Remember when families used to write annual newsletters, comb through their Rolodexes to decide whom to send it to, print it out, and actually snail mail it to their friends and relatives? I’m resurrecting this annual epistolary. Turns out it was actually a good way to keep in touch; something that is lost these days. Someone could get married, get pregnant, have a baby, move, or even move on. You wouldn’t know unless you check Facebook that day. However, printer toner is way too expensive for me to print this out and send it to everyone I know (plus I don’t know anyone’s address). I’m going to post it on my blog, which no one reads, so everyone can see it. I’ll cross-post it to Facebook also, so everyone can miss it there.
2019 neatly fits into four quarters for me, so if you can’t stomach the minutiae of my life in one sitting, I’ll break it down into four more manageable portions:
January – March
All good annual newsletters should start with informing the readers about where the subject woke up on New Year’s Day. In 2018, I woke up on a half-deflated air mattress at a friend’s home an hour or so from London. This year, I woke up in Indianapolis, IN. As with 2018, this was actually intentional. I was in Indianapolis of my own free will and volition. My friend from the Peace Corps, Thomas, was getting married in Indianapolis on New Year’s Eve. I was invited to attend the celebration. It was great fun, I saw a bunch of my best Peace Corps friends, and it was a great way to end 2018 and roll in 2019.
Work had me slated to conduct a digital product implementation in Indonesia from early January to the end of March. A few days after the wedding, (back in NY) I zippered up my suitcases and slogged down to JFK for the interminable journey to Southeast Asia. Turns out, it was well worth the slog. Indonesia is a wonderful country. It’s beautiful and diverse and filled with very friendly people. I spent most of my time in Medan, in North Sumatra, but I was also able to visit the surrounding environs, as well as Penang-Malaysia, Jakarta, Bandung, Jogja, Surabaya, Sulawesi, and Bali.
During March, I slipped away from Indonesia for a few days to attend my friend Sambhav’s wedding in Goa, India. Sambhav and I were members of the same study group during the first semester of business school. We completed nearly every assignment during those first six months together with the four other members of our group. Sambhav and his family were extremely generous and provided for my accommodations for the duration of the three-day extravaganza, along with a kurta that got great reviews from the other party-goers.
April – June
After three months in Indonesia, I was sent to Central America for three months, working on a similar digital project. I spent approximately two of those months in the familiar city of Matagalpa, Nicaragua, and the remainder of the time in Mexico and Honduras.
I love Mexico. It is my favorite country. It is beautiful and diverse and has the most delicious gastronomy in the world. I got to go back to Mexico City for the first time in 13 years and I had a great time. There is so much to see and do. I fear I merely scratched the surface of CDMX, let alone the vastness of Mexico. Coincidentally, while I was in Mexico, my friend Eric came down with his family to celebrate his 30th birthday. It was wonderful to see all of them and catch up on life post-business school. They had never been to Mexico City before and they all thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
Living and working in Matagalpa for most of April through June was challenging. The outright violence of April 2018 is no longer present in the streets of Nicaragua, but the feeling is still there. Many people have emigrated. Many more would like to leave. The economy is depressed. Most nights, the streets are fairly empty, which felt unsafe to me. Most of my days were spent at the office working. On weekends I did travel, and as it always does, it left me with the desire for more time to see and experience more of Nicaragua. Despite the problems the country is facing, I still would love to go back.
May and June came with a side dish of uncertainty. The Future Leaders Programme, of which I was a part of at Olam International, is a one-year program. My time in the program was slated to end in mid-July, at which time I would graduate into a full-time role with the company. By the end of April, we began the discussions about what sort of role we wanted and we would be suited for, and our boss was tasked with scouring the company to look for roles for all 13 of us. I had a strong preference to live in Latin America as a procurement manager or otherwise involved in the management of our farm-to-food supply chains.
