During my first 6 or so months out here I used to harass you lot to send me more e-mails with news from home. It took me a while but eventually I learnt to appreciate and enjoy the messages I did receive rather than complain about the ones I didn't. One common feature to most people's apologies for not writing more often was that they didn't feel they had anything exciting to tell me compared to some of the ridiculous things I was going through. Well, now that I have something approaching a normal life with an office job and supermarkets I'm beginning to feel the same way!

There is I suppose one thing that is new to me, and it's a little surprising that this should happen here of all places. For the first time in my professional life I actually look forward to going to work every morning, and I don't feel sad when the weekend comes to an end as I know the next day I'll be going into the office. This struck me during the week, and immediately led me to ask 2 questions:

1) Why am I enjoying work so much at the moment? and

2) Why, despite the many interesting and challenging jobs I've had before, haven't I felt this way before then?!

Taking them in order then, I'm almost certain that my current positive approach is in no small part due to where I was working these previous 16 months. I still maintain that my work with BRIF was very challenging from an intellectual point of view, and that I learnt a great deal that I'm sure will be of benefit for years to come, but it wasn't all beer and skittles you know. For starters, the working conditions weren't exactly top notch, with constant power cuts and regular inquisitive visits from grotty children, old men, not to mention frogs, rats and dogs. One afternoon I even had a meeting interrupted by a goat. Oh and in the summer the temperatures in the office exceeded 35 degrees while in winter I had to wear 2 coats and drink lots of sweet tea to keep warm. The move to VSO's clean offices with air conditioning and Internet was just a total no-brainer really.

There is also another key aspect which concerns the people I've been working with. The principal challenge of working at BRIF was that people just didn't get what I was talking about most of the time. The language barrier was obviously a big part of this, but even when I had a translator or was working with someone who spoke good English there were almost always problems in getting certain concepts across. To be brutally frank the problem was one of intellectual level, and meant that things just took so much longer to sink in and be understood. The plus side to this experience was that it forced me to become a better communicator by breaking everything down to its barest bones and using the simplest language possible to present it. I would often draft a document and then rewrite it 2-3 times as I eliminated and replaced any word or expression that could be confusing or just unknown to my colleagues. Unlike some of the consulting documents I used to see in previous jobs, the objective was not to impress but to explain and educate. The work I'm now doing at VSO is either with the Country Director and her programme managers, or with the senior managers of other mostly Dhaka-based partner NGO's. Of course not all of these people are geniuses but they're certainly easier to work with and generally have reasonable English.

One final point about what makes my current job enjoyable is that I'm genuinely busy which I don't think I've been since I arrived here. There's a fine line between being active and stimulated and being stressed and overworked, and so far I'm on the right side of that divide. I had a review meeting with my line manager this week (the Country Director) and I told her that I saw a very real risk of too many internal things being passed onto me hence jeopardising my ability to deliver on the short interventions that I'm supposed to be concentrating on with partners. Luckily she agreed with this, and while we haven't reached that point yet I'm very conscious of the "scope creep" that can happen when you join an organisation in some sort of support or advisory capacity. The work is also extremely varied so I get to flit from one subject to another before I get bored of any one thing.

Why then have I never really felt this joy for work before? I'm not sure I have an easy answer to that question. I suppose that as the years go by you develop a clearer picture of what it is you enjoy doing, the conditions you like doing it in and the sort people of people you want to work with. In addition, as you gain more experience and status in your chosen profession then you move slowly from a situation of being a follower or learner to one of leading or at least contributing as an equal. This I suspect means that you can have a greater say in what you do, shaping your own role, rather than relying on some generous benefactor to give you interesting jobs to do. Psychologically this could perhaps imply that the very question of truly enjoying a job doesn't necessarily get posed until later on in a person's career, once they feel they've learnt enough to fly solo and take greater personal responsibility. I for one now feel very comfortable shaping the role I play in an organisation to suit my own preferences and ambitions. As for where I see all of this leading me after VSO, I'll save that for another week when nothing exotic happened... again.