Tag Archives: social enterprise

On Creativity and a return to the UK

Posted on January 25, 2013 | 4 Comments

Last night was the first time in three years I’ve cried because I missed home. I had a craving for fields. Yes fields. And woods. And the smell of bonfires. And strawberries. Summer and autumn sights and smells. So if you dropped me back in the UK right now I’d swear at the cold and the snow and get back on the next plane, tossing my rose-tinted glasses into the bin on the way.

But most of all I was crying for my family and friends.

An email from my brother triggered it. Talk of my nieces and nephews. An email from my best friend too, with the butterfly heart-beating possibility that she might be coming to visit in March. The hope of that being tempered by the possibility she may not, just squeezed my emotions in such a way I burst into tears. OK, there was also the fact of a tax bill I have no idea how I’m going to pay. It had been a hard week.

Hard in that after three years, John and I are still finding our feet here financially. We walked out of well-paid jobs into a life of instability but outrageous potential. To pick yourself up from nothing and get back to a state of feeling comfortable takes a lot of hard work or a lottery win.

Though maybe that’s the point. Maybe ‘comfortable’ is not a place I subconsciously want to reside in. Being uncomfortable makes me work hard, push boundaries, try new things, keep trying new things when the first ones fail, keep throwing stuff at the wall in the hopes that one day something will stick. Would comfortable equal lazy and complacent? It’s a possibility.

My mum asked in an email ‘why not come home?’ and even through my tears (some now of guilt) I smiled and shuddered. Because even though I miss fields and strawberries (Kintamani ones have nothing on English ones) and bonfires and family and friends I could never move back there.

It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t been here. I have days where I hate Bali (the days when I’m told that ‘no your hard drive still hasn’t arrived from Singapore because it’s been diverted via Surabaya and now they’re holding it back until we pay a bribe’…the days when the internet fails for no reason and it takes a week before anyone can fix it…the days when I’m told I have a black magic curse on me) sure. But 99% of the time I love it here. And that’s not just because I don’t have to do the dishes.

I love who Alula is here. I love the world she gets to grow up in – this magical TV-free, advertising-free place where she is so, so happy. Never has a 6 year old child been so innocent. She’s growing into a conscious, kind, generous, empathetic and wildly imaginative child, as at home in a developing Asian world as in a first world city, able to flit between an American and English accent before ordering a juice in Bahasa.

Yesterday she said to us ‘I love living in Bali’ before skipping off to play among the butterflies.

I love that just as Alula gets to be creative and explore her imagination 100% of the time, so do I.

I love that John’s creativity has soared and he’s poured it into two incredible new businesses to inspire others’ creativity and connection.

I love the friends we have made here – all passionate, creative and entrepreneurial.

The word I keep coming back to is creativity. And the more I reflect on it the more I realize that for me, creativity has become a central component of living. It’s one of the main things that now gives my life meaning. Not always happiness that’s for sure, but definitely meaning. I see it give meaning to John and to Alula every single day as well. This is how we live now. We can’t ever go back from that. It’s inconceivable.

Which isn’t to say you can’t be creative in the UK. But it’s a hell of a lot harder. It would be something we squeezed in between going to work, doing the dishes and prising Alula away from CBBC.

This place is where we get to explore outrageous possibilities unfettered and unhindered, supported by the energy and people around us. So no, we’re not moving back to the UK.

While so much potential has been fulfilled there’s still so much ahead of us.

(sorry parents).

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A slum – but not as you know it

Posted on March 30, 2010 | 4 Comments

Dharavi is the largest slum in Asia. It is 2sq kilometres and home to 1 million people. Yes you heard me, ONE million people. Not a one of them wearing converse, leggings and a dress from Gap. So my attempt to blend in is not working. People are staring at us like we’re another life form come to probe their planet.

We are on a walking tour of Dharavi. I have issues. Not least with the walking part. But mainly my issues are with the part where we pay money to go stare at poor people. It feels like an update on the Victorian practice of going to stare at the crazy people locked up in the Bedlam all in the name of entertainment. But I am doing it anyway because there’s no Curzon in Mumbai and I was bored. Just kidding. I am here because the money from the tours goes straight back into the local community via a community centre and a kindergarten. And because John said I had to.

The guide zig zags us through alleys so narrow only the faeces can run through it freely. The rubbish dump burns day and night. A toxic plastic smoke sears our lungs. Children use the place as their playground.