At first, it looked like there were suitable positions for me in the Latin America coffee business and I would be headed for one of those roles come mid-July. Then, two days before my project was slated to end and I would be going on vacation before transitioning into the new role, I was informed that there were no available positions and my boss would have to look outside of the Latin America coffee business. The next few weeks were filled with doubt and disappointment. My boss first wanted me to pursue a role as a project manager for an enterprise-wide operational excellence initiative. It would be based in Singapore. Everyone at the company seemed to want me for the role, but I resisted. The location nor the role particularly interested me. After that, my boss told me she was looking into cocoa procurement in Côte d’Ivoire. While the role would have been great, I was less than enthused about the location.
July – September
By the end of my vacation, my permanent role was still not set. I had to pack my bags with everything I needed for life and work and board a flight with a one-way ticket to Singapore. I did not know where I would be going after the week of work in Singapore. It could have been Côte d’Ivoire. I could have stayed in Singapore for at least a year. It could have reasonably been anywhere in the world.
Turns out, I was headed for South America, which was high on my original list. The Internal Audit function was looking for an operationally-minded Olamite to round out their small but agile team. As soon as I got to the office on Monday morning, I sat down with the Head of Internal Audit, and he approved me for the new role with his team. I will be covering Latin America, out of Bogotá, Colombia, with occasional travel to the rest of the world. Olam’s Internal Audit conducts short, high-impact audits in teams of two, so it offers broad exposure to the company and all aspects of operations and finance.
Finding out that I would be joining Internal Audit was a shock. I had no expectation of joining a corporate function. I expected to work in a profit center. I had previously worked in corporate audit and risk when I was a banking consultant with Ernst & Young, but I thought that work was nearly six years behind me (I finished my last project in December 2013). Five months after those initial moments of shock and frankly, disappointment, I still don’t know how I feel about the assignment. Sometimes it’s very interesting, getting to go to new places and learn about new products, but sometimes it’s a slog. I’ve come to dread the day when we review the financial books. It usually involves an overly-air-conditioned conference room with no windows, from 9 AM to dinnertime.
Internal Audit wound up keeping me in Singapore an additional three weeks beyond the one week that was scheduled to conclude the Future Leaders Programme. They wanted to train me in the ways of an Olam Internal Auditor. When I wasn’t at the office, I ate my way around Singapore, visited some of the popular and less popular sites, got locked on my hotel room balcony (true story), and even went to Phuket, Thailand for a short weekend trip. Midway through my sojourn in Singapore, the Internal Audit Powers That Be informed me that they actually didn’t want me in South America, but instead in the US, preferably Fresno, CA. Fresno is the location of our US headquarters.
I was not happy about this development. I had signed a Placement Letter for South America. I was looking forward to experiencing new places, getting a home, and potentially learning Portuguese. Suddenly, my prospects became drought, poor air quality, and the meth capital of America. I expressed my dislike for the new plan, and they asked me to just go to NY, where I could temporarily stay with my parents, and start working with my new team. For the fourth time this year, I boarded when my zone number was called, mindfully noted that the nearest emergency exit may be behind me, and took off for the 24-hour journey across the Pacific.
Internal Audit has three vice presidents. One in Singapore, one in Dubai, and one in London. Each has a small team that visits the different business units around the world and conducts the audits. I was the newest member of Team London, joining our majordomo a British-Pakistani man, a young South African woman also in the London office, and a jovial Mexican man living in Atlanta. I met my team for the first time in North Carolina for an audit of our peanuts processing factory. I was relieved when they also saw no need for me to go to Fresno. My new boss was going to speak to Singapore and try to place me in a suitable location, although South America was likely not going to happen, for reasons that were never fully explained to me.
September was filled with time in NY and one big audit spanning Fresno (ironically), NYC, Providence, and Illinois. I was also getting increasingly frustrated with work for leaving my living situation unresolved. While being in NY is always nice, I wasn’t exactly enjoying living in my parents’ basement. Luckily, my boss did convince the Powers That Be that Fresno would not be the best place for me, and I was told that I would be working out of our Willowbrook, IL office in the southwest Chicago suburbs. I was happy that it wasn’t Fresno. I was also happy that it was Chicago. I have a lot of friends in Chicago and it’s a great city. I just really didn’t see why I had to move anywhere at all. My closest team member works from his home in Atlanta. The next closest are in London. I do not work with a single person in Chicago, except for one or two weeks out of the year when we audit their operations. Fresno makes sense because we have a lot of operations in central California, but my team also has responsibilities in Europe and Africa. The Fresno airport is atrocious for connections, and the time difference with Europe would have made communicating very difficult.
