Conakry news

By the way, a snippet of news from Conakry.  Remember a few months ago I said that I was staying at my boss's house for a few days, with a rather famous neighbour... the president of Guinea, Alpha Conde?  Glad I wasn't there this week (my boss wasn't either; fortunately he was on holiday).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/us-says-assassination-attempt-on-guinean-president-totally-unacceptable/2011/07/20/gIQAlXZFQI_story.html

I just checked my previous blog and you can see that I took an almost identical photo of the house as the Washington Post/Associated Press.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/19/guinea-president-survives-assassination-attempt

The guardian has more.  This is really unexpected - when you're in Conakry you get no real sense of this sort of tension.  However the president's under an awful lot of pressure to deliver basic improvements in people's lives, the sort of thing that takes time and people get impatient.  Plus of course this isn't a part of the world where everyone's signed on yet to the whole democracy idea anyway, many preferring a strongest takes all philosophy.

Change is in the air....

It's nearly the end of the first week of my two weeks break at home in Mossley and I've decided I need a personnel secretary.  I had all of these visions of me taking long walks in the hills, reading a book or two, doing some french lessons.  But no.  Instead I've been running around like crazy trying to do all sorts of boring things.

For example, just 2.5 years ago my passport expired and I got a new one.  Foolishly I decided not to spend the extra 50 quid or whatever it was and got a standard passport instead of one with extra pages.  Now I've got a measly 5 or so clean pages left, I need a swag of new visas that will take several of them and so I decided to get a new, bigger one.  Only the Passport Office tells me that because of some computer glitch I have to apply from scratch, which means masses of original paperwork, some of which I don't have and hence have had to apply back to Australia for.  I also need to make an appointment to go in person, in London (a £150 train trip, full day)  - but I can't make the appointment until I've got the number of the certificate that I've had to apply to from Australia... it goes on for quite a while like that.

I've also now got two tax returns to do.  In the UK, the majority of people don't need to put in a tax return if they are simply pay as you go employees.  This is both good (less work) but also bad as people don't even know what sort of tax deductions they might be able to get.  I think on balance I prefer our system because it makes us more financially literate.  I'm constantly amazed by how little otherwise educated people around here know about managing money.

Of course that's not the exciting news, which would be.... I'm moving to Paris!!!  The contract's signed, the date's agreed, I've just got to get the visas sorted out, hence the fuss as described above.  It looks like I won't need a French working visa if I've still got my UK working visa and it's an intra-company transfer (shades of Sicily?).

Of course, I now need to renew my UK visa. I cannot believe that I have been here for nearly 5 years.  Whenever I fly back into the country (relatively frequently), they ask me what's my basis for being in the country, I say I've got an ancestry visa and point them to the correct page in the passport.  A few trips ago, for the first time, the immigration officer then asked "So what are you going to do after October?". *gulp*.  It expires in a mere 3 months.  I should be able to renew it....  

So my next FIFO swing into Guinea should be my last.  Should be, depending on all these factors.  Of course I'm sure that I'll go back to Guinea every now and then on visits.  The project's not due to be completed until 2015, and this current Paris assignment is just to the end of this current stage of project development, ie to the end of 2012.

But I guess the blog will need yet another new title?

I'll try and update a wee bit more frequently.  I never find time in Guinea alas.