Yet for all its dirt and crammedness (it’s the most densely populated place on earth), Dharavi is a hive of activity and micro-industry and that’s what the tour is at pains to point out. This is not a slum as we would imagine one to be. Dharavi has an economy of around $800 million a year. Though the workers in the sweatshops earn about £1.20 for a twelve hour day. And these are literally sweat shops. Now I get why they’re called that. We stopped in a workshop where men were feeding ground up aluminium cans into hot lava, producing at the end of it all ingots of aluminium which get sold back to the canning factories so our coca cola can be reborn.

Over 250,000 Dharavi inhabitants are employed on recycling initiatives – from coke cans to paint tins and cooking oil vats.

We wandered through the Gujarati part of town. The part that looks like the garden section at homebase for all the thousands of flower pots. The guide asked if we had any questions. Yeah, I wanted to ask, is it hot enough?

We finished up with a visit to the community centre. There were lots of Dharavi inhabitants there learning English. We handed over our rupee notes. The equivalent of four days work to one of the people of Dharavi, then we took a taxi back to our fan cooled, maid-serviced, security-guarded, fully utilitied up flat and ate the lunch the cook had prepared and showered in clean water and lay down on freshly laundered sheets for a nap.

India makes me feel a lot of things – hot, tired, elated, frustrated, delighted, angry, stressed and relaxed. But mostly it makes me feel enormously lucky. And in equal measure…guilty.

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Why? Why? Why?

Posted on September 18, 2009 | 1 Comment

A lot of people keep asking us why – what inspired us to do this trip?

About six months ago I wrote my reasons on some Post-Its and stuck them on our bedroom wall next to a pinboard that I covered in pictures of white beaches, turreted chateaux, hammocks and clippings from the guardian travel section. Oh and this postcard.

La Majorite c'est vous

Here are my reasons:
Reasons for a new life (in the sun)

There were several things that poked me along the way. It took ten months from niggling half-formed ‘got to do something’ thoughts, to resignation letters and flight bookings. Here are my main prodders.

1. We are sitting on a plane flying back from Mexico. It is early Feb 2009. There is a man behind me whose naked, tattooed gut is pressing against the back of my chair. I look around the plane and think of jumping out the emergency exit. And this is not a response to ten hours on a flight with a toddler. This is more to do with the horror of coming back to Britain after two sun drenched weeks road tripping up the Mayan coast. That was when I first had thoughts along the lines of ‘why are we living this life in London that allows us a couple of exotic holidays a year when we could be doing it full time?’

The idea parked for a while until…

2. We speak to Rich, John’s brother. He runs several social enterprises from Mumbai and is generally inspiring. He tells us to just do it. I feel like I’m in a Nike ad.

3. I read Tim Ferriss’ The 4-hour Work Week and fall in love with the concept of not working ever again.

4. I realise that Lula, our baby, is no longer a baby and will be starting school in 15 months’ time (Sep 2010). A quick scan of the local Ofsted reports puts me into a panic. We have ‘that’ private vs state debate and I realise that neither really works for me. I am just not sure that our education system is providing what children need for the 21st century in either sector. Add to this my horror of facing the prospect of being tied into working in London in stressful jobs for the rest of our lives (at this stage I had parked Tim Ferris and was getting realistic).

5. I manage to convince John on steak night Wednesday that this is what we need to do. Absolutely and completely. And totally.

5. I read Fuck it: The ultimate spiritual way and decide to say Fuck It to everything. Job? Fuck it. Scared of not having an income? Fuck it. Possibility of getting amoebic dysentary in India with a child in tow? Fuck it.

6. One of my best project managers at work tells me she is leaving. I say Fuck it. I am too.

7. I resign and they make plans for my succession. It is like a bridge is burning behind me and I can’t turn back.

8. Ex-housemate comes around to discuss renting house off of us. She looks out window, sees a robin and says, ‘but won’t you miss things like English birds?’ I look at John then back to Lizzie and say, ‘Er, no. When I’m lying on my sunbed by the pool in Bali, I don’t think I’m going to be thinking about how much I miss English birds.’

9. Every single person I tell our plan to turns around and says ‘That’s so inspiring’ except for my father in law who thinks we are mad. I feel like Gandhi. No one has ever told me I’m inspiring before and now I feel like I’ve been told it 384 times in the last week alone. I could get used to this. I might not be a Head of Projects anymore but I am inspiring.

by Sarah

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