specialist/Team Leader and an Attaché Specialist to be included in our team for this project – you can find the descriptions of the positions in the TORs attached. I only have a very brief version of your CV, so I wanted to check whether you had experience of using Attaché accounting systems and whether you think you’d be qualified for either of these positions? The project is due to start in early April 2012, and will run for 21 months – the Treasury Specialist will have 10 months of inputs and the Attaché Specialist 3 months of inputs during that period. The ADB is following the Consultants Qualification Selection method, meaning that we will not need to submit a full proposal, and we should know relatively quickly whether we have been successful in our application (the deadline for submission of EOIs is 11th February). WYG International has a specialist public finance management practice area, and we are currently expanding our work in South East Asia and the Pacific. We have a representative office in Cambodia and have significant experience of working with the ADB, including a current project in the Solomon Islands, large PFM reform projects in Papua New Guinea, Cambodia and Laos and previous experience in small island states, including the Maldives and Fiji. We are therefore confident that we have a strong chance of being selected for this assignment. If you would be interested in being included as part of our team, please send me your latest CV (stressing your Pacific islands and Attaché experience as much as possible) as soon as you can – as I mentioned, the deadline for submission is the 11th February and we need to ensure that we have the right team in place before submission. Please feel free to contact me with any questions you might have in the meantime. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Kind regards Sara Breen Senior Consultant WYG INTERNATIONAL LTD 100 St John Street, London, EC1M 4EH" |
Of course, there was a time (before email and the internet) when a single phone call was enough for me to give up a secure job, pack up my things, and follow the siren call of yet another challenge in yet another country. Alas, not anymore. I am now stuck in this big place called Domesti-City which won't let me step onto that "canoe that flies" and wing it to Kiribati (pronounced Kiribas), and so I sent this email in reply:
| "Hello Sara, thank you so much for your email. What you have to offer is indeed very tempting but, alas, I am no longer 'in the game'. My knowledge of ATTACHÉ has also become somewhat dated even though I was one of the first to use it after Michael Rich, the owner, had bought out the rights from MICROTIGER in the USA and 'Australianised' it for the local market way back in the 1980s. I am now a self-funded retiree and live on the beautiful South Coast of New South Wales in Australia. Under Australian tax law, being a self-funded retiree makes me entirely tax-free but also does not allow me to re-enter the paid workforce which is another reason why I can't answer this tempting siren call ☺ However, I know from my past assignments that consulting firms sometimes find that a member of a team suddenly becomes unavailable. Should you find yourself in such a situation, I would be happy to bridge the gap for a much shorter period of time and as an unpaid volunteer." |
P.S. The name Kiribati is the local pronunciation of "Gilberts", derived from the main island chain, the Gilbert Islands. Gilbertese or Kiribati (sometimes Kiribatese, a mixture of both) is far from extinct, and just about all Gilbertese use it daily. Only 30% of Kiribati speakers are fully bilingual with English, meaning that the language is in no current danger of being swallowed by English. It is written in the Latin alphabet, and has been since the 1840s, when Hiram Bingham Jr, a missionary, first translated the Bible into Kiribati. Previously, the language was unwritten. Bingham had only a typewriter with a broken "S" so it does not occur in the language and "ti" is used for that sound instead. One difficulty in translating the Bible was references to words such as "mountain", a geographical phenomenon unknown to the people of the islands of Kiribati at the time (only heard in the myths from Samoa). Bingham decided to use "hilly", which would be more easily understood. Such adjustments are common to all languages as "modern" things require creation of new words. The Gilbertese word for airplane is te wanikiba, "the canoe that flies". Almost as good as the Pidgin Inglis word for helicopter: Mixmaster blong Jesus Christ. I just thought you might like to know ☺ .
