Escape The City

If you are or know someone who's considering a career change, you might find www.escapethecity.org helpful - largely based in the UK, this site seeks to provide a forum for people who are thinking of escaping the city (ie the City in London, but it can also apply to other cities!) for "greener" pastures.

I'm featured as a "Hero" on the site (ha!), for having escaped law for the charity sector. Some of the tips and experiences which I shared have been reproduced below - hope you'll find something helpful!

2) What did you do before this?

Well, I did quite a few things!

My first job was with a London magic circle law firm where I trained and qualified as a corporate lawyer. I was with this firm for 4 years. I know plenty of people who enjoy their lawyer jobs but for me I thought life was too short to be stuck in something I wasn't passionate about!

After I left in late 2007 I tried different things in international development and human rights, which included working with an NGO in relief and development (Tearfund) and interning with a couple of human rights think tanks. This summer my husband and I also volunteered on a residential project with street children in the Philippines, which was absolutely awesome.

3) What was your moment of truth?

It's hard to pinpoint to a particular moment which changed everything, though I have to say that having a teacher-turned-explorer boyfriend then (now husband) who was cyclinghalf way across the world just because that's what he wanted to do certainly didn't help!

I was also reading Richard Nelson Bolles' other less well known book How to Find Your Mission in Life and found it rather inspiring.

And I loved what John Eldredge said in Wild At Heart: Don't ask what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

4) How did you plan for it?

On one hand I wanted to have had something lined up before I left my corporate law job (I was, after all, a lawyer, so was naturally rather risk averse) but my hours were so long and there just wasn't any physical or head space to think about anything, so I had nothing planned as such when I finished my notice. I was really in need of a break though so was glad to have 4 months off.

During the break I rested and tried to regain perspective, and after that I spent a whole month talking to everyone and anyone who was willing to talk to me about the international development and charity world (I asked my friends for any contacts they were happy to give me) and built up my network that way. I found my first job through doing that!

Taking a few months off might not be a viable option for some, but I was fortunate enough having saved up a bit of money and I didn't have any mortgage or babies to worry about.

5) What have been the best and worst things about making this happen?

The best thing is that even though nowadays I'm still busy and sometimes working longish hours (nothing compared to the City though!), I'm doing something I'm passionate about and I no longer feel chained to my job because of some unknown fear/feeling of loss if I walked away from it.

Can't really think of the worst thing really.... obviously one has to go through lots of soul searching about one's own identity when one jumps ship, and I felt scared and vulnerable and insecure at various points, but it's all part of a very good growing up experience (with the benefit of hindsight I can of course say this now...). I talk about some of my struggles on my blog.

6) What is the best advice you have received?

Try not to give too much weight to people who tell you that it cannot be done - because there will always be people who are pessimistic / risk averse / or for whatever reason think you're mad!

The flip side of this is to talk to everyone and anyone who's happy to chat with you - you'd never know what you might learn or who they might point you to.

Got a burning question? Go ahead and ask me something.

7) What resources or information have you found really helpful?

What Colour is Your Parachute by Richard Nelson Bolles.

I love Don Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years - a hugely inspirational read, Don talks about living life as a story, which is an excellent way to go about living your life, so you'll be intentional about leading an interesting, meaningful life (which often requires some risk taking!).

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like So What Do You Do?, The Unedited Version and How Will You Measure Your Life.

The Lover

Recently I read a thought provoking, captivating book The Lover by A B Yehoshua.

Originally written in Hebrew, it tells of a story set in the 70s in Israel and evolves around a Jewish man, his wife, their teenage daughter, a young Jewish man who had returned from France and a teenage Arab boy.

Giving different voices to the different characters in first person, it is a beautifully book with depth, and much nuanced insight on both life in general (love, marriage, loss, identity) and people's lives in Israel and Palestine.

I'm not sure if it's intended to be on a commentary on the politics in the region, but certainly I didn't detect any biases but on the contrary felt that the author was portraying quite a balanced picture (though I'm sure someone is bound to disagree with me on this).

The Israel and Palestinian situation is no doubt an extremely complex and sensitive one, and I don't think the author was trying to side with anyone. It's a really enjoyable book and I would highly recommend it.

Jumping Ship

An ex colleague recently got in touch to ask me about jumping ship. The pleasant exchange of Facebook messages and other such correspondences made me realise I should probably at some point share here some of the tips and mistakes which I learned from my own experiences in moving to another field.

It would be great to explore questions such as these:

1. How does one decide to really go for it?

2. Once the decision has been made, what next?

3. Would further study help?

4. How does one find a job in a different sector?

5. How not to look back!

Watch this space!

Restarting my blog

I'm trying to restart writing on this blog, though a silly voice inside tells me I'll probably fail to keep up with my expectations.

