Verbal warning

Fuel wood market, Eritrea, 1999

"Tom we are sed to see you go. We wish you saccees." This was the sweet note left for me by our wonderful household staff today.

Unfortunately I'd left work under a bit of a cloud. Four of us had gone to The Elbow Room restaurant for lunch but none of us booked the car or asked for security clearance to go there. Plus we got in the wrong car - even if we'd had permission to go we weren't meant to use that driver because he doesn't speak good English (and thus our security could be compromised if there were a crisis). My colleagues reasonably thought I'd done all the preparations but I'd neglected them. We all received verbal warnings, which will (and this is typical Oxfam logic) be written into our personnel files. I'm terribly sorry to do this to my friends. (It wasn't my first warning - I and two different colleagues got one a couple of months ago for breaking curfew.)

The work day had started quite nicely because there were a few nice words of farewell in the morning, including a charming speech in developing English by our cook. (Everybody remarked, however, how spiteful the Country Director's remarks were.) The rest of the day was up and down.

Anyway it felt good to walk out of Oxfam's gates. Everything was lovely again until damned Quokka beat me at Scrabble again.

Scrabble: Quokka 5 - Tom 1

Chess: Quokka 0 - Tom 1