If I had a choice, I would have just chosen our Purchase, NY office. It’s around the same size as Willowbrook and right in the middle of where I am from. A remote work arrangement would have been nice too. I would have considered living in The Bronx or somewhere else in The City, or maybe Denver. Denver is unique for having direct flights to all our US locations plus international connections. My brother lives there, and it seems like a cool place. London would have been nice too. It sure would have made getting to The Congo and Gabon easier, plus who knows where they’ll send me next year.
Nevertheless, it had to be Chicago. After the audit of our operations there in mid-September, I stuck around for the weekend and looked at apartments. I focused on the southwest side of the city, which would roughly put me halfway between the office and The Loop. I settled on an apartment in the Little Village neighborhood. It’s on the south side of Douglass Park, with my front windows directly facing the park. It’s also very close to Pilsen. I have a spare bedroom too, so come and visit!
October – December
On September 30 I flew to Chicago from NY and got the keys to my new apartment the next day. It was dumpier than I remembered from the tour with the leasing agent, but the lease was signed, and the two months’ rent was paid. I had to make it home. October was very hard. I didn’t have a car, a bed, any furniture actually, or any of my personal items at first. If I had had time to stick around and gather what I needed, moving would have been a lot easier. Work made that an unavailable option. I had to go to Washington, DC to apply for a visa, Providence, RI two times, and in the latter part of the month, the Republic of The Congo.
Yes, The Congo. And less than two weeks after getting home, right back to Africa for Gabon. Most people, when I told them I was going to The Congo, raised an eyebrow and asked me, “Is that safe?” As for Gabon, they just asked, “Where is that?” In case you too are wondering those questions, I’ll leave you in suspense.
I was not scared or apprehensive in the slightest about going to The Congo or Gabon. I’ve become very accustomed to this sort of travel, plus work does quite a good job of handling logistics so there is not much trouble. Maybe I’ve become jaded. Other than the jetlag and the coach seats, it’s not much of a big deal for me anymore.
When I got back from The Congo I was chatting with a friend and he asked me how the move was going. I was honest with him. At that time, I felt more “at home” while traveling than while in my own home. However, over the following week and a half, I spent a lot of energy making it more like home. I stripped the head off countless alan keys assembling furniture. I got out my toolbox and put pictures on the wall, level. I got curtains up on the windows, so passersby’s didn’t think I was the exhibit in a bachelor zoo. I went to the grocery store and started preparing my own food. My friend Eric, who is in Chicago on a weekly basis for a consulting project, also helped a lot. I just gave him a power drill and fueled him with beer and Little Village tacos, and he mounted things on my wall until I basically had to kick him out of the apartment because it was so late. By the time I went to Gabon I didn’t want to go. The apartment was comfortable enough to make me not want to travel. Also, any lingering feelings of preferring to be on the road than to being in my apartment were dispelled as soon as I saw the guesthouse in Gabon.
Two weeks later, when I returned to Chicago from Gabon, I realized something monumental. For the first time since my last semester of business school (April 2019), I did not have any trips upcoming on my calendar. I have been in Chicago since then. There have been cold days and colder days; rainy days and sunny days. It has barely snowed, except right when I got back from The Congo and again when I was in Gabon. I am trying to see friends and make new friends. My apartment is now 100% set up, or at least as close to 100% as it is going to be this year.
Along with the newsletter comes some news. I’ve decided to close Incidents of Travel. At the moment, my main source of inspiration is work, but I can’t write openly and honestly about work. I’ll share a farewell post on December 31, and that will be the dignified end of this blog and The Economics Of … . I’m actively thinking about how I can continue writing and sharing it with everyone who doesn’t read my blogs anyway. When I know, I’ll be sure to post it on Facebook.