One challenge which I had felt (= an excuse for disappearing for months) was that I needed to write something super meaningful for each entry, as otherwise I would just be blabbering. But that means I almost never write these days, as we've been mega busy with setting up Viva in Hong Kong.

But that's a poor excuse, and one that will certainly stop most people from doing anything like this - as most people suffer from over busyness!

So I'll attempt to write again.

Ugly Betty

I'll admit it.

I've been enjoying Ugly Betty Fourth and Final Season.

While I, like many others no doubt, hesitate in accepting her "prettier" self as the final season progressed (she just looked so different without her braces), I (and my husband who normally only likes serious stuff) really like this season so far - it's funny, deep, innocent, and has a clear moral sense - like honesty, fidelity, loyalty, friendship are all good stuff, even if they cost at times!

Saved from Slavery... by a Sandwich Cart

This is a recent blog post taken from the blog of Viva, the amazing children at risk charity Rob and I are working for in Hong Kong.

Veata’s family live in a village outside Phnom Penh. She’s 15 now, but she’s been working since she was 11. Veata, her mother, and her siblings work as trash collectors to earn money – three siblings work collecting trash while the other three attend school, and then they swap. Veata’s father is a construction worker.

A few years ago, Veata’s mother enrolled her in the Phnom Penh network’s ‘Get Ready’ programme, a project that keeps girls out of brothels by helping them develop skills that will help them get work. That way girls are educated but are still available to help their families earn money –a balance that is really necessary in poor Cambodian villages and families. (For those of you who don’t know, the network in Phnom Penh, called Chab Dai, is a group of projects that Viva helped bring together and continues to support, to prevent girls from being sold into sexual slavery in Cambodia.)

The staff of the network could see that Veata was a good student and a quick learner. She graduated from the Get Ready programme and was encouraged to continue with ‘Bright Girls’, through which she was given an allowance so she could take advanced English lessons. Veata spent two years in the ‘Bright Girls’ programme and became a skilled seamstress and tailor – even earning money above her allowance from the sales of her clothes!

Then the effects of the global financial crisis swept through Cambodia, and Veata’s father found his construction assignments growing fewer and farther between. Even with Veata’s sales and allowance and the hard work of her family collecting trash, there wasn’t enough money to cover the cost of living. They became prime targets for traffickers, who prey on families in financial straits.

A man approached Veata’s parents with an arrangement for her that could relieve them of the poverty that threatened: he said Veata would make a good candidate for a ‘second wife’. A wealthy Asian businessman was going to be spending time in Phnom Penh on business regularly through the year, and was looking for a young live-in mistress. The man offered Veata’s parents £125 up front, with monthly payments of £75 to follow. Although they hated the idea of parting with their daughter in this way, they were becoming desperate - that money could prevent the family from going hungry and possibly losing their home.

Veata went to one of the teachers from the Bright Girl programme for help. Because of the love and care the staff at Bright Girl had shown her, she knew she could trust them with this huge problem. She was immediately taken in to the weekly boarding programme supported by the network to be kept safe from the trafficker, while the network's social workers talked about alternatives with Veata’s family. They were able to arrange a £50 microbusiness loan for the family to set up a sandwich cart. This wasn’t as much as the trafficker was offering, but Veata’s parents were willing to take any option that would keep their daughter from becoming a ‘second wife’.

Veata stayed in the care of the network boarding programme until her family’s sandwich business was set up and she could safely return home. Within four months, she’d even paid off the microloan using her monthly allowance and the income from her sewing business!

Working together, we’ve seen Veata grow from a trash collector in tattered clothes, exposed to the dangers of child sexual exploitation, to a talented seamstress who can help support her family and earns more than most factory workers in Cambodia. And even better than that, her younger sisters are now safe from the danger posed by traffickers, as the microloan from the network has lifted their family out of poverty and created a business for all of them to benefit from.

If you enjoyed this post, do check out Viva's blog for other encouraging stories, and you may also enjoy Cambodia II: Rehab House and For the Love of Cupcakes.

So what do you do?

This article was pitched as part of a series for a paper in Singapore but it was dropped (sob!) as the paper didn't want to encourage a trend for corporate exodus (!!!)

Thought I should post it here nonetheless for those who haven't got bored of reading about escaping the corporate life :)

So what do you do?

I dreaded that question 3 years ago but it was impossible to avoid being asked precisely that at dinner parties.

In November 2007 I had taken the leap and left my glamorous job as a corporate lawyer in London to instead pursue an alternative career in the charity sector. To my surprise the transition left me shaken inside and I found many things difficult, including how to introduce myself to new acquaintances. I felt embarrassed admitting that I was in transit to an unknown new world, despite the frequent response of admiration (which sometimes was accompanied by bewilderment). The temptation was always there to drop in a line or two about how I used to work for a top law firm.

