So Here You Go, to the Thames and to the Rain

When I landed at London Gatwick airport (as I later learned from a flattmate, the "red-headed stepchild" of Heathrow), I was probably in one of the worst dazes I've ever been in. It'd be a rumbling, nearly-sleepless Airtransat flight the previous night, leavened only slightly by the small glass of orange juice and plastic wrapped banana bread they'd given us before summarily disembarking. As I groggily stepped to the National Rail counter for my first social interaction in England, making the possibility immediate faux pas of asking where the "washroom" was, a feat I would continue to repeat over the next several days, it finally hit me: "this is really going to happen, I'm really going to live and work in London for the rest of the summer". Then, as I clattered my suitcase behind me to the train platform, that mildest bit of fear began to creep up: "how do I manage, what if I make the wrong impressions", all that sort of thing. As both a matter of personal and, to a lesser degree, national pride, I was bound and determined to not make a hash of this, and, about a week and a half in, I'm proud to say that hasn't been the case. Not that there haven't been difficulties and communication barriers at times. Trying to figure out the DLR on my first journey to work was a bit of trial, and I still don't think I've fully adapated to the whole "cars drive on the wrong side of the road here" thing. In my capacity reasearching the logistics of setting up a training program with Emmaus and their partner organisation Streets of Growth, I've had to learn a whole set of new terms and acronyms that fly a bit fast and furious around the meeting table: GCSE, sixth-form, NVQ, OFSTED, JSA. A bit daunting if I dare say so, but perhaps an old bureaucratic hand like myself can pick it up a bit better than most. I've also been blessed to have some really excellent mentorship in the person of Janice Smart, Emmaus East London's Retail Project Manager, who's given myself a bit of a crash course in business logistics, information about the East End/Poplar community in which I'm working and about a thousand other things I didn't understand the first word of before last Thursday. I'm not going to lie and say it hasn't been a bit of an uphill climb, but my work has already taken me through so much of the city, from Greenwich to Canary Wharf to Westminster and back, and even a bit beyond, when I went about an hour north to St. Albans, but if it has been uphill, it's been with a jaunty wind at my back the whole way. Still a long way to go yet, though I suppose eight weeks can go by in a heartbeat when you really begin to reflect upon it. Speaking with the people whom Emmaus has helped through its community projects, I'm deeply admiring the care and commitment the organisation brings to everything it does, and how self-reliant and sustainable the whole project seems to be. The demonstration of those values, that every person truly means and is capable of something, that we are something that many more orgisations, even those involved in the social work sector, would do well to truly emmulate. Social enterpise, at its peak form, represents a logically synergistic melding of profit-side and social goals, and Emmaus, from the short time I've been lucky enough to work with them, seems to have that relationship down to a science. Granted, some of this is the result of many decades of hard work and instituional memory which new start-ups can hardly expect to have the benefit of, but I do believe that knowledge sharing in all respects between sector groups would go a long way towards enhancing the kinds of social outcomes which, at least in theory, we are all in this sector striving towards. In the current social and political environment, we need new ways of oganising intiatives and new ways of responding to social problems that don't rely on traditional, often failed, models for charity and social welfare. Creating these new models, which can be truly sustainable and benefit the wider community in a whole variety of ways (socially, environmentally, etc.) is a difficult prospect and no two communities (Emmaus or otherwise) are going to benefit from the exact same, cookie-cutter approach, but the dilemmas of our time behoove us to, at the very least, as they'd say here, give it a go. As I continue to work with Emmaus and get deeper into its operational aspect and those of other organisations working in Poplar when designing the training program, I expect to find out a lot more, some perhaps less encouraging than what I have so far. However, I know now that, at least for myself, this is happening, this is possible, and I will do this.

------- London is a city lit afire; "life with the lid off" as a great British writer once said about Shanghai in an bygone era. Everywhere, there is movement, the sound of city bankers rush from deal to deal, the spatter of cell phones calling places thousands of miles afar. It's unlike anywhere I've ever been in its combination of modernist efficiency, monuments in carved stone to ages past, and the feeling that half the world is running past you on the morning's commute. It's that feeling, of infinite possibilities that could strike even when it's just you sitting in a kebab shop waiting for your order and watching the people patronize the semi-respectable mobile phone vendor across the way, that so intrigues me about here. In the time I've been here, on the nights off, I've drank cocktails in the sleekest glass and steel structure I've ever been privy to, and in an East End pub where one can order litterally only intoxicating beverages. I've shared an Underground station with at least a hundred people chanting a football song that was barely coherent to me but seemed to mean all the world for them. I've been hard sold on a ten pound pair of dress shoes by a Bangladeshi man who complimented my haircut and said I sounded like I was from New York. I've run past an army barracks and a brightly-decorated cenotaph on my semi-nightly jogs. I've run up and down the poorly-maintained staircase of Tower Hamlets council house building. And I've discovered the miracle of being able to by cider at the corner store. In short, I've had a lovely time so far, and thus do all things begin.

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