Equally challenging was the moment when everyone exchanged sleek-looking business cards and I would stand there feeling self-conscious. When my turn came I would apologise that I didn’t have a card, and joke that I should have prepared a homemade one. Perhaps my card would read: “Searching for a Job in International Development Relating to Children, Ideally if Previous Legal Skills can be Used”? And maybe “Ex Corporate Lawyer” should feature at the front, underlined, in case people didn’t think much of the convoluted title?

Having grown up in Singapore in my teens and succeeding all my life in the traditional sense (straight A student, Dean’s list in law school, scholarship to Oxford, high flying first job), I found it extremely hard to actually believe that I as a person was not defined by the parameters of conventional success. For months after I exited the revolving glass doors of Allen & Overy, I struggled not to view myself through the coloured lens by which I used to pigeonhole others: their jobs, their “proven” abilities; their financial status. I was also shocked to discover that I had those biases ingrained in me.

And there were other difficult aspects of the transition to deal with. All of a sudden, I found myself having to check my bank account balance and actually do some budgeting - such was the degree of my previous recklessness with my finances that I never knew how much money I had at any one point! Neither was I aware of the cost of, say, a red pepper in the supermarket, or a starter at a restaurant, as I threw things into my shopping trolley, or ordered from the menu without paying much attention to the numbers. I thought that was normal.

Socially, it wasn’t easy either. When going out with friends who also had lucrative jobs, it became necessary to have awkward conversations about how to split the bill. I had to muster all I had to fight the feeling of “losing face”. Also, I couldn’t attend the dinner at my best friend’s birthday bash at a posh restaurant but could only manage to join the party for a drink afterwards. For a natural people pleaser (with a delicate self esteem), all this proved to be very difficult, but these situations forced me to examine some of the deep seated attitudes in me and the motives behind what I used to do.

Looking back, it was a tough period of time, and writing about it has even depressed me slightly, but if you asked me if I regretted my decision at all, the answer would be an irrevocable no. There is no way I would exchange now (and the excitement of what is to come) for anything from my previous life.

Can Bling Bling be Fairtrade too?

Remember the film Blood Diamond? I never managed to see it properly; the only time I saw it was on a speeding coach along the coast of Negros in the Philippines this past summer. We were on our way to a beautiful island where one of the CFA staff was from, and were most thrilled when the bus driver decided to show it on the small TV screen at the front of the bus. Feeling hungry (we had got up at 5am), cold (the AC was intent on freezing us) and slightly nauseous from the bumpy ride, I strained to follow the exciting plot.

The film, if you don’t already know, is set in the late 90s in Sierra Leone and tells a tale of a family being broken up by civil war, and about how the father sought to find his lost son who has now been captured by the rebel groups to become a child soldier. The film also showed something that has been happening for decades now – the conflict diamonds which feed many bloodthirsty civil wars in Africa. In such instances, rough diamonds are mined for by civilians who have been captured by rebel groups and sold onto the next stage of the diamond chain for large sums of money, which in turn finance the continuing warfare.

Obviously no one would want to knowingly buy or own any diamond that might potentially have been tainted by “blood”.

The Kimberly Process is an initiative that has been set up since 2000 to ensure that diamonds in the world market are properly accounted for, by imposing extensive requirements on members to shipments of rough diamonds as “conflict free” and thus prevent conflict/blood diamonds from entering into the legitimate trade.

However, the Kimberly Process does not certify individual jewellers. According to their website, as a consumer, you can play your part by requiring the jeweller where you’re purchasing from to answer the following questions:

How can I be sure your jewellery does not contain conflict diamonds?

Do your diamond suppliers participate in the industry’s ‘System of Warranties’*?

Can I see a copy of your company’s policy on conflict diamonds?

*The diamond industry has set up a 'System of Warranties' that complements, but is distinct from, the Kimberley Process. You can find out more here.

I came across a further question about 2 years ago whilst I was working at Tearfund. During one of the lunch time seminars, we were introduced to the ethical jeweller CRED. CRED, I found out, is a jeweller based in the UK which only sells conflict free diamond, but it even goes further to ensure that the diamonds and metal (gold, silver, stainless steel) which they sell are sourced in an environmentally friendly manner and that the workers involved in the exploration and refining are paid a fair wage!

How awesome is that!

Thankfully, when Rob thought of proposing 1.5 years ago, he had kept the mass email which I sent out about my new discovery of CRED, and he went to CRED and got me a beautiful, conflict free and fair trade diamond ring! (Apparently they had to source the diamond from Canada – as that’s the only place where the stones are definitely free of conflict as well as exploitation!)

CRED makes very beautiful and classic jewelry and has a wide range of engagement and wedding rings too.

For those of you who are married, I’m not suggesting you to go and change your engagement and wedding rings, though I would love to encourage those who have not got rings to please consider CRED (or any other such jeweller, just do a Google search!), and do your extra bit in making our world a more ethical place.